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May 22, 2007
The right to an opinion
It seems to me that the blogging response to Richard Schickel’s piece in the L. A. Times has been admirably restrained. How easy it would be to fly off the handle at a class warrior who can and does decry the arrival of “hairy-chested populism” in the pages of a daily newspaper; such a critic reveals himself at the turn of his every phrase, and most every phrase is assailable.
In an earlier world, one perhaps more familiar with Mr. Schickel’s high perspective, such a full appropriation of culture would have caused men and women with literary vision to found journals. Even today, his subtexts might cause small-scale literary revolutions were the changes in our culture not already so far along what was once called The Information Highway for Mr. Schickel to regain the gates of his intellectual estate. Who once would have begun publishing in response to him now goes online—and reaches perhaps more readers than those journals would have reached.
It is painful to consider the assertion that literary discernment is the demesne of those powerful few, like Mr. Schickel, who are allowed to earn their livings solely by exercising their right to taste. This is especially troubling in a world where the media has so tragically and repeatedly failed to challenge the dominant idea.
But it is the end of this paragraph that most unsettles:
“And we have to find in the work of reviewers something more than idle opinion-mongering. We need to see something other than flash, egotism and self-importance. We need to see their credentials. And they need to prove, not merely assert, their right to an opinion.”
Creating for himself a single sort of blogger, one whom he seems to equate with the bedroom diarists who first used this medium, Mr. Schickel is able to dismiss everyone who studies, reads, considers, and asserts using the medium of the internet to reach readers. Is this more than building a straw man? No, it is not.
Mr. Schickel’s position is not unfamiliar and so not in any way surprising, really. Nor, obviously, has it arisen fresh and newborn in order to address the changes in the critic’s powerful world. His attitudes and tones would have been familiar to Robert Musil, could have been voiced by any number of characters at work on Count Leinsdorf’s “Collateral Campaign.”
What is shocking is that a position so inimical to the vox populi found its voice beneath the banner of a major American newspaper. There are other places I would have expected to see the assertion that one must prove one’s “right to an opinion.”
I’ve argued before that the importance of newspaper book and media review pages is that they can serve as a check against the dominant, bought-and-wrapped, celebrated, now-now, commercial culture. It seems to me that in our newspapers (yes “our” newspapers), reviewers and critics have a chance each day to assert the continuity of culture and to balance the new against the exclusionary forces that build gates and behind them feed dynasties. The class-based, information-controlling perspective Mr. Schickel reveals takes my breath away, and it dismisses the voices of so many people. But I imagine that irrespective of his media clout, the exercise of unproven rights of opinion will continue.
And it is, most likely, the digitized form of writing that will prove permanent when the artifacts of print begin to recede. (I say this with measureable regret.) Indeed, most every reader of Mr. Schickel’s article is already reading it online.
He sees D. J. Waldie’s assertion that blogging is speech not writing as “a wonderful point” because he wants to see it so. I was not there to hear it and so must take Mr. Schickel’s reporting of it as accurate. But I think that Waldie’s description would not seem so meaningful to the critic had it applied to personal correspondence (a reasonable parallel to blogging, I think). There the arbitrariness of such a judgment would have been made immediately clear.
And I wonder whether there is something in Mr. Schickel’s use of the phrase “concentrates the mind most wonderfully” to refer to writing, rather than to hanging, as Dr. Johnson originally had it. Lord, I hope there isn’t, that it was just insider’s play, just a literary wink from a well-read critic.
It seems to me the assertion that there is no room in the blogosphere—no room in “a purely ‘democratic literary landscape’”—for “oases of intelligence or delight” is so baldly an absurdity that I wonder how so learned a man could have made it.
It is not, I think, reason that reaches such a conclusion—Schickel’s is a wide-ranging assertion that does not arise from the experience of reading book reviews online.
Fred Ramey
Posted 5/22/07
Posted in: Publishers Blog, | Keywords: publishers blog
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Comments
A very thorough, well-put, and concise response to Mr. Schickel’s ill-advised words. Well done, Mr. Ramey. As you point out, Mr. Schickel seems to lack experience with the literary world online. To misappropriate Roy Blount Jr., Mr. Schickel seems to think he can find out about litbloggers in the same way he “might think you can find out about whiskey by chatting up someone in personnel down at the distillery.”
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Thanks for your comment. Some people seem to be asserting that the shrinking of book review coverage raises the issue of critical turf rather than of the books that go unnoticed by the general public or, larger, the thinning of the culture. This is, I suppose, a position that’s easy to recognize and explain, but it’s one that’s hard for me to buy into.
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Posted by Ramey 05/22 09:29 PM