Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Someone's feeling a little touchy

I'm feeling too lazy to dig up all the links, but there's been some discussion lately in the press about the plight of newspaper book reviews, and the role of lit bloggers in this trend.

On Sunday, the LA Times ran a piece by film and book critic Richard Schickel. The title? "Not everybody's a critic," i.e. "anyone with a blog can express an opinion about a book. But real criticism is so much more." And all these faux critics are messing things up for the real guys. So I guess I'm part of the problem.

Except am I really? I wouldn't even call this a lit blog; it doesn't purport to be literary criticism. It is overtly a set of (often un- or at least underinformed) opinions about whatever it is I'm reading. And if I don't know you and you're reading this, awesome, but this was always intended as a way for me to share with family and friends my thoughts about the books and articles that occupy so much of my life.

That said, I think Schickel must be trying to provoke when he says

Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author's (or filmmaker's or painter's) entire body of work, among other qualities.

Dude. Chill. We respect you.

Even more, I respect D.J. Waldie, who you quote as saying that "blogging is a form of speech, not of writing." Good point. I don't suffer over turns of phrase on this blog the way that I did when writing even grad papers, at least not usually. But I wish I did. And I think a lot of bloggers wish they did too. Cut them a little slack.

1 comment:

kathy said...

Schickel's a snob.