Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

blah blah blah…

his comment: 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.

I just wanna know if the book is worth 5.99 or not.

Klausnerization

Hehe.

Not quite the same impact as “truthiness”, but do you think it’ll make it’s way into the OED, too?

(see the currently inflated reputations of Philip K. Dick…easy reads for lazy, word-addicted minds)

WTF?

Is there a lynch mob forming yet?

(No, seriously not a fan-girl.  So I’d like to see his justification for that comment before joining the mob.)

“Opinion — thumbs up, thumbs down — is the least important aspect of reviewing. Very often, in the best reviews, opinion is conveyed without a judgmental word being spoken”

“That way often leads to cultishness (see the currently inflated reputations of Philip K. Dick or Cornell Woolrich, both easy reads for lazy, word-addicted minds).”

This is almost on the intellectual mud slinging level of Cat In The Hat

I feel Dr. Seuss moment coming on…

They make me sick
With their Philip K. Dick!
Richard Schickel pointed out in judgment

All the Blogs down in Blogville…

and his brain grew three sizes that day!

...but he was still not capable of identifying irony.

This is just one in a long line of elite newspapermen trying to explain why we should read the papers instead of blogs and online journals. Schickel is trying to explain why only he and his ilk are real critics, most likely in an effort to draw readers back from blogs like SBTB, which offer information free and (gasp!) without published credentials. It’s the yelp of a man going down for the third time, a dog whose day has done.

And really, don’t reviews exist to help us decide whether we’d like something? Candy and Sarah review a book and tell me if they liked it or didn’t like it and why; I value their opinions because I know that they’re intelligent people, and I could care less if they use the word “oeuvre” or not. Being smart isn’t just about the ten-dollar words.

Interesting that his defence of the art of reviewing comes at a time when lots of newspapers are getting rid of or severely curtailing their book review sections ....
You have to ask, if romance reviews are scarce and book reviews in print becoming scarcer, where are we meant to go for comments, insights, criticism ... if not to sites like the Smart Bitches’? 

I think Sarah’s point that many of the most popular books don’t appear in newspaper reviews is very well made.  Doesn’t that dichotomy deserve ‘serious engagement’?  Or is there an assumption that people who read those books are not the types of people who would read book reviews (in print) and therefore the disdain expressed towards blog-based reviews is associated with the disdain for the books they review?

two theories:

Coffee isn’t enough for Candy and Sarah to get their blood pressure up in the morning. They need to take on a dose of asshat.

They wanted a chance to use the phrase

I’m as fond of a pretentious and archaic turn of phrase as anybody else, but if this man sounded any more self-satisfied, he’d explode like an overfed tick.

Either reason works for me. Thanks for employing pitchforks of snarkidoom on this guy.

I want him to agree to a Review Off. You’ve covered the work of Connie Mason, right? So someone should get him to do a book report on the Connie Mason oeurve.

This is the reason this wasteland called the Internet is such a beautiful place, to read witty and well versed criticism like yours for free on a blog instead of paying for a load of tired old bullshit from someone who’s on the losing side…

“We need to see something other than flash, egotism and self-importance.”

He’s absolutely right…he should stop writing and save us from all his egotism and self-importance.

*blinks innocently*

People write book reviews in the paper anymore? Huh. Who’da thunk it?

Srsly, someone needs to get over himself. He sounds like someone who reviews books I wouldn’t read if paid to do so.

You know what I bet happened that got his panties all in a twist? I bet the LA Times (which has recently laid off a HUGE number of employees in its print department to better focus on its online efforts) asked Schickel to start a blog on thier site. Ha ha.

Dude. Get a grip. We are the consumers, and our opinions matter. You are certainly not giving much credit to your readers if you think they are not smart enough to seek out relevant reviews for products they are interested in. It doesn’t say very much about this guy’s confidence in his abilities and his readership that he finds it necessary to write a whole article about how Your Peers are Dumb and You Must Listen Only To Me Because I Am Smart and Verbose. So There. I mean, clearly that means his reviews are the only right ones, and I should only read what he chooses to cover.

Asshat.

Wow.  I’m just…wow.  I thought *I* came across like a jerk in posts.  This guy makes me look like a ministering angel.  Sheesh.

