Practical Criticism: Making It Work For You

[Now I've got the video for that Doug and the Slugs song, "Making It Work," running through my head...]

A while back I wrote a piece about criticism, attempting to answer the question Is there still a place for this? (My answer was Yes, of course.) At that time I suggested I might have some more to say, and here it is. This is a suggestion for how you can make practical criticism work for you—which is, after all, the point of practical criticism.

I want to start by telling a story. I'll try to keep it short.

At some point in the early 1990s I spoke with a guy who turned out to be a listener to my movie reviews on CBC Radio. (I no longer remember where he lived; I was syndicated across the country in addition to doing reviews live on Toronto's "Metro Morning".) It would be too much to call the guy a fan, though.

In fact, what he said was, "I disagree with everything you say. If you hate a movie, I know I'm going to love it." I don't think he went on to the obvious (that if I loved a movie he knew he'd hate it) but I think it was sort of a given thing. He seemed somewhat aggrieved, to tell the truth.

But I wasn't upset. And what I told him was this: "I am very nearly the perfect movie critic for you, then. You can count on my judgement, even if I'm saying the opposite of what you want to hear."*

And that's my secret to making criticism work, both as critic and consumer. As a critic, you must try to find a true line through your subject, so to make your taste and judgement as predictable as possible (allowing for those rare moments of serendipity that good critics live for). As a consumer, you must judge critics as much as you judge the works of culture you're consuming. When you find a critic whose judgement is understandable and (mostly) predictable, stick with that person. They can be the canary in your metaphorical cultural coal mine. And someone to recommend new things to you, and whose judgement you can trust (even if in an inverted fashion) is someone you should have in your life.

As for me, I don't do that anymore. One of the unfortunate side-effects of writing criticism on a regular basis is that you rapidly lose your sense of wonder at the material you're writing about. Well, I did anyway. It's been nearly four decades since I stopped writing and I still find myself cringing at the thought of attending live music performances.† I spent twenty years reviewing movies for CBC Radio (and a year before then reviewing television), and now I hardly ever go out to the cinema.‡ And I don't watch television very much either.

So the best you're going to get from me on this blog is the occasional recommendation of something I really like. And I'm not going to make a habit of it. Reading's just about all I've got left, and I'm not going to ruin it for myself. Besides, life's too short to waste time writing negative reviews.⸸

*Dialogue is, obviously, reconstructed. This was nearly thirty years ago, after all. I can scarcely remember what I had for lunch three days ago.

†The single exception is music of the renaissance, which I never wrote about. Lorna and I attend the Toronto Consort, and have happily done so for years.

‡Lorna insists on telling people that the last movie we saw in a cinema had a dragon and hobbits in it. This is not, strictly speaking, true. But it very nearly is.

⸸Though I have to admit, it was often a lot of fun writing those negative reviews, at least the movie reviews.