On Criticism

I'm reading First Nights , a study of the first performances of five famous classical works, because the Boston Globe ran an intelligent article about Thomas Forrest Kelly's wildly-popular Harvard course on the subject. And I've been listening to Solti's performance of Messiah , because Kelly's discography recommends it particularly.

You wouldn't know that, though, from reading Amazon recommendations like this.

For some bizarre reason, nearly every movement is very "angular" and clipped. It almost sounds as if the chorus has the hiccups! If you like your "Messiah" in the style of a military march this is the one for you! I suspect Solti was trying to achieve a light, bouncy effect but instead the performance comes off sounding very "mechanical".

I notice this snertishness in lots of user reviews -- especially in software review sites. Take Delicious Library, a much-buzzed and lovingly-crafted new application for keeping track of books and CDs.

Very sparse on the features. I find it rather insulting that someone thinks I will buy their program just because it looks prettier than the competition. $40 is very overpriced.

WWAAAYYY over priced. Not only does it import DUPLICATES (which I disabled), but, you can't even change the order of the visual layout, the sorting (well, there IS NO sorting), when importing from another database I get DVDs, etc in the list I DON'T EVEN HAVE, and worst of all they want $40!!?? Obscene and insulting...

I'm beginning to wonder if all our work toward social navigation and democratic open systems is simply a way for kiddies and snerts to get attention.