If you have written a post begging your readership to nominate you for the Bloggies, then please do us all a favor. Stop blogging. You’re part of the problem.

Because blogging isn’t a popularity contest. If you are not offending at least one reader or writing something that causes your readership to think, if you are not taking advantage of this alternative medium to do something worthwhile and different, the things that other mediums can’t do because they need advertising and readers, then I hope you’ll spend the rest of your days without an Internet connection working at a small-town newspaper banging out a weekly gardening column that offends no one.

I’ve been blogging in some form or another for the past seven years. Maybe more. So I’ve seen all five years of the Bloggies nonsense. Will someone please tell me just what exactly these awards have done to further humankind? Have they expanded blogging in any way? Have they provoked meaningful discussion? No. The Bloggies is nothing less than a big SXSW circlejerk, the online equivalent of a UHF fishing show that you’ve watched for the hundredth time. The same fishermen, growing older and specializing in catching the same fish, using the same techniques, saying the same things. Let’s look at the names. Jeffrey Zeldman. Evan Williams. Jason Kottke. Nothing against them, but yawn.

If you’re a person into blogging to win hits and influence people instead of saying no to constantly checking your Technorati rating or your stats, then I wonder how you can ever find pleasure in the form. Blogging as a stepping stone to a career? Helpful, yes, but hardly the cure-all answer. Why not just focus on realistic goals that lead you straight to the career instead of sneaking in posts during your day job? If you want to be a journalist, get a job on a paper. If you want a book deal, write a book and carefully market it. If you want to be a legitimate pundit, go to grad school and “publish or perish” in journals. But don’t automatically assume that your blog gives you immediate credentials. And don’t think that it entitles to anything. As we all learned back during the 2004 political convention coverage, it was the bloggers who proved to be the laziest reporters of the bunch, offering reports about as substantial as a Field & Stream cover story. Of course, if you do want to practice journalism through a blog, then stop railing against the mainstream media about how superior you are and do the fucking legwork. Back up your shit, yo. Make phone calls, talk to people, get multiple sides of the story. That’s what you can do in this medium that the big papers can’t.

For god’s sake, stop encouraging crap like the Bloggies, which is nothing less than a bunch of insular nonsense motivated by charisma rather than content. I should point out that the only person who had the balls to turn down a Bloggies award was Noah Grey. He recognized the hypocrisy and rejected it. (And long before those able pups Trotted into filthy lucre, Noah Grey laid down the framework for gradual evoloution of the software which guided this medium through Greymatter. The man understood community.)

So in conclusion: Fuck the Bloggies. Fuck it hard.

This has been a public service announcement.

The cat is out of the bag. This post marks the end of Return of the Reluctant.

If you’ve been paying attention to Publisher’s Lunch, I’m happy to report that I’ve received a $750,000 advance for my debut novel, Blog Days. Apparently, the name “Return of the Reluctant” now means something beyond the blogosphere. My name is being susurrated at cocktail parties. I’m getting more blowjob offers from random strangers than ever before. Hell, even Christopher Hitchens wants to blow me, but then he didn’t bother to check my political dossier and he’s in desperate need of attention. But it’s the thought that counts. And of course, a gentleman never kisses and tells. If I had been hired by Nick Denton right now, then I would definitely inform him to go summer where the sun don’t shine. (In fact, just for the hell of it, because financial emancipation unfurls the opportunity for a certain truth, I will. You heard me, Denton! Summer!)

Anyway, after the success of my groundbreaking essay “After Blog Life,” it has been decided by certain big names that what the world really needs is a salable and poorly plotted novel about a 31 year old prematurely balding, San Francisco-based litblogger trying to figure out what to do with his life, but finding a TV movie-friendly existential direction through the plot device of a man named Cat Stigmata and several podcasts produced for a better tomorrow. The marketing people have asked me to gain weight and develop perky man-boobs for my bookstore appearances, while also making tedious references to sodomy throughout the text. Because, you know, that’s the cute and hip thing to do. Normally, I wouldn’t do this. But hell why argue with hype when there’s so much cash on the table? The good news is that, despite my criticisms of Sam Tanenhaus, the New York Times has been effectively “bought.” They’ll be covering me with at least six articles during the week the novel comes out.

If you people hadn’t enjoyed my site so much, none of this would have happened. Of course, Return of the Reluctant will continue in another form. Two women, whom I understand are both Amish and nymphomaniacs, plan to take over the site while I spend my free time blowing spitballs at the people standing in the unemployment line. In fact, I may even take some of the $750,000 and form spitballs from these George Washingtons.

