[ilds] Readings

[Alejandro Adams]

>Musicians are considered artists but art critics are not.  I think this 
>disparity >has led literary critics to invent Deconstruction and even the 
>score.

Mencken held that the impulse to make art was essentially a critical 
one--or, rather, that the artistic impulse and critical impulse were the 
same.  His argument is convincing.  Various shades of caveat 
notwithstanding, I sense a lot of truth in that unpopular notion.

And Harold Bloom: "Criticism is either part of literature or nothing at 
all."  Indeed.

Hard to explain Auden's letter to the editors of The Nation which praised 
Agee's film criticism.  Auden disliked journalism and disliked cinema, yet 
he eagerly awaited each of Agee's reviews.

Clearly there are cases in which "criticism," "journalism," "literature," 
etc., coalesce, and we are left with prose which moves or stimulates or 
merely pleases us.  Gide's "diaries"?  Flaubert's "letters"?  Ford Madox 
Ford's "travelogues"?  Ideally, form is not the soil in which writing is 
planted, but the trellis over which prose shapes itself until the frame is 
no longer discernible.