So, if you start with the condensed version, titled The Critic as Thinker, from the new American Theatre magazine, you won't find this quotation. But, if you follow the links to the full transcript at the Philoctetes center, titled The Critic as Thinker: How Eric Bentley, Robert Brustein, and Stanley Kauffmann Re-imagined American Theater Criticism, you can read about Jonathan Kalb showing up and talking these gigantasaur theatricians about blogs.

And what are we going to do about this problem of the disappearance of critical culture? You have to find ways to be sneaky, to be clever, and to find little avenues to continue it. I think that the world is kind of mixing up right now, and trying to figure out what the place for judgment and discrimination is in this new mediated, wired, info-age world. We all, I think, have spent time being depressed about this "everyone's a critic" ethos on the Internet. And everyone is a critic. But on the other hand, there's a couple of really good bloggers out there. So why take aim at all blogging?

Someone said to me the other day, "Hey, I saw the HotReview. What an idea--an edited blog!" And I thought, "Wow, is that what I'm doing? I thought it was called a journal." You know, an edited blog used to be called a journal, where you're interested in the quality of the writing and you edit the writing carefully. That used to be called, you know, a journal. So maybe there are places for us to meet in the future, when all of this equalization sends up all of its dust. Everybody gets a chance to express the fact that they're a critic, and then becomes hungry again for the views of people who know a little bit more about the subject. So I don't know. Yes, I'm dismayed, I'm discouraged, but I also am in my 40s and have to look, hopefully, to a long life of figuring out what to do about this and I'm not giving up, regardless of what Eric says.

Not to be a ridiculous nitpick, but HotReview isn't really a blog. It doesn't list it articles in reverse-chronological order, it doesn't have any feeds, it doesn't have a place for discussion. None of which are required for a blog, but I think you've gotta have at least couple of these for it to be a blog and not just a website or, well, a journal.