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  My old buddy Chris Hudson pointed out this article on Lithub by Stephen Marche , and I went and found that very 00s thing, the platform Review! The Platform review takes a tour d'horizon of, usually, fiction and tells you why the current scene sucks, It used to be the specialty of James Wood when he was at the unlamented TNR under Leon Wieseltier, the biggest poseur since Norman Podhoretz. You know, Leon? who also considered himself a chaser of women, usually the ones working at the TNR, which meant he was cancelled for a microsecond and then has come back with some well funded mag called Liberties, as in the liberty to chase your hot intern around your desk, or grope her at the bar after impressing her with who you know. Liberties will no doubt sponsor platform reviews, but I wonder if, this time around, the bait will find fishes. James Wood made way for Dale Peck, whose platform reviews turned up the volume and were way more reactionary than James Wood's - so appropriate fo

    With her blood in the water short silk slip - her sleeping giant eyes - Isn’t she the cutest knock on your door Since you made it to the big girls club?   She’s knuckled down on the finish line -          This is a transition period – stuff happens! “ It was the wrong issue before the war, and it's the wrong issue now ,”   Sez the man with the plan. He cannot see her as he veers into oncoming - this daughter of Night - who from her rape Bore that scar Helen.   - Karen Chamisso

  Friedrich Schlegel as a young dude was adept at netting the words that were in the air – and a lot of them were in the 1790s. Thus, in his essay on Greek poetry, he netted the word “interessant” – interesting. In Kant’s critique of judgment, the aesthetic realm was distinguished from the practical realm by its dis-interest. It was not interested in money, science or ethics, in itself. Schlegel took this to be a description of art in its “objective” state. Being a German romantic, he connected German philosophy to Greek culture – an often repeated move – and contrasted the objective art of the Greeks, an art that was natural and close to pure aesthetics, with the interested art of the moderns. That we label Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Sophocles Oedipus the King both tragedies is, for Schlegel, an error in the universal inventory – Sophocles being objective, and Shakespeare introducing the “interested” element. The interesting – and self-interest – are, for Schlegel, hallmarks of the mo