This is via Suzy Khimm over at WonkBlog. I hate Mondays, not because they are the first day of the work week, but because the Sonoma County Library is closed on. Happy Monday.
What Will You Find?
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The Stone Golem
The Brothers Bloom is a mess of film. And yet, I own it and watch it a bit. It is the kind of film that is better on DVD because of all the stuff that comes with the film. In particular, it comes with almost 40 minutes of deleted scenes. As is often the case, the best stuff was left on the cutting room floor. What’s more, the deleted scenes show an original that is far richer and more complex. I can see why they cut it as they did. Even in its original version, the film was a mess. Why writer/director Rian Johnson didn’t see that his screenplay desperately needed at least one more draft, I can’t say.
And yet, the film is filled with some much that is wonderful, I’m glad it was made. There are two scenes that really stand out. The first is the opening of the film that tells the story of how the bothers started on their life of crime. It is narrated in verse and can be seen on YouTube. The second stand out scene is not in the film. It is very simple. The Curator, played brilliantly by Robbie Coltrane, tells the story of the death of his daughter and the stone golem.
I’ve been checking for the last year to see if anyone had put this scene on YouTube, but I guess no one could be bothered. It may be that the scene speaks more to me than to others. Certainly no one I have shown it to has thought as much of it as I do. I love story telling and this is just one man telling a story. But what a story and what a telling! So I went ahead and put it on YouTube. Enjoy!
Here is the text:
My daughter used to travel with me, when she was very young. And I showed her the places and the pictures, all the most joyous and terrifying things in the world. But you know: but of all the paintings in the objects d’art, she loved to hear… She would ask to hear the story of the stone golem. From the painting in a small private collection on the island of Icaria. Yes?
Well, like most monsters, the golem was once human. A boy about your age. And one day the boy was walking home and he quarreled, he fought with a very good friend of his. And they were very, very angry, and his friend pushed him a certain way. And the boy fell and struck his head and he died. Well, the boy’s friend was very frightened. So he pulled the body into a quarry, and hid the boy beneath a pile of large stones. Well, years went by and the boy’s friend became a young man. And one day, while he was drinking in the village, which, in his guilt, he did rather a lot of, he heard that a well was to be built near the forest from the stones in the quarry. Well, he ran to the quarry. He ran, and when he got there, he found there was almost nothing there. No rocks and no body. So, he ran to the well where the masons were completing their work. Had they seen anything unusual in the quarry? No, they had seen nothing. “Only stones,” they said. And they left him standing there alone, looking into the well as the sun went behind the mountains and the twilight set the whole world in a still, deep silence…
It’s 19 years to the day since my daughter died. She was six years old and she went out to play and she disappeared. [Sighing] And we found her the next morning. Down a stone well. You know, I climbed down to help her, but I slipped and I broke this leg. And while we were waiting for the rescue services to come and pull us out, she died in my arms. Shaking and crying. Her last seconds on this Earth were filled with terror for a stone golem.
This is the first painting I acquired, you know. And I keep it, maybe hoping that one night, the golem will come for me.
Story Spoilers
I prefer to know the plot of a story before I read it. There are a couple of reasons for this. On a visceral level, I don’t like uncertainty; I like to know where I’m going. More important, however, is that on a professional level, I’m pretty good at anticipating plots. So when I’m reading a novel for the first time, it is like a puzzle; I’m trying to figure it out—match wits with the author, so to speak. This has certain benefits. It makes me hyper aware of each thing the author does and why he does it. But it isn’t exactly fun and it stops me from losing myself in the story.
If I know the plot, I am better able to get inside the characters. I enjoy my time with them. And I’m able to evaluate the story on a broader scale. All of this may explain why I have never lost the child’s interest in watching the same film again and again. I do the same thing with short stories. I do it with parts of novels—I’ve read certain chapters of Don Quixote many, many times. But I don’t think I’ve ever read a whole novel more than twice; I don’t have the time or reading speed for that.
It turns out that I am not alone in this preference. Two scientists at the University of California, San Diego have published a paper in Psychological Science titled, Story Spoilers Don’t Spoil Stories.[1] Jonathan D. Leavitt and Nicholas J. S. Christenfeld write in their abstract:
[P]eople’s ability to reread stories with undiminished pleasure, and to read stories in which the genre strongly implies the ending, suggests that suspense regarding the outcome may not be critical to enjoyment and may even impair pleasure by distracting attention from a story’s relevant details and aesthetic qualities.
