The Critics Speak

On the backs of most books you'll find words of recommendation from critics or fellow authors. I've decided to follow suit and display some critical quotations on my site and I. The ones I'm about to list were all actually said--just not about me. Nevertheless, I believe they reflect the kind of commentary I would receive if I was actually deemed worthy of criticism. Here they are, my accolades, with the original recipients of the given words, if applicable, in brackets.

On Me:

"There has been no more original, no more serious critic and reader in our time."
- George Steiner (on Walter Benjamin)

". . . a drug addict in the pay of Czechoslovakia."
- Benito Mussolini (on Socialist Ex-Deputy Tito Zaniboni)

"A symbolic landmark, a prophetic figure in the path of man's struggle to achieve international peace through international action."
- U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld (on Emperor Haile Selassie)

"The Sex Symbol of Rootless Cosmopolitanism."
- Marina Koldobskaia (on Leon Trotsky)

"History's greatest monster!"
- Anonymous Springfieldian (on Jimmy Carter)

"Flames darted from his eyes and flowers fell from his lips."
- Anonymous Disciple (on Imam Shamil, the "Lion of Daghestan")

"A walking study in demonology."
- Courtney Love (on Courtney Love)

"He is presumptuous and ambitious and expects only to be admired, flattered and betrayed."
- Giuseppe Bottai (on Benito Mussolini)

". . . an emissary of pity and science and progress, and devil knows what else."
- The Brick-maker (on Kurtz)

"A theologian marooned in the realm of the profane."
- Gershom Scholem (on Walter Benjamin)

"The bravest man I ever hanged."
- Albert Pierrepoint (on John Amery)

"Unknown as only a Yiddish writer can be."
- Isaac Bashevis Singer

"He speaks, and it is done. He is unacquainted with contradictions."
- Baron Sigmund von Heberstein (on the Grand Prince of Muscovy)

". . . like a pig inserting scallions into its nose in an effort to look like an elephant."
- Liu Shaoqi

"A man raised so much above other men would not have been tolerated for forty-eight hours in the cities of old: Athens would have crowned him with laurel and promptly banished him without its walls."
- Jules Michelet (on Louis de Saint-Just)

"A thieving fanatical Albanian dwarf."
- Christopher Hitchens (on Mother Teresa)

"The Napoleon of the neuroses."
- Jean-Martin Charcot (on Jean-Martin Charcot)

"The most complete human being of our age"
- Jean-Paul Sartre (on Che Guevara)

". . . the perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, and luxury-loving."
- Richard Hofstadter

"That man will not hang, that man he will never hang!"
- Mclusky

"Sultry and corpse-like."
- Jarvis Cocker

"An amoral crocodile lurking in the depths."
- Winston Churchill (on Joseph Stalin)

"No more fit to be a schoolmaster than the Grand Cham of Tartary."
- Sir Richard Francis Burton (on Reverend Charles Delafosse)

". . . we are struck by the psychological force and even fierceness with which he reveals the deepest recesses of the human heart."
- E.F.J. Payne (on Arthur Schopenhauer)

"Anti-Sovietchik number one."
- Aleksandr Chakovsky (on Robert Conquest)

"He won the lottery when he was born."
- Eddie Vedder (on Eddie Vedder)

"His uncanny aesthetic power is a scandal to any ideologue."
- Harold Bloom (on Shakespeare)

"The first non-Brazilian to travel backwards through time."
- Homer Simpson

". . . somnolent and alert, sad-sweet, dark, beat, just out of jail, martyred, tortured by sidewalks, starved for sex and companionship, open to anything, ready to introduce new worlds with a shrug."
- Jack Kerouac (on Herbert Huncke)

"He's a poet-warrior in the classic sense."
- Photojournalist from Apocalpyse Now (on Colonel Kurtz)

"The most distasteful character I have ever crossed in my life."
- Noel Gallagher (on 50 Cent)

". . . the most famous of God's assassins . . ."
- Albert Camus (on Nietzsche)

"One man on a lonely platform. (Un homme dans une gare isolée.)"
- Visage

"It's recess everywhere but in his heart."
- Ralph Wiggum (on Bart Simpson)

