Tag Archives: criticism

Jim Booth guest commentary over at Southern Creatives

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If you’ve been paying attention you know that our boy Jim Booth recently published a novel. And that it’s really good. And that it presents us with the opportunity to consider fame and substance at war over the soul of an artist.

He has now authored a guest essay on “Southern Rock Stardom, Postmodernism, and the Persistence of Memory” over at Melinda McGuire’s outstanding Southern lit-focused site, concluding, appropriately enough that:

Here in the South, rock stars respect memory as all good Southerners do and, after all their wanderings, come back home where memory matters, Thomas Wolfe and postmodernism be damned.

Hear, hear. Give it a read.

Is George RR Martin a creepy misogynist? Alyssa Rosenberg brings a big dose of perspective to the “debate” (plus some comments on Terry Pratchett, while we’re at it)

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Last week, Sady Doyle published a protracted rant against George RR Martin’s Song of Ice & Fire series at TigerBeatdown.com. My initial reaction was that while her piece was certainly stylishly composed, the level of intellectual rigor informing it was lacking. Acacia Graddy-Gamel, commenting in an online discussion thread earlier this afternoon, put it this way: “the Doyle piece is everything I absolutely hate about feminist or postmodern critique in that it is just as insular, smug, narrow-minded and condescending as the hegemonic structures they’re railing against.” I don’t want to be that harsh, but I can understand her frustration.  Read more

Why American media has such a signal-to-noise problem, part 1

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Part one of a two-part series.

From Cronkite to Couric: the Kingdom of Signal is swallowed by the Empire of Noise

The recent death of Walter Cronkite spurred the predictable outpouring of tributes, each reverencing in its own way a man who was the face and voice of journalism in America for a generation or more. The irony of all these accolades is that we live in an age where “broadcast journalist” is such a cruel oxymoron, and we seem to speeding headlong into an era where the word “journalist” itself threatens to become a freestanding joke. Why, against this backdrop, would so many people who are so involved in the daily repudiation of everything that Cronkite stood for make such a show memorializing the standard by which they so abjectly fail?

As I read what people had to say about Cronkite, I realized that something I studied and wrote about over a decade ago helps explain why our contemporary media has gone so deeply, tragically wrong. Read more