late_stranger's review
4.0
I picked up this book at a used book store because it was at the intersection of my interest in arts criticism especially of the "low" arts and the fact that I am obsessed with early 20th century writing about non-serious topics because it all seems so inconsequential and funny, and if I had been looking for one or the other I would have liked this a lot less.
The not fun parts of this were that he is pretty astoundingly racist - it took me over halfway through the book to remember/ realise that the dude he consistently portrays as the best the American arts have to offer is (exclusively) a blackface comedian/musician, and he's like, really into DW Griffith, and there's a chapter I straight up skipped called "The Darktown Comes to Broadway" which... yikes.
And, when in his white little bubble, he's a charming essayist who is clearly a proto-hipster who's totally anti-gentrification or whatever, and is a fascinating window into the state of the arts in 1924, and wrote the book in France completely without references/from memory, and then wrote comments on the book for when it was reissued in 1957 which are hilariously critical, and made some alarmingly sharp predictions (as well as some comically off ones). So. All this and more.
The not fun parts of this were that he is pretty astoundingly racist - it took me over halfway through the book to remember/ realise that the dude he consistently portrays as the best the American arts have to offer is (exclusively) a blackface comedian/musician, and he's like, really into DW Griffith, and there's a chapter I straight up skipped called "The Darktown Comes to Broadway" which... yikes.
And, when in his white little bubble, he's a charming essayist who is clearly a proto-hipster who's totally anti-gentrification or whatever, and is a fascinating window into the state of the arts in 1924, and wrote the book in France completely without references/from memory, and then wrote comments on the book for when it was reissued in 1957 which are hilariously critical, and made some alarmingly sharp predictions (as well as some comically off ones). So. All this and more.
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