{"id":1189,"date":"2005-08-24T16:52:07","date_gmt":"2005-08-24T20:52:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2005\/08\/24\/those-who-can-do\/"},"modified":"2005-08-24T16:52:07","modified_gmt":"2005-08-24T20:52:07","slug":"those-who-can-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2005\/08\/24\/those-who-can-do\/","title":{"rendered":"In the &#8220;Those Who Can, Do&#8221; Department"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t know too much about <A href=\"http:\/\/www.thefirstpost.co.uk\/\"><I>The First Post<\/I><\/A>, which sort of looks like a British version of <I>Salon<\/I>, but their first lead story is <A href=\"http:\/\/www.thefirstpost.co.uk\/index.php?menuID=1&#038;subID=4\">an interview with John Irving<\/A>, or rather a partial transcript of a conversation between Irving and Radio 4&#8217;s Sarah Montague. Now, I&#8217;ve noted some awfully bad reviews for <I>Until I Find You<\/I>, as I&#8217;m sure you have, but Irving&#8217;s not worried:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m not really concerned about book reviewers. They don&#8217;t write books themselves&#8230; People who don&#8217;t write them can&#8217;t tell me how to do it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Fair enough, then, but what does Irving do when confronted by a reviewer who <I>does<\/I> write books? <A href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2005\/08\/04\/AR2005080402279_3.html\">His reaction<\/A> to  Marianne Wiggins&#8217; criticisms has been widely reported, of course, but did he learn anything from the negative assessments of <A href=\"http:\/\/slate.msn.com\/id\/2123021\/\">April Bernard<\/A> and <A href=\"http:\/\/books.guardian.co.uk\/reviews\/generalfiction\/0,6121,1539417,00.html\">Adam Mars-Jones<\/A>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t know too much about The First Post, which sort of looks like a British version of Salon, but their first lead story is an interview with John Irving, or rather a partial transcript of a conversation between Irving and Radio 4&#8217;s Sarah Montague. Now, I&#8217;ve noted some awfully bad reviews for Until I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1189"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1189\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}