“George Orwell . . . was more pointedly political than Wilson, and more attuned, perhaps, to the vagaries of trash culture, but his defense of honest vernacular prose in the face of bureaucratic (and totalitarian) obfuscation remains a critical beacon.”

Brilliantly said!  Huzzah for critical beacons shining through bureaucratic obfuscation, and for the honesty of vernacular prose!

Of course, if I wanted to pose as a critical beacon amidst bureaucratic obfuscation, I might have chosen different words:  “Orwell wouldn’t take this crap.”

Who gave the old geezer a Thesaurus for his birthday?

I love the implications that all opinions should be his opinions.  This came off to me as just another example of someone trying to make sure everyone knows their opinion is the right one, and that if you disagree then you are someone who speaks in one syllable words with a mom for an uncle.

But of course, my opinion doesn’t count because I haven’t read every word written by the reviewer plus all the stuff he’s reviewed plus the back of the cereal box where he got the idea for that post.

OT1H, I can see a legitimate difference between a “review,” which is a thing telling a reader or moviegoer if the experience is worth their 10 bucks, and a “critique,” which I take in this instance to mean a critical analysis of a work, such as many of us learned to do in 400-level English classes in college.

OTOH, he’s a pretentious dipshit with not a scrap of understanding of how the internet works. Dude, if you want more highbrow criticism, write it. The folks who want to read serious scholarly criticism will seek it out and find it and read it. If you leave them a means to comment upon it, they will. They will perhaps write their own commentary on their own sites and link to your post (saving some librarians a world of trouble).

But first, he needs to learn what a cliche is, and how to avoid it. Sorry, I needed to include this snipe, because zomgwtfbbq maybe the man can critique, but he hasn’t an original turn of phrase in the whole mess. Or was he expecting that folks who know the origin of the phrase “concentrates the mind most wonderfully” would be pleased by his comparison of “writing for print” with Johnson’s “prospect of death”? GET OVER YOURSELF, GUY.

This was the bit that most amused me: ...see the currently inflated reputations of Philip K. Dick…easy reads for lazy, word-addicted minds…

Oh dear. I never found Dick an easy read. Does that make me lazier than lazy? And…I don’t understand what “word-addicted” means in this context?

Apparently criticism doesn’t require clarity. No need to educate the unwashed masses by speaking to them in their own language. I bet this guy goes to a church that still holds mass in Latin.

So, basically his is the only right opinion and I cannot have an opinion even on his opinion because I have not read all of his reviews, plus the things being reviewed, plus the cereal box where he got the inspiration for that little diatribe that made almost no sense?

I also get the impression that he feels anyone who disagrees with his so well-formed opinions must be a toothless moron whose mom is her uncle.

Someone needs to review How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Sorry. I had trouble posting. 

I believed this so much I wrote it twice.

This is just one in a long line of elite newspapermen trying to explain why we should read the papers instead of blogs and online journals. Schickel is trying to explain why only he and his ilk are real critics, most likely in an effort to draw readers back from blogs like SBTB, which offer information free and (gasp!) without published credentials.

Just for the hell of it let me play devils’ advocate here for a minute. I read the above comment and my first thought was:

Jesus. This is the first time I’ve heard SBTB is in direct competition with the LA Times. Wow. LA Times probably has a circulation of half a million or so give or take on Sundays. SBTB has - what? Twenty? Yeah. I can see where the Times is freaking the fuck out in their shoes.

HAS SBTB’s taken readers away from the reviews in the Times?  Really?  Are the reviews on this site that are in ANY way shape or form comparable to an LA Times review?  The only way these two entities are alike is that they both take in ads.  LA Times probably gets about 1.5 million a day in ad dollars. 

More likely he is talking about BookSlut.com and Slate.com (Christopher Hitchens does some excellent reviews for them) which IS taking ad dollars and eyeballs away from the print press.

I am taking a mere moment out of my elite enterprises to offer this well intentioned criticism of Richard Schickel’s article…. it sucked. He sucks. His opinion sucks. He does not have a clue. Someone should take his keyboard and toss it out a window…. followed by ... never mind, someone might be tempted.

