Reading Richard Rohmer

Backstage at Reading Richard Rohmer

Q: “How do you come up with the grades on Reading Richard Rohmer? And how come he almost always gets a C?  He’s written so many different kinds of books.  What gives?”

A: I’m glad you asked that, person I just made up.  The modern Internet could no more exist without grades and ratings than it could survive without fictitious questions from readers. But blog-grading art is hardly an exact science.  Gertrude Stein said something about how everything new is ungainly, but I forget exactly what.  Grading is like that. 

This is especially true when a third party, like Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic, is assigning a grade to a review, rather than the reviewer doing the grading herself.  I have a friend at the AV Club who recently gave a cop show a C, and was surprised to find Metacritic calling her review “favorable.”  (And if you read her review, you could see that she’s a nice person, gently hinting that the show drew flies.)  Two weeks ago David Edelstein, who doesn’t assign grades, called Interstellar “so clunky it’s fabulous,” but also used these words:

“sputtering”…“bewildering”... “inane”… “overexplanatory” … “intricacy for intricacy’s sake” … “florid”…“goopy” … “incoherence” … “By the end of the three-hour Interstellar, you might wonder if 21 years has passed in the outside world too.” 

Metacritic’s rating of Edelstein’s review? Initially? 100.  (I see now it’s been reduced to 70.)

At Reading Richard Rohmer we assign the grades ourselves, rather than outsourcing it to aggregators. That’s how committed we are.  (As the Flintstones put it, “Our burgers can’t be beat because we grind our own meat.  Grind, grind, grind, grind, grind.”  See, that I can remember by heart.)  We rate them individually, and then Brian averages them out, and it almost always comes out to – well, look for yourself – C.

Here’s a peek into our process:

Fri, Nov 14, 2014

Re: Poems

From Brian Busby

Not that we're in any way done with this thing, but can we at least say we've all read it? I'm tired of looking at the 'seventies wallpaper sample used on the cover. If we have finished it, how about some ratings. I'm wavering between D- and A+ myself. 

Fri, Nov 14, 2014

Re: Poems

From Stanley Whyte

Oh I've read it, but I too am having trouble assigning a rating.  A lot of them are laughably bad; a few just dull.  But is it fair to rate them compared to the novels? I'm wondering how long did this take him - a weekend?  Or had he been writing them for years?

Fri, Nov 14, 2014

Re: Poems

From Brian Busby

Okay, I'll go first: D-… No, it's an F. Ah, I can't decide. 

See?  It’s hard.  This is why the Supreme Court doesn’t let in cameras.  And sometimes one of us will think a book is a hoot, while the other two think its torture, and for the same reasons.  So the good grades for something like Separation II – which I enjoyed the hell out of; it’s easily the cheesiest thing Rohmer has ever produced – will be cancelled out by an adverse reaction from my colleagues to the same cheese.  Patton’s Gap is the deadliest book Rohmer has ever written – maybe the deadliest book anyone has ever written.  But the subject was interesting, before Rohmer got through with it.  So the judges’ scores were all over place, and it ended up averaged out to a C, the same as Retaliation, which is just a dud.

And what about Poems by Arthur Henry Ward?  It’s a hundred times more fun than the average Rohmer.  And it’s a fascinating look under the hood at Rohmer’s problems.  But it’s also an insult.  Poetry isn’t a cop show, or a space movie.  Poetry and theatre are how we justify ourselves as a species, to make up for the fish we’ve killed.  It doesn’t make up for it, probably.  But it’s what we’ve got.

And Rohmer's not even trying.  And that's just unbelievably arrogant.

F-.