Quotes
Quote 339 of 521
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 <cite>The Nation</cite> 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 <cite>The Nation</cite> 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 <cite>The Nation</cite>’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", <cite>The New Yorker</cite>, 2004-06-28 http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?040628crbo_books1
Tags: jamesagee whauden literarygenre pedants goodwriting filmcritic intellectuals sentences amp lt insight editors pleasure love