I would go further. Consider the following story:
A man wakes up late. He’s in a panic. He quickly dresses and goes to the kitchen where he finds his wife, in her dressing gown, leaning against the sink in the dark. He asks her why she didn’t wake him. She tells him they really need to talk. It unnerves him, but he has to get to work. He grabs some coffee and runs out the door. As he is unlocking his car, a truck comes around the corner, hitting and killing him.
I think that story has a surprising ending. The story implies some ominous confrontation between husband and wife that will hang over the day. But instead the guy is killed by a random occurrence. Surprising, boring, and completely lacking drama.
One of the hardest things about writing fiction is creating an ending that makes sense without being boring or obvious. But more and more, stories end satisfyingly rather than surprisingly. Consider the film The Sixth Sense. Most people find the ending of that film quite surprising. I know I did. And yet, if that were all it was, it wouldn’t have been good. I’ve seen it a half dozen times. What brought me back was the sadness of the film. The first time I watched it, I was focused on the boy. Every other time, I was focused on the husband and wife.[2]
Tim Parks wrote an excellent article in The New York Review of Books called Why Finish Books? In it, he makes the case that reading a book is a certain experience and when we’ve had enough of that experience we ought to stop. He further suggests that we get over our childish obsession with equating finishing a book with accomplishment.
I think this is excellent advice, even if I find it hard to follow. Friends of mine have told me how they skipped certain parts of novels—the technical chapters in Moby Dick, for example. And I’ve always been horrified. It seemed to me that I wasn’t reading the book if I skipped even a word. In hindsight, I was deifying the writers. As a writer now myself, I know how silly that is. Part of a story may seem boring to me because, well, it’s boring. Writers are not perfect, especially the great ones.
My current novel is fundamentally about a guy trying to figure out who killed his girlfriend. The plot is very much like the kinds of things Scott Turow writes. But I’ve been wondering why the book goes on a ways after we find out who the killer is. And I think I now know. I could write a plot summary in a couple of paragraphs, and you might find it clever—or not. But the ending would have no emotional impact, even though the ending is poignant; it would definitely make me cry. However, the only way it works is if you sit with the main character the whole way through and get to know him. The only way I know to trick you into doing that is to create a clever plot. But if you stopped reading the book halfway through, you would have gotten the experience that is most important: meeting my character.
Often novels annoy me. I want to know how they end, but the book doesn’t seem worth it. If the book is a blockbuster, I can turn to Wikipedia for a summary. Of course, this is useless for me, because I don’t read blockbusters. Wikipedia does not have summaries for the vast majority of novels, because, you know, most Wikipedia users don’t read novels other than the Harry Potter books. (But just look at all the summaries of movies!) So I slog through the book to find out how it all turns out, even when (Especially when!) I figure I already know.
Is that any way to appreciate a novel?
[1] I heard a couple of news stories about this late last year. It sounds like something I would hear on NPR or read in Ezra Klein’s WonkBlog. But I don’t know. There is a very easy video introduction from ABC News, but I didn’t get it from them.
[2] I am disinclined to reveal the ending, because it is fun to have that experience. However, knowing that there is a surprise ending is enough of a spoiler. And some people don’t even need that. My mother, a master of plot deconstruction, had it nailed within 5 minutes.
Conservative Rock?!
Back in 2006, National Review published Rockin’ the Right, a list of the 50 greatest conservative rock songs ever, by John J. Miller (hereafter National Review or “they”). Like Christian Rock, Conservative Rock strikes me as an oxymoron. And even National Review agrees with me, starting the article, “On first glance, rock ‘n’ roll music isn’t very conservative. It doesn’t fare much better on second or third glance (or listen), either.” But they try. And fail.
I think their biggest problem is that modern conservatism doesn’t really believe in anything other than tax breaks for the wealthy. But most conservatives think they are secretly libertarians; they think they just have to get rid of all the taxes first and then they’ll get around to protecting civil liberties with their nonexistent government. They also think they have “family values,” which in practice means that everyone but them should be stopped from having fun. I always remember Bill O’Reilly defending Bristol Palin’s out of wedlock pregnancy after blasting Jamie Lynn Spears’. So finding good conservative rock songs is a hard task unless there are a lot of songs I don’t know about that say, “Give me freedom and cut my taxes / Kill the poor with Christian axes.”
