The Publishing World Post #2: "The Fall"

As a student who failed to read newspapers throughout college and a writer who blatantly avoided book reviews for fear of their impact on my own writing far-off in the still non-existent future, I have a lot of catching up to do. I’d missed the demise of the book review—though I’d earnestly saved quite a few old sections of the Miami Herald to read “when I had time” back in high school—and now I’m intrigued enough by the Columbia Journalism Review’s conference in New York and in-class references to the San Francisco Chronicle’s recent article on reviewing that I’ve decided to investigate. A post from Critical Mass: the blog of the national book critics circle board of directors helped set the stage: “Over the past few months, the erosion of space for book reviews directed at general readers has reached critical proportions. The tipping point was the departure of Teresa Weaver as book review editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, not to be replaced,” wrote guest blogger Morris Dickstein. The Associated Press followed, closing it’s book review desk, then the Raleigh News-Observer, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times all fell prey to cutbacks to or complete obliteration of independent book reviewing and review sections. His quote from Adam Shatz, literary editor at The Nation, helped me put the issue into further perspective: I might not have been a life-long reader of reviews, but it does reveal that “‘the pleasure [of reading] is had at the expense of analysis and criticism, as if the latter somehow robbed us of the fun instead of adding to it’” (qtd. in Dickstein). Dickstein’s belief that “the Internet is seen as the enemy of literature” made me cringe, though. I found that I agreed more with the stance that Adam Kirsch took in his New York Sun article “The Scorn of the Literary Blog.” He argues that “bloggers…tend to consider themselves disenfranchised” and thus tend to leap wildly at established authors, publishers, and literary journalists, making their reviews a risky choice for the future of criticism. Even if the minority of truly literary blogs were given an open field with no illogical, passionate competitors as distracters, “the blog form, that miscellany of observations, opinions, and links, is not well-suited to writing about literature” (Kirsch). Most importantly, Kirsch argues that “literary criticism is only worth having if it at least strives to be literary in its own right, with a scope, complexity and authority that no blogger I know even wants to achieve.” He’s right, too. Truly lofty, scholarly blogs get small readership in most cases, unless they are tied to a larger, reputable news service. At that point, the “blogs” become a cross between the traditional print opinion column and the emergency-valve of Blogger: the writing is scholarly and regular, the references are linked in, and comments can be made. Even while this hope is nigh, literary scholarship is threatened by the likes of Pierre Bayard, author of How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read, a book reviewed in July by the Times Literary Supplement in London. Even the literary journalism community thinks one of the most prolific reviewers, James Wood, may be detrimental thanks to his possible misunderstanding of American culture (a theory Wood strongly debates), according to an article from the Boston Globe. The best source, however, was from the Columbia Journalism Review itself—an article I happened upon last, of course. In “Goodbye to All That,” Steve Wasserman confronts the demons of his experience as the literary editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review from 1996-2005—what he calls “a front-row seat at the increasingly congested intersection of culture and commerce.” From everything I can gather, the book review—along with the codex—cannot wait for the gravitational pull of technology to wrestle it into submission; without a driving force behind the change, technology’s centrifugal forces might not leave scholarship recognizably intact. Dare we be the dinosaurs who refused to evolve and the few ancient alligators among us the last, deadly reminder of a bygone age? Or will we stop despairing about change and progress and get on with preserving what we love?