Found this interesting article.
No more heroes: writers
Ever felt you're missing the point with some of our biggest cultural heroes? Admit it - everyone can name at least one hip, wildly praised band, album, film, TV show or author that they've never really rated. In this special issue, Guide writers get personal and demolish some of the greats they hate
James Ellroy
Ellroy. Dice this. Dame got juiced by her own .38. The DA 's chewing pretzels,and all I get is cold coffee and cigarettes. Jesus. Unfinished paperbacks. Or to put it in plain English, I have tried to appreciate James Ellroy's universally-acclaimed crime novels. But it's like cycling through porridge, because of his overwhelmingly stylised, staccato prose and monkey-puzzle plotting. He's also an originator of the now-ubiquitous fashion in books and films of jumping back and forth in time, viewpoint and plot strand just to show off. It's roughly equivalent to a prog-rock guitarist playing solos on his double-necked guitar - very impressive, but excuse me if I take a raincheck. Of course, if I had more patience I might find out what the plots mean - ie the world of crime is nasty and horrible.But as Ellroy might put it: Life - too short.
Johnny Sharp
Don DeLillo
Sometimes wisdoms are conventional because they 're true. Every critic hails the prologue of DeLillo's Underworld as exemplary, and they're right: the description of a 1951 Giants-Dodgers baseball match is a masterly evocation of a moment, and the ripples it creates. And sometimes wisdoms are conventional because people shy from challenging them. Every critic hails Underworld as a masterpiece, and they 're wrong. It sucks. Well, maybe it picks up after the first 6,000 pages, but who stuck with it that long? The urge to bellow "For God 's sake, get on with it!" becomes overwhelming. The intrepid souls who have voyaged towards the conclusion report, through lips trembling with the trauma of boredom, that it seems to be preoccupied with America's ungovernable production of stuff nobody needs. Years from now, opaque works will be written about the towers of unread DeLillo novels written in our time.
Andrew Mueller
Shakespeare
Whenever someone wants to be clever at a dinner party, they say: "Of course, if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be writing EastEnders." And of course, they've got that dead right. Shakespeare, apart from writing completely unmatchable plays, is to blame for everything rubbish: the Reduced Shakespeare Company; Stratford-upon-Avon; Shakespeare's Sister; and the myriad terrible, tragic attempts to "update" his plays. I've devised a game that's a variation on the who's-the-ugliest-person-you'd-sleep-with? thing: what's the worst thing you 'd watch in preference to a Shakespeare play? Go on,be honest. I 'd rather see Midsomer Murders on ITV. Savage Garden in concert. Hell, I'd even prefer Shakespeare In Love. Shakespeare was no looker, either. More Bill Bailey with a pearl earring.
John Patterson
Dennis Potter
Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven, his sole stand-out work, is tragically but revealingly diminished by what came later. Pennies seemed to brood on questions of misanthropy and misogyny while the Singing Detective and the piss-poor Black Eyes read like nihilist manifestos. Potter was not a man pondering hate, he was in the grip of it. Potter was praised for innovatively shoehorning his favourite songs into the plot. This was certainly innovative but it was also (Pennies excepted) utterly pointless. The audience, weary with a dramatic device that owed nothing to drama and everything to gimmickry, switched off in their droves. In his latter years the increasingly bitter writer came to believe that all the world 's problems stemmed from satellite dishes and the moronising, mesmerising effect they had on the British public. He sounded for all the world like Hitler in his bunker blaming the demise of the Third Reich on the German people. Truly a preposterous man.
Ben Marshall
Beat writers
Pop-lore posits the Beat writer as a cartographer of social discomfort: a radical who refused literary constraints. The Beat writer was, in fact, a layabout who couldn't hold down a cogent idea. Kerouac, Ginsberg et al were self-aggrandising flaneurs, boozed-up alpha males who "became the work" by documenting their every brain-yawn like it was the declaration of a magic goose from the future. The "beat" that ensued was not America's heart condensed into chunks of polemic. It was the dull rhythm of flaccid egos being yanked by gits who never washed their trousers.
Sarah Dempster
Agree with these or disagree with these? Or maybe you would like to add your own? What writer/genre/book is over rated?
