Cricket Schism

Two interesting articles about criticism: the New York Times reports on the fading landscape of newspaper book reviews; and the Orange County Register's excellent classical critic Tim Mangan mulls over friendliness and objectivity.

I'm not heavily invested in there being professional book reviews since I don't read them (yes, I'm a bad book geek); but I guess the question would come down to "Do you want people being paid to devote themselves full-time to thinking about what makes good books," and my knee-jerk answer to that is "Yes." At the same time, I don't think we'd lose any vital cultural function, like the ability to identify books worth reading; in fact I think there we're better equipped with a wide field full of small critics, each chirping away indepedently. But of course there are widely divergent views on this.

I don't have any particular thing to say about the Tim Mangan post, besides that I think it's interesting and nicely written.

Besides sounding vaguely like the word "criticism," the phrase "cricket schism" applies to an actual course of events in the Australian sports scene in the late 1970s. If you are more interested in this than I am, read away.