"Give him the stick. DON'T give him the stick!"
- G.I. Joe guy

"A man as ready for big globular tears as for drink, poetry and invective."
- Anthony Burgess

". . . just as bored as me."
- Kurt Cobain (on Polly)

"A miserable little pile of secrets."
- André Malraux (on Man)

"One third genius, one third false, one third incomprehensible."
- Raymond Aron (on André Malraux)

"A potential H-bomb."
- Johnny Rotten

"A man of wealth and taste."
- Mick Jagger (on Satan)

"Our underwater ally."
- Napoleon Dynamite (on the Loch Ness monster)

"A wolf in a monk's robe, a monster with a human face but the heart of a beast."
- Zhang Qingli (on the Dalai Llama)

"So clever and classless and free."
- John Lennon

"A curious mixture of geniality and venom."
- Winston Churchill (on Herbert Morrison)

"Ethiopians shall bow down before him, and his enemies shall lick the dust."
- Psalms 72:9, Septuagint and Vulgate translations

"He strikes the blazing match of his wit on the sole of stupidity's shoe."
- V. Khlebnikov (on Vladimir Mayakovsky)

"He's the greatest philosopher since Nietzsche."
- John Aes-Nihil (on Charles Manson)

"A humanist who disliked humanity."
- E.M. Forster (on Aldous Huxley)

"Boxer and painter. Actor and singer. Lover and father. Band man and loner. Trouble shooter and trouble maker. The champ who would rather show you his scars than his medals."
- Bono (on Frank Sinatra)

"Behind his eyes he says, 'I still exist.'"
- Ian Curtis

"Like the best modern artists, his goal is to always make the familiar strange and the strange familiar."
- Jeet Heer (on Art Spiegelman)

"A tiny shadow which has taken refuge at the furthest distance from the imperial sun."
- Franz Kafka

"A selfish, narrow-minded, venal, treacherous, cruel ruler possessing all the despicable attributes of a feudal lord in the dark ages."
- Count Ciano (on King Zog of Albania)

"Arguably the best-known, best-liked Canadian in the world."
- Knowlton Nash (on Lester Pearson)

"The prettiest by far."
- Siouxsie Sioux

"A fool, but an honest fool."
- Gandalf (on Pippin Took)

"A dope-sniffing, voodoo-loving thug."
- General Colin Powell (on Manuel Noriega)

"The perfect child facsimile"
- Thom Yorke

"The esoteric political and aesthetic conscience of his generation . . ."
- Juxtapoz magazine (on Glen E. Friedman)

"He is wonderful company with his ironic asides, his shafts of wisdom, and his sighs of resignation."
- Charles Ritchie (on Norman Robertson)

"He's a fat little insect!"
- Nick Cave (on Nick the Stripper)

"The little Jew who wrote the Bible."
- Leonard Cohen

"Washington's Bolivian bete noire."
- Reuters (on Evo Morales)

". . . a sombre, savage and great figure, only half emerged from barbarism, strong, méchant and honest, but nevertheless doomed to perish because always in advance of the future."
- Ivan Turgenev (on Yevgeny Bazarov)

". . . his search for glory is difficult to understand for those who no longer believe in its existence."
- Michael Ledeen (on Gabriele D'Annunzio)

"Ha Ha! You'se a funny nigga."
- Big L

"Benjamin is a ravenous wolf, in the morning devouring the prey, in the evening still dividing the spoil."
- Genesis 49:27

On Head Wide Open:

"It's not shocking."
- Perry Farrell

". . . a beautiful use of negative space."
- Company Flow

"Leaves one alternately impressed and exasperated."
- Newsweek (on the Andrzej Wajda film Ashes and Diamonds)

". . . the great sewer of Tarquin itself would have been incapable of dealing with such a mass of filth."
- Hughes Felicité Robert de Lamennais (on the Papal Court)

"Psychic automatism in its pure state."
- André Breton (on Surrealism)

"The stickiest of the icky."
- Rick James

"A living blueprint of the future."
- Walt Disney (on Epcot)

"That grab-bag of our nation's refuse."
- Ignatius J. Reilly (on the Smithsonian Institution)

"This is the definition of my life."
- Beta Band

"Not just another drop in the ocean."
- Echo & the Bunnymen

"Like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light."
- J.R.R. Tolkien (on Mordor)

