Esteemed literary personage Geoffrey O’Brien of the Library of America demonstrates what’s wrong with today’s literary scene. He writes not for the public, but a handful of the pretentious. Here’s an example from an essay in yesterday’s New York Review of Books:
“It is all about information being passed along and shared, but by whom, with whom, and toward what end? In laying out the elements of these stories—paying particular and sensitive attention to the personalities, so far as they can be surmised, of the individuals caught up in them—Frankel asserts no resolution beyond a nagging sense of the “relentless ambiguity” embodied by Ford’s movie. An unhealed historical wound finds expression in a film whose extraordinary beauty cannot assuage the contradictory and painful emotions that resonate at its core.”
Say what? As an old friend of mine used to say, “Spit that shit out of your mouth and speak clearly.”
I’ll have a few remarks about the actual essay upcoming.
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