At Slate Ron Rosenbaum sounds the new-media warning bell.

To say John Leonard was a reviewer at heart is to pay a great compliment to a profession that currently seems to be limping toward an undeserved obsolescence. I remember having lunch with him in a ratty ethnic dive off Times Square in early 2000, when he explained that, what with one thing and another, he’d somehow drifted out of the practice of reviewing books. That happens to many a fine critic; take time off to write your own book or to work some other beat, and eventually you migrate to the inactive section of book review editors’ rolodexes. It bothered him.

At Salon Laura Miller remembers John Leonard.

Back in 2002 I had a running debate with a friend of mine on the subject of “dignity.” She claimed that this was something I was excessively concerned about. She didn’t think it was possible for people like us to be really dignified in the old (and possibly imaginary) way of prior generations and characters in classic novels.

In writing about David Foster Wallace at n+1, Benjamin Kunkel writes about art and criticism in general.

Jacki Lyden of National Public Radio’s All Things Considered interviews Daniel Mendelsohn, author of How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken.

In “Who Killed the Literary Critic?” at Salon Louis Bayard and Laura Miller, spurred by Ronan McDonald’s The Death of the Critic (I noted the TLS’s review in March), discuss the future of literary criticism.

The Times Literary Supplement has a review by John Mullan of Rónán McDonald’s The Death of the Critic.

Nowadays, there are more critical responses than ever, but critical authority has been devolved from the experts. McDonald surveys the rise of blogs and readers’ reviews, of television and newspaper polls and reading groups, under the heading “We Are All Critics Now”. He argues that the demise of critical expertise brings not a liberating democracy of taste, but conservatism and repetition.

In the Times Literary Supplement, Sophie Ratcliffe examines James Wood’s How Fiction Works.

Adam Kirsch at the New York Sun writes of the role of the critic:

The critic’s first job, then, even before he evaluates individual works, is to make the reader feel uneasy about his ignorance—to convince him that the art in question is vital and serious, deserving of complex attention.

The Print On Demand (POD) crowd has grown (like horse shit grows mushrooms; sorry) a critic. Snideness aside, if the critic is serious and works as the lead editor of a small press as he claims, then this Web log will prove to be an interesting experiment.

The New York Times has an essay by Sam Tanenhaus on the writing of Saul Bellow. Herzog is one of my favorite novels, and Tanenhaus’s selection from it reminds me of why that is the case.

And the prose! Here is Herzog, the most fully realized intellectual in all of American fiction, aflame with lofty ideas and petty grievances, aboard a train hurtling along the Connecticut shore: “The wheels of the cars stormed underneath. Woods and pastures ran up and receded, the rails of sidings sheathed in rust, the dripping racing wires, and on the right the blue of the Sound, deeper, stronger than before. Then the enameled shells of the commuters’ cars, and the heaped bodies of junk cars, the shapes of old New England mills with narrow, austere windows; villages, convents; tugboats moving in the swelling fabric-like water; and then plantations of pine, the needles on the ground of a life-giving russet color. So, thought Herzog, acknowledging that his imagination of the universe was elementary, the novae bursting and the worlds coming into being, the invisible magnetic spokes by means of which bodies kept one another in orbit. Astronomers made it all sound as though the gases were shaken up inside a flask. Then after many billions of years, light-years, this childlike but far from innocent creature, a straw hat on his head, and a heart in his breast, part pure, part wicked, who would try to form his own shaky picture of this magnificent web.”

Michael Dirda at the Washington Post reviews John Haffenden’s William Empson Volume II: Against the Christians.

This is the second, and final, volume of John Haffenden’s monumental biography of the 20th century’s most dazzling and original literary critic.

. . .

William Empson: Against the Christians is even better than Haffenden’s first volume, rich in anecdote and scandal, with superb summaries of the difficult later criticism, and honestly affectionate.

The New York Inquirer has an interview with Keith Gessen of n+1. On the topic of his magazine’s rivalry with McSweeney’s he says:

This is where McSweeney’s and the Believer come in. When we launched, it seemed like they were the ideal representatives of a certain kind of literary position, which states that 1) reading, in any form, is good, that writing is good, that literature is good; 2) all these things are imperiled, and therefore 3) that anything done in the service of these things is good. We disagree with all three parts of that, even #2. And we’ve said so a number of times.

I have been well aware for some time that the sections of newspapers devoted to the arts (and especially to fiction) have been shrinking. Somehow I missed September’s poignant farewell from critic Jerome Weeks, who chose to accept a buyout from The Dallas Morning News rather than work in an arts section cut to the bone.

After reading a few lackluster descriptions of Stranger Than Fiction, I thought that nothing could persuade me to view the film. Enter Roger Ebert, whose skillful review put the Marc Forster work back on my radar. I am very happy that Ebert has recovered sufficiently to write criticism. I lament that critics have lost sway, for their erudite navigation of complex subjects has been replaced by a million anonymous one-line assessments: 1t sukk3d, dud3.

Newspapers across the country are eliminating or reducing their book coverage, claims a Publishers Weekly article. The main reason cited is that devoting column inches to books does not bring a monetary reward.