Transcript: The Golden Age of The Working Critic (Criticism LTD, Episode #1)
EDITOR'S NOTE: These transcriptions are generated by the editing platform, Descript. I lightly edit them for proper names, etc. The transcription quality is, in my opinion, very impressive, but it isn’t perfect. Transcription software has been known to make basic errors, even confusing homonymic antonyms, like adequate and inadequate. While I hope such errors are rare and I invite you to let me know when you find one, so I can correct it, if you are going to quote from an episode of The American Vandal (which I encourage!), please review the associated recording (or have a colleague do so), as that is the proper source of record.
[“Lush Life” by Joe Locke]
Matt Seybold (in Washington D.C.):
Any scholar who has spent any significant time in Twain’s archive is forced to reconcile themself to an evident truth: He knew we were coming. Sometimes he leaves us little sarcastic messages and makes it abundantly clear, he regards us as necessary, but despicable.
Matt Seybold (in Elmira, N.Y.):
What you’re hearing is a recording from February of this year, of a presentative I gave in Washington DC about a rather obscure text, among the last Twain published in his lifetime, called “Is Shakespeare Dead?”
Matt Seybold (in Washington, D.C.):
He says, “I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and drama, is the most degraded of all trades…It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden.”
Unlike most of his 19th-century peers in both the US and UK, Mark Twain rarely reduces himself to what he considers this menial task. But on the few occasions he does, that is, prior to 1909, it is almost always for the purpose of decanonization. The only form of criticism he deigns to write is the lambast. Most famously, he used this mode to deride the influence of Romanticism, particular that of Lord Byron, James Fenimore Cooper, and Walter Scott.
In each of these essays, his arguments follow the same pattern, an almost hyperbolic estimation of the influence popular literature has - Walter Scott, he says, is the single man most responsible for starting the American Civil War - this is followed by a plea to his populist readership that they reject the conventional wisdom of critics, and stop lionizing these authors whose work does direct social harm, in addition, he usually adds, to be aesthetically inferior.
Some critics, reflexively, have viewed such essays as evidence that Twain is an anti-intellectual who idealizes his own bootstrapping autodidacticism, but Twain scholars like myself, who have spent decades wading through “the vault” I mentioned earlier, can easily cite numerous instances of Twain deriding the delusions of the self-taught, lauding universities and libraries, and championing public education.
So, Twain’s vitriol is reserved for the critic, the literary historian, not for other breeds of scholars, educators, and researcher. The reasons he gives are two-fold. The first is very explicit. Critics, he alleges, are perpetuators of received wisdom, and slaves to canonicity. They mindlessly repeat each other’s plaudits and reproduce the value judgements of their professors and mentors, who were themselves, reproducing the value judgments of the previous generation of critics. This explains why Twain thinks the only criticism worth engaging in himself is that which tears down sacred cows. Given the state of criticism in the late 19th and early 20th century, its hard for me to argue too much. A calcified canon is produced by American and British scholars between the Civil War and World War II. Contemporary literary studies probably would have benefited from more criticism by Twain and by critics who followed his method.
However, the other explanation for Twain’s animosity is equally important, and considerably less noble. It’s grievance. He needs us. He knows he needs us. As farsighted and ingenious as Twain’s posthumous controls over his archive are, he knows his reputation will depend, as all artistic reputation do, upon scholarly attention. “I like criticism,” he says, and you can listen for the famous pause, “But it must go my way.” But my favorite description he gave about the critic, and the most revealing, I think, is this: “The critic’s symbol should be the tumble-bug: He deposits his egg in somebody else’s dung, otherwise he could not hatch it.”
[“Song for Vic Juris” by Joe Locke]
Matt Seybold (in Elmira, N.Y.)
I gave my “Is Shakespeare Dead?” lecture on the third of February, exactly a month after releasing our 50th episode, the last before I took the much-needed hiatus which is now coming to an end.
Driving back to Elmira, a scenic, but in February, rather treacherous trek through Central Pennsylvania, I found myself pondering Twain’s dung beetle metaphor, which renders literary critics low, dirty, fungible, repulsive, but also generative, ecologically sustaining, necessary for the perpetuation and appreciation of art and artists. A tumble-bug is a pretty mean thing to call someone, sure, but around the same time Twain conceived this insult, in late 1904, he wrote a fable in which he himself took the form of a grasshopper, and another in which the protagonist was a cholera-germ named Huck. In the essay “The Lowest Animal,” he literally argued for inverting the hierarchy of species. An ant is morally superior to a millionaire, an anaconda less predatory than an artistocrat. It is not so bad to be a dung beetle in Twain’s taxonomy.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the tumble-bug critic in the ensuing six months and, as you shall hear, I’ve discussed the metaphor with several other scholars. Among other things, I’ve come to realize that if literary critics are dung beetles, well, then what Twain produces, that literary archive he spent 30 years carefully prepping for posterity. Well, that’s just shit. Nothing but rot and stink unless somebody like me labors to ball it up, move it about, and use it to make things grow anew.
[Joe Locke’s “Makram”]
This is the American Vandal, from the Center For Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College. I’m Matt Seybold, executive tumble-bug.
On those snowy state roads six months ago, it was not just Twain’s self-reflective Shakespeare essay that had me thinking about the utility of literary criticism. That morning, the New York Times had published a profile of John Guillory under the headline “What Is Literary Criticism For?” It was just the most recent legacy publication to question the legitimacy of the tumble-bug trade and the institutions upon which it depends. The New Yorker ran with “Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism,” and then, just a few weeks later, “The End of The English Major.” The Nation, not to be outdone, opted for “Is This The End of Literary Studies?”
All were, at least ostensibly, reviews of John Guillory’s recent book, Professing Criticism, as were two more pieces published that same day in The Chronicle of Higher Education, including one by Bruce Robbins which initiated a reply from the author. We’ll be hearing from both in this series.
The day of my Cosmos Club lecture was perhaps the peak of what Leigh Claire La Berge had recently dubbed Guillory Gate, a months-long eschatological garment-rending about literary studies by legacy publishers under the veil of reviewing Professing Criticism. I asked Guillory himself about his book’s initial wave of reception:
John Guillory:
The initial response to the book as pessimistic, as declaring the end of criticism, was mistaken. I’m not sure I expected that response. I thought, well, it’s possible, because I have a lot really hard-hitting arguments about what I think we’ve done wrong.
[Barking Dog]
Matt Seybold:
Here John’s dog punctuated his points. We had been talking for almost two hours and she was ready to go out.