I’m still trying to decide whether this guy is just a pretentious git who is terrified that he might be losing his special status, or a pretentious git who is smart enough to know how much attention he can get by starting a blog fight, and understands which buttons to push. At the moment I’m leaning towards “both”.

“Are the reviews on this site that are in ANY way shape or form comparable to an LA Times review?”

Probably not, but the article was basically a slag of anyone who DARES to write a book review on their blog.  This is, according to the author, the perview of the “superior” mind not engaged in “cocktail party chatter.”  Or somesuch.  Eventually, all I interpreted reading the piece was “blah, blah, blah.”

Yes.  He comes off as a supercilious snot.  But in a way he has a point.  What would happen to the Romance Genre as a whole if the only people even willing to review them took them seriously enough to analyze the work using some measure other than the number of batteries exhausted in their vibrator during a read?

He’s an elitist snob. 

There, that’s my review.

Schickel wrote: (Criticism) 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.”

Gee, if only lit’rary critics employed that rule instead of offering broad, ignorant generalizations about entire genres of fiction they don’t regularly read.

“What would happen to the Romance Genre as a whole if the only people even willing to review them took them seriously enough to analyze the work using some measure other than the number of batteries exhausted in their vibrator during a read?”

Heh I can see that now the new SB rating system.

Sarah says Nora’s last book rated 2 D’s and 4 AA’s

What struck me was equating the importance of the review or criticism with the work itself. (down the years??? WTF)

A couple of years ago, I recall many articles decrying the lack of private correspondence. They talked about the letters between EB White or James Thurber and their respective editors—Thurber’s had little drawings.
  This year, I realized that bloggers and commentors are the 21st century versions. The little drawings are now photochopped collages and digital photos with captions.
  Schickle is caught in the old 19th century ways. He will bemoan the changes, but in reality the message lives, the messenger has morphed.

Maybe he’s just trying to bring his own brand of bitchiness to the newspaper :)

“And let them eat cake, too.” This guy is so arrogant to think that the only opinion that matters is his own and his cronies. Maybe reading should be reserved for the elite as well, not the dirty rabble, like myself. (Although I did take a shower this morning…)

Why shouldn’t reviewing be democratic? What country is this guy living in? My money is as good as his (and I bet he doesn’t pay for his books), if I want to shout from the rooftops, “I hated this book!” that is my right as a free person in a free country.

Why do I have to be qualified to have an opinion? You can take it or leave it. It’s nothing to get worked up over.

I can just see him raiding a suburban housewives’ bookclub, just in case opinions about books are being shared. Oh, oh the horror! The horror!

When readers share opinions, authors and publishers benefit. I’ve bought many a book on the opinion of another blogger, whose opinion I respect.

Vive la revolution!

There’s always an outmoded character in Austen style family manners books, the one who cannot grasp that times, they are a-changin’—a snobby uncle or somesuch who laments the loss of an antiquated way of life. He’s that dude.

He doesn’t have a single point at all because

a) very few bloggers see themselves as actual replacements for published reviews and criticisms. Most literary bloggers read and blog about their favourite publications. The divide Schickel has created is false. The NYT article he linked to showed this but for some reason his quick Guggenheim mind failed to grasp tit.

Certainly in the case of romance, review blogs and sites (it is not only blogs that offer book commentary, reviews or criticisms) there are actually fulfilling a need that the establishment ignored.

b) Generalising book bloggers is a stupid and intellectually deficient tactic because the format allows the person to do so many different things with it. Some are review sites, some are chatter, some are publishing gossip, some do promotion, some do lengthier critiques, some are a mixture etc.

c) Many of these “elite institutions” *have* published reviewed by bloggers. Sarah Weinman is now at the LA Times, Maud Newton and Mark Sarvas published in the New York Times Book Review, Ed Chamption regularly at the Philadelphia Inquirer and across the pond, Stephen Mitchelmore at the great Times Literary Supplement.

So Mr. Schickel can take his uninformed opinion and stuff it.

