Leah Lievrouw

Metareading: Dubious Distinctions Dept.

February 17th, 2007

I am fated to play intellectual catch-up…but been carrying around this clip for a month-plus.

From the Times Literary Supplement of 1 December 2006. Well it’s a review in an outlet we pointy-heads lust after, but it could make one wonder how that shiv slid in there without one noticing. Keith Miller does the kind of long-form admiration piece on Simon Schama’s recent book & BBC series, Power of Art that anybody would love, made me regret not being over in ol’ Albion to see the show. Miller gives us a plenty to admire about Schama (whom he calls an “archive-wallah” — love that!) and the project, such as his grudging admission that, in Schama’s treatment of Rembrandt,

Prating on about brush strokes has long been somewhat unfashionable, and it’s a brave thing for Schama to do, even if he does so with a light, conversational touch (and a richness of diction that makes his scripts anything but repetitive).

But it couldn’t last, I suppose: snark to our brit cousins is like white on rice, like refrieds on the combo plate. Don’t know about you, but in the very last paragraph, I’d hate to be described as

…lounging like a leather-jacketed Diogenes on the Scala Regia in the Vatican, gazing wistfully over the rooftops of this or that city, shooting the cuffs of a Reservoir Dogs suit and generally behaving like a man in the talons of a severe midlife crisis — [which] only slightly detract[s] from the intense sustained pleasure of shared looking which Schama’s commentary, and the consistently excellent camera work, conspire to convey.

There’s whipsaw for you. Ow.

Entry Filed under: CulturlStudys