Yeah, yeah, no time to think. Gimme gimme now! Thumbs up, thumbs down. Should I buy it or should I not? These appear to be the essential frames for modern criticism to function in today. Just serve the ever-shrinking moment and get the hell out of the way of the pleasure stampede. And please don’t bore us with an idea, let alone an essay disguised as a review. Please don’t bore us, period.

That’s how Mark Mordue begins his essay on the dwindling of our written culture.  Mark was recently awarded the Pascall Prize for critical writing at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, and the essay is an extended version of his acceptance speech.

The essay won’t reassure you, but it certainly invigorates.  In a postscript he says he was unable to get it published in print in Australia.

To read the full essay click on the link at the bottom of this post.  In the meantime, here are some excerpts to whet your appetite.

Not that ‘the critic’ has ever been a greatly appreciated or understood figure. Some fat toad with a feather in his hat who thinks he is a modern-day Oscar Wilde. A bearded dweeb with a bad tie boring us senseless with his obscure expertise. An uptight librarian type with cats-eye reading glasses taking her revenge on the world. All in all, as the saying goes, a great bunch of faces for radio.

Leading the pack are the assassin and the leech …

There’s another standard view around the traps that a critic is some form of reverse mechanic, taking apart a play, piece of music or film, leaving all the pieces everywhere and grunting down at the dismembered mess he or she has made, ‘Well it’s clear that doesn’t work.’

Newspapers and magazines long ago surrendered their prime ground to this snappy thinking, moving from a tabloid mentality to a matchbox one as marketing-minded editors strutted in mouthing platitudes about “multiple entry points per page”, reducing the lengths of stories and reviews, enlarging the images …

It can seem like our culture is being ferried on its own electronic light all the way into hell.

To read the full essay, click here.

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