Congrats on your fellowship Celine!! This line exactly describes what personal canon is to me: A critic acts as a deeply invested friend, or a generous teacher, when they introduce you to a work.
This is so kind! I really enjoy writing the newsletter (and am sad I haven't had as much time for it lately)…it's always encouraging to hear what people enjoy about it. Thank you for reading and for your well-wishes!
loved these lines: "He says something. But I am inside the clementine. I imagine myself miniature, walking through vaulted orange membranes, a fruit cathedral."
Loved this! Just a small correction: Victor Henringer is Brazilian, not Portuguese. Brazil and Portugal share the same language because of Portugal’s colonization of Brazil, which is why Portuguese is spoken there today.
Oh no, nothing to be ashamed of — it happens! And I really, really loved your post. I’ve been a bit obsessed with literary criticism lately, and your work definitely scratches that itch for me.
i have to say though, i miss seeing your restacks on my feed, i always love discovering new people and works through your recommendations.
in line with what you said about criticism teaching us how to read and appreciate literature, i want to share a recent experience. so i recently discarded my 5 star rating system, and in its place, i have been attempting to (and failing woefully) to write reviews in my notebooks. a week ago, i wrote a 3 page 'essay??' (does 3 pages count as an essay lol) on claire louise bennett's checkout-19, and that experience changed how i viewed the book. going back to the passages i highlighted, sentences i loved and asking myself "what drew you to that particular bit?" made me feel more connected to it, and when i was reading my next book, i felt like i was more present in the moment, more discerning with what i highlighted, and scrutinised the author's choices of words and sentences more, and its so fun. just wanted to share that lol
Checkout 19 is one of my all-time favorites—Claire-Louise Bennett has such a distinctive style and way of using language. It's really lovely to hear about your own notebook reviews…I was going back through my notebooks recently and realized that, in the months before pitching my first review and writing this newsletter, I'd started journaling a lot about what I was reading! Like I read Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and then I tried to identify people in my life who reminded me of different characters, and I made a little table of characters who I admired in different novels, with Lily Briscoe at the top…
I've definitely experienced something similar! The act of going through highlights, picking out the sentences I loved the most, trying to remember what was special about them…
Thank you for sharing!!! And if you post any of your reading thoughts/essays, please let me know!
shamefully…I have never read Waiting for Godot…I must! maybe I should have a month of plays, where I also read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead? (early on in the relationship, one of my exes tried to read the play to me…I fell asleep, but it's not Tom Stoppard's fault!)
oh don’t read it - go watch it! I guess you need a theatre production on, or you could do like a staged reding with your mates. It’s Beckett so rhythm and cadence matters quite a bit, tho tbh the play text is sort of timeless and poetic. Anyway thanks for all your links and thoughts! 💭 oh and my fave Stoppard is Arcadia. I bet ur ex was trying to show off with that absurdist number. Ciao
thank you!!! you are definitely one of my earliest readers, so I feel very honored that you're still here…letting me inflict these huge emails on your inbox
Brilliant news, your work continues to expand my world of reading and writing, so thank you and congratulations.
To echo Caroline Beuley in an earlier comment, the Beckley piece was truly inspiring. It loosed some daring (courage?) in my own latest substack writing, which begins with you and Beckley, and travels back in time to Philadelphia and Jerusalem (1969-1970).
thank you for this, Havi! very, very generous and kind—it means a lot that you enjoyed the Beckley post (it felt so freeing to WRITE, and additionally freeing to see how others have riffed off of it!)
really appreciate you leaving a comment—all the best with your readerly and writerly adventures!
Congratulations, Celine! Maybe you've addressed this elsewhere: I would love to "break in" to publishing book reviews. I'm broadly familiar with the pitch process for nonfiction essays. Do you have particular advice or remembrances concerning getting that first foot in the door? For instance, you mentioned your first published review was of Mieko Kanai. What factors contributed to the Cleveland Review's acceptance of your pitch? Any behind-the-scenes insights you can offer on that first publication would be much appreciated!
For both the Heti/ArtReview and Mieko Kanai/Cleveland Review pitches, it helped to have some angle for why I, specifically, was the right person for that book and angle. For Heti it was that I wanted to analyze Alphabetical Diaries by thinking of Heti's process as making a "small" language model/dataset for herself (and I have a background in CS, which many book reviewers don't). For Mieko Kanai, I mentioned that I'd done an MA in design history and wanted to touch on the domesticity/materiality of Kanai's novel, and her focus on consumer objects.