Does this guy get paid to write this shit? I don’t read a book because someone I don’t know likes it. I would rather read a book that someone who I know thought it was good. Atleast I know my friends and other bloggers aren’t gonna say a bunch of mindless garbage just to earn a paycheck. I’m not saying all critics are like that, but I’d still trust my friends over this guy.

What a dingbat.

Not only does he not understand the difference between a “criticism” and a “review,” but he also hasn’t kept up with the general academic opinion regarding criticism: useless piles of crap.

Seriously. Every professor I had (and I’m an English major at a VERY nice, VERY expensive and VERY reputable univerity in New England) who was forced to teach criticism began the lecture by groaning, “Sorry I have to teach you this useless crap. Ugh.”

But that’s just my opinion, Ideal Readers.

And they need to prove, not merely assert, their right to an opinion.

**boggles**

I can’t tell you how relieved I am that this twit doesn’t have control of the voting process in this country.

Semi-related to the rant:

Did any of the bitchery read Cynthia Ozick’s piece in Harpers last month?  All about how the literary fiction community needs more literary critics—if there were more of them, the book review sections of papers wouldn’t be disappearing.  With a long explanation of why reviewers aren’t critics, etc.  Less trained, fewer skills, blah blah blah.  Do these people have nothing else to write about?

Sort of on topic but possibly not ...

The TV\media critic for the paper was asking for general input on jazzing up the column so I pointed him to TWoP just as an example of what new and entertaining critiques on TV shows were capturing eyeballs.

I got back an email saying (paraphrased) , “WTH was that?  What WAS that? I couldn’t understand anything on that site.”

Yeah.  So.  His column is still boring as hell.

I think the key to understanding where Schickel’s coming from is in the phrase ‘Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing’. I may be wrong, but this gives me the impression that he thinks of literary criticism as the ideal way to respond to texts. Reviewing, he says, is only a ‘humble cousin’, and it seems that he believes that the more the ‘humble cousin’ tries to resemble its big cousin, literary criticism, the better.

If he’s really aspiring to write academic, peer-reviewed literary criticism, then it begins to make sense that he should declare that reviewing

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.

Generally that’s true of the academic literary criticism published in scholarly journals. And papers published in such journals may indeed ‘initiate intelligent dialogue about the work in question, beginning a discussion that, in some cases, will persist down the years, even down the centuries’. Authors of these papers do have to show ‘their credentials. And they need to prove, not merely assert, their right to an opinion’, because academics usually have a Ph.D. and/or a list of publications.

Basically it sounds like he’s got an inferiority complex. He doesn’t think reviews are as intellectual as academic papers (they’re the ‘humble cousin’), so he’s trying to lay claim to some intellectual credentials by comparing himself to critics who wrote in such a way that

intelligent readers [...] emerged from their reviews grateful to know more than they did when they started to read, grateful for their encounter with a serious and, indeed, superior, mind

He’s trying to prove that he has a ‘serious and, indeed, superior, mind’ because deep down, he feels that reviewing is really the inferior, ‘humble cousin’ of literary criticism. And, it seems to me, it’s his insecurity, his sense that his reviews aren’t on the same intellectual level as academic literary criticism, that makes him so keen to denigrate bloggers. He fears a “democratic literary landscape” because he derives his sense of importance from the belief that his reviews are special, and the proliferation of bloggers writing reviews threatens him.

Either that, or he thinks his role is to educate the masses and believes it’s unfortunate that, with the demise of book review sections, the masses won’t be exposed to this source of education, but will instead have to read ‘opinion’ pieces written by ‘a former quality-control manager for a car parts maker’.

Nothing says “my shit don’t stink and even if it did it would surely smell like shit from a bull fighting ring after WWI located in Spain somewhere near a nice fishing hole” like intellectual elitism.
And I can talk Orwell too…Think Police much? Because having a limited few, educated within a narrow set of guidelines, deciding what everyone should view as art; good, bad or otherwise art,  is just plain scary and wrong (in my humble 1st amendment loving opinion; that’s right, I said opinion).
 
