(Our friend Ward Long is guestblogger-in-residence on ACO.
Let’s hear it for WARD!)

I read James Wolcott’s Lucking Out because my favorite music critic mentioned it on twitter, my favorite movie critic interviewed him on KCRW, and my favorite art critic wrote a blurb on the back. It’s accurately subtitled My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York, and it details Wolcott’s transition from Maryland college drop-out to serious critic in the cultural capital of the world. Although the book can at times be like the worst dinner party of the decade, with self-important guests jealously jockeying for table position, the prose is a nimble and delightful acrobat. We trapeze through assorted strains of punk at CBGBs, swing across scuzzy Times Square, backflip over desks at the New Yorker, fly over Lester Bangs and the ballet, and finally bow for applause with the slangy movie review crew of Pauline Kael. Here’s a bit of advice from his early receptionist days at the Village Voice.

Sifting through the slush pile served the useful purpose of pointing me in the direction of what not to do as I tried to break into print from inside the building. Avoid parody, which slides too easily into facetiousness. Avoid political satire, which has the shelf life of a sneeze. Avoid preamble—flip the on switch in the first sentence. Find a focal point for your nervous energy, assume a forward offensive stance, and drive to the finish line, even if it’s only a five-hundred-word slot: no matter how short a piece there has to be a sense of momentum and travel, rather than just allotted space being texted in. [...] Loosely fortified with these scraped-together guidelines, bent like a concert pianist over a borrowed typewriter and barely able to think further than one or two sentences ahead, I applied myself to whatever chanced by in order to break into the Voice with my own byline, enhanced with the versatility of a novice willing to essay a variety of subjects because I was equally unversed in all of them.