All you need to know about the list is that number 50 is that great rock anthem Stand By Your Man. In general, the songs are not so much conservative as non-political and non-offensive. As you would expect. And frankly, it doesn’t include a single great song in the top 10. Here they are:
- 1. Won’t Get Fooled Again
- They write, “The conservative movement is full of disillusioned revolutionaries; this could be their theme song, an oath that swears off naïve idealism once and for all.” But that’s not what the song is about. And this is a funny statement given how reactionary the conservative movement is. It is, in fact, the liberal movement that wants to make incremental improvements in society. The conservative movement wants a revolution; they say so all the time. Pete Townshend said of the song, “It is not precisely a song that decries revolution—it suggests that we will indeed fight in the streets—but that revolution, like all action, can have results we cannot predict. Don’t expect to see what you expect to see. Expect nothing and you might gain everything. The song was meant to let politicians and revolutionaries alike know that what lay in the centre of my life was not for sale, and could not be co-opted into any obvious cause… From 1971—when I wrote Won’t Get Fooled Again—to 1985, there was a transition in me from refusal to be co-opted by activists, to a refusal to be judged by people I found jaded and compliant in Thatcher’s Britain.” You know: Thatcher’s Britain, the government that the modern Republican Party would call socialist!
- 2. Taxman
- I have to give this one to the conservatives. And I’ll be glad to see it go. The problem is that I just don’t have a lot of sympathy for millionaire musicians complaining that their taxes are too high. Is it unkind to point out that when George Harrison wrote this awkward little ditty that the top tax rate was 95% and that it is now 40%? I think most liberals would say that 95% is too high a top tax rate. The Republican Party thinks 39% is too high; they want to lower it to 25%. (Of course, once it is down to 25%, they will want to lower it to 15%. And so on.)
- 3. Sympathy for the Devil
- This is just a bizarre choice. They write, “The devil is a tempter who leans hard on moral relativism—he will try to make you think that ‘every cop is a criminal / And all the sinners saints.'” What? They totally misunderstand the song. The song is about moral ambiguity: good people are also bad; bad people are also good. This is most definitely not a conservative song. (It also happens to be the best of the top ten.)
- 4. Sweet Home Alabama
- This song is pure apologetics and the conservatives can have it. Basically, it is an answer to Neil Young’s Alabama. Lynyrd Skynyrd is saying, “We’re not all racist pigs in Alabama. Look at the blue skies and Muscle Shoals.” Pathetic.
- 5. Wouldn’t It Be Nice
- Remember what I said about non-offensive songs? This is what I was thinking of. They claim the song is “Pro-abstinence and pro-marriage.” Although I am not sure that it’s pro-abstinence, that is certainly a valid reading of the song. What is more important is that the song is unrealistic. The picture it paints of married life is that of a five year old. And that is about as deep as conservatives go when thinking about social issues.
- 6. Gloria
- They write, “Just because a rock song is about faith doesn’t mean that it’s conservative. But what about a rock song that’s about faith and whose chorus is in Latin? That’s beautifully reactionary.” They are not talking about the actually great Them song Gloria but rather the so-so song by U2. This is a ridiculous argument. What’s more, as Jules from Pulp Fiction might have said, “What’s the Fenian to do? He Irish.”
- 7. Revolution
- There are two versions of this song. In the second version of the song, Lennon sings, “But when you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out. In.” The song is as confused as Lennon always was about this stuff. Regardless, it is not a conservative song in any way. More than anything it is a liberal anthem against communism or anarchism. It’s shocking, I know: National Review again shows it knows nothing about rock.
- 8. Bodies
- Ah! Finally a song that is as radical and disgusting as the conservative movement. They write, “Violent and vulgar, but also a searing anti-abortion anthem by the quintessential punk band.” Before I start, only someone who doesn’t know anything about punk would say that the Sex Pistols are the quintessential punk band; it is the same thing as saying, “I only know of one punk band.” Pathetic. Bodies is not really anti-abortion; it is more anti-woman and anti-sex. If conservatives want to embrace misogyny along with their anti-abortion beliefs… Wait! Of course they want to do that!
