SCOTT REVIEW OF ANONYMOUS

what is surely one of the more effective openings in recent reviewery, A. O. Scott writing for the New York Times begins his critique of the new Shakespeare costume thriller Anonymous with this account: "a vulgar prank on the English literary tradition,a travesty of British history and a brutal insult to the human imagination. Apart from that, it’s not bad." He is more generous later on: "My point is that it might be a mistake to suppose that the director of 10,000 B.C. — to mention only the most salient example — should be taken as a reliable guide to history." Oh come on, Mr. Scott; that may be part of your point, but not the whole of it. The full review, which asks the question "How well does the director manager this complex question?" of a film which asks, "How could a commoner write such great plays?", appears at http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/movies/anonymous-by-roland-emmerich-review.html.

Nota bene: Here is an excerpt (from an article on the NPR website) from Mark Twain's pamphlet response to the incredulity exhibited by skeptics of Shakespeare's authorship:

is surmised by the biographers that the young Shakespeare got his vast knowledge of the law and his familiar and accurate acquaintance with the manners and customs and shop-talk of lawyers through being for a time the CLERK OF A STRATFORD COURT: just as a bright lad like me, reared in a village on the banks of the Mississippi, might become perfect in knowledge of the Behring Strait whale-fishery and the shop-talk of the veteran exercisers of that adventure-bristling trade through catching catfish with a 'trot-line' Sundays."

WEAK SAUCE OF WORDS

Jessa Crispin, writing for The Smart Set, agrees with Goldsmith that it's all dross, but unlike Goldsmith does not see much value in setting oneself up as a dross broker:

Not even the most idealistic among the cultural critics bother to argue that the system is merit-based. She takes aim at the MFA industry, the overproduction of underdeveloped books, and at the shallow hunger of amateur writers.

Of course, her complaint is not new: "Of making books there is no end," said Ecclesiastes a few millenia ago. Brian Bauld, a retired teacher of secondary school English, has compiled a capacious round-up of sensible essays concerning books and the idea of books, many of which make the same point -- too much noise, too little music. His list of lit crit is also worth checking out.

MIŁOSZ REVIEWED

Enda O'Doherty has a long review in the Dublin Review of Books, of the essays by Czesław Miłosz collected in Proud to Be a Mammal (a book discouragingly not available in the US market at the time of this post).  O'Doherty writers in reference to one section:

From the martyred Poland of the war years, the country of German occupation, casual murder and coolly planned genocide, Miłosz wrote a sequence of short naive poems entitled "The World." An excerpt from one of those, titled "Love": "Love means to learn to look at yourself / The way one looks at distant things / For you are only one thing among many."

Read the review, titled "All Things Considered," at the DRB website.