Most accurately, you've written yourself a most handsome turde de force!

If there's a hell for book reviewers (and I'm sure many authors hope there is), no doubt we will spend eternity there being jabbed by trident-wielding imps bearing certain adjectives emblazoned across their brick-red chests: "compelling," "lyrical," "nuanced" and so on. Even in this world, the conscientious critic is bedeviled by clichés; how many ways are there to say that a book is "beautifully written" or that the characters in it are "fully realized" instead of "two-dimensional"? These are the words that rise up in a reviewer's mind, like those clouds of gnats that ruin so many walks in the woods. No matter how hard you try to bat them away, they just keep coming back.

[. . .]

Within a couple of hours it seemed like every book reviewer in the country had been forwarded multiple links to Kerns' column. "It's getting worse," tweeted Ron Charles, fiction editor and critic for the Washington Post Book World. "People in the office are now emailing me Book Reviewer Cliché Bingo without comment." In silent shame, dozens (if not hundreds) of delete keys wiped out instances of "poignant" and "gritty" and "tour de force." (Laura Miller, “Book critic cliché bingo,” Salon, 16 March 2010)

Most accurately, you've written yourself a most handsome turde de force

If the reviews are seeming stale, mightn't in truth the books be so much stasis as well -- or are you different breeds, with one in need of more precise wording to delineate/describe the exact nature of their surging, and the other in need of well-intentioned friendly-fire to keep them from more downhill sagging? How do authors keep writing things that keep drawing you to declare "tour de force," while you guys twitch at any suggestion of being old hat, as if the concern was already sufficiently pronounced that you'd prepared yourself to be ever so quick to ensure it need not continue to be the case, when presented with its apparent existence?

Some of us are suspecting you're all into fine-tuning the largely indiscriminate, which has us wondering if precision is what you aim for when the interesting and novel is not in fact something you're anymore interested in -- the thing that eventually did the scholastics in, that is.

Patrick McEvoy-Halston???

Patrick, I think you take yourself a bit too seriously. Are you for real??? I have two degrees; I excelled in my English graduate program; and your verbosity and pomposity was a marvel to behold, in equal measure. Congratulations. You, sir, are a tour de force...

But all that was surpassed when I looked at your website at http://patrickmh.blogspot.com/. My favorite of yours is "Hey gang! You're at Me, Central--THE place to all good things...."

Oh yeah, nice hat. (Keith Stroud, response to post)

Thanks, Keith

It's feels good to write something that can provoke a response that -- for me at least -- is one to remember. Hmmm. Maybe if I became a successful writer, that would help solve the critics' current problem (or at least help prove a point)!? It would be nice to help out, so.

I'm back in the west, but no longer cowboy -- I've got glasses that keep me feeling just as singular but now urban and strange: where I like to be.

Luminous

Sometimes cliches are necessary to get the work done, but "luminous" really gets my goat (pardon the cliche). It may or may not be a reviewer cliche yet, but it has been a blurb cliche for the last 30 years. It sounds so earnestly meaningful, but its presence on the backs of half of all books is good indication of what it really is: lazy and meaningless. What is it supposed to mean with regard to prose? It is so completely without application that you can call any book luminous without having read it and not be any less accurate than anyone else who has ever called a book luminous.

Reed Richards

P.S. Patrick: What fun! Keith: So true! (richarre, response to post)

Link: The sins of the book critic (Salon)

Discussion over the fate of Jolenta, at the Gene Wolfe facebook appreciation site

Patrick McEvoy-Halston November 28 at 10:36 AM Why does Severian make almost no effort to develop sustained empathy for Jolenta -- no interest in her roots, what made her who she was -- even as she features so much in the first part of the narrative? Her fate at the end is one sustained gross happenstance after another... Severian has repeated sex with her while she lay half drugged, an act he argues later he imagines she wanted -- even as he admits it could appear to some, bald "rape" -- but which certainly followed his discussion of her as someone whom he could hate so much it invited his desire to destroy her; Severian abandons her to Dr. Talus, who had threatened to kill her if she insisted on clinging to him; Baldanders robs her of her money; she's sucked at by blood bats, and, finally, left at death revealed discombobulated of all beauty... a hunk of junk, like that the Saltus citizens keep heaped away from their village for it ruining their preferred sense ...

Salon discussion of "Almost Famous" gang-rape scene

Patrick McEvoy-Halston: The "Almost Famous'" gang-rape scene? Isn't this the film that features the deflowering of a virgin -- out of boredom -- by a pack of predator-vixons, who otherwise thought so little of him they were quite willing to pee in his near vicinity? Maybe we'll come to conclude that "[t]he scene only works because people were stupid about [boy by girl] [. . .] rape at the time" (Amy Benfer). Sawmonkey: Lucky boy Pull that stick a few more inches out of your chute, Patrick. This was one of the best flicks of the decade. (sawmonkey, response to post, “Films of the decade: ‘Amost Famous’, R.J. Culter, Salon, 13 Dec. 2009) Patrick McEvoy-Halston: @sawmonkey It made an impression on me too. Great charm. Great friends. But it is one of the things you (or at least I) notice on the review, there is the SUGGESTION, with him being so (rightly) upset with the girls feeling so free to pee right before him, that sex with him is just further presump...

The Conjuring

The Conjuring  I don't know if contemporary filmmakers are aware of it, but if they decide to set their films in the '70s, some of the affordments of that time are going to make them have to work harder to simply get a good scare from us. Who would you expect to have a more tenacious hold on that house, for example? The ghosts from Salem, or us from 2013, who've just been shown a New England home just a notch or two downscaled from being a Jeffersonian estate, that a single-income truck driver with some savings can afford? Seriously, though it's easy to credit that the father — Roger Perron—would get his family out of that house as fast as he could when trouble really stirs, we'd be more apt to still be wagering our losses—one dead dog, a wife accumulating bruises, some good scares to our kids—against what we might yet have full claim to. The losses will get their nursing—even the heavy traumas, maybe—if out of this we've still got a house—really,...

The Invisible Counterpoint

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