- 9. Don’t Tread on Me
- Any song by Metallica can’t be all good. This song was written to make up for …And Justice for All which was kind of down on America. It is telling that in writing a pro-American song, all the boys could do was spout a lot of catch phrases. The song has never been performed live. Co-writer James Hetfield doesn’t like it. I must admit: it is a rock song and it does have a (vile) conservative message. And they are welcome to it.
- 10. 20th Century Man
- Luddite does not mean conservative. I prefer old literature to new; I hate the modern world; and I am not conservative. As National Review pointed out in discussing Gloria, conservatives are reactionary, not truly conservative. No 20th Century Man for you!
So I’m only inclined to give the conservatives four of these songs. They get the utterly forgettable poor-rich-boy-cries-about-his-hardships Taxman. They get the Confederate flag waving Sweet Home Alabama. They get Don’t Tread on Me because the song was created to pander to them. And they get Bodies because John Lydon had a major hate-on for women when he was young and conservatives have a major hate-on for women all the time. Otherwise: no rock for you!
Oh: they can keep Stand By Your Man too.
Good Lord!
With all this discussion of the Trayvon Martin murder, various news outlets are dredging up old cases that are similar, like the Bernhard Goetz case. I was very surprised to hear about the Joe Horn in Texas. In this case, Horn, a 61 year old retiree, used the Texas “Castle Doctrine” law to murder two men who were robbing his next door neighbor. Here is a bit of discussion about the case with the original 911 recording:
Like the end of it where you hear one of the panelists say, “Good Lord”?
As horrible and damning as this 911 recording is, it isn’t even the worst part of the story. Police who arrived on the scene determined that both men had been shot in the back.
Is this what we’ve become?
Just Saw Hot Coffee
Hot Coffee, the documentary about the infamous McDonald’s coffee spill lawsuit, is out on DVD. For more, check out my brief article on it from last June. I just watched the film. It is much better than I expected. You should see it. Be prepared, however: it will make you angry; it will make you sad. You really should see it.
Speaking of French
Here is a great American band who pretend to be French, Les Sans Culottes (“The Pantless”):
You might also check out their hit: Allô Allô. Or buy their latest album: ‘Pataphysical Graffiti.
It’s Hard to Die in French
There are few songs in the world as insipid as Terry Jacks’ Seasons in the Sun. If you doubt me, consider this statistics: it is one of the top 30 best selling singles in the history of the world. Apart from this, however, there is something about this romantic notion of death that ruffles me—it is sentimentalism at its worst. But there is something good about the song: Le Moribond by the Belgian artist Jacques Brel.
Le Moribond, or “The Moribund” (Never would have figured that, huh?) is what Seasons in the Sun was based upon. It is in French. It tells much the same story: goodbye my friends, I’m going to die. But whereas that seven word summary completely explains Seasons in the Sun, it fall well short of the complexity of the original.
In Seasons in the Sun, there are three verses. The first is directed to a friend, the second to the singer’s father, and the last to the singer’s girlfriend. Especially repugnant is that last verse: “Goodbye, Michelle, my little one / You gave me love and helped me find the sun.” And so on, but worse.
In Le Moribond, there are four verses. The first is also directed to a friend. But whereas Seasons would have us believe the friends are very young (“Skinned our hearts and skinned our knees”?), it is clear that these are adult friends. What’s most important is that this verse introduces the singer’s wife:
Goodbye Emile, I loved you
Goodbye Emile, I loved you well, you know
We sang of the same wines
We sang of the same girls
We sang of the same sorrows
Goodbye Emile, I’m going to die
It’s hard to die in the springtime, you know
But I’m leaving for the flowers with peace in my soul
For, given that you are good as white bread
I know you’ll take care of my wife.
Goodbye Emile, I loved you well, you know
We sang of the same wines
We sang of the same girls
We sang of the same sorrows
Goodbye Emile, I’m going to die
It’s hard to die in the springtime, you know
But I’m leaving for the flowers with peace in my soul
For, given that you are good as white bread
I know you’ll take care of my wife.
He’s just laying the groundwork. After this, he goes into the chorus which is kind of a proclamation of life: “I want to laugh / I want to dance / I want us all to raise hell … Until they put me in the ground.”
