Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 9:26 AM by Gene

I have seldom surfed Arts & Letters Daily recently, sensing that too many of its links are eyeball-rollingly self-indulgent or obvious, or just plain tiresome. Three examples: Philip "M." Roth (I will let my three readers guess what the "M." stands for) has written what is supposedly a new novel, only it sounds like a restatement of the sixty or so that came beforehand, and a couple of cri-TICS pretend to savage it, but in that tired, impatient manner that one fears has become the essence of too much of what's left of book reviewing. Then comes an endorsement of The New Yorker's dashing music cri-TIC Mr. Ross, and these 170 words made us hide under the table:

By the last third of the 20th century, it seems clear that the pressure of history had driven composers a little bit insane. Much of the music Mr. Ross discusses in the later chapters of "The Rest Is Noise" is strictly conceptual, noteworthy only for the ways it violates tradition or expectation. Elliott Carter's Piano Concerto is scored for 50 strings, each playing a different part simultaneously; Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Gruppen" splits the orchestra into three groups, situated at different spots in the concert hall; Alvin Lucier's "Music for Solo Performer" is a translation of his brain's alpha waves into patterns of percussion; most famously, John Cage's "4'33"" is "performed" as an interval of pure silence. Experiments like this can also be found in visual art and literature, and in every case they are purely parasitic; without the prior existence of positive artistic achievements, their purposeful vandalism would be meaningless.

Mr. Ross, in keeping with his usual practice, almost never says a skeptical word about even the most extreme musical absurdities.

In other words, he won't get mad when anger is justified. We have enough such writers, and many of them seem to get links in Arts & Letters Daily.

Then comes this squib:

In her first assault on Hollywood, Joan Collins slept with so many men she was known as the British Open... more»

Down, boy. Oh, we forgot. This is a production of Thuh Kronikul uv Hyer Ehdyukayshun. They've already downed their brains.