Sunday, June 03, 2007

May the yammering continue ...

... Comments of an Unrepentent Yammerer. Here is another: Less is more. And here's the Persephone Books 'Letter'.

The point of departure for all of this Richard Schickel's recent hissy fit, which I have commented on here and here.

Ms. Beauman's assertion that "only the professional critics ... know what they are talking about; bloggers are merely expressing an opinion" suffers from a couple of problems. One is that all reviews contain opinion. Another is the presumption that bloggers, for some unspecified reason, don't know what they're talking about. I daresay that a good many bloggers are better read than Ms. Beauman, and can probably hold their own with Schickel. The principal thing you need to "know about" when "talking about" a book is a thorough familiarity with its text. To learn that, you have to be able to read - which is not as easy to do as you may think.
In his Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, Albert Jay Nock tells of a test devised by a college president he knew, who administered it to all of his incoming freshmen. The test consisted of a few paragraphs of standard English prose. The students were instructed to read the text to themselves, then read it aloud, and then look it over for a moment before writing down in their own words the gist of what it said. Nine out of 10 failed. They would write down what they thought the passage meant, or what it reminded them of, or a chain of thought the passage triggered in their minds. They would interpret it. But they could not write down in their own words what it said. They were literate enough. They just couldn't read.
One of the pitfalls of professional reviewing - yes, Mr. Schickel, there are such - is that one can begin reading a book not for its own sake, but for the sake of writing about it. The fundamental flaw in Schickel's reasoning is that where one writes has little bearing on the value of what one writes. Would one of Schickel's preciously well-informed reviews suddenly become eminently dismissible if he perversely posted it on a blog?

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous11:05 AM

    The moon is gone.

    She fled as dawn approached.




    Dawn as a slowly opening eye.




    White sea birds skimming over the water,

    looking for an early morning snack.



    The mirror brightens.


    From a blood moon at dawn to a mirror

    reflecting waking life...






    #######



    I woke her to take the moon.


    Her campaign was swift and terrible.


    Metallic and fierce.

    Glaring up in the twilight.


    But the moon was both implacable and unreachable

    and in the end the war against the moon failed.

    As dawn rose slowly from her bed, the moon slipped away.

    But in the end, all that was lost,

    was a little sleep....




    ################


    1 June 2007



    Burning Moon

    Moon Fire

    Blood Moon

    smoked Moon

    Smoky Moon

    Smouldering Moon

    ReplyDelete