Hitting Below the Mason -Dixon Line

[Blake Stacey]

Quoting moishe lichtfuss <moishe.lichtfuss at demusement.com>:
> that ain't even criticism...i mean: does he make any kind of point  that isn't
> devalued
> by his polemics?
>
> moish

In the third volume of his autobiography, Isaac Asimov offered up a couple
aphorisms on critics.  The first one goes roughly, "A critic is like a eunuch
in a harem.  He can see what is done, and he understands why it is done, but he
can't do it himself."  Asimov couldn't remember who said that one first, but the
second is his own invention:  "No one can be accepted as a critic until he
presents written and notarized evidence to the effect that he beats his
mother."

And as long as I'm dropping famous names, Borges said somewhere in his vast
corpus of short writings, "In a modest way, by arranging books upon the shelves
we ply the critics' art."  I keep my Pynchonia on one shelf in chronological
order, bracketed by the unabridged Shakespeare I inherited from Honorable
Mother and a little book entitled **How to Insult, Abuse and Insinuate in
Classical Latin**.

Blake