Quote of the day

I found this indictment by Eliot Weinberger of the terrible predicament of contemporary criticism in Squandermania and other foibles. If you substitute Canada for the United States, it's what I've been trying to say for years.

The United States doesn’t have the class of literary supplements that you find in Spain and many other countries. It only has one important periodical literary criticism publication: The New York Review of Books. There aren’t any powerful American critics any more, as there were up until the 1960s, writing in a prose that was understandable by anyone and introducing literature into the political, social and moral problems of the day. So-called ‘serious’ criticism has passed, for the main part, into the dominion of academics, who write in a specialist jargon, in the strange belief that the complex can only be presented by means of impenetrable phrases… Criticism, in the United States, has been reduced to ‘recommendations’, which arrive through reviews, blogs and Twitter. Prizes have become the standard validation of literary merit. I can’t think of a single American critic to whom one can turn in search of ideas …