“All art is also criticism,” Geoff Dyer writes in the afterword to But Beautiful. He is quoting George Steiner: “All literature, music, and art embody an expository reflection on, a value judgment of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.”
It isn’t only in essays or letters that writers reveal themselves as critics. The Portrait of a Lady is, among other things, a commentary on Middlemarch. The best readings of art are art.
In But Beautiful, Dyer treats jazz as a cumulative tradition, like mathematics: “Every time [a saxophonist] picks up his horn he cannot avoid commenting, automatically and implicitly, even if only through his own inadequacy, on the tradition that has laid this music at his feet.”
The inheritance beneath expression. It shapes how I read, and it shapes this blog: every response to a book is also a response to every book that preceded it.
>Dear Anthony,Thanks for this reference. The little excerpt I either posted or thought about posting this morning hits this point straight on. It might be subtitled, "The Ambition of Artists."Thanks again.shalom,Steven
>StevenHave you finished Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi? If so, what did you think?Anthony
>Dear Anthony,I have not finished yet–I've been half-working on several books over the last several weeks and have settled on a completion order–Wolf Hall, Jeff in Venice. . . , and then before I finish Tinkers, I'm going to read Under the Lion's Gaze. So I'm hoping by mid next-week depending on how long Wolf Hall takes.shalom,Steven