Post Gazette: “For my first author interview, I picked Sir Stephen Spender, the legendary British poet then in his 80s and perhaps in need of a few American dollars. Why else would he speak at a small women’s college in rural Western Pennsylvania? The moment has stayed with me as one of the most painful episodes of my new life as the book reporter. The great man was wrapped in a gray wool double-breasted suit worn shiny with age. The collar of his white shirt was frayed and yellowed at the edges, and his silk tie had survived decades of tea parties. We stared at each other for what seemed a fortnight until I mumbled some inane question and he mumbled a reply.”

From today’s edition of The Leonard Lopate Show (“Why Are Book Reviews Disappearing?”), roughly around the 33 minute mark:

Lopate: Is this a growing area? And are people who really care about books going [to literary blogs] to learn about books?

Freeman: To a degree, yes. But it’s all for the presorted. So if you want to read about books, if you want to read about a certain book, you can go to a specific kind of blog or a specific kind of online news site and find coverage there, tailor-made to your sort of ideological or stylistic preferation [sic], uh, preferences. But I think it gets away from the idea of putting as many readers under the same tent as possible and getting them all to participate in the same conversation. So I think if blogs have done anything, a few of them have very cleverly and creatively used new technology in ways that newspapers haven’t yet. But they could certainly start to borrow from and use that to re-energize their website. The New York Times has done it by having a podcast.

* * *

In other words, John Freeman, the man who publicly declared, “I have never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept. It’s hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia,” is telling us that blogs are for “the presorted,” that newspapers should pretty much steal all of the hard work that litbloggers have innovated in to carry on.

Meanwhile, John Freeman has mobilized his action using an online petition and by using online conduits to champion for print reviews.

It sounds to me like John Freeman isn’t so much fighting for ongoing literary coverage in newspapers, as he is using the NBCC as a bully pulpit to drown out all voices contrary to his own. (Meanwhile, this “presorted” blog, which covers a variegated array of topics, leaves comments open to everyone in order to facilitate discussion and it continues to maintain the position, without waffling, that literary coverage in all forms must be championed and preserved.)

No word yet on whether Freeman avoids basements in Terre Haute, but given that he considers Pittsburgh to be part of “fly-over America” (when it’s merely an eight hour drive from New York), I’d say the answer’s leaning towards an unequivocal yes.

WCCO: “It probably sounded like a good idea — sit on a couch with two buddies while another friend in a pickup truck tows the couch through a cow pasture.”

The New York Times checks in with biographer Robert Caro and offers the bold claim that Robert Moses wasn’t such a bad guy.

Karen Long, first, poked her bookediting head into the creaking carriage and, entering deftly, seated herself. Mr. Litblogger, disheveled and unnamed, stepped in after her, curving his metacarpals with care.

— Come on, Litblogger.

— After you, Mr. Litblogger said.

Mr. Reader covered himself from the spume and venom and got in, saying:

— I like to read.

— I know but isn’t Mr. Litblogger gleeful? Karen Long asked. Come along, Reader. I promise long-term.

Mr. Reader entered and sat in the vacant place, all printed and blogged for his perusal. He flipped the laptop open and fired wi-fi to find offerings and, seeing nary a difference, looked seriously from the open carriage window at the lowered blinds reminding him of divide between Long and Litblogger. Outside another reader aside: an old woman weeping. Books section flattened, no winners. Thanking her stars she was passed over. Extraordinary the interest they take in a needless corpse when there was time for resurgent vivacity.

— Gleeful how? asked Mr. Litblogger. Examples?

— Never you mind, said Long.

— I like to read.

Mr. Reader saw fists fly between Litblogger and Long and, having not anticipated violence, asked the carriage to stop. Reader wanted book recs, not strings of resentment.

— You two duke it out, said Reader. I’ll travel elsewhere.

Callie Miller, editor staff writer of the LAist and proprietor of the litblog Counterbalance is looking for a few good minds to discuss Marisha Pessl’s novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, next week for a forthcoming roundtable discussion. Drop Callie a line if you’ve read the book and you’re interested in talking Pessl.

Independent: “The trouble is, her new book is the last thing anyone seems to want to discuss with Lionel Shriver right now. We meet within a week of the Virginia Tech shootings, and Shriver has unwillingly been thrust into the role of an expert. Four years ago, she published We Need To Talk About Kevin, a bold and shocking novel with one of the most chilling endings since Don’t Look Now. It was a very early example of what she now, guiltily, calls the ‘campus shooting’ genre. Which means that, since Virginia Tech, her phone has not stopped ringing.”

Variety: “That blogger at TMZ.com, which is owned by Warners’ own AOL, doesn’t fit the common stereotype of a lonely geek in sweats hunkered in a dark basement staring into a glowing computer screen. In fact, he was a trade reporter who was competing with his ex-colleagues at Variety for scoops. His advantage: as a blogger, he could post his items faster online.”

