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When it ["voice", one of writing's "immaterial properties"] does
appear, the subject is often irrelevant. “I do not care for
movies very much and I rarely see them,” W. H. Auden wrote to
the editors of The Nation in 1944. “Further, I am
suspicious of criticism as the literary genre which, more than any
other, recruits epigones, pedants without insight, intellectuals
without love. I am all the more surprised, therefore, to find myself
not only reading Mr. Agee before I read anyone else in The
Nation but also consciously looking forward all week to reading
him again.” A lot of the movies that James Agee reviewed between
1942 and 1948, when he was The Nation’s film
critic, were negligible then and are forgotten now. But you can still
read his columns with pleasure. They continue to pass the ultimate
test of good writing: it is more painful to stop reading them than it
is to keep going. When you get to the end of Agee’s sentences,
you wish, like Auden, that there were more sentences.
		-- Louis Menand, "Bad Comma", The New
		   Yorker, 2004-06-28
		   http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?040628crbo_books1

Tags: love pleasure editors insight sentences comma newyorker intellectuals filmcritic goodwriting pedants literarygenre whauden jamesagee louismenand