John Guillory:
I think the response is very early and that it will take awhile to absorb what I’m trying to do in the book. It was difficult to organize the book because it had so many subjects in it. And it was partly critical, partly analytic, and partly historical. I think it was inevitable that it was going to be challenging because the moment is really fraught. You know, I didn’t ask for the Nathan Heller piece to be published. I think that probably upended things a little bit in a not good way. These are contingencies you can’t predict. They just are not capable of being anticipated in advance.
So, anyway, the answer in brief is, yes I was surprised a little bit by how negative the book was perceived to be, but I’m hoping the book will begin to look a little different as reception continues over the years.
Matt Seybold:
Already, I think, the tenor of Guillory’s reception is changing, and though I set out to make a podcast series about the state of literary criticism without a central master-figure, its impossible to deny the role the book has played as catalyst. Even when it is not a primary object, the arguments coming out of its reception have proven generative, for instance, of essays like Sarah Blackwood’s “Letter From An English Department On The Brink” in New York Review of Books, and several pieces in The LA Review of Books, most recently Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado’s “The Humanities Are Worth Fighting For.” While I would hesitate to reduce the series that follows, a compilation for more than two dozen voices in conversation, to a single premise, were I forced to do so, Nacho’s words might suffice. He’s been in my head from the start of the project. His essay begins by noting both that: “The conversations surrounding the humanities in liberal-leaning mainstream publications are of such carelessness and scandalous frivolity.” But also: “within academia, the conversations about the humanities in the United States today, including some of the presumptions that ground efforts to ‘save’ them, are deeply inaccurate and misguided.”
Frequently, the word conversation, in this context, might be presumed to be figurative, but I think both Nacho and the editor of his essay, Michelle Chihara, who you’ll hear leaning into the word later in this episode, mean it quite literally as well. It was in literal conversation with Nacho at the Cityscape Bar in San Francisco this past January that I heard him rehearse some of the ideas that would become “The Humanities Are Worth Fighting For.” Though not exactly a jeremiad, because Nacho suggests realistic reforms, it is in part a plea for better conversations, ones that acknowledge that there is a real crisis, a labor crisis, but do not presume that crisis reflects either a lack of demand for or legitimacy of the work being done under crisis conditions.
Such conversations must include voices from throughout literary studies. That’s what you’ll find in “Criticism LTD.” Academics at all career stages, working in a wide range of institutions, with varying specializations, methodological commitments, and political identifications, producing multimedia and multimodal criticism, sometimes even building new venues for critical work, as well as working critics, like Ryan Ruby, winner of the 2023 Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, who we’ll be hearing from later this episode.
But I’m going to start with Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado, the Jarvis Thurston & Mona Van Duyn Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. He’ll appear in several episodes over the course of the season. But here’s a passable recreation of that starlit conversation we had at MLA, recorded in May.
Matt Seybold:
One of your favorite and I think also most effective rhetorical moves is reminding those of us who primarily read and study the Anglosphere, especially the U. S. and the U. K., that we are dwelling in the provinces, right, in the periphery fretting about literatures in English, which in terms of sheer scale of readership, are dwarfed by literatures in Spanish and inevitably any claim about the state of a discipline that just eludes that fact is, is gonna have some flaws.
And it does sometimes feel to me that English departments are sort of drunks who keep looking for the keys under the light post. And so, clearly one of the questions I wanted to ask is, “What are we missing?” How does the perceived crisis in literary criticism change when we trade the Orient for the Occident, the province for the capital, right?
If we start to think of English as something that is not representative of the larger state of the field, the larger state of literary production, as well as literary criticism, how does the sort of narratives around criticism in the 21st century shift?
Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado:
I am the happy scold that goes to English language events and tells my English colleagues that they're provincial. And they don't see beyond their cultural nose, you know. And it's a rhetorical gesture, of course. I love and respect my colleagues, and I learn a lot from them in many areas. But, it is a failure of the identification of language with literature, right? It's not all bad, but that's certainly the worst consequence of it.
But in the case of, I think, the Anglosphere, it is a feature of being part of the empire. It's an imperial trait. Provincialism is an imperial trait. If you go to a bookstore in Mexico or in Spain or in Italy, I presume in Africa too, and you go to see the literature or the fiction section of a bookstore, the vast majority of what you're going to see there is literature in translation and from other places in the world.
If I go to my local bookstores here, some of them are wonderful, but I'm pretty sure 90% of the stuff in there is written originally in English. And it is particularly frustrating because many of the other countries don't have the financing or the infrastructure to be cosmopolitan in the broader sense. The cost of being a cosmopolitan Latin American or African is very steep. It's a steep hill to climb. But here you have all the resources. You have in the endless libraries, university funding, like, the austerity here is enormous compared to the universities in other parts of the world. Even the austere university we have here is much wealthier than a university in the Global South.
And it angers me, it frustrates me, if anger is too strong, it frustrates me to see that. You have all this culture in the palm of your hands. I mean, you can see it in streaming, right? Everybody goes from Twitter to think pieces about the stupidest things that are being churned out by Netflix and then you actually have platforms like Mubi, like Criterion, you know, and others that have a plethora of world cinema that nobody watches. Not even the kind of educated people that should in principle be motivated to watch it. And that is very frustrating. If you understand that, then you understand why English thinks they're the humanities.
It's because they don't see beyond their nose. As a matter of scholarly knowledge, when you have global knowledge, then you qualify your claims, right? For example, I hear a lot of people, as a film person that doesn't like television, people say, oh, cinema is over, and I'm like, I mean, yeah, if you watch American cinema, you can surely make that claim, maybe, but have you seen the cinema from the rest of the world? You cannot say that. If you have bothered to see East Asian cinema, for example, which is incredible. People celebrate these mediocre books as the next great thing. And then you start thinking about the novels that are coming from other parts of the world and they dwarf a lot of the stuff that gets celebrated and discussed.
This is not to say that the US or Britain don't have great stuff. There's a lot of great culture. But the thing is that the scale of the world gives you a different aesthetic sense, and cosmopolitanism is a luxury. There's a criticism that one of my mentors makes in one of her books that not everybody that consumes books is cosmopolitan, because if you don't do it in ideal conditions, you actually lose culture rather than gaining it.
But it tells you how precious it is to have a cosmopolitan and deprovincialized sense of knowledge. The humanities have to be co-equal with the world. I mean, even discussions of race, right? There is all this conversation about blackness that is tied to the U.S. identity. There's a lot of it, of course, responding to the political dynamic of the U. S., but I mean Latin America has black people, Europe has black people, black people trace their origin to Africa. Can you talk about blackness without those people? See what I mean?
