uruloki’s lair

From Slate, Ben Williams critiques some of the critics from the last year. There are two items in particular, parts of “The Most Tiresome Culture War” and “The Best Reason to Click Refresh,” that had some good stuff that I am going to highlight.

Most Tiresome Culture War The high-low debate continued this year with regrettable vigor. A.S. Byatt argued in a New York Times op-ed that the Harry Potter books are “written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons.” Defenders dismissed her as “an acolyte at the temple of high culture barring the doors as the ignorant masses who love pop culture come a knockin’.” Then Harold Bloom turned his cannons on Stephen King, who had the temerity to not only give Potter a rave, but also win a National Book Award for “Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.” King fired back, first with an odd humor piece in Book Magazine, then with an aggressive acceptance speech at the NBA ceremony that asked his critics if they think they “get social or academic brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture.”

King hit the nail on the head during his acceptance speech. Many of the “elite,” literary and otherwise, think that they are above and are better than American culture. This disassociation from what should be their culture is what leads to the surprise when books like Harry Potter are devoured and when the Dixie Chicks are rejected. The problem that many of them have is that they are critics and are therefore not true practitioners of the arts. As Kenneth Tynan (himself a critic) said, “A critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car.” Instead of being out there and driving readers to new places, critics are sitting in the backseat, telling the driver that they should have turned left instead of right and so on. Now, they have the right to critique, I’m not against that, what I am saying is that they need to start operating in the real world as opposed to the subset of the world that is their literary circle. Oh yeah, King’s acceptance speech should be read for itself, not just in this context.

Best Reason to Click Refresh Culture blogs. They’re not quite the oppositional alternative to mainstream media that some would claim: The best ones tend to be written by people who are getting published elsewhere; most of them enhance links to media stories with either bitchy commentary or a kind of meta-media service journalism that rounds up the most interesting pieces of the day; and, as the Washington Post pointed out in a piece on “blogrolling,” the “blogosphere”—new, less pompous term please—mimics certain tendencies of old media. But in 2003, they were often faster, wittier, smarter, and hipper than mainstream media, and they made room for types of writing and debate that overly formulaic print often doesn’t anymore.

Although I don’t think “blogosphere” is pompous, I do agree that it is beginning to mimic certain tendencies of the established media. As called out by the referenced wapo article by Jennifer Howard, many blogs are beginning to fit into their own circles. You can click on one link and follow that through a chain of more-often than not similar sounding blogs. Now, this may be the part of the evolution of the net intelligence (as postulated by Den Beste), but a mind that speaks only to itself can often come to the wrong conclusions or overlook data that would change opinions. I even find myself falling into the trap of, “The people I normally read haven’t posted anything, so there’s nothing to read.” So, I will be working on finding more places to read and comment on. Of course, that presupposes I will take the time to comment on it in the first place

Tags: Life //