The Passion of the Critic

Everybody wants their book reviewed. The problem is that hardly anybody knows the first thing about writing a review anymore let alone writing a book.Let’s play stud poker, showing all cards face up one at a time.
I have a Masters of English degree with a focus on modern literature and my thesis was a creative, non-fiction travelogue piece that I wrote while backpacking through communist Poland in 1985 before the Berlin Wall came down. You can get the eBook version cheap at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Although I’ve sold quite a few copies, only one person reviewed it and gave it a two star rating, claiming that it was ‘too short’. Apparently, he didn’t bother to read the detailed description that said the print length version was only 64 pages long. Every intelligent person I know that read it said it was great, bucolic and resonated with multiple levels of meaning and, although the prose was simple, it was far from being simplistic. That’s if you know what I mean. But most people don’t. Most of the reading population, if they graduated from high school, took no more English classes than was required of them besides the mandatory and dreaded, College Composition course which I’ve taught at several universities around the world during my twenty-five years as an educator. Now how are critically handicapped people able to evaluate a book on the market using lyrical and rhetorical devices better than those who have spent years studying literature? They can’t. That’s why you get nothing but plot summaries in most online reviews  peppered with cliché phrases such as ‘page turner’, ‘likeable characters’, ‘couldn’t put it down’ or ‘lots of surprising plot twists’.Hello? Excuse me but literary criticism used to be a bona-fide field of academic studies with its own set of clearly defined parameters, commonly shared vocabulary and reliance upon the knowledge of rhetorical devices like exposition, development, climax and denouement. I know, I know. I’m speaking in a foreign language again but it just so happens that I’ve also studied Spanish literature at the graduate level and am still certified to teach it at the high school level. Take a deep breath all of you monolingual readers and reviewers. Place your bets or fold. I’ve shown two aces already.

Next card.

I’ve talked to more than a hundred authors on my podcast blog, 2012writers (STILL) ALIVE. Some of them are famous worldwide and have been on the New York Times best seller list more than once. Others have not been so fortunate, but yet they write with passion and knowledge about their particular fields of expertise. One thing that they all have in common is that they like feedback, hopefully the positive and encouraging kind. So when some idiot with a computer and Internet connection gets online and reviews their work with bland comments such as ‘not worth the money’, ‘didn’t hold my interest’ or ‘waste of time’, I feel sorry not only for the author but more so for the “reviewer” who doesn’t know the semantic difference between lightning and a lightning bug, as Mark Twain once said.

Another ace on the table.

I was accepted into a PhD program at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan and took several courses in advanced Linguistics, Composition and Literary Criticism before having to drop out for financial reasons and job demands. So I know just a little bit about language and its structure, history and usage. It’s amazing how many writers and reviewers today don’t, but like I said above, hook them up to a broadband signal and get tons of garbage upchucked online. That’s why I rarely write reviews or post them on Amazon,Goodreads (under my pen name, Conrad Johnson) or Blogcritics.org. anymore. You just can’t be intelligently honest and write the slightest negative review, no matter how constructive in tone it is, without drawing the ire of keyboard pounding Neanderthals who resent the fact that you use vocabulary outside of their knowledge base. And I’m not about to waste my time arguing with idiots on forums that I don’t have complete control over.

Ace number four. Call or cop out.

I’m extremely secure in my knowledge of literature and quite a few other subjects and if you take the time to listen to some of my short podcast interviews, you’ll see that I don’t bore guests with script questions. I engage them astutely, based upon my research of their work and my own lifetime of experiences as a world traveler and lifelong reader, writer and teacher of language. All of my guests have enjoyed talking to me and I’ve gotten private and public praise from them that I deserve because I earned it along with their respect. Is that all the money you have? How much is that watch you’re wearing worth?

Last card. The kicker.

I’m a damn fine writer (so I've been told by many professionals) that has published several novels and written for various venues on the Internet but I don’t care to ‘toot my own horn’ much because the way the book marketplace is today. It sounds like a zillion vuvuzelas at a football match. The cacophony is deafening and that’s why many agents, publishers and reviewers are slamming their doors shut for some peace and quiet, including me. Sure, it’s nice to be recognized and, sure, it would be wonderful to sell a million copies of some pulp, pornographic thriller like E.L. James or James Patterson do, but until that day arrives for me (if it ever does), then I’ll just be satisfied with an intelligent response to my writing by someone like John D. Rachel who reviewed my recent novella, Jesus Told Me To Kill Her,  with marvelous precision and insight that the mockers and the envious loathe-- similar to the type of people who stood on the sidelines on that historical day when a  simple carpenter carried a cross to Golgotha and was spat upon and brutally attacked because he dared to speak honestly and intelligently about a subject that everyone in his nation could only grasp at the basest of levels.

Your deal.
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