No more heroes: writers
Ever felt you're missing the point with some of our biggest cultural heroes? Admit it - everyone can name at least one hip, wildly praised band, album, film, TV show or author that they've never really rated. In this special issue, Guide writers get personal and demolish some of the greats they hate
James Ellroy
Ellroy. Dice this. Dame got juiced by her own .38. The DA 's chewing pretzels,and all I get is cold coffee and cigarettes. Jesus. Unfinished paperbacks. Or to put it in plain English, I have tried to appreciate James Ellroy's universally-acclaimed crime novels. But it's like cycling through porridge, because of his overwhelmingly stylised, staccato prose and monkey-puzzle plotting. He's also an originator of the now-ubiquitous fashion in books and films of jumping back and forth in time, viewpoint and plot strand just to show off. It's roughly equivalent to a prog-rock guitarist playing solos on his double-necked guitar - very impressive, but excuse me if I take a raincheck. Of course, if I had more patience I might find out what the plots mean - ie the world of crime is nasty and horrible.But as Ellroy might put it: Life - too short.
Johnny Sharp
Don DeLillo
Sometimes wisdoms are conventional because they 're true. Every critic hails the prologue of DeLillo's Underworld as exemplary, and they're right: the description of a 1951 Giants-Dodgers baseball match is a masterly evocation of a moment, and the ripples it creates. And sometimes wisdoms are conventional because people shy from challenging them. Every critic hails Underworld as a masterpiece, and they 're wrong. It sucks. Well, maybe it picks up after the first 6,000 pages, but who stuck with it that long? The urge to bellow "For God 's sake, get on with it!" becomes overwhelming. The intrepid souls who have voyaged towards the conclusion report, through lips trembling with the trauma of boredom, that it seems to be preoccupied with America's ungovernable production of stuff nobody needs. Years from now, opaque works will be written about the towers of unread DeLillo novels written in our time.
Andrew Mueller
Shakespeare
Whenever someone wants to be clever at a dinner party, they say: "Of course, if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be writing EastEnders." And of course, they've got that dead right. Shakespeare, apart from writing completely unmatchable plays, is to blame for everything rubbish: the Reduced Shakespeare Company; Stratford-upon-Avon; Shakespeare's Sister; and the myriad terrible, tragic attempts to "update" his plays. I've devised a game that's a variation on the who's-the-ugliest-person-you'd-sleep-with? thing: what's the worst thing you 'd watch in preference to a Shakespeare play? Go on,be honest. I 'd rather see Midsomer Murders on ITV. Savage Garden in concert. Hell, I'd even prefer Shakespeare In Love. Shakespeare was no looker, either. More Bill Bailey with a pearl earring.
John Patterson
Dennis Potter
Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven, his sole stand-out work, is tragically but revealingly diminished by what came later. Pennies seemed to brood on questions of misanthropy and misogyny while the Singing Detective and the piss-poor Black Eyes read like nihilist manifestos. Potter was not a man pondering hate, he was in the grip of it. Potter was praised for innovatively shoehorning his favourite songs into the plot. This was certainly innovative but it was also (Pennies excepted) utterly pointless. The audience, weary with a dramatic device that owed nothing to drama and everything to gimmickry, switched off in their droves. In his latter years the increasingly bitter writer came to believe that all the world 's problems stemmed from satellite dishes and the moronising, mesmerising effect they had on the British public. He sounded for all the world like Hitler in his bunker blaming the demise of the Third Reich on the German people. Truly a preposterous man.
Ben Marshall
Beat writers
Pop-lore posits the Beat writer as a cartographer of social discomfort: a radical who refused literary constraints. The Beat writer was, in fact, a layabout who couldn't hold down a cogent idea. Kerouac, Ginsberg et al were self-aggrandising flaneurs, boozed-up alpha males who "became the work" by documenting their every brain-yawn like it was the declaration of a magic goose from the future. The "beat" that ensued was not America's heart condensed into chunks of polemic. It was the dull rhythm of flaccid egos being yanked by gits who never washed their trousers.
Sarah Dempster
Agree with these or disagree with these? Or maybe you would like to add your own? What writer/genre/book is over rated?