Latinidad, yes, Latin Americans have been neglectful in recognizing the Latinx diaspora in the U. S. But then there's all these things about Latinidad where Latin America disappears. We have to have a sense of both. An example of the global humanities. You have ethnic studies. That can be defined maybe inaccurately, but you know, tentatively as a set of disciplines that are concerned with the problem of race and culture in the U. S. And then we have area or global studies working with the regions around the world. And then for those it's both/and, right? You don't know the Latin American, Latinx community if you don't know Latin America and US Latinx culture. So cosmopolitanism today is also refusal not only to serve the imperial logic of the English sphere, but also to understand that the problems that we have in front of us require a transdisciplinary approach.
And transdisciplinarity is only possible if you get out of the regionalizations of knowledge.
Matt Seybold:
That sense of sort of boundary crossing seems to be something we come back to, right? These somewhat arbitrary walls between the disciplines are also somewhat arbitrary walls between literatures, between mediums, between genres that are constructed for the purpose uh competition, obviously, you know, colonization and I do think one of the questions I'm most driven by is like, how do you find time? To pursue that cosmopolitanism or maybe more accurately, not to make it an individual level, right? How do we incentivize or structure the access to, and the motivation for cosmopolitanism within the existing system of education? How do we make this thirst for knowledge, which some students have, and some young people have, a thirst for the access to and engagement with other cultures, they have it sort of instinctively, but most don't. How do we cultivate it?
Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado:
So, at the level of undergraduate students it's one of two or maybe both. So, on the one hand, the one that has to do with support, is that many students, most students in the country, in fact, have to work in addition to their studies. You can’t be cosmopolitan without leisure time. If you are a full time student plus a full time worker to make a living, who can reasonably expect you to do anything else? In a country this wealthy and the wealthy universities that we have, to me, it would be a sensible and realistic political goal that no college students work while they're in college. That the college financing packages always, per definition, include funding to support themselves. I'm in a university that in becoming midline is providing some of that, not enough, but much more than before, and the transformation of the students performance is astounding. Students that come from the most marginalized backgrounds are excelling in the classroom because they don't have to work.
You know, I know that because I could have worked in college. My mom killed herself almost prevent me from working. She banned me from getting a job, and that allowed me to be not only a good student, but also a good reader and a good cinephile, right? She afforded me the time, and I think that has to be structuralized.
Beyond that is the choice, the matter of choice. If we don't have arts education, students don't have the capacity to appreciate the arts. And something that I see in my university more intensely, because it's part of the country club culture that they have to provide in very expensive universities like this one, is that they come conditioned from high school to a lot of extracurriculars that take over their time and the time for intellectual cultivation is lost in athletics, in accappella groups, in volunteerism, in fraternities, whatever it is that is encouraged by institutions.
I don't think the university should provide anything other than education and they should rather provide an infrastructure to develop the intellectual curiosity of students in a broader sense. That would be the space to do it. But I think the difficulty with that is that that doesn't correspond to us in the core educational part of the university, where we can be resources for this, but it really is a request of the constitution of residential life. At universities. I mean, universities need to stop hindering the free time of the students with useless activities.
Matt Seybold:
This is oftentimes framed in a kind of commercial, consumer rheroic. We're giving the students what they want. They want club sports, they want, you know, social organizations, they want accapella groups. But I agree with you, I actually think that students flock to what is being offered. They follow the resources, not the other way around. And if instead we had movie screenings and book clubs, and various forms of extracurricular academic and cultura events, right? Music performances, performing arts, things like that.
Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado:
But also make use of your faculty to do that stuff. I think that many students, even if they're motivated just to get a little recommendation would follow. I can give examples of things that I have already seen. The film program put screenings of films like Chunking Express.
They were packed. I have a class on contemporary Latin American cinema. I asked them to subscribe to Muvi and Mubi and to watch the films from there. And then the assignments require them to study the platforms. And I would say that probably half of the students are keeping the platform after the class just for their own use.
Because they learn how to use them. So you know that the literacy behind cultural resources is lacking, and I think that one of the issues that is societal is that compared to European or a Latin American country, the US doesn't have minister of culture, and therefore there is no government entity that is invested in the promotion of Cultura. Right? That's why the term doesn't exist in English, if you think about It. In French or in Spanish, because the ministry, whose job is to ensure that there are book fairs, whose job is to ensure that books are accessible to people, whose job is to ensure that museums are affordable, whose job is to ensure that culture doesn't just stay in the tourist centers of cities, but goes into the peripheries, that it is spread out across the territory.
I mean, Mexico, there's a lot of failings. I could criticize the Mexican system all day in a different podcast, but there is a federal and 32 state cultural ministries, and every municipality has a cultural ministry too, especially larger municipalities, all of them from theater to literary writing and so on.
So what does that mean? The capacity of people, maybe they're supporting the education system, but there is something there that you can grab. So when I was growing up, I could go to the Mexican Cinematheque and watch the cinema, to the Bellas Artes to listen to the Mexican Symphony Orchestra. And there were cheap books in government bookstores that I could buy. So money was not an obstacle. So it's money and time. I don't know that we're going to get a minister of culture in the U. S. anytime soon, but I think if universities have been the repository of cultura, for better or for worse, universities need to begin by creating the time and space and resources for students to have that experience, regardless of their major.
[“Tushkin” by Joe Locke]
Matt Seybold:
That’s Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado. As always on The American Vandal, each episode in this series will be associated with a webpage where you can learn more about our guests and view a hypertext bibliography of works discussed. This episode’s homepage at MarkTwainStudies.com/GoldenAge. This season, for the first time, you may also receive the bibliography via our SubStack newsletter. Subscribers will be alerted to new episodes, receive full transcripts, and occasionally additional commentary on past, present, and future Vandal series. The newsletter is completely free, but you may sign up as a patron, and by doing so, you will be donating directly to the podcast.
The Golden Age of Popular Criticism is an epoch named by our next guest, Ryan Ruby, first in a twitter thread, where he listed 21 favorite works of criticism published in 17 different venues in the span of a single calendar year, then further elucidated in a lecture sponsored by Vinduet magazine in Norway earlier this year, shortly after Ruby received the 2023 Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism.
