� Michael Kimmelman, in "Free to Play and Be Gooey" (NYT today)

Who else I like is Armond White of the New York Press. Dig if you will: this, for example. I think that pulling the song into the movie review and turning the whole shebang into a point-counterpoint instance of cultural analysis is sheer genius. To me, how the best criticism synthesizes this kind of distilled understanding is nothing less than an art form, and reading it is the intellectual manifestation of the last shot in "Nashville," when the camera goes up, up, up and holds on the American flag, which after the movie you necessarily have to see anew as not just a flag but metaphor, commentary, punctuation, and delirious declaration of love. The reason I like Julia Keller is that you can see her trying to get at this, trying to find the words to distill what she already gets intuitively, and her informal prose style � in contrast to White�s, for example � is perfect for this because it makes the attempt more relatable-to somehow, you are there with her, puzzling it out.

I have decided to make this a project of sorts. I am going to keep track for a while of who I like and why, and who I dislike ditto. (Should I have one dislike per like? OK, I find Dave Eggers distasteful because, in addition to his nauseous wink-wink self-commodification, he is all Minister of Information and Calculator Brain, and no Secret Heart.) The reason for this is that my ego knockdown from the former prof came in tandem with the directive to think about what it is I�d actually want out of an MFA program � time to write, connections, community, what? And this seemed like a good idea. I know that I would like to go through a decent MFA program, if I could get into one, but attempting to articulate the bullet-point whys of that certainty has always caused my self-consciousness to throb, and I�ve never gone through with it. I started to think a little about that, and then a few weeks ago I was talking to Steve and he asked me what, in my ideal post-MFA world, I would be writing. He meant, what would I propose that people pay me to write. How would I position myself; how would I, all right, market myself? Which is a fine question too. He had also said that he was curious about what I considered good writing, and when I sent him that last Hank Steuver piece, the one about the cultural symbology of the hot tub, I wrote that this, for example, was the kind of thing I would like to get paid to write. So he wrote back, Isn�t this what you�d call a feature, couldn�t you say then that you want to be a features writer? and I was a little stunned for a moment, thinking, Holy cats, is it that easy? It felt like one of those baby-school exercises where in your workbook you draw lines between two columns of items, connecting the ones that go together, and even if I am not sure that the items in question are Me and Features Writer, I suddenly remembered what solutions like that felt like, in algebra and in life, the deep satisfaction that real certainty engenders, and I decided to take up as a mission this more analytical two-pronged approach to the questions of whether I ought to try eventually to get paid to write and what form that writing would take. So that�s what I�m kind of working on.

Disclaimer: of course the first question is whether or not entertaining those thoughts in the first place is an act of hubris. I know I know I know. But did you know that in general, it�s a lot easier to get into master�s programs in journalism than into MFA school? Then again, this is because the starting salary for the average fresh-minted journalist is less than the starting salary for the average schoolteacher. Then again, if the talent pool there is not as deep, it would be easier to distinguish oneself in it, and maybe I could graduate at a level past averageness. Then again, there we are back to the hubris again. As for the MFA, one argument is that if I�m willing to pull up roots and move to freakin Budapest to escape the horror of the humdrum here, then I should be willing to apply to other programs than the one at the UW and to move away if I get into one. Then again, the work I�ve seen coming out of there is plain old mediocre � in the software era, I was often called upon to vet program managers for interviews, and weirdly a lot of them had UW MFAs and would submit creative writing samples with their applications � and if that�s an example of where I might be able to get in if I clap my hands and believe in fairies and wish very hard, I don�t know how interested I�d be in the real and opportunity costs of revising my expectations downward, setting my sights on programs in which the standards are even lower. Note: I am shocked and delighted to find out that having to think like this seems not to affect my ego. If the UW said I wasn�t good enough, that would not be the end of me. I really believe this � yow. Rock on with my bad self.

More later.