Festering Opinion

I really really really thought I was past it, my old, bitter disdain for Literary/Art Criticism.

I recently attended a small-venue retro-rock concert. The band was a large-scale Steely Dan tribute group called Nearly Dan. For parched people used to hearing scattered Steely Dan on a local radio station that proclaims, “Livin’ in the past and loving it”! Nearly Dan was like drinking out of a fire hose, with some nice Led Zeppelin and Michael Jackson asides that off-and-on diverted we faithful worshippers from “old school” Don Fagan and Walter Becker’s electric poetry.

MY old gripe jumped back up in my face because the concert was attended by a State Representative, an actual, Oregon elected official. So, during the band’s break, he got up on stage and proceeded profanely to name-off each of Steely Dan’s biggest hits and delineated to the worshipping, packed-house audience the nefarious crimes central to the themes of the lyrics of each and every of Steely Dan’s beloved songs. That Elected Official stood there and turned each absolutely over-the-top artistic song into a prosaic, sordid grotesquequery.

The dunce might just as well’ve been trying to tell a cathedral full of Roman Catholics that, “It’s nothing but a wafer.”

So, to all you Writers out there taking it on the chin, Literary Criticism is always out there. “It doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear. And it will never stop…”

…until WE make the perspective shift of seeing a critic’s rancor as one of our food sources, as notoriety-giving controversy.