Posts Tagged ‘criticism’

Britain’s official royal poet was in a bit of a snit. Sir John Betjeman had been asked to pen a verse for Queen Elizabeth’s 1977 Silver Jubilee. And the usually good-humored 70-year-old Poet Laureate was not pleased with the response. Among other criticism, Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn had called Betjeman’s patriotic work “banal.”

After the poet left in a huff, his agent explained to reporters, “He is very upset that it is being treated as a poem when in fact it was never intended to be. It is a hymn.”

Whatever literary critics and politicians thought, when Betjeman’s “hymn”—sung to a composition by Malcolm Williamson, Master of the Queen’s Music—premiered later at London’s Royal Albert Hall, it was greeted by long and thunderous applause. Clearly the public overruled the critics.

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I’m standing at the counter in the doctor’s office, waiting to schedule my next checkup, when a stranger approaches and makes a snarky crack because I’m wearing a long-sleeve cotton t-shirt in the summer.

Now this woman could be Tommy Boy’s lost twin—not that there’s anything wrong with resembling Chris Farley. But she has a near-platinum rounded hair bob and is wearing solid smiley-face yellow from her collar to the cuff of her Capri pants. Perhaps not the wisest wardrobe choice for a female Farley.

So this giant lemon drop has strolled up to me, completely unsolicited, and—with all the condescension of Miss Piggy at her diva best—announced that I look ridiculous for wearing long sleeves. As we say in the American South, some people just need to be slapped. But that’s an expression, not rational problem-solving advice. Suppressing the urge to comment on being momentarily blinded by her neon presence, I simply say, “I’m comfortable,” and turn to the desk clerk.  

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Occasionally we’d wander to the restaurant across the street from the journalism department and grab a corner table. He’d light a cigarette, lean back, and start critiquing my articles. When he came across a passage that didn’t work, he’d read it aloud … and laugh at my goofy sentence construction. I’d grimace and writhe in my chair, and he’d laugh even harder because he knew I was fighting the urge to throw my drink at him. One day I asked, “Do you laugh like that at all your students?” “No,” he said, “only the ones that can take it.” Taking it wasn’t always easy. But the lessons stuck, and they made me a better writer.

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Every James Bond fan knows the classic scene from 1964’s Goldfinger, the film named for one of 007’s most memorable nemeses. But though the rest of us aren’t secret agents caught up in international intrigue, we still have to contend with an enemy who is just as ruthless as Bond’s gold-obsessed adversary. And unfortunately, our enemy can’t be dispatched in the time it takes to play out a movie script.

That’s because the enemy is us.

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You know how it is. Some friend or coworker asks what you think about so-and-so’s job performance or what you’ve heard about such-and-such’s marital troubles. You make some offhand comment that was better left unsaid. And the next thing you know, your comment has spread like wildfire and you’re feeling the heat. So you go back and try to make amends, only to wish you’d left it alone.

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