But before I officially retire from blogging and become an overpaid hack (Tito Perez and Scott Esposito have accepted the positions of personal assistant and part-time pamperer, respectively), let me offer you an excerpt from one of the chapters, all in the interest of filling up the coffers:

Excerpt

Newtonette emailed me today. She said that she’d meet me in New York and discuss what percentages of the “litblogosphere” we owned. So that’s what all this “web log” business boiled down to! That’s why Mink Sorvo and Leela Lulumi were such good friends with her. In the end, it didn’t boil down to Technorati ratings or the emails you answered from attention-starved writers. It came down to brass balls and the deals brokered in Brooklyn dives.

I was new to this “web log” business. So I agreed to the terms. So long as I didn’t venture into New York, so long as I stayed on my side of the United States, Newtonette and I wouldn’t scuffle. There would be no Farrar, Strauss and Giroux building destroyed. There would be no Peck-Crouch style brawl captured by the New York Daily News. Newtonette injected a microscopic pellet into my neck and told me that the pellete would explode, releasing poison into my bloodstream if I didn’t leave New York within 24 hours. So I caught the next plane out of Kennedy and I fell asleep watching an in-flight movie of Uwe Boll’s Alone in the Dark.

I woke up when the plane landed in SFO and my mind was racing. I was still suspicius about Mink Sorvo. The man was everywhere, although I didn’t pay attention to what Steve Peanutsize and Justine Extra-Crispy said about him. What Newtonette didn’t know was tht I had formed a pact with Extra-Crispy: a complex agreement that made the Stalin-Hitler Pact look like an eight year old’s party invitation.

I caught on really quick. You betrayed your colleagues or you got yourself sodomized.

I’m pleased to announce that our Young, Roving Correspondent will be talking with the five nominees for this quarter’s round of LBC goodness. The podcasts will first be released in five installments at the LBC site and will then be edited into two or three Segundo shows. More information about what the LBC is up to this quarter can be found here.

But in this case it’s the all-important Whitbread. This week’s winners:

Novel: Ali Smith, The Accidental
First Novel: Tash Aw, The Harmony Silk Factory
Poetry: Christopher Logue, Cold Calls
Children’s Book: Kate Thompson, The New Policeman
Biography: Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master

We’re still working on Segundo #17. Yes, we made a pledge to you yesterday and we broke it (hanging heads down low). But there were some unexpected ambient noise issues and since we are quite anal about tweaking audio and we don’t like the nice people who appear on the show sounding as if they’re talking into a tin can, the attention was needed. However, last night, we slept about six hours, which was more zees than we’ve had in some weeks (at least in one sitting). And it was too good an opportunity to pass up. Bear with us. We’re dancing as fast as we can.

Okay, the holidays have made us extremely lazy and we really have very little to say that might be construed as witty and/or urbane. Like our homeboy Golden Rule Jones, we suspect we’ve gone over the deep end and, if it keeps up like this, we may start consorting with top ten kvetchers who know their stuff and aren’t afraid to flaunt it. Perhaps all this was because the coffeehouse was inordinately packed yesterday and we grew slightly claustrophobic typing meaningless nonsense into our laptop on a small round table. And instead of concentrating upon the work at hand, we then started writing about the attractive young lady who was sitting near us. The text became Byronic and slightly provocative. (I’m sure you’ve experienced this.) This was when we had to stop writing, and we deleted the file and slammed the laptop shut. The streams of consciousness were crossed, so to speak. We then stared into our warm cup of green tea and imagined that we could detect its soothing smell (reminiscent of haiku) permeating from just outside, followed by a veritable tsunami of green tea flooding through the coffeehouse and soaking the sartorial garb of all, some of the folks producing rubber ducks and toy boats instead of being offended by the destruction, all this of course being personified in torrential size and undulations by our harmless thoughts. The laptop was then packed. And we proceeded to lie for a long while. Not bored. Just perplexed. Slightly fatigued. What was it that was turning us into such lazy asses? Then we dumped audio, did dishes, responded to a few emails that looked interesting, and began trying to prod the indolent individual who was probably reacting this way.

The point of all this:

1. We’re not going to bed tonight until we give you a new podcast. The conversation involves hypothesizing about violence.

2. The LBC is dormant, but will reawaken on January 15 with the new set of nominees and the winner. We have something extremely ambitious and special planned, which will be cross-posted here. As does the incredible Dan Wickett.