And, oh yeah, sometimes it is the untrained or those free of the preconceived rules that have the ability to see and value art that is not acceptable to mainstream critics…examples of artists critics didn’t much like at first but the average “lazy, word-addicted minds” did(if my memory has failed me here please let me know, but I’m pretty sure); Emily Dickinson, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Shakespeare (his first comedies weren’t wowing the critics of the time but brought in the masses). If left to the critics alone, without the opinions and leanings of the “unschooled” masses art would remain static IMHO. That’s just me; I could be wrong.

Walt Whitman…I meant to put him in my list of writers critics didn’t think much of, and Poe and…

Angel, I was just using SBTB as an example of the blogosphere in general—which, these days, seems to be a better and better alternative to traditional newspaper reporting. Schickel sounded to me like a guy trying to disqualify the blog reviewing altogether by pointing out how he and his ilk are the only real reporters.

Although if SBTB got big enough to actually compete with the Times, that would be nifty too.

At any rate, I think Schickel definitely deserves a brand-new asshat. Maybe it will encourage him to turn the other cheek?

Reminds me of the Elizabeth Bennett quote - I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women, Mr Darcy. I rather wonder now at your knowing any.

Can’t be many reviewers, in print or on-line, that would meet those requirements.

Schickel’s blog-hate was dialed too high, but lookit: he’s not talking about SBTB.  There’s a lot of crap in blogland that deserves to be blasted.

Catherine J: Candy and Sarah review a book… I value their opinions because I know that they’re intelligent people

On the internuts, intelligent people can be hard to find.  For years I agreed with Schickel, because it takes work to find good sites: the ratio of crap-to-content is horrible.  Trade off. Print has better crap-to-content but less variety of books and reviewers.

Schickel: Criticism… requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author’s… entire body of work, among other qualities

I’m down with that!  If Candy and Sarah only read one subgenre, or only said “so hawt” and never went lit crit on our asses, we might as well go to Amazon.  Yay for reviews with context.

Sarah: it’s not like he or any other reviewer in a major newspaper would “initiate dialogue” about a Roberts

I would have trouble initiating dialogue about many romances.  I’ve discussed JD Robb (what will/won’t change in 30 years).  But that’s the social commentary, not the romance.

Sarah: How many romance authors are on the NY Times Best Seller list?... already the door of your privilege is half-shut to nearly 50% of a top-10 list of bestsellers.

I don’t need reviews of bestsellers.  It’s easy to get opinions on those, and they’re easily found and cheap.  The high stakes are in finding books that are expensive, less common, or more demanding.  That’s often the focus of “credentialed” reviews.  But romance is a high-volume business; that’s better suited to the blogosphere, where we can sift many people’s experience.

Chris: I’ve bought many a book on the opinion of another blogger, whose opinion I respect.

Like Schickel, you’ve found a critical community you respect.  You don’t rely on the incoherent internet noise that Schickel dissed.  But most people aren’t in the know; to them, online reviews are a wasteland of OMGWTF its so g00d.

iffy: Yowzer.  I swear I’m not Schickel.  How did I end up defending him to the death?  “free speech” meets “sometimes elitists are yummy”... “elitists” goes down for the count…

Sarah: How many romance authors are on the NY Times Best Seller list?… already the door of your privilege is half-shut to nearly 50% of a top-10 list of bestsellers.
——————————-
Sarah, here’s how it works.  Amazon and Barnes & Noble give the NYTimes a list of the books they’ve bought in huge quantities, and the NYT distributes that list to booksellers.  Booksellers are only allowed to pick the “bestsellers” from the list.  It’s all very self-fulfilling:  bestselling lists generate sales of bestsellers.

A lot of indie bookstores have opted out of this rigged game.

As for reviewers at newspapers, there’s no requirement that reviewers have any background or qualifications.  Newspapers move around staff upon whim, so that a fashion editor one day can be a political editor the next.  And many newspaper reviewers also review online.

I’m going to disagree with you iffygenia. He is referring to blogs precisely like SBTB. I don’t know if you’ve read the NYT article he’s referring to and, unfortunately, they’ve put it behind a subscription wall but you can see the very first paragraph:

Are Book Reviewers Out of Print?