". . . rooted in ideas and fiercely contrarian . . ."
- Sam Tanenhaus (on the Political Philosophy of Albert Jay Nock)

"Treat it like an oil well."
- Stephen Malkmus

"A magnificent desolation."
- Buzz Aldrin (on the Moon, literally)

". . . that most obvious and yet least expected place . . ."
- Sheila Fitzpatrick (on the Soviet Union)

"Between the click of the light and the start of the dream."
- Arcade Fire

"A chronicle of confused miracles, barely salvaged, from time to time, by its poetic ambience."
- Jorge Luis Borges (on Gustav Meyrink's The Angel of the Western Window)

"I particularly enjoy the circumference."
- Kurt Cobain (on a Moist Vagina)

"Boringly filled with giant aircraft."
- David Thomson (on the film Strategic Air Command)

". . . like a blazing searchlight that radiates in the midst of an ocean of abjection."
- Gabriele D'Annunzio (on Fiume)

"A tour de force of intellectual comprehension, summary, and balance."
- Washington Times (on The Iranians, Persia, Islam and the Soul of a Nation by Sandra McKay)

". . . a one-man birthday party."
- P.J. O'Rourke (on Drugs)

"Filthy! But genuinely arousing."
- Mrs. Quick

"Once it takes hold of us. . . it never lets go."
- Gollum (on the One Ring)

"Criminally vulgar."
- Morrissey

"Between plankton and philosophy."
- Blixa Bargeld

"A fair forgery."
- Roger Waters (on the Pink Floyd album A Momentary Lapse of Reason)

". . . opens the sluices of sensibility."
- I. Taylor

"An abyss that laughs at creation."
- Ian Curtis

"The diseased world's bathhouse."
- Mark Twain (on Germany)

"A flaccid hieroglyph for penguins."
- Umberto Eco

"Why buy a mattress anywhere else?"
- Sleep Country Canada

"An immense altar on which all the living must be sacrificed, without end, without limit, without respite, until the end of time, until the extinction of evil, until the death of death."
- Joseph de Maistre (on the World)

"That peculiar institution."
- Sources Unknown (on Slavery)

"Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
- William Shakespeare (on Life)

"An instrument forged in hell by a renegade Jew and issued with the knowledge of Mr. Jan de Witt."
- Anonymous Denunciator (on Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus)

"God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
- C.S. Lewis (on Pain)

"An unforgettable, utterly riveting portrait of a loser"
- Martin Knelman, Toronto Star (on the documentary Halos and Horns)

"A corner of Earth that is forever Mars."
- J.G. Ballard

". . . an island of double or triple entendres told by a drunk idiot signifying everything."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante (on Cuba)

"A secret path to nothingness."
- Nietzsche

"Internet, eh?"
- Homer Simpson

". . . such an enormity wakens the terrorist slumbering in us all."
- E.M. Cioran (on Claudel's famous edict)

"A kind of sewer with a holy spirit hovering over it."
- Anthony Burgess (on what François Rabelais rubs our noses in)

". . . a mindless agglomerate, like the Portuguese man-o'-war, with tentacles spiralling off in all directions, propelled by the action of wind on the bag of inert gas at its centre."
- Eric Griffiths (on Media and Cultural Studies)

"The very negation of the national revolution"
- The Vichy Government (on the writings of Andre Breton)

"It's like love--the more you analyze it, the faster it disappears."
- Bill Bernbach (on Ideas)

"A handful of heaven possessed by demons."
- Mercia MacDermott (on Bulgaria)

". . . the most eloquent chronicle of the Soviet empire's demise."
- Washington Post Book World (on Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick)

"A skylight through which one might submerge himself in the true Abyss, which is the soul of man."
- Léon Bloy (on I Corinthians, 13:12)

". . . a very inept and pretentious effort . . ."
- Stanley Kubrick (on the film Fear and Desire by Stanley Kubrick)

"The finished form of the future catastrophe."
- Jean Baudrillard (on the United States)

"The last trustworthy vessel of the inner life."
- Cynthia Ozick (on the Novel)

"So long as somebody gets a laugh out of it, what the fuck?"
- Frank Zappa

And that is all for now.