Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Writing in the Los Angeles Times over the weekend, book and film critic Richard Schickel has an opinion piece entitled “Not everybody’s a critic” in which he excoriates bloggers and declares that an atmosphere in which everyone can contribute to the literary conversation is a “wasteland.” Fun, right? Wait, it get’s worse…

To start with, Schickel comes out swinging: “The most grating words I’ve read in a newspaper recently were in a New York Times report on the shrinkage of book reviewing in many of the nation’s leading newspapers.” Mind you, we’re at war, people are dying, the Middle East is once again lighting up like a Roman candle, but what really gets Schickel’s goat is the fact that the world may no longer be able to know what Michiko Kakutani thinks of D.B.C. Pierre.

After this apocalyptic opening, Schickel doesn’t waste any time — or many words — in getting straight to his point: “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).”

I would now be making fun of Schickel if he weren’t already so profoundly making fun of himself. His words are truly the worst kind of snobbery, and his logic is so twisted the inside of his mind must look like spin art (done in black ink). He’s so concerned with who is bestowing the judgment that he doesn’t care about the judgment itself; he only cares from whose lips the words are issued. To him, all bloggers are just hoi polloi with HPs.

Schickel also writes: “The review’s highest business is to initiate intelligent dialogue about the work in question, beginning a discussion that, in some cases, will persist down the years, even down the centuries.”

Again, I would be ridiculing Schickel for being a pretentious snob if he weren’t so intent on saving me the trouble by heaping ridicule upon himself. Not since Milli Vanilli declared that they were “more talented than any Bob Dylan” has an artist or critic so overstated their own importance.

Even the title of his essay, “Not everybody’s a critic,” is totally wrong. These days, in a flattened Web 2.0 world, where the notions of so many things — television, music, communication, and now publishing — have been shattered, more people than ever have a voice. But Schickel just wishes everyone would keep it down; can’t they see he’s speaking?

LA Times: Not everybody’s a critic