I opened our conversation by asking Ryan to reflect on another podcast interview, one he’d recorded with Justin E. H. Smith on Point Magazine’s “What is X?” Podcast two years earlier. Here’s Justin:
Justin E. H. Smith:
The notion of criticism, it's closely wrapped up with its kind of semantic cousin, crisis, right? And a critical moment is a moment from which things will never be the same again a turning point, so to speak. And that's significant perhaps for understanding again, what criticism itself is, but also it makes it seem particularly strange or so to speak next level to ask the question that I'm about to ask, namely, is criticism in crisis that is to say in the present moment with the economic structures that support or fail to support critical work, is it even possible to play a social role as a critic today?
Ryan Ruby:
This is a great question the answer is yes and no. Yes, criticism is in crisis in that sense that the function of the critic as it has been previously known as an arbiter of taste, as a person who can make or break a career in the old mid century sense. That is fast disappearing to the point of being gone. But I think what is actually less discussed is the no part. In which sense criticism as a mode of writing is flourishing. And probably as a result of the crisis itself.
And in that, we see a proliferation of very talented extreme. I'm just overwhelmed. We have an embarrassment of riches in the time to make critics that we have. I'm just speaking in a sort of anglophone literary or critical space. Coming from either from as working novelists or poets or writers. Coming from the academy, people are being academy for many reasons, primarily economic reasons, and they're bringing their academic expertise into a sort of, paraacademic critical space. And in that respect, what we have is a really bright, vibrant, critical community.
Our influence Is not the kind of influence that was wielded by critics in previous periods, but what we have is Sort of what I would see what I see in the contemporary moment is a lateral move onto a kind of criticism That moves from the sort of classic consumer reports model, as you still see in the newspapers, which still have book sections, into a space where criticism has become an art in and of itself, a genre of writing in and of itself.
And if we look at criticism and that as a way of writing about, in this case, books in a way that sort of breaks down the sort of primary, secondary text relation. We have a lot of that, and it's really quite good, right.
Justin E. H. Smith:
Is this a paradoxical situation where we're left unable to explain why there's such a proliferation of high quality criticism at precisely the moment where the economic structure is least supportive of it? I think about, for example, Christian Lorentzen’s lovely never-ending plaint about all the listicles and the transformation of what we used to think of as relatively medium to highbrow reviews into top 10 beach reads type of publications, and this is something that is happening, you want to say At the same time as criticism is also reaching new heights as an autonomous domain of creative expression.
That's really interesting, but also paradoxical.
Ryan Ruby:
The singular fact of our time in terms of culture is abundance. And I just mean pure, sheer qualitative abundance, right? Abundance of information, abundance of data, abundance of writing, abundance of venues.
And that has it's I think probably the effects of that are overall harmful, but if when we're looking for a silver lining of it, what we're seeing is the proliferation of really quite stupid things of which. Christian’s argument about the the listicles is quite a spot on example.
Especially in venues where the financial resources are more there where one would expect a better quality. We are not saying that we are seeing this sort of the typical complaints about, you know, clickbait articles and lowest common denominators of readers and so on and so forth.
But that coexists and it doesn't negate, there's no more sorting mechanism for really any kind of information distribution and its quality. We live in a weird way, in a very in principle egalitarian production space. In terms of information, what that has led to is just a sort of, the metaphor is always the flood and a flood of information.
And so what you're seeing is, and to, to your second point, I think that's actually, that's quite astute, like insofar as the critic has indeed become the artist, you know, to, steal a phrase from Oscar Wilde before say, in the classic period of Bohemia in the sort of mid 19th century France, there's a very strong division between the social character of the artist and the social character of the people writing about art and producing discursivity about art, and there was a very strong opposition between those two groups of people and then generalizing here across a large bit of history.
But now what we're seeing is that as the critic becomes an artist is forced to engage in this as a sort of expressive medium because there's so much abundance and because there's abundance generates competition for these very small perches at known or what is derided as legacy media.
The critic, the artist, the academic had been pooled and proletarianized in a way. And they're responding to the same kind of economic pressures.
Matt Seybold:
One of the things that I found interesting listening to that conversation now at some remove was that it sort of preempts and anticipates some of the things that were coming. And there's at least two ways in which I imagine your perspective might have evolved since then. One, of course, is that I think there is a much wider perception of criticism in crisis now than there was two years ago. And some of that is the result of the book by John Guillory, Professing Criticism, that kind of makes a version of that argument. And some other books that have come out in recent years that are either revising or in some ways in conversation with the idea of a criticism in crisis.
And then also my perception is, and I could be wrong, that there's been something of an increase in prominence for your work in the ensuing couple of years, right. More mainstream publications, some awards, I would presume, you know, indelicately, slightly higher fees, keynotes, such and such. And I imagine that those two things, might have some bearing on altering, or at least giving you a broader perspective on this question of what is the crisis in criticism right now? And so I was hoping you would talk about specifically, how has your understanding of criticism as an art and profession changed in very recent memory?
Ryan Ruby:
Well, I think that and this is sort of my position, so I'm going to commit to it. So I have a rather contrarian view on this which seems to be out of step with the broader mood when we're talking about criticism, scholarship, especially the state of the humanities and the English department in the academy, which is that I think that I'm committed to the view that in fact what we're looking at is in fact a golden age of criticism.
And what that means exactly is going to depend on how you're looking at criticism, from where you're looking at it, and what the sort of factor you want to determine as crisis or as as golden age, right? And what it seems to me is that for a certain group of readers there has been, over the last two years, and I think it has only increased since I gave that talk with Justin, that the amount of criticism available to nonspecialist readers, who are the people I consider my general audience, has increased and I can only speak anecdotally here, but seems to have increased by a large magnitude, and so if you're a reader of criticism and you're interested in specifically very sophisticated critical treatments, of course, my object of concern is literature, but across the board, all other media as well, that group of people is doing very, very well in terms of a pure sort of quantitative output.
And I think that what has occurred also in the last couple of years is through a number of factors, which we can discuss, or a number of para institutions or counter institutions, however you might want to describe them, that this criticism is reaching an audience who reads criticism for its own sake and of course, the traditional consumption of the book reviewer, which is the sort of broadly journalistic category in which I belong, has always been the idea that you read a book review and it's instrumental. It is a means to an end to deciding whether or not to read the book under review. But I find that, through my conversations with this audience, through the production of my own work and through my time on Twitter, that what we're looking at is the development of a specialized readership outside of the academy that is, made up of members of the academy, but mostly they're reading not as academics.
