Word: ollman
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...very critical of criticism," he told Leah Ollman in a long Art In America interview in 2004. "The length of sentences and the amount of narcissism involved throws me all the time. People like Proust and Melville please me. They don't waste words." He denounced and avoided the critical cult of personality; "I made it a point never to use the word I in an essay, an article," he told Ollman. Though hardly a hermit, he avoided the community of critics and the proximity of the people he wrote about. "Anonymity and coolness... writing film-centered criticism rather than...
...rhythm and visual texture, then write it up, with special attention to originality of expression and sentence-solving, so that the reader can approach the finished piece with the same concentration, and expectation of rewards, as any work of art. "I believe most of what I wrote," Manny told Ollman with a disconcerting blitheness, "but I'm more interested in the elegance of the word and what it throws...
...office was in the American Bible Building; he remarked that he had worked on the building's construction.) Carpentry may have influenced his later collages and their element of compartmentalizing in squares. It also supplemented Manny's work as a critic - though, he professed to Ollman, he never acquired practical expertise: "I can't fix anything...
...challenging job: total planning, total inspiration, hard work. And a respect for his craft. He was tough on other critics, and on himself, but he never demeaned the writing to which he brought so much passion and pain. "Criticism is very important, and difficult," he said in the Ollman interview. "I can't think of a better thing for a person to do." Surely no one did it better than Manny Farber...
...question, however, is far from easy to answer. Since Marx died in 1883, his admirers have written innumerable explanations of his work. They have frequently, and often fanatically, denounced one another as revisionists or worse. But Bertell Ollman, a professor at New York University and an avowed Marxist, observes that "Marx had very little to say of a concrete nature about socialism," the transitional society that would follow the revolution Marx preached. (In strict Marxist terminology, "Communism" is the ideal stateless society to be reached as an ultimate goal.) The only way to get a definitive opinion on the features...