Hamlet without the Prince

“Good criticism requires lengthy reflection and slow maturation.”

I bet much of that lengthy reflection is spent searching through the reviews of other critics and even the writings of those gossipy raucous bloggers.

Of course your post had bugger all* to do with Hamlet. I shoulda read the post first.

*I’m American, can I say this? FWIW, I’ll regard dsquared’s opinion as authoritative should he decide to weigh in on the matter.

Well, this is off topic, but I thought the recent action movie “Crank” with Jason Statham as a hit man trying to get revenge before dying of some “chinese poison” that will kill him if his heart rate slows, was in fact a ferocious black comedy. Much of it was silly (if cruel)…
And I’m on topic now to think of all the ‘serious’ reviews of books I’ve read that were more about the reviewer’s ax to grind (generally with the author or their perceived ideology) than the tome in question…

Isn’t this whole ‘blogging good/blogging bad’ thing reeeaaaalllly played out? Skidelsky has a point that the blogging crowd won’t ever acknowledge and the blogging crowd has a point that the Skidelsky crowd won’t ever acknowledge. The people who care about book reviewing will continue to produce and consume book reviews until cohort replacement leaves only the bloggers standing. Move on…

Hmmm. About this bit:

Good criticism requires lengthy reflection and slow maturation. The blogosphere does not provide the optimal conditions for its flourishing.

Well then, neither does reviewing books for weekly newspaper sections, or weekly magazines, for one of which Will used to be Lit Ed. I very much doubt anyone worked for more than a few days, let alone a full week, on what he paid for a review. So not much room for lengthy reflection and slow maturation there.

Perhaps, though, one’s writing can flourish in its maturation and lengthy reflectionism to a much greater extent when one is comfortably ensconced at a monthly magazine.

If blogs have any edge over academic studies, it’s probably in the same way as forum comments: the “I” that might signify aloof superiority in official criticism can free up a blog to approach a subject predominantly as a personal experience. This can be just as enlightening in putting a piece in its cultural and political context, etc, than any brilliantly researched and written academic piece. I’ll also wager that any reader that cares about criticism can differentiate between different types and contexts; just as they could discriminate before between academic rhetoric that is only in love with its own naval, and those that truly opened up the text.

Good writing is good writing, whether book, blog or literary supplement. I’ll take it where I can find it, whether from a curriculum-approved study or blog whimsy.

A whole essay on the shallowness of raucous blogging culture and no citation of Lee Siegel’s breakthrough book on the shallowness of raucous blogging culture? Come on, that’s not even trying.

You know what might enhance book reviewing in print culture? Giving book reviewers nice long deadlines, a decent check, and more than 800 words of space. I think we have one or two print outlets in the US that do this. One or two more would be great! Because that would be twice as many.

Sure, blogs can be chatty. (Why, I’m being chatty right now!) But the idea that they have anything to do with the decline of serious book reviewing does not seem to be, how shall I say, the product of lengthy reflection and slow maturation.

“Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world, though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst, the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!”

Laurence Sterne (1713–1768) Tristram Shandy, Vol. iii. Chap. xii.

I’ve been a reader for 35 years and I can recall only one occasion on which I was prompted to read a book I wouldn’t otherwise have looked at based on a review. Am I unusual in this? Do others rely on reviews to help them select what they read? Do people have favorite trusted reviewers?

the authority of critics is being undermined by a raucous blogging culture

You will respect mah authoritah!

Is Skidelsky cheesed off that he might have to find a real job someday? Or is this yet another iteration of Kids These Days ™! I bet there was similar muttering when the price of books and paper dropped sufficiently that even the working-class could afford reading material of their own. Tsk, tsk!

Well, fie on me for going for the cheap Siegel joke first as usual! I totally missed this bit, which makes for much better material:

on the whole, journalists increasingly dominate the literary review pages of newspapers—and since an increasing number of books are written by journalists too, this results in a kind of circularity (which bloggers, quite reasonably, often moan about). But if literary journalism is increasingly feeding off itself, then, McDonald contends, that is largely because academic criticism has withdrawn from the field. In the last two decades, English literature has both tangled itself up in arcane and inaccessible debates about theory and emasculated itself by allowing itself to become a handmaiden to other disciplines, through its embrace of historicism and cultural studies.

Yes, that sounds about right. When academic critics had our testicles removed so that we could become handmaidens to cultural studies, we stopped appearing in newspapers.

I’ve been a reader for 35 years and I can recall only one occasion on which I was prompted to read a book I wouldn’t otherwise have looked at based on a review. Am I unusual in this? Do others rely on reviews to help them select what they read? Do people have favorite trusted reviewers?

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book based on a newspaper review, but I’ve read countless books on the basis of a write-up in the LRB or NYRB, and many on the recommendation of blogs.

So you were joking about its being a “breakthrough book”?

Hmmm, good question. Insofar as Against the Machine may be the first book that (a) inveighs against nasty pseudonymous comments on the Internet (among other things) and (b) was written by someone whose career was derailed by the nasty pseudonymous comments he’d posted on the Internet in effusive praise of his own writing, it might be legitimately considered a “breakthrough” book after all.

I’ve been a reader for 35 years and I can recall only one occasion on which I was prompted to read a book I wouldn’t otherwise have looked at based on a review. Am I unusual in this?

On what basis do you select your books then? Do you read according to a literary canon or does one thing lead to another? What about contemporary fiction, I’d be totally lost without critics.

As for myself and to be brutally honest, I generally enjoy reading reviews a lot more than reading the actual books – saves a lot of time too. Needless to say that, when I was studying CompLit, I belonged to the theory faction.

hulk, art and commerce aren’t synonymous, The former requires the latter for practical reasons, and inverse was once true as a matter of PR and the goal of social advancement. But these days, to many in the thinking class commerce is self-justifying as the origin of] the scientific[sic] logic of individual achievement and the social world that’s built around it. A serious discussion of the realm of illusion and lies seems counter to analytic and instrumental reason.

But meanwhile in the world of the day to day, commerce keeps art sharp and to the point and the nouveau riche still aspire to that old odd mix of vulgar honesty and good taste that makes popular art and entertainment pretty interesting. Art and commerce feed off each other in conflict. To argue otherwise <a href=”is to miss the point
—

“I don’t think I’ve ever read a book based on a newspaper review,”

This country isn’t known for its newspapers.

Bloix, I started reading the Inspector Wallander novels on the basis of a review of Nordic detective novels in the London Review of Books. Other than that, I found the whole magazine to be pretentious in the extreme. Towards the end of my year’s subscription I suspected it of being satire.

Wasn’t there a discussion on this site recently of criticisms of the humanities in the UK, of proposed funding cuts to “less important” fields?

17: “And when I think of “slow maturation” I think of cheese.”

And when I hear the word cheese, I reach for my knife. Mmm, artisanally spoiled milk…

I have no idea how that first word got there.