Both of these rely on my educational/professional background, but there are definitely other things you can lean on! I do generally feel that the specificity/novelty of the idea is key, and you can land a pitch—even as a relatively inexperienced writer—if you can express that clearly, compellingly, and concisely
Great newsletter. I am experimenting writing book reviews and this discussion has made me think more deeply about it. I have read some very good books this year so far including Miller's The Land in Winter, Crummey's The Adversary, July's All Fours, Van Dear Wouden's The Safekeep, Watts's Elegy Southwest, de Kretser's Theory and Practice, Seiffert's Once The Deed is Done.
Beautiful, just a beautiful essay. I especially appreciate the pointer to the Vinson Cunningham line that a "A critic…is someone who loves experience." It gets at what makes criticism bad, or at least one way criticism can be bad, which is when the critic does not love, or has come to hate, the experience of reading. If the critic does not love the experience of reading then criticism fails along any of the dimensions you sketch here.
I just finished re-reading Against Interpretation, and found, again, yet how great Sontag is.
The “criticism is dead” discourse is coming out of a specific silo of folks who feel they have been disenfranchised by the widening of participation and recognition of people who also make up the human race. Theory and Criticism have always been alive and well. What I find most funny in the writings by this group is their use of the very theories they disparage in their own analysis of literature. It is clear that many simply have very little to no knowledge of theories or literary history — having not studied literature in any substantive way other than a very subjective, I know what I like sort of way. The age-old battle between the Humanities and STEM is that STEM folks do not take the Humanities seriously in that they feel they can easily speak authoritatively without those credentials — how hard can it be? I am a human too, they think. I am all for expanding the market, but like STEM there are sections of the literary market where more than a hobbyist’s level of knowledge is required. Also, my son did his undergraduate at MIT — and he confirms the humanities are very much an afterthought — if even that.
Congrats on your fellowship Celine!! This line exactly describes what personal canon is to me: A critic acts as a deeply invested friend, or a generous teacher, when they introduce you to a work.
Excited to see what's next for you!
This is so kind! I really enjoy writing the newsletter (and am sad I haven't had as much time for it lately)…it's always encouraging to hear what people enjoy about it. Thank you for reading and for your well-wishes!
Congrats Celine! Really enjoyed this piece!
Also, so grateful for your last Bill Beckley piece! I wrote a story inspired by it and it got featured by the Substack Post :) All thanks to you!
omg Caroline! I can't believe I missed this! very happy to hear that the post was inspiring, and that your story was shared more widely (also, linking here for others to read https://fairytalesbycaroline.substack.com/p/peel-me-like-one-of-your-clementines)
loved these lines: "He says something. But I am inside the clementine. I imagine myself miniature, walking through vaulted orange membranes, a fruit cathedral."
Loved this! Just a small correction: Victor Henringer is Brazilian, not Portuguese. Brazil and Portugal share the same language because of Portugal’s colonization of Brazil, which is why Portuguese is spoken there today.
This is so embarrassing because I got it right in the review, wrong in this post—but I appreciate the correction! Have updated the post
Oh no, nothing to be ashamed of — it happens! And I really, really loved your post. I’ve been a bit obsessed with literary criticism lately, and your work definitely scratches that itch for me.
Congratulations Celine!!!
i have to say though, i miss seeing your restacks on my feed, i always love discovering new people and works through your recommendations.
in line with what you said about criticism teaching us how to read and appreciate literature, i want to share a recent experience. so i recently discarded my 5 star rating system, and in its place, i have been attempting to (and failing woefully) to write reviews in my notebooks. a week ago, i wrote a 3 page 'essay??' (does 3 pages count as an essay lol) on claire louise bennett's checkout-19, and that experience changed how i viewed the book. going back to the passages i highlighted, sentences i loved and asking myself "what drew you to that particular bit?" made me feel more connected to it, and when i was reading my next book, i felt like i was more present in the moment, more discerning with what i highlighted, and scrutinised the author's choices of words and sentences more, and its so fun. just wanted to share that lol
Checkout 19 is one of my all-time favorites—Claire-Louise Bennett has such a distinctive style and way of using language. It's really lovely to hear about your own notebook reviews…I was going back through my notebooks recently and realized that, in the months before pitching my first review and writing this newsletter, I'd started journaling a lot about what I was reading! Like I read Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and then I tried to identify people in my life who reminded me of different characters, and I made a little table of characters who I admired in different novels, with Lily Briscoe at the top…
I've definitely experienced something similar! The act of going through highlights, picking out the sentences I loved the most, trying to remember what was special about them…
Thank you for sharing!!! And if you post any of your reading thoughts/essays, please let me know!