The second verse is pretty much a replay of the first, except that it is sung to a priest. It provides the first insight that the singer might just be a tad bitter. He knows that the priest will take care of his wife because the priest has been her confessor. What?! Moving on…
Everything comes to a head in the third verse that varies substantially from the first two:
Goodbye Antoine, I didn’t like you well
Goodbye Antoine, I didn’t like you well, you know
It’s killing me to die today
While you are so alive
And even more complete [?] than boredom
Goodbye Antoine, I’m going to die
It’s hard to die in the springtime, you know
But I’m leaving for the flowers with peace in the soul
For given that you were her lover
I know you’ll take care of my wife.
Goodbye Antoine, I didn’t like you well, you know
It’s killing me to die today
While you are so alive
And even more complete [?] than boredom
Goodbye Antoine, I’m going to die
It’s hard to die in the springtime, you know
But I’m leaving for the flowers with peace in the soul
For given that you were her lover
I know you’ll take care of my wife.
Ouch! This is level ten bitterness. Not only have you been fucking my wife, but soon I’ll be dead and you’ll still be fucking my wife.
The fourth verse is sung to his wife. I think it is telling that this song is fundamentally about the wife whereas Seasons has only a girlfriend and she is not central to the song. This is because Seasons is a children’s song. And this makes the song of no real value. Certainly it is true that children die, but mostly they die in car crashes.[1] The whole process of preparing for death and having “those” conversations is something for the old, not the young. It was probably because Terry Jacks pulled out all the complexity of the song that it was able to be a hit with a demographic largely unable to understand the material.
This verse has my favorite line:
Goodbye my wife, I loved you well
Goodbye my wife, I loved you well, you know
But I take the train to the Good Lord
I take the train before yours
But we all take the train we must
Goodbye my wife, I’m going to dying
It’s hard to die in the springtime, you know
But I’m going to the flowers with my eyes closed, my wife
Because I’ve closed them so often
I know you’ll take care of my soul.
Goodbye my wife, I loved you well, you know
But I take the train to the Good Lord
I take the train before yours
But we all take the train we must
Goodbye my wife, I’m going to dying
It’s hard to die in the springtime, you know
But I’m going to the flowers with my eyes closed, my wife
Because I’ve closed them so often
I know you’ll take care of my soul.
“Because I’ve closed them so often”?! Ouch! He just turned the bitterness up to eleven! It’s brilliant: Now my eyes will be forever closed, so I won’t have to close them to the fact that you are fucking Antoine.
Jacques Brel died far too young—just a year older than I am now. It is a great shame because all his music is really great, not just this song. He is well worth checking out. Enter him into Pandora and see what happens. Or you could just buy Jacques Brel either on CD or as MP3s. You won’t be disappointed (assuming you have good taste).
[1] The top five causes of death of teens are, in order from most common to least: accidents, cancer, suicide, congenital disorders and anomalies, and murder. This may explain why I’ve always kind of thought that Seasons in the Sun was about someone who was going to kill himself.
Rosalind Russell’s Mysterious Writer
One of my very favorite movies is His Girl Friday. I watch it about once a month—any time I need cheering up. It has two of my favorite actors: Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. I will always be in love with Russell, or perhaps more accurately, I will always be in love with the character she plays in this movie, Hildy Johnson.
In her autobiography, Life is a Banquet, Russell discusses the making of His Girl Friday, in a chapter titled, “Back Door to The Front Page[1], or How I Was Everybody’s Fifteenth Choice.” She says that she thought the screenplay “could stand some improving.” But she doesn’t say why.[2] Her brother-in-law was Chet La Roche, who was the president of Young and Rubicam, a big advertising firm. She writes:
So I was pacing around, and Chet asked me what was the matter and I told him this script had me troubled. “Why don’t you fix it?” he said.
“What?”
“Why don’t you get a comedy writer and fix it?”
I said, “Chet, let me tell you something. On these lots they have a big building, it says Writers’ Building, see, and the people in that building are the ones who fix it.”
Well,” he said, “we have a lot of writers.”
So she hired one of his writers, who came to her house for dinner each night during the production of the film. (Russell goes out of her way to say that the writer never ate; he only drank. So we know he was a real writer!) Apparently, it was obvious what she was doing—at least to Cary Grant. She wrote, “It got so every morning when I went in to work, Cary would meet me, asking, “What have you got today?”
I’ve known this story for years. What I didn’t know was what Russell put in a parenthetical paragraph block:
Years afterward I was arguing about a different script with Harry Cohn, and he said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You thought His Girl Friday was in trouble and it turned out to be a smash hit.”