Last year Dan Wickett, a former quality-control manager for a car-parts maker, wrote 95 book reviews on his blog, Emerging Writers Network (emergingwriters.typepad.com/), singlehandedly compiling almost half as many reviews as appeared in all of the book pages of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Sound familiar? This is the same figure who was snidely dismissed in the LA Times article. Of course no one who has actually read Mr. Wickett’s blog would think he peddled in crap. In fact he does his best to promote short fiction that appears in literary journals that are typically published by none other than universities. Literary journals are certainly more obscure, in general more automatically associated with “elitism”, and feature the kind of reviewing and literature that Schickel would adore.

In fact Mr. Wickett has now become a publisher himself.

The other bloggers quoted in the artcle do not review “best seller” fiction, are informed and have been published in newspapers.

Maud Newton
Mark Sarvas at The Elegant Variation
Ed Champion at Return of the Reluctant
And another blogger whose name I can’t quite recall.

In the NYT article most comments given amounted to “while bloggers can do things that newspapers can’t one is not meant to replace the other”.

I’m down with that!  If Candy and Sarah only read one subgenre, or only said “so hawt” and never went lit crit on our asses, we might as well go to Amazon.  Yay for reviews with context.

Most newspapers don’t do literary criticism they do reviews. They may have one long article but for the most part its reviews. And the fact of the matter is that most major regional review sections, including the NYTBR, are not putting out better reviews than the better bloggers or sites found on the web. The kind of literary criticism Schickel is defending, as someone mentioned before, is the kind published in academic journals, or the ones for the more general readers like the Times Literary Supplement, Book Forum, London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.

I’d like the name of one mentally stable blogger who sees him or herself as scaling these “elitist” walls, eager to vanquish all. The problem with Shickel’s article is not that he is describing the advantages of literary criticism but that he thinks such things must be and can only be found in print. But alas

The Valve
The Reading Experience
Long Sunday

There I’ve listed only three blogs are current and former academics who are doing precisely the kind of criticism that I daresay rarely if ever gets published in the L.A. Times.

Everyone knows that the unedited nature of the internet makes it harder to find good things. So what?

(I’m sorry about the lack of links but there’s no way I’m pasting all the urls I’ve mentioned intoa comment. :) )

And as an added note to Acosta’s remark a lot of the reviewers of books in newspapers are merely other authors. Last time I checked you don’t need a PhD to write a novel and get it published.

And I’m fine with that. I don’t need every newspaper book reviewer to be a James Wood or Colin Burrow. There are many facets to the literary conversation or dialogue, and many points where they come together. Arguments in favour of keeping one part of it alive in no way need to be built on ignorant criticism of the other.

Take a look here for more comments in the Schickel vein (this time from a novelist who appears to be determined to drive off potential readers):

http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2007/05/conversation-with-sheila-kohler-on-book.html

The highlight:

Q. Does your work get reviewed/discussed much on literary blogs? If so, how do those reviews compare with print reviews of your books?

A.Occasionally someone may mention my books in a blog. I believe the dangers of this indiscriminate reporting on books is that people who have no knowledge of literature can air their views as though they were of value and may influence readers. Critics may not always be right, of course, but at least they have read and studied literature, the great books, and have some outside knowledge to refer to when critiquing our work.

Oh my.  Arethusa, thanks for finding the headline.  Using that, I found what I think is the whole article: Are book reviewers out of print?  That article does give it a different context!  OK, I can agree that Schickel’s article sounds just a little meanie poophead duckfuckerish and jealous.  I do stand by some of what I said, but I’m not revising all that.

Amazon and Barnes & Noble give the NYTimes a list of the books they’ve bought in huge quantities, and the NYT distributes that list to booksellers.  Booksellers are only allowed to pick the “bestsellers” from the list.

And I’m sure Amazon and B&N buy those quantities with no enticements from the publisher :p

Sounds like the music biz.  Albums are certified gold based on shipments to stores, not sales.  For a movie soundtrack, the studio could cut a deal with the record company to ship 500 000 copies to stores.  If they didn’t sell, they could be sent back.  But simply shipping 500 000 guarantees “gold”: insta-success!  Of course, this could also be done for a band that wants to make a splashy “comeback”, or for… say… a wealthy pop culture figure.  That’s hot!  There’s a big incentive for any entertainment company that wants to keep milking a big-name artist.

