Raising the prematurely buried (the trust-man's 2nd chance WO)
Oct 16 '03
The Bottom Line Read and watch and listen and write!
It is very rare for any writer of any sort to think that anything s/he has written is too well-known, too often-discussed, or too widely distributed. In my academic publishing career, I am somewhat discomfitted that my earliest work has been the most cited. However, this is more a feeling that my more recent work is under-recognized than that my first-borns (articles published in the long-ago year of my professional fledgling) are too well-known.
Having received more than a hundred thousand hits, I really don't have much to complain about in the way of overlooked epinions. (I do, however, remember when I wondered if the total would ever make it into four figures.) There are several that have surprising numbers of hits (Paul Auster's New York trilogy and Michael Powell's creepy movie Peeping Tom, for instance) and gratifyingly high totals for my rare travel reviews. My very first review (of the Samuel L. Jackson Shaft) just earned its first income share this week, three and a fraction years after being posted, so surprises continue.
I review some fairly obscure books and movies (black-and-white and/or foreign) and don't expect a mass audience for what I say about them. I like to be read, but leading a reader to something I think is important and good that she or he did not know of is what makes me feel good.
Thus, I care more about the attention reviews I write championing under-rated or too-little-known books and movies gets than that accorded to reviews smiting over-rated and undeservedly venerated works or ratifying existing consensuses. I think it is more difficult to explain what is superlative than it is to slash trash—at least for me. My Midwestern upbringing discouraged enthusiasm and instilled a fear of seeming to gush in me along with guilt about wasting time on trash (consuming it is bad enough, discussing it is even more heinous!).
In taking up John's invitation to bemoan the unceremonious burial of epinions I don't think were dead (/stillborn), two of particular relevance to the current American imperial project came to mind:
my review of a novel about earlier American Mideastern desert floundering, Little America, a novel by Henry Bromell (that has no member ratings from this Iraq-invading year)
and the collection of dispatches from the European part of World War II by John Steinbeck, Once There Was a War
(particularly his essay on the will to forget).
Some of my other Steinbeck reviews from the writeoff celebrating his 99th birthday have received many hits, but not that one.
I guess that my fervent championing of a movie some others dismissed that I would like the world to take to heart and seek out is Giuseppe Tornatore's heart-breaking film Malèna.
The other epinion from very early in my epinion incarnation that I particularly like and think was underattended if not overlooked is my list of the greatest anti-epics movies. (It was a lot of fun to write, as was the more often noticed singling out of the worst movie to win an Academy Award as best picture in each decade at http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-E51-2CC0B514-399D819C-prod5.
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After such wallowing in narcissism, if not (I hope!) self-pity, I want to close by mentioning two long-silent earlier epinion writers who left behind bodies of interesting postings:
http://www.epinions.com/user-wickengel
http://www.epinions.com/user-jeffcoffy
long gone, but not entirely forgotten.
And the best story I've read on epinions remains kchowell's "Mr. Brown and the Vicious Fifth-Graders." It was rated by 121 epinion members, but would be insufficiently appreciated if it had thrice as many!
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I'm glad that John cycled in a year ago, less because he is hosting this writeoff than for writing and posting so many interesting epinions. Links to other epinion writers' bid to dote on their underappreciated progeny are included in John's initiation of this discussion at
http://www.epinions.com/content_3544490116.
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