Otis Chandler > Status Update

Not the most positive mention ever. ;)

I tried to give it a good spin :)

"Who's to say that if Edmund Wilson were alive today, he wouldn't have a thumbnail photo of his dog to identify himself and use a frowny-face emoticon to express his displeasure with a novel?" hahaha

john mcnally says in the interview that he doesn't see "many academic critics these days who actually, honest-to-God love literature" and he finds that "if you still have an old-fashioned love of literature, you're doomed as a "scholar". He says "I also blame the culture. Amazon reviews, Facebook, Goodreads. Everyone's a critic. " Yet, the other side of the readers' bell curve is offputting to him too. It seems the printed word holds such an important role for him that he can't release books to the same fate as more ephemeral songs that rise up the charts and fall back down again. There seems to be a nostalgic reader in him who believes contemporary writing should be able to rise to the status of yesterday's classics -books that become so known as worth reading that it doesn't matter if the majority of people thumbs up them or actually like them because of their "greatness"!