Word: critics
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With warp speed, Saylor's proposal became the talk of the highest ivory towers. And the reactions were mostly of the unpublishable kind. "Saylor's naivete is breathtaking," says David Noble, a history professor at Toronto's York University and a sharp critic of distance learning. "It's the quintessence of counterfeit education." Adds Carole Fungaroli, an English professor at Georgetown: "It's the same as sex on the Internet. You can get it online, but it's not as good as in person...
...Seeing Mary Plain (Norton; 939 pages; $35), Frances Kiernan, a former fiction editor at the New Yorker, has written a portrait not only of McCarthy, the critic and novelist, but also of her literary generation. Kiernan's book teems with a splendid cast of characters--starting with McCarthy's Partisan Review crowd of the 1930s and '40s (Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Delmore Schwartz and Dwight Macdonald), then widening to include other figures in McCarthy's busy, contentious life, including Wilson, whom she called "the monster," her unexpected soul mate Hannah Arendt and dozens of gifted walk-ons, such as Robert...
Back in 1960, an obscure Dutch cultural critic named Constant Nieuwenhuys predicted that someday we would all become architects. Stuck in a world where everything looked the same, he suggested, we would be so alienated from our environment by technology that we would constantly redesign the space around us just to recover the joy of living...
...tempest in a tabernacle simply increased, loaves-and-fishes-style, the publicity for a lame, tame series--in which telling Satan "Go to hell!" passes for a punch line--that a merciful deity would have let expire silently by April. Which raises a now familiar situation for a critic. You'd like to stand up for GD&B. Because that's your job, right? To defend viewers' free choice? To save misunderstood works of genius from the philistines? Except GD&B isn't a work of genius. It's just an inept sitcom that lucked into some free media...
Hence the critic's dance: parry censors with one hand; hold your nose with the other. And it's not limited to TV. Look at the art world, where aesthetes regularly defend the rights of heavy-handed art--Sensation, Santa on a cross--that would be lucky to grace the editorial page of a second-rate alternative newsrag...