John Gardner, from On Moral Fiction  (1978)

Merdistes! Love it - I wonder if it is his own coinage? And who did he have in mind? 

Letter to a Young Music Critic

The easy answer: if you want your writing to be more passionate, write about things you feel passionate about

Otherwise it can feel a bit forced

If you feel neutral or indifferent about something to start off with it, it’s hard to not reproduce that – you can maybe get round it by finding something interesting in the larger phenomenon, or the question of why do people like this...

It’s tricky one, passion, because it’s easy to overdo it and slather on the superlatives and "lyrical" descriptions

Nothing worse than that sort of SHOUTING LOUD prose mode, or uncontrollably gushing , or overly poetic

Because gushing and superlatives can be quite vague – the praise terms are interchangeable, you could substitute a different artist or record’s name – the tricky bit is being precise in your passion

I think the goal is a sort of ‘controlled passion’ or ‘controlled power’ – it’s actually more effective if you ration it out, have a little burst where some kind of excessive feelings cut through

How you develop that, I’m not sure – you could experiment with different registers, more personal elements – do some writing that isn’t for publication, where you write about your emotional responses to films or books or music, how things have related with what’s going on in your life

Then you can see if there’s a way to ease that element into your writing that is published, without it becoming cloying or too memoirist-ic

And read some more criticism – read some of the classics, in lots of different fields, to see how they managed it

Lester Bangs is the king of the super-passionate rock critics, it reads often like a guy who is drunkenly spilling out his guts in a bar (he’s the only rock critic to have a biography written about him and it was called LET IT BLURT), but then later he gets more controlled and elegant while still passionate and moving. E.g. piece on Astral Weeks by Van Morrison (it appears in his posthumous collection of writing but also in the various writers collection Stranded). Try writers on film like Pauline Kael or David Thomson (although his stuff is cooler and calmer in tone)

There is also negative passion, where people denouncing stuff. Mark Fisher was good at that! He called it nihilation. For that to come off, though, you really have to believe in the moment of writing that there is something deplorable and pernicious about the thing you are decrying.

Nowadays that kind of outburst oriented, fiery style of criticism - positive and negative -  has gone out of a fashion a bit. Or at least the younger generation don’t do it as much.  Music writing today seems quite hung up on authoritativeness, knowing your facts, having done your research, and also positioning – where does this fit into the scheme of things, the artist's’career moves, what they are trying to signify, statements being made etc… It’s often done very well and is precisely written, but feels dry to someone of my generation.

What’s too often missing for me is that sense of music’s power to seduce and to break you down – the flooding of pleasure almost to the point of swooning –   the bliss and in a way the violence of music– whether it’s a very physical thing of the bass impacting your body or the way melody and harmony can lacerate you emotionally, because sometimes the softest music has the most powerful effect  - if a record (or a film) can make you cry that is really powerful, much more being noisy or slamming.

There are some great music writers who never go into that aspect and they produce work that is well reasoned and eloquent. But for me, for music writing to be complete, it needs to register at some point the sensual and emotional power of the music. There should be at least a little bit of rhapsodizing about the beauty – that’s what we are in it for, surely, the beauty, the intensity.

Experiment with this element -  listen to things and try to think, why do I like this so much, what is it doing to me?

"Art history has decided that 1958 and 1959 are years when the style called ‘Abstract Expressionism’ or ‘action painting’ or the ‘New York School’ grew tired of its triumph and lay down to die. Jasper Johns’s Flag – Abstract Expressionism’s ghastly patriotic shroud – had its first showing at Leo Castelli’s in January 1958. You might say, especially in retrospect, that Flag was always waiting to be draped over Suburb in Havana’s dream of freedom. Flag never grows old.

‘Lay down to die,’ I wrote. But morbidity in modernist art is a necessary condition, and very often horribly lively. Modernism is an art of endings – of art’s ending – and it goes on elaborating its death rattle. De Kooning certainly did."

 T.J. Clark, 2026

 ‘Content, if you want to say, is a glimpse of something, an encounter, you know, like a flash – it’s very tiny, very tiny, content.’ 

-  Willem De Kooning,, 1960, to David Sylvester in 1960 

"Most of [my recent pictures] are landscapes and highways and sensations of that, outside the city – with the feeling of going to the city or coming from it, you know. In other words, I’m not a pastoral character, you know, I’m not a – how do you say that? – ‘country dumpling’. I am here and I like it in New York City, but I love to go out in a car. I’m crazy about weekend drives even if I drive in the middle of the week. I’m just crazy about going over the roads and highways ... They are really not very pretty, but the big embankments and the shoulders of the roads and the curves are flawless – the lawning of it, the grass. This I don’t particularly like, or dislike, but I wholly approve of it ... I mean, I am not undertaking any social ... I’m no lover of the new – it’s a personal thing ...When I was working on this [Merritt Parkway] picture, this thing came to me: it’s just like the Merritt Parkway."

 - De Kooning, ibid

:There is this strange desire which you can’t explain. Why should you do that? I think I like it because of the ordinariness ... The landscapes I made in the 1950s, such as Parc Rosenberg, were the result of associations. But I had a vast area of nature – a highway and the metamorphosis of passing things. A highway, when you sit in a car – removed ..."

De Kooning, to Harold Rosenberg, 1972

 

from T.J. Clark's critique of Clement Greenberg