“Harry,” I said, “you aggravate me. Send for the original script of His Girl Friday.”
He did, and it came and I went around his desk and said, “Now we’re going over this, line for line.” I started spouting cracks from the finished picture. “Where does it say that in this script? And where is such-and-such in this script? And where is so-and-so? I hired a writer to put in those laughs.”
Cohn digested the information. Then: “Who was that writer?” he said, and I told him, and he hired him.
This is exciting information, because I think it means that some enterprising young historian could figure out who this writer was. He must have worked for Young and Rubicam in 1940 and then he must have worked for Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures some time later. The film she was working on when she had this conversation with him had to have been My Sister Eileen (1942), What a Woman! (1943), The Guilt of Janet Ames (1947), Tell It to the Judge (1949), or Picnic (1955).
It doesn’t matter, of course. Whoever this anonymous writer is, didn’t write His Girl Friday. He only punched it up. But he clearly was a very funny guy. And it would be interesting to see if he went on to do any other interesting films.
[1] His Girl Friday is based upon the play (already produced as a film twice by that time) called The Front Page. The big change is that in the original, Hildy is a man who is about to get married and become an insurance salesman. Although The Front Page is an excellent play, His Girl Friday is better.
[2] Wikipedia claims Russell stated that it was because she felt that Cary Grant had the better lines. This (along with much else about their history of the film) is not true. She points out that what she had added to the film included laughs for Cary Grant as well as herself.
Tim Tebow Hypocrisy
Will Leitch writes in New York Magazine about The Jets Have Made Pat Robertson Part of Our Lives Again. The piece is ostensibly about Robertson’s comment that because of the Tim Tebow trade, it would serve the Denver Broncos right if Peyton Manning got injured.
Why would Robertson say such a thing? I don’t really know. According to him, the Broncos treated Tim Tebow “shabbily.” Over the course of two weeks, there was a lot of publicity about the trade negotiations. Apparently Tebow got his feelings hurt. That and his multi-million dollar contracts will buy him, well, any damn thing he wants.
According to the Denver Broncos’ management, Tebow was involved in all the negotiations. In fact, they turned down a better offer from the Jacksonville Jaguars because they thought that the Jets were a better fit for him. Tebow, like a good Christian, took the low road whining to reporters on a conference call that the Broncos held “all the power.”
Tebow is an annoyance. And yes, I am talking about his ostentatious religiosity. I don’t mind people doing their whatever in public. If people want to walk around naked, I really don’t mind. But I do mind hypocrisy. It all comes down to the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 6:5 reads (New American Standard Bible):
When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.
It would have been fine with me if Tebow had done his religious thing as long as it wasn’t a media sensation. But the moment he started getting coverage about it, he should have backed off. In addition to being counter to probably the most important speech of Jesus’ career, Tebow was making his Christianity about himself.
And I say to you, he has had his reward in full.
Dylan Moran on Americans
I’m rather fond of the old British sitcom Black Books, even though it isn’t that good. It is mostly a vehicle for Dylan Moran who is brilliant. Here he is talking about Americans:
Art is Not “Good” or “Bad”
I was going to write at length about Wallace Shawn’s Essays, which I recently read. Unfortunately, I’ve now forgotten what I was going to write about. It is an excellent book and well worth a read. You can check out one of his essays (not in the book) over at Huffington Post: “Why I Call Myself a Socialist: Is the World Really a Stage?”
Here is a quote from his essay “Reading Plays”:
More and more, I’ve come to think that to call plays or stories or poems “good” or “bad” is often not very illuminating, whereas it can at times be extremely helpful to notice that “right now, when I read these particular poems, I fee well, I fee happy, I feel that I am getting something that I have needed.” It’s not that those poems are “the best” poems or that they’re “better” than certain others, but that for you, now, they are important and right. Animals in the forest require certain nutrients, and they learn how to find them. They don’t all need the same things, and they don’t need the same things at every stage in their lives. The nuts that a particular badger finds of very little value may turn out to be crucial for a particular squirrel. As writers, we can’t predict who might come along who might find our offerings valuable. But because we’ve all been readers, we know what the experience is like, and we hope that what certain writers have given to us, we will give to someone.
The only thing I disagree with is that it is never illuminating to say that a piece of art is “good” or “bad.”