There are several questions that must be asked:

1. Is there anything wrong with basements?

2. Why is it that bloggers are associated with basements? Which blogger set the precedent? Have any bloggers been found dead in a basement?

3. Was the first basement-observed blogger based in Terre Haute?

4. Are they any journalists in New York now working in basements?

5. Is the preferred blogger basement a daylight basement, a walk-up basement, or a look-out basement? If we are to carry out a stereotype, I think it’s important to be specific about it.

6. Are there any known cases in which a blogger working in a basement has been bitten by a rat or a spider or a creepy crawly? Asbestos?

7. Are most of the basements owned by Warner?

8. Why would one wear sweats or pajamas in a basement?

9. Is the basement really that ideal of a spot for a desktop or laptop computer?

Publishers Weekly: “About 50 protestors showed up outside the Atlanta Journal-Constitution today for a ‘read-in’ organized by the National Book Critics Circle to protest the the dismissal of the newspaper’s book editor Theresa Weaver.”

Of course, seeing as how the read-in was inexplicably scheduled for 10:00 AM — a time when most people are stuck at work — I’m gratified that even 50 people took the time out to protest.

A word to the wise for those who fancy themselves activists: When plotting any revolution, never forget the workers.

If you are an author or a publicist who has emailed me because of the Times article, please see this post. Thank you.

Great congratulations to Mike Harrison for winning this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award for Nova Swing.

Our Save the Blogs! campaign, trademarked as of 2:37 PM EST, has generated over 5,000 signatures. None of them knew what they were signing. But don’t let that stop YOU from joining the fight!

Here are a few of those names:

Candy Butterfingers, Henry Throatwobblermangrove (real name pronounced differently), I.P. Freely, Ebony N. Ivory, John Smallbeeries, Leopold Bloom, Jonathan L. Ethem, Henry “Kiss Kiss” Enninger, Moira Hokes, Len G. Kanshure, Em Phizima, Harvey Ardscum, Shel Entitled, Rachel Estsykes, Fay Gann, Oliver Twistenshout, Mel Gibthreesomes, Dr. Joyce Sisters, Che Koff, Billy Gaddisfly, Rick “Samantha” Powers, Mark Cerveza (blogger of “The Inelegant But Democratically Pleasurable Variation”), Levi Ashenden, Luna C. Rains, Shepard Tones, Ina Godly, Christopher Sorrenmartini, Abby Grhaib, Martin & Amy Kingsley, Archie Jeffries, Jane “Steve” Austen, Nickelback Baker, John Banvillagepeople, L. Frank Furter, Mallory McDowellery, Red Diaz, T.L.C. Boyle, Tiffany Tits, A.S. Buyout, Michael Chamilkbone, Barack Adenoid, Ana Tina Marie Cox, Bryan T. Jeff, Jonathan Saffron Burrows, Tricky Dick Yates, Virginia Baskerville, Sarah Cabarnetman, Joan Deadyonarrival, Rupert Thommygunson, Liz I. Spywithmyeye, and John Witless.

We hope that you too will join our cause!

Reports from the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books blogging panel are coming in:

Carolyn Kellogg: “Instead I would have loved to have a topic like: ‘litblogs — what’s good, what’s bad, what’s next?’ I know what I’d like to do more of (I think it’s a congenital blogger condition to be cursing oneself for not fill-in-the-blank), but I want the bigger picture. What does it take for a litblog to be successful – voice? genre? regular posting? Have we made any big mistakes (like engaging n+1 in an argument over an article critical of litblogs — an article they never put online)? What exciting, fun things are happening in the litblog world? I would have loved to hear what Tod and Ron and the audience thought.”

Ron Hogan: “I spent most of my time veering away from the money question (after pointing out that I’d figured out how to get paid) and hammering at the notion that online media is inherently less reliable and more susceptible to corruption than its traditional counterparts, and, in the particular case of book reviewing, the online media were frankly picking up the slack for the dwindling coverage in print. Somewhere along the line, Keen said something like, ‘I just think we have enough media already.’ Frankly, I sorta boggled, and called that an incredibly stagnant notion. ‘We have enough books already, too, but we keep publishing new ones,’ I went on. ‘We have enough movies to watch… The horse and buggy was a perfectly good way to travel, what do we need cars for?’ (I’m slightly paraphrasing here; the transcripts and, with luck, an audio recording of the event should be available online one day from the Times.)”

