Even the Mac Can Betray

So in keeping with Steve Smith's personal content-loss woes, I wrote a very thoughtful, mixed review of Peter Gay's book Modernism: The Lure of Heresy and then, for some reason, my mac failed me and all was lost.

So let me recap: I liked the book, even forgave a few bad copyediting moments in the music section (i.e. composer and biographer Jan Swafford was referred to as "she," and Cage's revolutionary non-etude was, in fact, 4'3") but was really annoyed at the film section wherein Gay, an amazing scholar, thinker, chronicler, reduced himself to a fan by offering a vast list of all the directors he loved but did not include. Nothing too awful--certainly forgivable--and yet it soured me on the book for some reason...and this was a book I was more than prepared to love.

So this is the truncated version--call it version 2.0.