Literary criticism can be an art in itself and illuminate a novel for the reader.  And, yes, you do need more than just an opinion to understand a great work and give incisive criticism.  Let’s not pretend that all novels are equal.

However, I think Schickel is a little hysterical about the danger posed to criticism by the unwashed blogging masses.  He also seems unaware that many serious scholars blog, too, and they appreciate that their writing can reach an international audience.

No, I didn’t read Schickel’s article.  If he can be blindly judgmental, so can I.

I like the word “clownboat” but I think “assclown” may have been a better turn of phrase…but wait, would that be a review or a criticism according to the aforementioned assclown? :-)

All my opinions have already made appearances here, and have been stated more gracefully than I could’ve, so I’m going to skip straight to this:

I honestly fail to see why having comprehensive knowledge of the critical traditions, the artist’s entire oeuvre, the socio-political context or how low Hemingway’s left nut hung vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s is required in order to write a cogent, entertaining, mentally stimulating and perfectly valid review.

Because it’s brilliant.

Oh, and I had to look up oeuvre.  Guess that makes me one of the unwashed masses.  Then again, I already knew that—I do live in a trailer, after all.  *And* I raise chickens.  Nevermind that the chickens I have are so rare they’re on the endangered species watch list, they’re still chickens, so I meet the trailer trash definition.

Now if only I had a truck up on blocks in my yard…

I’m having a really hard time remembering the mantra of “do not snark other authors” after reading the thing Susan posted.

And now I will lower the tone of the conversation by revealing that my security word is: comes26

Iffygenia: I’m not arguing that all opinions are excellent, nor that we should give all of them equal weight, nor that they should be allowed to pass unchallenged and uncriticized. I’m just saying that they have a right to be expressed, even opinions I think are wrong (Schickel’s, for example), even those I find downright repugnant (e.g., Vox Day, Ann Coulter). Hell, even the terrible reviews on Amazon.com? As long as they don’t violate the terms of service, let ‘em stay. I like my rabble multifarious and dirty—ok, not dirty, but moderately grubby is nice—but more than that, I’d like to determine for myself what’s relevant and what’s good.

I think I can’t get riled up because too much of what he said was blah blah, snoot snoot, and it reminded me of the blah blah, snoot snoot I’ve heard/read for years on the Romance genre.

Not real, mindless twaddle (twaddle being a snoot word), suitable only for the unwashed—and not good for even them.

Reviews, like popular fiction, are written for people. People have this odd habit of seeking out what they want. The popularity of blog reviews tells me people are seeking out what they want.

What a very speshul, precious snowflake he is!

Or, as we uninformed, non-eliteist, unwashed plebes usually say: What an ass!

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I went off on a rant for that very reason.

iffygenia: I have found a group that I trust, thanks to the internet and the blogging community. Where I would have found it otherwise, I don’t know.

Oh, finding this discussed here just made my day. So many good points, such wicked turns of phrase (my favorite was “Pretentious Buttnoid Times”). Although Susan H.‘s link made me seethe even more.

I also liked this book blogger’s take on Dick S.: He Had Me at “[I]n language even a busy blogger can understand.”

A good quote from Mmv’s response:“And let me put this bluntly, in terms even a pompous polemicist can understand: Give me a love of reading, idle opinion-mongering, and a democratic literary landscape any day over your idea of an oasis of delight (i.e., the disciplined tastes of blowhards who describe their own profession in terms such as “elite enterprise”).”

I like my rabble multifarious and dirty—ok, not dirty, but moderately grubby is nice—but more than that, I’d like to determine for myself what’s relevant and what’s good.

I think your comment here raises an unexpressed anxiety in rants like Schickels’s that too many people can’t really make those decisions because education no longer trains them to.

At its basest and most reactionary level, that anxiety is expressed by books like “The Closing of the American Mind,” but it has also been expressed by progressive intellectuals like Richard Hofstadter in “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.”  Hofstader’s version of this argument, with which I agree, is that students are being tracked into various academic and non-academic curricula based on all sorts of faulty measures, from IQ tests to school resources, and that the majority of students are pushed off the academic track quite early on, with little chance of getting back on before college. 

