Excellent. I didn’t have enough things to beat myself up about. Because now I’ve been told — as you, reading this, have implicitly been told in the original post — that it’s not that I work from 9 to 5, plus lots of time after hours, it’s that I’m both incapable of intellectual conversation and not even interested in it.

But really. How is saying something like this even acceptable, and why are people not absolutely outraged about it? 

(via katherinestasaph)

BOOM

(via nickminichino)

No, not “BOOM,” Nick, and a hearty “what-the-fuck-ever” to you both being personally shitty to me without attributing the quote (to me) or providing any other context. The original post, and my responses to it, does not refer to anyone personally except Mike Barthel and Mark O’Connell, who wrote the Slate review — and I admit quickly that I’m over-shooting the mark by singling it out. It was just bugging me.

The post refers to the general community of rock criticism, which by and large does not “take itself seriously” as an intellectual pursuit. There are people within it, many of whom have contributed to various conversations, who take it seriously. Katherine does. Nick does. I do. Frank does. Maura does. Mike does (who I do go in on, by name, for a particular quote, and note immediately afterward that it was overkill).

But for some reason, the individual sparks of people taking it seriously don’t seem to cohere into a “sustained intellectual conversation” — a concept that is not well defined in the post and which several people are working out in the comments section — the way that other fields gradually address and respond to it [EDIT: “it” being their subject and one another].

But Katherine and Nick and anyone else, if you’d like to respond to it in some kind of constructive way with the full understanding that you will not be personally attacked, and have not BEEN personally attacked, and I’m honestly trying to operate in good faith [EDIT: deleted my own shittiness to the best of my ability, apologies. Grr.], you can respond here.