Against The Day

[Paul Mackin]

On Jun 21, 2007, at 9:48 AM, Ya Sam wrote:

> I'm with Tore on this one. You didn't like AtD, Henry? Fine by me.  
> However, a more detailed critique with concrete examples and more  
> focussed observations would be even better. Hell, such people as  
> Umberto Eco seriously discuss the flaws of 'The Da Vinci Code',  
> although il professore could have called it dismissively 'un pezzo  
> di merda'. So why not be more attentive to AtD which is, I daresay,  
> is a little bit higher achievement (put in the respective emoticon).
>
>
>


Happen to be rereading Martin Amis's The Information (which is ABOUT  
bad writing) and to just have come across Richard's
interesting meditation on judging good and bad.

"For Richard was thinking, if thinking is quite the  word we  
want,  . . . . you cannot know if a book is  good.
A sentence, a line, a phrase: nobody knows. The literary   
philosophers of Cambridge spent a century saying
otherwise and said nothing. Is 'When all at once I saw a crowd' worse  
than 'Thoughts that do often lie too deep
for tears'? (Yes, But it is  the  the better line  that contained the  
identifiable flaw: that DO, brought in to make up
the numbers.  I.  A. Richards  reanatomized the human mind so that   
it might  be capable of such divination.
William Empson offered a quantity theory of value, of what was  
ambiguous, what was complex, and therefore
GOOD. Leavis said that while you can't judge literature you can judge  
life . . . ." etc, etc,