Some of his assertions about the fifteen most overrated writers hit very close to home: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/the-15-most-overrated-con_b_6... There is a tone in common here with John Palatella's piece from The Nation a couple of months back (http://www.thenation.com/article/death-and-life-book-review), a general angst about the absent moral core of American letters. In Palatella's piece, the decline of print seems especially key; in Shivani's, things are much worse -- there's no one to pronounce real judgments, only spin and promotional hype, self-promoting "prized" authors, philosophizing poets who don't understand philosophy, a lack of attention to real quality, overblown academic theorizing that has little or no artistic sense and has lost its humanist bearings--there's more but I'll stop. Palatella's piece seems tailor-made to accompany the announcement of the launch of the Los Angeles Review of Books in the fall (http://chronicle.com/blogPost/The-Los-Angeles-Review-of/25674/), and in fact, the model of the NYRB seems to lurk somewhere in the background here, or at the very least a slower, reflective, judgmental (in the sense of discriminating) conversation about the life of the mind, informed by a clear historical sense and generally anti-totalitarian politics. Basically, it would seem, what we need is the 1950s.
Russell Valentino
