Wednesday, April 28, 2004

Yeah, Josh, I was just reading that New Yorker profile of Dorothea Tanning, too. I guess it was kind of irritating because of its self-congratulatory angle--a glowing New Yorker profile of a New Yorker poet--but after a while it just became a kind of silly testament to how the New Yorker long ago abandoned anything like serious literary criticism (especially of poetry); its profiles of writers don't pretend to be anything more than puff pieces about the writers and their famous friends. Given Tanning's stated hatred of having her work socially categorized (as "feminist" art, or herself as the wife of Max Ernst), if I were her I'd be pretty pissed that in the whole thing there's probably about three sentences about her art, and pretty much none about her poetry.

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