3. Because of our general inability to concentrate, posting will be light until we recover. Unless of course we are pushed over the edge (likely) by some ungodly literary topic. Should you wish to serve as a momentary muse, emails, of course, are welcome.

Janet Maslin, The New York Times: “‘Dog Days’ manages to be doubly conventional: it follows both an old-fashioned love-betrayal-redemption arc and the newer, bitchier nanny-Prada chick-lit motif. Melanie is a myopic and self-interested heroine by the standards of either genre. The reader will learn about Melanie’s expensive shoes, Melanie’s drinking, Melanie’s buying of groceries at drugstores, Melanie’s playing with sushi and Melanie’s first shirt with French cuffs. Then there are Melanie’s descriptions of cellphone noises, the Delta shuttle terminal and Washington’s byzantine parking laws. Throughout all this, the ‘Berry’ – a word used as both a noun and a verb – is never more than a pesty ping away.”

USA Today: “The novel has a stripped-down story line and limited character development. The plot is predictable and matter-of-fact. But it does have a blunt, albeit tawdry, honesty.”

Publishers Weekly: “Fans of Wonkette’s wit will find themselves better served by her blog.”

The Book Standard: “[R]eaders hoping for some real-life dirt (or at least a salacious facsimile) will be dealt nothing more than lightweight fluff and throwaway farce.”

Okay, so I’m deliberately discounting the fact that I finished up the two last-minute LBC reads over the long weekend. (You’ll unearth the results of that very soon.)

In the meantime:

Book #1: Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent. Vincent disguises herself as a man, infiltrating male support groups, strip clubs, bowling alleys and monasteries (!) to try and understand masculinity. Now admittedly this is the kind of quasi-anthropological stunt that I’m interested in, particularly since I’m very interested in gender perceptions (likely due to being situated in San Francisco and counting a transgender individual as a friend, but that’s another story). But Black Like Me this ain’t. Vincent’s conclusions are neither terribly groundbreaking, nor are they entirely persuasive. She’s at her best when she’s investigating love and sex, but when it comes to supposed “earth-shattering” conclusions that men enjoy the cruel power of Glengarry Glen Ross-style balls-busting vocations and are capable of being emotionally sensitive too, this isn’t really news at all (and it actually doesn’t tell the whole story of masculinity). And it stops short of the kind of penetrating insight that I had hoped for. Vincent hints at a major emotional divide that separates the two genders, a folkway concerning the expression of sentimentality that seems to lock current gender roles in place, but she fails to offer a constructive analysis of why this exists — all this despite a philosophical background. In the end, Self-Made Man comes across as an entertaining stunt, but hardly the kind of soul-searching implied by the title.

Soft Skull’s Richard Nash has won a well-earned prize: the Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing.

It’s 3:00 PM, the first day of the year 2006. And I have already observed the following:

1. At my neighborhood cafe, a man and a woman break out into a fight. The man shrieks that he’s a peace-loving person, but he’s getting a “bad vibe” and this is somehow motivating the violence. Peace for this gentleman essentially means screaming at the top of his lungs something about doing time for 14 years and about how the woman, whom he claims is his sister, won’t speak to him. He is also overturning random objects outside, apparently to further what he describes as “peaceful intent.” The woman, who claims she has not invited any of this on, proceeds to continuously egg on this disturbed gentleman with cutting insults, walking to the doorway separating the Haight Street nomads from the neighborhood dwellers ensconced inside and continuously chiding him, letting loose all manner of violence to this guy’s face (punches, slaps, the like). The following cycle occurs about three times: After a short burst of this pugilism, the woman then says, to the great bafflement of workers and the customers who have not fled the premises (apparently, just me by round three) that she claims she has done nothing. This after she has proceeded to bust the man’s chops. And then the man enters the doorway. Various people (including me) separate the two from inflicting further physical violence on each other, which is not as easy as it looks because these two are quite determined to hate, this enmity being established, strangely enough, as a peaceful demeanor. The woman leaves only because she is asked to by the establishment. And by the end of this all, I am the only customer who remains. Although the coffeehouse fills up to capacity again within twenty minutes.

