Word After Word

Who?

A master of “rigorous noticing.”

“It you don’t consent to understand a little, on its own terms, what you dislike, your love loses muscle tone.”

Schjeldahl is one of my favorite writers and I’m loving his new book immensely, Let’s See, the collection of his writing on art for the New Yorker.

Some of my students complain about having to write about other people’s work (published authors and peer authors). It’s always, always, always the case that the best writers in the class are the students who work hard on reading—noticing—and articulating what it is they think about the work.

There is never an exception. The noticers have the cerebral six packs