Also why "Critic!" is shouted as the ultimate insult in Waiting For Godot. my fave play. congrats on being one!
shamefully…I have never read Waiting for Godot…I must! maybe I should have a month of plays, where I also read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead? (early on in the relationship, one of my exes tried to read the play to me…I fell asleep, but it's not Tom Stoppard's fault!)
oh don’t read it - go watch it! I guess you need a theatre production on, or you could do like a staged reding with your mates. It’s Beckett so rhythm and cadence matters quite a bit, tho tbh the play text is sort of timeless and poetic. Anyway thanks for all your links and thoughts! 💭 oh and my fave Stoppard is Arcadia. I bet ur ex was trying to show off with that absurdist number. Ciao
congratulations, celine!! so well deserved. this piece was wonderful – your work on writing always reminds me why it’s such a beautiful thing.
thank you!!! you are definitely one of my earliest readers, so I feel very honored that you're still here…letting me inflict these huge emails on your inbox
Brilliant news, your work continues to expand my world of reading and writing, so thank you and congratulations.
To echo Caroline Beuley in an earlier comment, the Beckley piece was truly inspiring. It loosed some daring (courage?) in my own latest substack writing, which begins with you and Beckley, and travels back in time to Philadelphia and Jerusalem (1969-1970).
Bravo!
thank you for this, Havi! very, very generous and kind—it means a lot that you enjoyed the Beckley post (it felt so freeing to WRITE, and additionally freeing to see how others have riffed off of it!)
really appreciate you leaving a comment—all the best with your readerly and writerly adventures!
Congratulations, Celine! Maybe you've addressed this elsewhere: I would love to "break in" to publishing book reviews. I'm broadly familiar with the pitch process for nonfiction essays. Do you have particular advice or remembrances concerning getting that first foot in the door? For instance, you mentioned your first published review was of Mieko Kanai. What factors contributed to the Cleveland Review's acceptance of your pitch? Any behind-the-scenes insights you can offer on that first publication would be much appreciated!
So I actually have SEVERAL POSTS about pitching (or at least specific pitches I sent…I should have linked it in the post too!)
This is about my pitch/research/writing process for my Sheila Heti review for ArtReview, and it quotes from my pitch email https://www.personalcanon.com/p/i-reviewed-sheila-hetis-alphabetical
And this is about my review of Chaim Gingold's nonfiction book for the LA Review of Books, published by the MIT Press https://www.personalcanon.com/p/take-the-paranoid-reading-pill
For both the Heti/ArtReview and Mieko Kanai/Cleveland Review pitches, it helped to have some angle for why I, specifically, was the right person for that book and angle. For Heti it was that I wanted to analyze Alphabetical Diaries by thinking of Heti's process as making a "small" language model/dataset for herself (and I have a background in CS, which many book reviewers don't). For Mieko Kanai, I mentioned that I'd done an MA in design history and wanted to touch on the domesticity/materiality of Kanai's novel, and her focus on consumer objects.
Both of these rely on my educational/professional background, but there are definitely other things you can lean on! I do generally feel that the specificity/novelty of the idea is key, and you can land a pitch—even as a relatively inexperienced writer—if you can express that clearly, compellingly, and concisely
Excellent. Thanks so much for taking the time to share these links!
The spirit within this is so resonant! I appreciate what you do and that you do it with joy and optimism.
Great newsletter. I am experimenting writing book reviews and this discussion has made me think more deeply about it. I have read some very good books this year so far including Miller's The Land in Winter, Crummey's The Adversary, July's All Fours, Van Dear Wouden's The Safekeep, Watts's Elegy Southwest, de Kretser's Theory and Practice, Seiffert's Once The Deed is Done.
Congrats Celine, very happy for ya.
Beautiful, just a beautiful essay. I especially appreciate the pointer to the Vinson Cunningham line that a "A critic…is someone who loves experience." It gets at what makes criticism bad, or at least one way criticism can be bad, which is when the critic does not love, or has come to hate, the experience of reading. If the critic does not love the experience of reading then criticism fails along any of the dimensions you sketch here.
I just finished re-reading Against Interpretation, and found, again, yet how great Sontag is.
The “criticism is dead” discourse is coming out of a specific silo of folks who feel they have been disenfranchised by the widening of participation and recognition of people who also make up the human race. Theory and Criticism have always been alive and well. What I find most funny in the writings by this group is their use of the very theories they disparage in their own analysis of literature. It is clear that many simply have very little to no knowledge of theories or literary history — having not studied literature in any substantive way other than a very subjective, I know what I like sort of way. The age-old battle between the Humanities and STEM is that STEM folks do not take the Humanities seriously in that they feel they can easily speak authoritatively without those credentials — how hard can it be? I am a human too, they think. I am all for expanding the market, but like STEM there are sections of the literary market where more than a hobbyist’s level of knowledge is required. Also, my son did his undergraduate at MIT — and he confirms the humanities are very much an afterthought — if even that.