And what they're reading is good criticism in the same way one might want to read an excellent short story or a personal essay or some kind of genre that is more traditionally thought of as quote unquote creative writing. And that group of people has formed a connoisseurship. And they have specific critics that they are interested in. They're interested in discourse about criticism. And they're reading it because they're interested in the particular art of writing this particular kind of critical essay. Which has many subgenres. So my answer to you is that the crisis of criticism, in my view, is not a crisis of criticism as such. It is a crisis of the discipline of, let's call it for the moment, English and/or comparative literature.
And that particular crisis is in my view, there are two levels of discussion about that crisis. One are things like, well, what is the raison d'etre of critical methodology? What is the you know, particular curricular reform that might be enacted to attract more students? And that's one level. And I always I happen to be personally skeptical of those explanations because the real crisis in my view is not a crisis of criticism as such.
It is the crisis of the institution, which is producing the kind of, professional groupings, professional safety net, payment questions, unionization questions, the real crisis is a labor crisis, which is to say it has become more and more difficult for people who work in the humanities as academics to continue to labor in that field.
And that has, in my view, very, very little to do with the superstructural levels of criticism. And much more to do with the particular convulsive shock that the university is currently undergoing. And I think if we would have had this conversation two years ago the mood would have been very, very grim indeed.
But of course, again, if I may be just contrary as an outsider looking in, one of the most heartening developments of the last two years to address, what I'm calling the real crisis has been. Signs are good. We have seen unprecedented industrial action in the United States and the United Kingdom around the university, which has spread out into a number of other sectors of society and which has sort of redoubled back onto increased drives for grad student unions, for example.
And that's a really good sign because, the crisis of criticism is almost perpetual in a way. Or at least it's a very old vintage. And for the first time in my lifetime, or let's say since the first time since my adult lifetime, since I graduated university, you are really seeing success in fighting back and addressing these particular issues.
And I think that the efforts of the, of those people to address that crisis, which is the key crisis is really something very, very heartening.
Matt Seybold:
Yeah, absolutely. I'm so glad we're, we're thinking about the relationship between those two things. The possibility that optimism, on the one hand, about the increasing proletarian fight against the destruction of, certainly the humanities, but also of academic institutions in the U S and UK more broadly. There are real wins on that front, particularly in the last two years. But I do want to raise the possibility, and I agree with you, that there is this abundance of criticism, the golden age that you refer to, is characterized by the abundance and accessibility of criticism on the one hand, something that Guillory and others have spoken to is that there seems to be maybe a decline in the publication of academic monographs, right? The peer reviewed journals in literary studies are struggling to some extent or another, fewer issues, fewer subscribers, so on and so forth.
Simultaneous with that, is the birth of all these paraacademic or paraliterary publications, most of them digital, sometimes online only, as well as, and this is sort of one of the theses of the series, right? Things like podcasts and social media and web series and zoom channels and so on. There is criticism happening by other mediums. And that was not happening, 5, 10, certainly 15 years ago. And there's a sort of thriving polyphony of voices that we have access to because of that. And it does feel as though there's an enormous appetite and also an enormous amount of criticism for us to consume.
I do wonder, however, whether that abundance is to some degree, at least a product of the precarity of the laborers within this system, right? There's both intense pressure not just to publish, but to publicize oneself starting as early as the graduate student phase and also, those publications are able to sustain themselves paying very little for that, sometimes nothing at all, because they are trading upon this sort of need to produce that particularly emerging scholars feel and contingent faculty and those that are on the fringes of the academy and of the publishing world, need to get their voice, get their material out there and are willing to do so for you know, close to nothing. If we have a better, more stable and more prosperous labor system, in fact, the abundance we recognize might dry up to some extent.
I'm not sure that correlation is absolutely true, but I'm curious how you would respond to that kind of thesis.
Ryan Ruby:
Yeah. I just want to first off start with the point that you made at the outset which is that there's an expanded notion of criticism.
That's really, I think, really worth, before I answer your question, really worth underlining and highlighting because that's one of the more exciting features of what's happening today in this paraacademic space more things are being recognized as criticism, both in terms of the particular media that they're coming through, so not just writing, not just literary media or literate media but also there are these particular venues for the dissemination of criticism that have expanded our notion of what criticism is and indeed can be, and I think it draws an awareness to the fact that a lot of this was always going on already, and now that we're having a different recording media for these particular things, we've begun to see how often we actually do, and by we, I mean a much broader community than merely academics extending potentially out to any person who is even of amateur interest in literature. That they themselves are doing criticism and as a sort of mode of everyday existence and that's been a really nice thing to see and that sort of distinction certainly is and I guess this is now my transition to the second half of your question the unfortunate and precarious situation of the labor conditions in the academy have been a real boon for quality of production and quantity of production because, of course, one finds it very difficult to imagine and perhaps this will change in, I don't know, the next 5, 10 years.
We'll see, but the notion that a podcast could be criticism is something that is not going to be recognized or rewarded or incentivized within the strictures of the academic discipline as we've known it as recently as let's say five years ago. Speaking to the sort of people who are working in the academy, who are working in this sort of para academic space where I consider my colleagues that there's been a lot of recognition of what's called, as you know, public facing criticism, right? So the ability to count work, not just in specialized scholarly journals towards your publication record and to be encouraged, and of course there are institutions that are developing to specialize in this particular subject matter, and we could discuss the relationship between that and the sort of strange position of the creative writing program in the academy and the the English department more particularly, but all of those things are really good developments when you're just looking on the product end, right, these are all very, very good developments because what's happening is, again, I feel bad to say this, but it looks as though…like, you might see this like two countries, right?
One country is a previously wealthy country that has been undergoing some extreme political mismanagement and persons in that country are brain-draining out to a second country, which is not as wealthy by any means but is, has an old robust tradition, has some prestige and has cheaper rent, right?
And, the analogy here is between the academy and the sort of, journalistic public sphere in which of course in the 19th century, and one of the features of Gillory’s book that I latched onto is the interesting part is that what we're looking at as a story about the discipline as a sort of perhaps an interregnum between two phases of the public sphere.