Now this argument doesn’t naturally progress into Schickels’s elitism, because not all self-proclaimed elites care about educational equity or intellectual development as a universal right. But the shadow argument to Schickels’s rant, the diminishing of intellectualism, is something I wish we’d talk more about these days.  Because I think it’s real, and I think that when W gets up in front of a graduating Yale class and says, ‘see what a C student can accomplish—don’t work so hard’ (massive paraphrasing there), we’ve skewed as a society away from valuing education for its own sake.  As much as I appreciate the incredible rise in vocational techs, for example, I also lament the fact that we don’t think every student should have access to calculus, organic chemistry, AP English, AP History, AP whatever just because it’s a good thing to know this stuff and to be trained to be thoughtful and able to do complex analysis (insert obligatory lecture on the welfare of democracy here). 

So what makes me sad about Schickels’s piece is not his elitism per se, because, well, he’s of a generation, so to speak (like when Norman O. Brown told me I should only study American literature as a “hobby”).  It’s the fact that such a rant distracts from a discussion of why there are no longer any public intellectuals (another sad reason for the passing of Edward Said), or how we’re tracking students based on whacko reasons (i.e. poor schools get fewer resources and thus fewer AP classes, which means that fewer of their students go on to higher ed, IF they graduate, that is), or how we’ve grown distrustful as a society of authentic political debate (e.g. witness the coverage of the one television show where women are arguing about politics).  If Schickels could only be made to understand that his rant may actually be undermining a great deal of his own arguments, well, that would make me happy.  OTOH, I don’t blame Schickels and his ilk for the death of intellectualism in American life, even though I don’t really think he’s helping, unless his piece really opens up more spaces for real discussion.

I usually just lurk around here, but I really wanted to thank y’all for quoting the brilliant MST3K song “Sodium”—that made my day, seriously.

Re: RS, the thing that struck me as most foolish (apart from his general thesis) is that for someone who would require PhD-level qualifications from a critic or review, he doesn’t appear to be familiar with the actual history of criticism. Early print critics were elite in the sense that they had to be literate and have enough lesiure (ie money) to write and publish their work, but other than that they were just lovers of books who had something to say about it. Even as late as the early 1900’s, when the newspaper critic was beginning to be a recognizable institution, one of the most prominent forces in the field was the Bloomsbury group, who counted only one career journalist (MacCarthy) in their number. Virginia Woolf, who wrote lovely literary criticism and whose critical style was itself criticised at the time, had the authority to comment basically because she claimed it, not from the aprobation of any commercial interest. (And if the internets had existed then, Lytton Strachey would be the biggest blogger ever. Actually, so would Rosetti. And Shelley. And Pope.)

The industrial revolution made literacy and lesiure time available. Thus, the subset of people who have something to say about books is larger than it was in the 18th century; the only thing the internet does is make the means of publication available to more people. Anyone could always comment on books. The passing of the period of history where “Anyone” meant only “people hired at newspapers and magazines” is just as beneficial to the general literary culture as the passing of the period where it meant “the upper classes and any uppity merchants who have become literate”.

The passing of the period of history where “Anyone” meant only “people hired at newspapers and magazines” is just as beneficial to the general literary culture as the passing of the period where it meant “the upper classes and any uppity merchants who have become literate”.

What I’d like to see is a diversity of voices emerge from the blog culture as masters of the art of the blog—voices other than professionally trained journalists, art and lit critics, politicians, etc.—a true public, democratic conversation and “marketplace of ideas,” including those who actually rise as blog “stars” rather than transferring their existing fame to the blog culture. 

Early print critics were elite in the sense that they had to be literate and have enough lesiure (ie money) to write and publish their work, but other than that they were just lovers of books who had something to say about it.

What bothers me is that we seem to be drifting back to a cultural space in which meaningful literacy is again tied to wealth and that there is a diminishing incentive for people to want to be engaged in public conversation about books, films, music, science, politics, history, etc.  I know that many think the Internet is socially isolating, but I think we’re already very socially isolated; I’m looking toward blogs and such to get people from different classes, cultures, and generations to reconnect in a different type of common space.