Chekhov’s Mistess

More Litbloggers and Blog Floggers

I’ve been more quiet than usual during the most recent spate of condescension aimed at bloggers. I have been reading it all and taking in all the responses, and wondering when it will end. Not, I suppose, before I moderate my panel next week at BEA on book reviewing and blogging.

The fact is that I couldn’t take Shannon Byrne seriously when she so tritely called bloggers “parasitic microorganisms”, because she or her co-horts at Little, Brown send books to bloggers in hopes of attention. I can only assume she didn’t really mean it because that would make her a hypocrite as well as a dullard.

But I do take Richard Schickel seriously; he’s an established critic and has a vested interest in the state of book reviewing. There must be something to what he’s saying. My inclination after reading these attacks (after lashing out!) is to try to write better so that at some point these people will have no fodder. But that’s kind of silly of me. Blogs are what they are and as good as they can be, they’re nothing like newspapers and never will be. In some cases, as we’ve seen, blogs act as a farm team for mainstream publications, but in most cases, they’re something quite different.

Schickel is right when he says that “not everyone should be a critic” even as petty as it was for him to call out a blogger because of that person’s previous day job, about which I might remind him of some of the day jobs one Mr. William Faulkner had while writing some of the greatest literature this country has ever seen. But everyone has a right to be a critic and few who do it have specialized training. Surely, a “love of reading” is not enough, but how do critics get “disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge”? They write. They think. They read. They write. They write. And that’s where the similarities begin. Curiosity is the truest qualification.

I have no advanced degree in literature or criticism (does Mr. Schickel?), but I do have a master’s in economics from New York University where I learned very little except how to think. I don’t have an editor or mentor or guide to help me improve, but I spend hours writing and sometimes rewriting my posts (that admittedly few people actually read) and often enjoyably sift through my books fact checking or looking for neat quotes to help me look smarter than I am. And I write. I work very long days as a self-employed person, but late at night I write poetry, short stories and blog posts. I write I write I write. Nobody has to read it and nobody will ever read this blog because the authority of a major corporation is behind it. They are free to go.

Now, just as Mr. Schickel is thinking of his ideal critic when he writes, I think of the better part of blogging. I know that a lot of avid litbloggers take criticism such as his personally, but I honestly believe that these critics are looking at the broadest range of sites and the narrowest swath of time, or at elements of blogging that they don’t like, such as the linking or the informality and collegiality. In fact, when Bob Hoover, the books editor at the “Post Gazette,” wrote a shockingly similar diatribe against bloggers a year ago, I looked at some of his contemporary articles and found a review of Marley and Me (no matter how good it may be, it’s not serious literature), an article about the (literal) weight of books, and a list of recommended books including a collection of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons. Not very impressive, but I gave a look at his work equal to what I felt he gave ours.

But what about those things people don’t seem to like? Since this is a “mini-altar of self-worship” I’ll quote myself from the letter I wrote (and then published on my blog) to Mr. Hoover:

“Blogs, sir, are more like a conversation than the articles you pride yourself on. This is why at first glance, they may seem to you to occupy the “modern version of Pithole, Pa., the rickety, raw oil boomtown of the 19th century.” The truth is, the short posts, the exclamative and reactive posts or personal anecdotes are part of what give blogs their personality. You pride yourself on being boring (your words), but I would submit to you that there is more than one way to engage readers.”

Blogs engage readers in a way that is entirely different than a collection of seven- to twelve-hundred word reviews can. Praise me, I’ll quote again from my letter to Mr. Hoover:

“If you bothered to read with anything approaching the seriousness that bloggers – and I am strictly speaking of “lit-bloggers” – give to their sites, you would find book reviews or thoughtful impressions of books read (whether or not there exists some market demand for the book to be considered); championing of ideas, independent presses and unknown authors. You would find groups of people gathering together to write on the same topic to further their understanding of the book at hand. You would find sites popping up on one topic so that bloggers can write in depth on them. You would find writers supporting other writers. You would find people discussing in a very loose (and admittedly sometimes difficult for the newcomer to grasp at first) way, the articles of respected literary journalists. In short, you would find something with a great deal of breadth and occasional depth that can’t be matched in the revenue driven ‘established media.’”

Dammit man, that’s good stuff. It’s not always serious, but it can be and there are a lot of serious people doing this, increasingly whom publish books and articles just like the big kids. It’s not all of uniform quality and the range of quality is far greater than in a newspaper, but just as I subscribe to the New York Review of Books and not Entertainment Weekly, readers will find good writers so those who ‘shouldn’t be critics’ don’t really matter (or more appropriately, shouldn’t matter to the Mr. Schickels of the world).

