>Personally, I think we should start a >peer-reviewed journal to review the reviewers.

I'm in...

Alas, I'm rather busy avoiding my own pile of Real Work (tm) to handle any more procrastination.... try me again in a couple of days.

Trust me, sweetie, I do in fact know more about what my book is about than you do, no matter how desperately you would like to excise the author from the process entirely.)

That attitude is one of the reasons I ended up leaving art history; too many of my fellows were (IMO) creating fictions out of the works of artists and calling it research.

I'd be happy to help with chores...except I'm not quite nearby.

And, a peer-reviewed journal sounds like a great idea!

I do find critical arrogation of privilege--both academic and in the lay press--more than faintly ridiculous. Trust me, sweetie, I do in fact know more about what my book is about than you do, no matter how desperately you would like to excise the author from the process entirely

HA. Wow, why I left grad school, right there in two sentences.

I think I'd be too scared to actually read reviews of my reviews. I know I've written a few that completely missed the point (Jacqueline Carey's anti-LOTR series comes to mind, for one *wince*), but I console myself that even my worst reviews are still better than Harriet Klausner's. It's a cold comfort.

This is true. But hooboy, that was a doozy.

Forget reviewing the reviewers. I say we run with a long-running idea of mine, where we start a foundation that tracks down bad book critics, movie critics, music critics, "humor" columnists, science "journalists", and all of the editors who keep them off welfare, and pay them just enough to assist them in drinking themselves to death. If I win the lottery tomorrow, I'm putting $1 million toward that goal, and I'll even pay for lobbying to legalize heroin so as to speed them on their way. (Me, filled with self-loathing for my old writing days? Naaaaah.)

I dunno if I buy the idea that the author always understands their book better than the reader does. This seems like a theory that would be true in a world in which writers were miraculously free of the defects in self-knowledge that commonly plague all other varieties of human being. In this world, not so much.

Mind you, I'm entirely open to the idea that matociquala understands her book better than you do. Different category of assertion, that.

On what grounds, then, is a reviewer (or editor, or reader) ever able to reach a soundly-based negative view of any book?

Trust me, sweetie, I do in fact know more about what my book is about than you do, no matter how desperately you would like to excise the author from the process entirely.

According one of my UW English profs, Steinbeck claimed to be unaware of the biblical parallels in The Grapes of Wrath, which frankly even given some of the blind spots on display in his collected letters [1] I find hard to believe.

F. Paul Wilson believed as of the Tor collection Soft that his use of Libertarian themes in his fiction was subtle. Subtler than the competetion, I'll buy, but there's a definite "Why won't you dumb-asses listen?!" tone to the scenes in Healer set on Tolive, and to most of Wheels Within Wheels and An Enemy of the State.

That said, I miss the LaNague Federation stuff.

1: Specifically, he seemed to find how angry his wives got when they caught him cheating something of a surprise.

But considering how the number of blatantly obvious things the average reviewer makes in the average review, I stand by my statement.

Could I talk you into using some other word than "thing" in that sentence?

Makes me think of the bit in "Waiting For Godot" where they're trading insults and the final, untrumpable, insult is "Critic!"

It can do, in the sense that a critic is a judge of work.

I'm sure there was a long thread about exactly the same idea on Lucius Shepard's Nightshade board a couple of months ago, but I'm damned if I can find it now.

Personally, 1) I'm entirely happy to have any review I write scrutinised for logic, fairness, etc, but 2) I'm with pnh on the idea that no-one has perfect objectivity on what a book is about. Which is the question begged by the idea of this journal as peer-reviewed: who decides if your peer reviewers are objective? It's turtles all the way down.

Sure. But I'm sure you'll also agree that a book (like a person) can give off unconscious meanings that aren't intended, that may in fact be vehemently denied by their originator - like the Steinbeck example upthread.

peer reviewing

In this case, who are the peers doing the reviewing? Reviewers or writers, to the extent those are different groups?

Yeah, I think this is the point where I bow out of this conversation.

Trust me, walking away was preferable to my instinctive reaction.

I seem to recall, from the grad school days, whole journals full of people disagreeing violently with each other's readings, impugning reading ability, etc, so on, and so forth. Of course that's academic critics, which are a slightly different breed than a reviewer, ime, but even so, there's this need for Authority that I just don't understand...in the reviewers, the critics, or the authors.

...that last sentence has issues. I shall blame the lack of coffee, and go get some.

This isn't a call for 'can't we all just get along!' or anything. Sometimes people are sooo off-base it's painful, and sometimes it's pretty clear that the review is about the critic, not the book. And sometimes the author is pompously convinced that no one can say jack or shiznitz about hir work. As long as we don't privilege *any* of them... I'm all for reviewing the reviewers. And the counter-reviewers. And the reviews of the counter...oh shut up and drink the coffee...

Of course it is. Who ever said otherwise? Besides some reviewers, that is, who seem to think stories leap out of our heads fully formed.

And fuck you, Coleridge, with your "Oh, the words just came to me!"

...yeah. In drafts, apparently, just like they come to the rest of us.

I don't know just why it happens, but this page is unreadable in Opera--black text on black background.

Anyway, I think an author can sometimes be too close to their own work to see all that's getting into it. Whether it's another person doing the analysis, or the author distanced by time, I think there is room for discovery.

A possible example: Asimov uses the line "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" in the Foundation series. In The Saint in New York, book and film, Simon Templar is given the line "Violence is the last resort of the incompetent".

Coincidence? Common source? Who can tell, but it's possible that Asimov came across the line, in print or in a cinema, and uncosciously reused it.

On the other hand, the critic sees a connection, but can an explanation ever be more than guesswork?

*High-pitched Mike Tysonish voice*

But that Entropy, he punches so HARD!