Literary Criticism isn’t Music for the Blind and Deaf
Literary Criticism isn’t Music for the Blind and Deaf
Literature has a problem with the type of journalism that believed writers for the English music press, for example, Melody Maker (1926-2000), New Musical Express (1952-), and Sounds (1970-1991), was criticism. Such writing was ostensibly for the effectively deaf, who’d never heard the musical composition, wouldn’t have any opinion other than that of the critic, and read ’rags’ purely for their bullying of musicians who didn’t care what the writers thought. The listeners could decide for themselves. The music papers were only good advertising, or bad, ‘A never-ending supply of throat sweets is one of the secrets behind the continued success of the Beatles, who come crashing into the NME Chart this week with 'From Me To You' at No. 6! "We couldn't go on without them," says lead guitarist and vocalist John Lennon.’1 What’s important is the writer’s pose in relation to the music being criticized, rather than the sound, as most readers hadn’t any possibility of listening, either because they couldn’t afford to buy any music recordings, which was the reason for the existence of the music papers, that is, they were written for the impoverished, or they were deaf.
The ghettos of science fiction, fantasy and horror, became the journalistic home for the equivalent of the writer of criticism for pop music, ‘My personal take on literary criticism is largely derived from the work of Stanley Fish who argued that the text only exists as something constructed from the words on the page and the mind of the person reading it. Perhaps this makes me a coprophile but some of the books I read are, in the words of The Firesign Theatre, “really good shit."’2 Referred to here by Marc Ortleib, ANZAPA (Australia and New Zealand Amateur Publishers Association), for the sake of appearing superior in knowledge, is a US’ surreal comedy troupe, who first appeared in a live performance on November 17th, 1966, for the California state capital Los Angeles’ program, Radio Free Oz, station KPFK FM, but it’s deliberately over the head of most casual browsers, because the critic wants to obfuscate the understanding of the reader to ensure ignorance, as a matter of routine, although the assassination of intelligence to rival a smattering of savvy is ritualistically evil.
However, the readers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror aren’t illiterate, as they have to be able to understand the material in order to read, whereas the readers of Melody Maker, New Musical Express and Sounds, for example, were taught they were reading some really heavy duty criticism, if they weren’t able to comprehend what was supposedly being communicated, ‘I can’t comment on “The Purge” or any of its sequels. I’ve never seen it, nor heard of it.’3 That Ortleib doesn’t care whether you’ve seen the movie, The Purge (2013), or not, and isn’t interested in what you think, is too peremptorily dismissive of the US $ 83 million the film made at the box office, regardless of the plot, which is based on the notion of what would happen if people were allowed to police themselves. That the critic hasn’t seen The Purge is meant to indicate its and your worthlessness, which isn’t a measure of its value. The role of the critic is to experience a work in order to make an objective attempt at measuring its value for others, rather than to despise the attempt to evaluate on the understanding that the other’s opinion is irrelevant and can be safely disregarded, because the critic’s secluded in his ivory tower of academe.
The writers of literary criticism for ghettoized fiction such as Cyberpunk, which includes the seminal movie, The Terminator (1984), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, about a world in which humans war with machines for survival, and Space Opera’s wars between its good Princesses and its Empire of evil, for example, in the box office successful ‘blockbuster’ movie Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), with the prequels and sequels of its lucrative franchise, were encouraged by the ostensibly obscure provenance of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, to write in a style similar to those of the deafening and dumbing down of the music papers, which seemingly also wanted to blind the readers to the value of going to see the musical performance by indifferently dismissing its significance.
Genre criticism is the condemnation of the writer on the basis of a self-fulfilling prophecy, that is, it isn’t readable, so it isn’t written; for example, Ortleib’s comment on futanarian women’s seed, who’re women with their own penis’ semen, therefore identifiably a separate species from men, as a subject more than fitting for exploration by the science fiction genre with a remit to examine alternate social systems, ‘As far as I can see this is just a concept from manga or perhaps Japanese culture in general.’ Japan’s practice of ‘foot-binding’ of women to prevent their escape isn’t a cartoon, but a determined effort to prevent the human futa race from developing enough brainpower to rid itself of slavers through women’s mode of sexual reproduction with each other as a species, while anime manga depicts the torture of these humans as entertainment for the alien: just.
1 Smith, Alan ‘Throat Sweets Keep Us Going Say Beatles!’, New Musical Express, April 19th, 1963.
2 Ortleib, Marc Australia and New Zealand Amateur Publishers Association (ANZAPA), Wednesday, May 4th, 2022, 6: 35 pm, https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/tmxqemfvddxw/?&th=18092489a4a3e9fa&d=e&v=c&s=t .