Sven Birkerts, editor of Agni, complains about unintelligent bloggers, declining book sections in print newspapers, and the need “to keep alive the possibility of shared discourse” in this article from yesterday’s Boston Globe. Apparently, “shared discourse” means you and I should stop blogging and suck from whatever bottle the critics will hold up for us.

Brikerts is right that blogs can be sloppy. I aspire to better writing than I achieve. He’s also right that blogs can be thoughtless and of-the-moment, much the same way 24-hour news can be. Too bad bloggers were not better educated at their modern grade schools and universities. And it’s too bad there isn’t some intellect barrier to blogging. It’s so darn democratic any fool can start a handful of blogs and waste his life posting to the world (a reminder that the best content filter is the disciplined mind).

That’s the opposite of what Brikerts wants. His quotation of Cynthia Ozick describes his desire:

“What is needed,” Ozick writes, “is a broad infrastructure, through a critical mass of critics, of the kind of criticism that can define, or prompt, or inspire, or at least intuit, what is happening in a culture in a given time frame. . . . In this there is something almost ceremonial, or ceremoniously slow: unhurried thinking, the ripened long (or sidewise) view, the gradualism of nuance.”

That’s what we can get from our metropolitan book review sections if we would only subscribe–unhurried thinking, gradual nuance. (Lately I wonder if the word nuance has come to mean either “stop disagreeing with me so fast” or “don’t be so sure of yourself.”) So, we need the right mess of critics to define or even inspire what culture does, and blogs work against this important societal goal. I think critics will do this very thing just because they are critics, whether they should or not, whether blogs complain or praise, whether paper newspapers stop production or find new life.

Are newspaper book sections defining culture for us now? Where? Ron Hogan mentions this in his post on Birkerts’ article.

Why this should be the case with as ephemeral a medium as the American newspaper rather than the massively archived blogosphere is an issue Birkerts doesn’t address. And by failing to return to the idea of “coexistence” mentioned earlier, Birkerts only widens the gap between the print and online camps—a gap that has no rational reason to exist, since both sides, when viewed in good faith, want exactly the same thing: a viable platform for the wide distribution of serious discussion of contemporary literature.

You could call it shared discourse. (via the Literary Saloon)