{"id":26,"date":"2006-01-04T14:07:38","date_gmt":"2006-01-04T20:07:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/index.php\/2006\/01\/04\/surpassing-expectations-ltd\/"},"modified":"2006-02-13T14:10:27","modified_gmt":"2006-02-13T20:10:27","slug":"surpassing-expectations-ltd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2006\/01\/surpassing-expectations-ltd\/","title":{"rendered":"Surpassing expectations, Ltd."},"content":{"rendered":"
Copyright 2006 Ben S. Pollock<\/font><\/h6>\n
<\/font>Surpassing expectations by accepting limits<\/font><\/h5>\n

Wednesday 4 January 2006.<\/font><\/b><\/font> Last issue, The New Yorker<\/i> praised James Agee<\/a>. Actually, it was New Yorker<\/i> movie critic David Denby. (If I don’t always agree with Denby, he’s about the only current writer who every once in a while drops in a sentence or a paragraph that could have been Robert Benchley’s.) The argument going into the remembrance was that Agee’s contemporary critics and those who considered him after he died saw him as a wasted or squandered or underused talent. Until Denby of course slayed those straw men. (If there were no straw men, who would we write essays about?)<\/font><\/p>\n

His point was that Agee’s limits made him great. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men<\/i> after all was an assignment from Fortune.<\/i> The magazine would have had no idea he would have come back with overlong, experimental, borderline journalistic yet haunting prose that would barely fit in book format, much less a periodical. (It was reassuring to learn I was far from the only one who found it basically unreadable.) Denby praised Agee’s film reviews (which may be the hook for that movie critic). What capital-W Writer writes bits like reviews?<\/font><\/p>\n

So, Agee may have had only that nonfiction book, and a couple of novels or shorter fiction, and those little magazine pieces in him. He did not live life well (alcoholic in a word). He also had to earn a living, and that cut short available time. Or did it? Denby argues Agee gave all he had and did not in truth squander his talent and skill, nor did life cut short his productivity.<\/font><\/p>\n

Continuing Denby’s logic, beyond The New Yorker<\/i> piece, is what fascinates. We who create, do what we do. Could Fitzgerald have produced more, or should he have, if he wasn’t such a sloppy drunk, if he wasn’t married to Zelda (yet she was his inspiration, in lofty but often practical ways, a nice way of saying matrimonial plagiarism). Dorothy Parker wanted to write novels, failed at them, but she was a first-rate short-poem and short-prose artist. How dare anyone say she should have done more, but people do. On the other side of the coin of the realm, Edna Ferber in some quarters is all-but-damned for her productivity and consistency. Say Ferber today and the response is, "Giant,<\/i> right? Showboat?<\/i> They were novels first?"<\/font><\/p>\n

"You’re wasting your talents cooking Here when you could be a chef There." It’s a ploy bludgeoned by loved ones more than strangers, outside of critics, that is. Guilt-assigning, Me-too-ism, Stay-down-here-with-us, whatever.<\/font><\/p>\n

Denby’s right. Writers and other artists play out the best they can with the hands they’re dealt. Any comment otherwise really is mere second-guessing. You weren’t there. -30-<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Copyright 2006 Ben S. Pollock Surpassing expectations by accepting limits Wednesday 4 January 2006. Last issue, The New Yorker praised James Agee. Actually, it was New Yorker movie critic David Denby. (If I don’t always agree with Denby, he’s about the only current writer who every once in a while drops in a sentence or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-course-of-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":183,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2006\/04\/pied-pipers-of-grimm\/","url_meta":{"origin":26,"position":0},"title":"Pied Pipers of Grimm","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"April 18, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2006 Ben S. Pollock Not to be outdone, we in the Ozarks have a playwright equal to the latest Irish sensation Martin McDonagh. Salvatore O'Mally of Farmington, Ark., has an even more larcenous soul than McDonagh. It's a wonder he isn't as well-known. McDonagh got an eight-page profile in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Course of Words"","block_context":{"text":"The Course of Words","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/course-of-words\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":147,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/05\/mothers-day-2005\/","url_meta":{"origin":26,"position":1},"title":"Mother’s Day 2005","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"May 8, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Sunday, May 8, 2005: An ode to Mother's Day. It's the first one since Mom passed last November. I've started reading a new, and perhaps the only so far, full biography of Ogden Nash. Here is a lede that won't work in my eventual newspaper\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Life Lessons"","block_context":{"text":"Life Lessons","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/life-lessons\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":463,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2008\/07\/a-little-magazine\/","url_meta":{"origin":26,"position":2},"title":"A Little Magazine","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"July 25, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"For decades, The New Yorker arrived 52 weeks a year, on the same day, must've been Tuesday, in Mom and Dad's mailbox in Fort Smith. Rarely, it came on Wednesday. A little while before it dropped to 47 issues annually, the regular day ended, annoying Mom to no end. It\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Course of Words"","block_context":{"text":"The Course of Words","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/course-of-words\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":273,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2007\/02\/good-words-to-you\/","url_meta":{"origin":26,"position":3},"title":"“Good Words to You”","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"February 7, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Fishing around for a headline to this, I remembered the above. It's the outcue for the audio column on NPR's Morning Edition that the late poet John Ciardi used to do in the early to mid-1980s. He considered origins, histories and roots of words in them. Posthumously, in 1987, Harper\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Course of Words"","block_context":{"text":"The Course of Words","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/course-of-words\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":417,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2008\/04\/judge-date-by-her-cover\/","url_meta":{"origin":26,"position":4},"title":"Judge Date by Her Cover","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"April 7, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Here are three articles claiming with scant evidence that women are fiction and men non-fiction. The earliest comes from the March 24, 2008, edition of The New Yorker, which started out as possibly a look at where the two literatures overlap in either memoir or false memoir. But near the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Course of Words"","block_context":{"text":"The Course of Words","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/course-of-words\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":863,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2009\/01\/turn-rupees-to-scruples\/","url_meta":{"origin":26,"position":5},"title":"Turn Rupees to Scruples","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"January 26, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Report: Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire. Why, everyone should see Slumdog Millionaire. It's a cross between Oliver Twist (book and any movie version) and WALL-E. Other lead characters: Fagin, Artful Dodger and Eve. The plot: fish-out-of-water-into-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire. (Shouldn't reviews now and then be as short as possible? Complete write-ups, not capsules) In\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "American Culture"","block_context":{"text":"American Culture","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/american-culture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}