And so if we, take the hypothesis seriously that what's happening is the conditions in the academy are returning or even regressing if you want to put it that way to a sort of late 19th century norm in which criticism is performed primarily as a quasi journalistic activity and critics engage in the sort of like grand Arnoldian critique of life and so on and so forth that has been extremely good for the readers, in that world because academics are bringing specialist knowledge, period specialties, extremely sophisticated methodologies and just, the wealth of knowledge that you accrue in a discipline in a format that is much more loose generically. It has the opportunity for kinds of aesthetic play that are not available to you if you're writing in a journal whose aim is the advancement of knowledge. The pay is terrible, but it's better than what you get working at a journal. And of course the readership is much broader the academics who are working in that space I think are just again, from a purely product standpoint, really, really thriving and producing incredibly good work and from an audience point of view, I think that what people are seeing is they're like, Oh, we are finally being keyed into a kind of way of looking at literature that was not previously available in the public sphere of journalism. And, which is much more sophisticated, much more interesting, much more aesthetically pleasing. And once these two things are brought together, both the sort of bellatristic prose stylist and the sort of academic methodological expert I think academics are finding that the thing that they do has, in fact, a wider audience than they had previously thought.
And that people, especially the sort of connoisseurship for criticism, are responding to it with a kind of hunger that they're seeing something new, or rather seeing something that they've always wanted, that the market for literary journalism has not yet provided them. And I think that's what's exciting about this particular moment.
Now, to your underlying point, all of that is the result of very unfortunate labor conditions, right? It's a sad situation, right? Because there's this sort of vulgar Marxist idea that the way to produce the best work is to produce the best conditions.
In terms of, time, luxury, wealth, social worry the theory being if you don't have health care and you get sick, and you have to spend lots of money paying for your health, you are now not doing work and your work is suffering because you are suffering and so on and so forth, right?
And the sad truth is that, and I say this, I mean, this is an incredible compliment to all the people who are working under these conditions. They're doing better work. I hope I am not saying that this is a good reason for withholding people the social protections which are their due as human beings, but the relationship between those two things is not causal in any way.
And in fact, when you look at history, literary history, at least the literary history of let's say the modernist period, which is the one that I'm most familiar with. People find a way to do incredible work under incredibly adverse situations. And making their situations more adverse does, in fact, rally them to great degrees of creativity and intellectual expenditure, as it were that is just so much more remarkable given what they have to go through to make it happen. And I think that, again, I think these are actually, in a way, two separate issues. And what we need to say is, on the one hand, there's a serious crisis happening, and that crisis needs to be addressed, and that crisis needs to be addressed because the work people do is valuable, and they are human beings.
And secondarily, out of that crisis, out of that enormous crisis, people are rising to the challenge and really giving all of us, who are able to encounter it something really special and for which they are to be doubly commended in my view.
Matt Seybold:
I think that's both a kind of frightening observation about the way our suffering, our precarity acts as a kind of incentivization. And has, I would agree with you, that the quality of work being produced by this generation of critics and scholars is very commendable, excellent, despite the so-called crisis in the humanities, there's not just the abundance, but there is also a remarkable consistency in the quality and also a kind of ambitiousness, a willingness to take risks, and that's one of the things I definitely want to talk to you about
Ryan Ruby:
Cause you just can't keep these people down, right? It's incredible. It's so amazing to me, I just cannot emphasize this point enough because it really speaks to the level of value that the people who are producing it and consuming it really think it has.
[“Shifting Moon” by Joe Locke]
Matt Seybold:
That’s Ryan Ruby. We’ll be returning to this conversation next episode. But, as he acknowledges here, the line between academic and popular critic has become harder to parse, in part due to the expansion of what he calls para-academic space. These spaces are clearly integral to the golden age of criticism that Ryan diagnoses. One of the things we’ll be doing over the course of this series is exploring a variety of para-academic spaces with the creative people who are responsible for building and maintaining them.
Perhaps the para-academic publication par excellence is the Los Angeles Review of Books. Founded just over ten years ago by Tom Lutz, a professor at UC-Riverside, the site affectionately known at LARB not only publishes a plethora of criticism that might not have found a venue otherwise, but it has become a springboard for writers and editors, mainstreaming critical methods and tastes previously deemed too niche or academic for legacy media. Andrew Hoberek recently speculated that the “biggest impact on litererary criticism in the last decade came not from scholarly shifts, but from the rise of LARB.”
We’re going to close this episode with Michelle Chihara, who recently became editor-in-chief, and has been tasked with guiding the publication, now something of an esteemed institution itself, through what seems to be yet another epochal change to our media infrastructure. As many listeners know, Michelle and I have been frequent collaborators, and even co-editors, and she’s appeared on The American Vandal several times before. The fuzzy divide between academic and popular critic which Ryan and I discussed is one Michelle has been straddling for years, and at the outset of our conversation, I asked her what it was like to reconsider the state of literary criticism, including its perceived crisis, from her new position.
Michelle Chihara:
Let me say it this way. As soon as I took that step outside of the academy and started full time in the editor in chief position at the LA Review of Books, it seems very clear to me that the crisis is a crisis of time in all arenas. The intensification of work in academia is happening everywhere.
It's just, the people that I know are from academia who are talking about it. But I have a friend in the restaurant. Industry. And at one point I was talking to him about restaurants post pandemic, and he was saying something about how the industry is unsustainable and all these different ways and there are these labor practices that are problem and I was like, that's everywhere.
It seems obvious to me that when the ecosystems that keep the conversation alive are crumbling in various ways. Of course, the conversation is crumbling too. I think that literary criticism is a social structure that relies on people who care about it. And if we don't have the time to do the work that leads to the conversation. Of course, the conversation is going to change. But I think the need to get in there every few years and reassess how the conversation is going and think about the stakes of the conversation that seems to me to be necessary work that would not be perceived as crisis if the labor realities weren't crumbling beneath it.
Reading is for many of the people in the world who read the Los Angeles Review of Books reading is a leisure activity. The cultural production that we're doing there is something that they do in that gray area between work and fun, right? Where you're doing something because it's both edifying, but also fun, and also you want to know, and also you want to be up on things.
That's always been part of why we turn to cultural products like the Los Angeles Review.
Matt Seybold:
What you originally said about working intensification, I think is extremely important, but doesn't necessarily surprise me at all.
That seems like fundamentally part of the crisis in the humanities that then extends throughout academic institutions and then leaps out into the private sector, et cetera. But the other thing that you mentioned there, like this idea that what has sustained the LA review of books, what has made it consistently attractive.
To a range of readers is that it does self consciously straddle this line between reading as pleasure and reading as productivity. And that is a line that of course academics and particularly literary studies academics are constantly dancing around. Am I reading this book, this novel, because I plan to teach it, because I plan to write about it, because I plan to do something with it, right? Turn it into some kind of product. Or am I reading this because reading is something that I enjoy and that is relaxing and that makes me think and laugh and emote in various ways? We struggle around that question, particularly literary studies academics struggle around that behavior all the time. And it's interesting to think about a publication like L. A. Review of Books or like some of the others that are in that cross-section of pseudo-academic, para-academic publications as trading upon that.
oh, you can read this and to some extent it will be part of your professionalization. Like you need to know about books that are coming out in your field. You want to know about what are the hot novels of the season or whatever, but also it's going to be written in such a way that will give you a degree of pleasure.