Like I said, blogs are nothing like newspapers, but they do seem to be thriving at a time when commercially supported cultural coverage is shrinking. I have a personal count of around 700 book oriented blogs in my feed reader (500 of which are members of MetaxuCafe), many of which are intimidatingly good. Still, I don’t read or like all of those blogs. There should be more proving of rather than asserting opinions. I don’t like everything that goes on in blogs. I’m not a personal fan of reviewing other reviewers, except when that’s discussing and furthering ideas from the original, but I imagine to review the review you have to read it and think about it; what more could a writer ask for? Many of the things people see and say about blogs are true, at least in general. But don’t let that keep anyone from getting past the patina of what deep down is a significant, vibrant, intelligent and thoughtful social life of the mind.

comments

Very nicely said, Bud.  I’ll admit, I took the liberty of taking Schickel’s comments personally, but guess maybe I had a right to.

As to Byrne’s comments - at best she comes across hypocritical.  The larger issue I had with hers was the location - the non-stop crying on the NBCC Blog of ‘Really, it isn’t us, we don’t feel this way about bloggers’ when every third or fourth post had highly inflammatory comments.

Anyhow, enjoyed this.

    – Dan Wickett (05/24  at  09:08 AM)

Well said. I thought Schickel’s essay was breathtaking in its condescension.

    – Jonathan Potts (05/24  at  11:36 AM)

Social qualities can not replace individual communion so that may prevent critical appreciations. Of course this holds other qualities for inspections too!

    – Brian Hadd (05/24  at  02:39 PM)

Well, Brian, you could say that what I’m talking about here is a new, less formal type of criticism, that may or may not be just as valid as anything we read in today’s newspapers and in some respects, due to its sometimes serial and lack of space constraints, has advantages over more formal criticism (not to mention a few inherent issues with criticism today, but let’s just say they’re cancelled out with other issues on the blog side of the equation). Personally I hope both forms thrive, because they each inform and enhance the other, IMHO.

    – Bud Parr (05/24  at  03:06 PM)

I think survival raised issues that people have begun thinking on maybe and are requiring solutions. Your aspect of serializing however may consist a try--I frankly believe you have interesting points on committing post upon post. Social work has drawbacks too I think. I think.

    – Brian Hadd (05/24  at  06:08 PM)

You wrote thrive, I thought survive. Troubling?

    – Brian Hadd (05/24  at  06:12 PM)

A lot of what Schickel says is fine in some ways. However he doesn’t really deal with the problem that so much criticism doesn’t live up to his quite sensible (if incomplete)standards, and is often indistinguishable from middle range blogging.

If someone like Schickel leads by example then journalists and bloggers alike can learn a great deal. What he’s also fudging is the whole issue of who reviews the reviewer, and what literary barrows the paper pushes - in literary matters, one can only claim authority, but almost nobody can earn it largely because of the enormous problem posed by taste.

In Australia reviewers until recently had been consistently reviewing the same kind of books for quite a long time, which was boring the socks off people who don’t read them or like them. These critics do not, in my opinion, have the right to claim authority for the books they refuse to read or are not invited to review by the paper.

I happen to enjoy the stuff they review, but what of people who don’t like it? Who’s to judge why their favourite books are ignored? It’s not a question of democracy or politics, but of failing to account for taste and subjectivity in these matters: the two are quite different things.

    – genevieve (05/24  at  11:35 PM)

I agree Genevieve. That is a fundamental problem. He’s looking for an ideal and completely dismissing bloggers as having any hope at fulfilling it (and taking cheap shots at Dan along the way) while to an extent ignoring the state of his own world.

At the very least (and I do mean least), blogs have the ethos and luxury of covering what’s uncoverable in established media that in most cases caters to the popular. There’s a great deal of value in what blogs do, and while I think I know why it’s not apparent, these attacks are just so dispiriting for the state of criticism.

His confusion about the whole topic comes from not looking very deeply, which is odd, don’t you think, for someone patting himself on the back as being a high thinker? The other problem is that this issue is treating blogging and reviewing books in newspapers as mutually exclusive. They’re not, of course.

I think we need to think about just what criticism is, how it functions and what it supposed to accomplish (and by accomplish, I don’t mean for the career of the critic, but I do mean to include that). Ah, another time!

    – Bud Parr (05/25  at  12:22 PM)

Beautifully stated!

    – VampireFaust (05/25  at  04:07 PM)

Well, the other issue is one of information literacy as well - if a critic doesn’t have time to read all the blogs out there, he has no idea what he is up against. So it’s safer to make a blanket statement like the one Schickel has made about the elitism he prefers to have built into his profession, than to get down and dirty with an RSS reader and find out exactly what’s going on and where.

There’s an arts editor in this country who reads blogs all the time, and it’s beginning to have a flow on effect in his publication - while the Ozlit coverage has diminished, he is commissioning work from a wider range of critics, and I’m sure he’s using a range of culture blogs as ‘current awareness’ tools.

Which the best ones definitely are.

And one would hope the book pages of papers and litblogs could enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship in this way

    – genevieve (05/25  at  08:29 PM)

But that incorporated blogging Genevieve instead. Whereas I think at this juncture we are considering competing natures (print and blogs) and really asking for print incorporation does nothing to permit blogging. I agree that blogs complete awareness (serve to guage zeitgeistics!).

    – Brian Hadd (05/27  at  04:53 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: May 24, 2007
• Filed Under:
  Litbloggers & Blog Floggers

• Comments:11
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