Frank Kogan

Warning about Ferguson and Farber. Ferguson as I've said has long sections where he goes opaque or blank or sentimental; and Farber is frustrating in his lack of specificity, so you get metaphors for what's going on in a movie but often the movie itself doesn't seem all that tangible on his page. He's a better theorist than Ferguson; in a way you could say his theories do right by Ferguson's practice (better than Ferguson's own do), but that he himself never came up with nearly as good a practice. Also, difference in personalities: Farber has a lot of resentment. What I've been running to Ferguson for recently is his lack of resentment. Obviously, this isn't particularly his long-run intellectual value, that he lacked resentment, but he did seem to avoid being beaten down or obsessed with the fact that he was taking positions that were very minority amongst the literary intellectuals of his time. So his good humor seems very different from my own reaction to the nastiness and laziness and stupidity that you and I are running into every day in regard to the music we love.