Eileen Jones – who is most famous for her iconoclastic, working-class brand of film criticism at The eXiled – has just put out Filmsuck, USA, a new collection of writing in ebook form, with a long introductory section that hopes to explain precisely why America’s cinema is in decline. Her thesis is an interesting one: the inventiveness that at one time made Hollywood the ‘dream factory’ of the world came largely from the American working class, and neither studio nor independent filmmaking has gained much since by divorcing itself from the plebs.

i.m. Alison Stoddart (1980–2012) It’s a sign of the full force and audacity of the Modernists (I’m using this term, slackly perhaps, both for the writers themselves and for their institutionalisation via Kenner and the rest) that, even now, and after all of what’s been, theirs are the lines I reach for in self-justification.

Over on his blog, Emmett Stinson comments on my article on creative writing courses in the university, ‘Liberated Zone or Pure Commodification?’ There is much to agree with in Stinson’s post, though his defence of creative writing courses is rather tendentious. Still, there were several points that attracted my attention. In particular, Stinson critiques my […]