Michelle Chihara:
But I don't think that most people are actually reading the LA Review of Books for work in the way that you just described. I don't think people are like, I need to know what's going on in this field, and I'm going to go read the latest six articles.
About these topics, and, I can't speak for the readership because the way that readers come to the LA review of books is always changing. It's changing now. Social media is changing. We don't even know necessarily on a granular day to day basis, how and why people are reading , but I think that, the strange dilettanteish career that I've had has been a process of just, making everything that I love into work.
But the worlds that I've been in from, journalism through fiction and literary criticism, right? All being defunded in various ways. And what that means is that there's all these people who still want to do them, but it's really hard to get that. That work that you're doing fund is hard to get it valued, but the value in reading and writing is always value that's created among people, right?
And the more you bring that capitalist how do I make, how do I make this work pay off when you bring that pressure into it? You're already participating in the problematic, circuits of value out there, but I also have a problem with the labor of love discourse, right?
Don't do it unless you love it. You're going to be able to make it pay off if you love it.
Matt Seybold:
It doesn't matter if you're getting paid. Yeah.
Michelle Chihara:
If we want to keep the conversation alive, if the conversation matters for something more than monetary value, we got to keep doing it.
And that's how I end up coming back into these situations where everything that I love is work. But I'm not reading and I'm not choosing articles based on some objective idea of what books are important, cultural capital. I'm very much trying to keep the conversation alive based on what people care about and are reading.
And I do believe, there's like the kind of second order importance of the conversation as an abstraction in a democracy. I really believe that you can't have a functioning democracy of any type, capitalist or not, without a world of letters, people reading and thinking about both the news and research, writ large.
And, that has almost started to sound like a naive cliché to be like, I believe in the role that these things play in democracy, but I really do believe, and the value is about, The value that we bring by caring by continuing to care we're still trying to affect monetization and we're a nonprofit. We're literally nonprofit and we're actually much smaller. We were talking about this before we started recording. But the LA review of books is a smaller operation than people often think. I just had a writer who's piece did really well and a writer on, I think it was Vulture listed her article alongside articles, it was an article about BTS the Korean, the K pop band, and listed her article alongside, the New Yorker, the Atlantic and some other East Coast legacy media publication, as if we were there.
And the writer was being snarky about all these articles because oh, these legacy media places, they're too respectable. We're not legacy, we're scrappy and small still. They have so many more resources than we do. So I was psyched that we got listed in that because I was like, hey, they think we're big.
But also, guys, we're not, we're still small and scrappy. Yeah. We're trying to navigate that, but always in service of keeping the conversation alive.
Matt Seybold:
And we've talked about this on previous episodes of the podcast, that, for many of those legacy media outlets, the kinds of things that get covered as you were mentioning earlier, the kind of idea of the sort of the hot books, the books of the season, the topics of the season, the cultural products of the season. There is a kind of top down element to that, recognizing like what's being produced on film and television, what's being put out by the, the big five publishers, so on and so forth, dictates then what is farmed out to both staff and freelance contributors on those legacies publications. It strikes me that la review of books works in a far different way that it's crowdsourcing that conversation And looking to potential contributors to provide what needs to be introduced into the conversation.
And so that makes me wonder then what is the critical ethos of a publication like that, I imagine that there is not a lot of recruiting based upon a particular paradigmatic political or cultural sensibility, but rather looking for ways to recognize what work is being brought to you, or is being solicited by the section editors that then fits into. What might be comprised as an L. A. Review of books essay. And so I wondered if you would talk a little bit about what do you think in L. A. Review of books essay is what makes this publication identifiable? Not just as different from, academic publications, but also legacy media.
And like, how do you stand out as this sort of peculiar outlet that I agree is Hitting above it's it's you. Yeah. A Jenny Lou kind of metaphor.
Michelle Chihara:
Everybody go read muscle memory. I think that because we have a network of editors most of whom are remote and part time and many of whom are academics. And so I'm in the position of coordinating a lot of efforts. I'm almost like conducting in a way where an editor in chief at a place like Harper's, right?
They're going to lose license by reading everything. Every issue is going through that single editorial awareness. And that's not the way that LA review of books works because we have so many editors we’re soliciting from all over the place. And I'm coordinating the efforts of a large group of people to make sure that we have an intentional mix.
I talk about the mix a lot right now. We were set up with an enormous amount of yes and energy from all sides. And we still have a lot of that. What that allows us to do is it allows people who have real depth of expertise in a particular area to break in a way that they wouldn't necessarily otherwise be able to break in.
And so we represent that depth. As one point in an enormous breadth. The breadth of what we're covering is really vast. It's, humanities and science and tech and medicine and history and political economy and then film and TV and culture and the arts. And I'm actually between section editors and some areas bringing people back who were doing arts before, for example, it's very exciting.
The experience of it is the experience of feeling there are just so many balls in the air, but when I look at the mix, when I look at everything that we're publishing in a month on top of the quarterly, where we're trying to do more reported essays, a little bit more of a Los Angeles focus in the print quarterly.
I look at all of that. It's amazing. Really being able to give people who have that depth in these particular areas a point on this map and then the map is just amazingly wide. And when I try to sum it up, one of the phrases I've been using is, we're bringing the world of letters to L.A. and L. A. to the world of letters. But L. A. is this distributed global city that represents everything and nothing at the same time. It's exciting. It still feels there's this wave. Of content out there that I'm just trying to open the floodgates in the right way to let it through at a good pace.
Matt Seybold:
Another very appropriate L. A metaphor.
Michelle Chihara:
We're doing a, an event. In honor of Mike Davis to honor his legacy. It's a posthumous lifetime achievement award. And one of our board members co wrote set the night on fire with him. Very much an LA author, but at the same time, such a widely recognized author who really straddled that line between.
Academic and scholarly writing and public facing writing. It feels like a really fantastic way for us to take our resources and our ability to get stuff out there to really cement the connection in everyone's mind between the city and these books and how important they are, but also, LA is a bellwether for what's coming. A lot of ideas come through Mike Davis's history of the city , so we're like, Hey, we're going to hand out this zine that has some MRF and his family, never before published stuff, we have excerpts of set that night on fire going around and we're just going to party and that's on mission for us. To have a party celebrating what writers can do celebrating the city, but also we're going to put everything online. Try to say, hey, also, this is for our audiences around the world. We literally have readers around the world and that's just that's how you keep the conversation alive.
