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Another shot is fired across the bow in the great lit bloggers vs. book reviewers feud, this time courtesy of Time movie critic and occasional Los Angeles Times book review contributor Richard Schickel:
“Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: 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). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author’s (or filmmaker’s or painter’s) entire body of work, among other qualities.”
Okay. We got it. Strangely though, this interesting (though sometimes childish) debate is taking place in the pages of the Los Angeles Times, a newspaper that, through it’s recent move, has come down decisively on one side of this issue: it recently announced it was killing it’s own freestanding book review section.
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