a grammar

Dave Eggers on being a critic

veiledyellow:portraitoftheartistasayoungman:

Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.
[Dave Eggers, sent to me by Wes]

I remember when Eggers said this, and I remember wishing he’d used some term other than “a critic” — a term too easily mistaken for a profession, a position — when what he really means is a critical person: the Merriam-Webster 2. definition of critic (“one given to harsh or captious judgment”), rather than either the 1a. (“one who expresses a reasoned opinion” on matters of “value, truth, righteousness, beauty, or technique”) or 1b. (“one who engages often professionally in the analysis, evaluation, or appreciation” of art). If he meant that last one, all he’d be saying is that he made a spectacularly shitty critic, which is not his point — although he does seem happy to let the lines blur between these things, to let it be inferred that critics are merely critical, just like it says on the label; this is what’s known in the world of not-saying-YES as a “dick move.”

Really what he’s telling in this paragraph is the story of an age cohort, or at least a certain segment of one. He is a person of the 90s, you know, part of a cohort that once rode high on a wave of useful irony and suspicion and overclocked bullshit detectors — all things that seemed necessary, at some point, even refreshing, even productive of real truth. He started a magazine (Might) that thrived on snarky pop-culture jokes at a time when snarky pop-culture jokes seemed to say something useful about the world. But then they didn’t. And then, growing slightly older, this clever cohort turned around and began issuing prophetic warnings about the danger of the very habits they’d once indulged in, mourning the loss of sincerity and belief, lining up against now allegedly oppressive levels of cynicism and snark, urging reconnection with real sincerity and what DFW liked to call “basic human verities,” things that these very same people had once sandblasted with caustic irony/suspicion/cynicism because they’d been handed down in such tarnished condition that they kinda needed a sandblasting. Having successfully, caustically, eroded the gunk off what their ancestors believed, they felt a strong, sudden, imperative urge to figure out what they believed, to act not corrosively but constructively, to talk honestly about finding things to say YES to.

Ah but here’s the rub: meanwhile along come a whole bunch of younger people for whom these issues are not all that vexed or pressing, people who are fluent in irony and sincerity both and don’t need to be told how to love earnestly, people for whom “say YES” is not a profound and meaningful shift in mentalities but just a stitched-sampler reminder of something very, very basic, and maybe in this sense every generation digs a hole and then goes around preaching about the importance of climbing out of it while young people nod politely at them and dig different holes entirely.