Matt Seybold:
That strikes me as one of the things to talk about LA Review of Books was conceived of as a kind of digital first publication, at least as I understand it, and was probably one of the first, Para academic or review of books style publications to come about in that way. And as you said you are also, creating a print quarterly. You're getting into, multimedia and also events, you do workshops, you have podcasts, you have some sort of, video and digital media and social media
it strikes me that one of the things that distinguishes L. A. Review of Books is it's constantly trying to present criticism in multifarious and multimedia forms. How do you understand the potential crisis is criticism as also part of a transition or a reimagining of what criticism does that is apart from The sort of critical trajectory that we might date back to the 18th century in which criticism is something that takes place in print periodicals, the literary critic is somebody who's publishing in newspapers in magazines in places like harper's in the atlantic it is a genre form that is exclusive to a particular media and it strikes me that at the very origins, L. A. Review of Books was trying to transcend that association. And maybe has to continue to do so, as you said earlier, as things like the social media environment. Seems to be in a kind of transitional phase the ways in which people are engaging with and consuming literature are changing, like, how do you think about how the review of books has to change along with that rapid media disruption or adaptation?
Michelle Chihara:
It seems to me that we probably need to make sure that our different feeds amplify each other, we're heading for a more meaningful UX redesign, we need to be thinking about that. We were studying the ways that people move through the content on the site. I'm in the process of pulling together a video essay about Caleb Smith's book Thoreau's Axe, and it seems like such an obvious fit for me.
It's thinking about attention and how the discipline of attention functions, right? And how it connects back to the collective and our social media manager, Maya, who's awesome of course, has experience making video essays because it's something she actually practiced and learned in college the academy has been thinking about.
Video essays and what's happening with criticism. My younger generations, people are still reading, people are still interested in criticism. They're also still listening to podcasts and watching video essays and putting together new ways to consume this stuff.
I don't think anyone knows exactly what the future holds along all these lines. And I'm trying to do this video essay as an experiment to see, how can we use our different feeds to pull people in here and then send them over there? All of that is still very much in beta testing.
Those of us who create this stuff have to be thinking about what is the next wave going to look like? I feel like you, you've already been talking about this on the podcast, but thinking about how, what's going to happen as social media shifts.
The behavioral economists who I criticize all the time, right? They study the past to try to predict the future. They say the wave, it's often very short timeline. But Twitter came into existence, changed the way journalists work, changed all sorts of aspects of journalism.
And now, what people decide to do next, what we build. And where we build community next will determine the way that it goes next. I don't have a crystal ball around how it's going to work, but I think it's important that we just keep trying things.
Matt Seybold:
Openness to experimentation is definitely something that I associate with the L. A. Review books, right? Yeah, for sure. You will take chances. Both on variations of text first kinds of essays, but also that you're thinking about, how they can maybe move into other mediums.
I think, one of the things that's exciting about being a critic now, there are all sorts of things that are perhaps precarious as well, but this question that I often have when I'm conceiving of a project of like, where does it belong? Is this something that is going to become a peer reviewed essay in a specialized journal in my field?
Is this something that is appropriate for, an L. A. Review of books type of essay. Is this something that goes on the center for Mark Twain studies site? Is this a podcast? Is this a mini documentary that we could release on YouTube or a video essay? As you said or do I need to like back the heck off?
And this is a fucking tweet And I do think that is a kind of question that is more urgent now than it was even like 5 or 10 years ago is that the various venues and vehicles for critical work have diversified.
It used to be is this a book project? Is this an academic journal article? Is it maybe just a review or a panel presentation or something like that? Now, there's literally dozens of different ways.
that you can conceive of moving something from the idea phase to a kind of product. And that's both really intimidating, but also really exciting, and it forces you to ask those sort of genre and medium questions from the very origins.
Michelle Chihara:
I feel like I should shout out Sarah Mesle because, I think she was the first person that I was talking with about the LA Review of Books at the outset.
And one of the things that the LA Review of Books did at the beginning was support all these channels. She started avidly with Sarah Blackwood, and then it was a LA Review of Books channel. It's still a channel. We have these channels and affiliates. It's not clear. How that's going to evolve.
We probably need to change some of that. We have a number of those partners who are no longer producing content. But. When Sarah started Avidly, it was like this generic explosion. It was like, wait a second.
Academics want to be able to say that they like things. And now, now that Sarah's published a whole series of books, that's what NYU Press on Avidly reads. And, Phil Maciak, our TV editor, his Avidly Reads book is coming out now and it just feels like part of the landscape and it's hard to remember that there was a time when it felt so it just felt so fresh to say, wait a second, academics wanna talk about what they love. They wanna be avid about something. Yeah.
Matt Seybold:
Effusion is okay as a mode, right? Yeah.
Michelle Chihara:
And in fact, it's great as a mode, and it sells well, and it brings academics to a new audience. now, maybe we have to go back to pessimism for a while, but it is really important to remember.
I think that the other review of books did help bust open all these generic lanes, and now some things are being recreated. They're reconsolidating in different ways. We still don't know where it's going. It was really important and it. It was really fun to break some of that open and it's still really fun.
People still really do care and want to read. It's just a matter of how we. How we build something sustainable on these really shifting fans.
So when I'm talking to writers about how to write a review essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, one of the questions I almost always ask is, why does this book matter? You're explaining that to an audience who are interested in this topic, probably already, but who haven't heard of this book yet.
I had a kind of spontaneous conversation with the CEO of Macmillan at an event a few weeks ago, and I asked him, what's the real, what's going on in publishing and he said, people are definitely reading, but the inflationary pressure on the supply chain, but then he said, the other real challenge is discoverability.
And I said, discoverability by which you mean how people discover. What to read next and he said, yeah, I was like, oh that's how we come in but that question why does this book matter If you can answer that well in an essay, you've got an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books
[“Shifting Moon” by Joe Locke]
Matt Seybold:
That was Michelle Chihara. This concludes the first episode of Criticism Ltd. For more about the people, topics, and works discussed, please go to MarkTwainStudies.com/GoldenAge or subscribe to our SubStack newsletter. We’ll be talking much more about it in future episodes, but special thanks go to Joe Locke, the tremendous composer, bandleader, and vibraphonist whose new album, Makram, provides the soundtrack to this season.
Thanks for listening.