Mfa Creative Writing

First Four MBA/MFA Students Graduate from NYU

NYU is more impressive—and expensive—than it was in my day. When I transferred from upstate Hamilton College—having run the film society and disc-jockeyed at WHCL-FM—to Cinema Studies at Tisch School of the Arts, my father was furious that I was giving up my hard-won scholarship aid for full-freight tuition. I had to work part-time to make up the difference. But I loved it.

Two of my NYU professors have since died: Jay Leyda and William Everson, whose upper west side apartment was stacked to the ceiling with flammable nitrate prints. Bill Rothman taught Hitchcock, Renoir, and comedy; Bill Simon, who taught me to read the trades and critics Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, chaired the department for years and still teaches there; even intimidating structuralist Annette Michelson is still listed as emeritus faculty.

My early Super 8 efforts told me that I wasn’t heading for filmmaking—that was for the likes of the Coen brothers and Spike Lee. Writing was clearly my forte. I went on to graduate study in Cinema Studies; my NYU buds were John Pierson, Larry Gross, Wendy Dozoretz, Henry Seggerman and the late great Anne Friedberg, who later allowed me to teach Film Criticism at USC’s Department of Critical Studies. After NYU I landed a job in the publicity department at United Artists (729 Seventh Avenue, in the heart of the porn district) via Allen Eichhorn, the department assistant and college press liaison (I did radio reviews at WNYU-FM). He was leaving to go back to school, and so I duly replaced him. Jonathan Demme is one of many grads of the UA PR department, along with John Dartigue, Mark Urman, Michael Singer, Michael Klastorin, Blaise Noto, Dennis Higgins, Randi Wershba, Nan Bernstein and Scott Yoselow. Sadly, Gary Kalkin and Bill Werneth are no longer with us. My move to journalism came when then-editor Richard Corliss brought me over to help him at Film Comment. But I digress.

Last week new Tisch Film and TV undergrad chair Joe Pichirallo invited me to a Soho House party hosted by alumnus Brad Furman ( The Lincoln Lawyer ), NYU Tisch School of the Arts Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell and John Tintori, chair of NYU’s graduate Film and TV program. Adjunct Professor Peter Newman introduced me to the first four recent grads of NYU’s new three-year dual track MFA/MBA program , a partnership between NYU’s Stern School of Business and Kanbar Institute of Film and Television at Tisch. Whoa.

Ruth Fowler And The Ballad Of The High And Mighties « Patrick Hipp ...

), Ruth Fowler’s criticism of it, the prize it was awarded, the author, and her sweeping condemnation of MFA creative writing programs deserves special praise. I tweeted that using the Huffington Post to criticize someone’s writing is like making editing marks with a red crayon, which is true; the HuffPo is one of the worst things to ever happen to writing in general and to journalism in particular. The analogy was lost on Fowler, but it’s safe to blame that on Twitter’s 140-character count. The editorial standards there comprise a null set, a Caligulesque lack of restraint, and they show no passion for what words, phrase, sentences, and punctuation can and should do. It’s akin to using a NAMBLA newsletter to warn parents about the dangers of pedophiles while subtly implying with your choice of words that you, too, enjoy partaking of nubile flesh. It’s a disingenuous pulpit to give that particular sermon from, much less to do it as poorly and as personally as Fowler does.

It bears mentioning that she admits to having not fully read the book in question—I’d wager she got just far enough to start wondering if she still remembered her HuffPo password—which doesn’t help her argument. Nor does it help that the entire article—a term I’ll use, but only with serious reservations—is written in a style that smacks more of an angry student’s quickly scribbled notes on the back of a story in an MFA workshop than an honest, studied critique. It seems absolutely personal, almost borne of jealousy, the way Fowler goes after Obreht, Zadie Smith, and MFA programs in general. I won’t pretend to know what her inner motivations for writing the piece were, but in its execution, it seems like just so much petty nonsense. If people really, truly do not like a thing, it’s easier to just disregard, and I would think most people do; it takes a particularly special thing to engender enough ire to make you put pen to paper. Maybe that’s the problem: it’s easier to put fingers to keys and requires less of the deliberation that might make an otherwise rational person think, “You know what? This isn’t worth it. This doesn’t advance any conversation, this doesn’t provide any real insights into the subject at hand. I’m just angry about something and assume the world needs to know about it, and that’s just not true.” It’s not true. The world doesn’t need every half-considered criticism any more than it needs half-baked books. My suggestion to Fowler, if she really wants to improve the overall standards of writing in the known universe, is to stop feeding content to the Huffington Post. They are word criminals who should be tried in the Hague for their unending crusade of journalistic atrocities. You just can’t make a coherent argument for literary achievement while you’re in league with them. It’s disingenuous and so very transparent.