Brussels Sprouts

In case anyone was curious about what Professor Streible meant by his reference to "Brussels sprouts," while we were discussing the state of academic publishing and so forth, you can follow this link to my 5 seconds of fame, or shame. (You have to watch the whole thing and not blink around 3 minutes and 40 seconds.)

Carr, for those of you who don't follow the arts and business reporting in the Times, is a media industries columnist who does a regular column called "The Carpetbagger," which follows awards show hysteria. His jibe (which I think is kind of funny, actually) isn't that far from what people say about writing on documentary when they're being more charitable: the pull quote from a positive review which now appears with the Amazon listing describes it as a "sobering reappraisal of documentary film," which I'm pretty sure is meant to be praise, but sounds a bit like "it's not fun, but at least it goes over things we already know." This is an echo of Bill Nichols's now-famous phrase (in Representing Reality) describing documentary as participating in the "discourses of sobriety."

Just for the record, I think Streible's book is excellent. And it's got a blurb by none other than Martin Scorsese, who knows something about Fight Pictures.