2. While on a daily walking constitutional (a New Year’s resolution of sorts), I observe a car, traveling at what appears to be a stellar velocity (at least 45 mph) down Oak, attempting to brake before a red light and completely losing control, weaving in a dangerous curlicue onto the sidewalk before the light, just missing a pedestrian trying to fire up a smoke (with the pedestrian completely unaware of this caroming vehicle until the inevitable CRASH! tinkle reverberates across some six square blocks) and collide into a parked black Saab. I freeze for ten seconds. It seems like something out of a movie. But after this ten second period has passed, I run across the street to make sure nobody’s hurt. Amazingly, despite the car’s bisected Gaussian curve into what might have been a house had not the Saab been there, not so much as a soul is injured. A crowd of fifteen or twenty have congregated around the crash. Cell phones have been whipped out. There are impassioned pleas to 911. And I don’t think the smoker guy realizes he could have been killed or that the driver and passenger of the car knows how lucky they are to be alive. The authorities have been called. A svelte jogger who is easily half my weight and I pick up abandoned newspapers and attempt to staunch the gas, oil and greenish fluids that are now oozing their way into the gutter marked “WARNING: THIS FLOWS INTO NATURAL WATERS,” and I begin to imagine the sea life and fish that might be harmed or killed because of this driver’s failure to proceed down Oak Street at a safe velocity and/or keep tires aligned. In fact, the driver and passenger of this car seem generally amused by this all. They seem ripe and ready to laugh over the transformation of their vehicle into toxic detrius and perhaps slap the officer writing up the collision report some high fives. I am unable to find the owner of the parked Saab in the crowd. But I don’t think s/he’ll be so amused or conclude that this is the best time to apply a Louisville slugger to a piñata. When it is clear that everyone is all right and that there are plenty of witnesses to the accident, I take my leave.

It is said that things happen in threes (although I have never known a shady usurer to be audited three times in a row). While I neither believe in a god nor am particularly superstitious, there is a small part of me obsessed with patterns that wants to believe that Terrible Incident #3 will occur if I leave the house again. Even though every rational fiber in my being knows that this is wrong. There is a groping here for some kind of meaning or order. Never mind that this is probably all coincidence, that these things happen all the time, irrespective of my existence or where I wander, and that these two terrible things just happened to happen as I walked by. It could have been five terrible things or none at all. But while I am glad that there was no loss of life in either incident, I’m still asking myself why there’s some compunction inside me that believes that (don’t laugh) I am partially responsible. I’m thirty-one. Didn’t I shed these scutes a while back? Is it guilt? Is it some residue of agnosticism that I packed away decades ago? Is it a simple desire to ascribe meaning to everything? Or is it my imagination getting the better of me? Do I want to be persecuted? Is that what this is all about? Do I feel too much for the world around me?

The fact that any thinking person with even the slightest ethical compunction can’t be completely at ease with the idea of people who are alone on Xmas, possibly starving, or that people are being tortured in inhuman ways in order to loosen lips for this so-called “war on terrorism,” or wars that are called “conflicts” are permitted to go on with great loss of life and no exit strategy and no end in sight. And people are dying and they don’t really have to. And how can anyone really sit back and watch an episode of My Name is Earl while all this is going on? How can anyone bitch about something as picayune as the co-worker accidentally swiping the wrong brown bag in the fridge and remain completely ignorant about the current political situation?

The gist I’m getting at here: How can any of us completely turn our backs on this stuff? Whether local incidents of violence or faraway ones? I understand the need to avoid unnecessary conflicts or volatile scenarios, but what the hell is it in the damn atmosphere that causes people to remain so blissfully unaware and unassuming, walking (as I saw people walk past both Terrible Incident #1 and Terrible Incident #2) as if it involved two people whispering or a stick falling to the ground? A mere pittance! Not even so much as a head turn or an “Is everything alright?” Are people so scared shitless of the world around them? Are they so unwillingly to accept the reality that this cannot be a zero risk world? It seems that combatting the risks themselves has taken on cartoonish proportions: melodramatic Amber Alerts (aka The Kids Who Cried Wolf; see here) and the stripping of civil liberties without public debate. But is it possible that basic human decency, that kind of nascent concern for one’s fellow beings, has been occluded by the current atmosphere that insists that the largely unseen DOJ/NSA entities (whose scope of authority and invasions into privacy we can really only speculate upon) will somehow take care of this mess? The same “Kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out” mentality that provokes people to look the other way at the dangers of Hubbert’s Peak or a car accident? If that’s the case, frankly the willfully ignorant, those who would sacrifice all passion and integrity in this social contract quid pro quo scam the boys at 1600 Penn have got going on right now, strike me as the wussiest scoundrels I’ve seen since Richard Nixon.