BookFox: “What I found disconcerting was that the panel seemed to revolve around Andrew Keen – his book and his assertion that the only possible model for online content is one that pays financial dividends. Everyone kept mentioning his book The Cult of the Amateur – usually attacking one premise or another – and for most of the conversation, the panel focused on the problem of money. So it seemed that rhetorically, the conversation revolved around rebutting Keen’s arguments, giving him the high argumentative ground, rather than the bloggers being able to establish a neutral space to discuss the facts.”

The Elegant Variation: “Keen’s overriding concern was with the absence of a sustainable business model in the blogosphere, and the problems inevitable for institutional media once the audience gets hooked on free content. As a corollary, when the institutions falter, the superiority that Keen claims for professionalism disintegrates. He claimed that a form of expression that anyone can do is so easily imitable that the risks of corporate corruption and abuse are huge, and the reader is vulnerable not only to some weak-ass literary criticism but out-and-out fraud.”

My response to the muddled arguments in the first 30 pages of Keen’s book can be found here. I am hoping to address the book’s balance in future posts.

Years later, there’s little in the way of vocal improvement (in fact, there is a marked decline), and there’s a troubling reliance upon stage presence of dancers.

At the same show, you can look no further than this guy for lessons on how to sign and perform at the old Wembley Stadium.

Smoking Gun: “A Pennsylvania woman claims that her teaching career has been derailed by college administrators who unfairly disciplined her over a MySpace photo that shows her wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup. In a federal lawsuit, Stacy Snyder charges that Millersville University brass accused her of promoting underage drinking after they discovered her MySpace photo, which was captioned ‘Drunken Pirate.'” (via MeFi)

There are more arguments against the current NBCC approach from Colleen, Jeff and Marydell.

Michael Dirda and I have emailed. He’s a reasonable guy and he confessed to me that it was likely that he was having a bad day. Like any of us, Dirda is concerned about the future of literary discussion. (And it should also be noted that Dirda maintains an online weekly book chat for the Washington Post.) In an effort to keep the discussion constructive, I have offered him some ideas on where print and online might meet in the next ten years. (And, yes, I also attempted to email John Freeman, but he has proven, to put it lightly, highly antagonistic towards civil conversation.)

I suspect that much of the hostility towards online literary outlets comes from print people who again see it as a threat and would rather bash those participating in literary matters rather than integrate it. That’s a great shame. Because all of us are really on the same side here.

UPDATE: Former San Francisco Chronicle Books Editor Pat Holt, one of the first literary journalists to understand the possibilities of the Internet, has offered a new column (her first in many months) on the issue, asking:

But maybe it’s time for those of us who have worked as critics for a living to evaluate what’s happened to our profession — and why we may be driving readers away.

In the last 25 years, just about everything about the print experience has changed — except the way critics review books.

UPDATE 2: John Freeman has offered a more conciliatory post this morning, pointing out, “It is in the preservation of that resource that we are fighting now — and we’re asking everyone who cares about it to join us. Even those of you — print journalists or bloggers — who write in your fierce pajamas.”

While this doesn’t address all the problems of the NBCC’s campaign, it’s a very encouraging start. I have again reached out to Freeman by email.

UPDATE 3: Dan Wickett also offers his thoughts, pointing precisely how he started off in the blogging business. I have to say that if you told me three years ago that I’d be talking with John Updike, Richard Ford, Erica Jong, T.C. Boyle, Martin Amis, and many other fantastic authors (120+ interviews in just under two years), that I’d be reviewing books at newspapers, that I’d be a member of the LBC and the NBCC, that I’d be seriously working on my own novel every dutiful Sunday, that I’d have more books than I’d know what to do with and that I’d find many good friends from all this, I wouldn’t have believed you. Like Dan, my unexpected trajectory into books emerged out of my literary passions. This came from nothing, and I certainly expected nothing. I just worked very hard under the often crazed circumstances, did my best to answer every email, and did the very best I could to present literary coverage, hoping that others might find some use for the bounteous material here and elsewhere. I’ll have more to say on this, and other matters, in about two weeks, when I’ll be making a major announcement here. But I truly believe we are in a serious convergence. I also believe we can put last week’s fracas behind us and concentrate on what we all do to soldier forth into the literary future.

Stephen Elliott: “Studies have consistently shown that people with more screens open get less done. Multitasking slows down productivity.”

Uncited studies have also shown that relying upon uncited studies to make generalizations is a poor way to make an argument for something that should be taken on a case-by-case basis.

I have eight windows now open on my LCD monitor. I have tweaked about ten minutes of audio, revised a review that I need to turn in, replied to about twenty emails, gone for a walk to get my blood flowing, talked with the friendly guy at my neighborhood cafe for about ten minutes, helped a stranger get to the Castro area, finished reading a book, and picked up my books from the post office. And it’s not even nine o’clock.

We work the way that works best for us, at the level of technology that works best for us. (There are, believe it or not, certain technologies that I resist. And I remain surprised by how many people prefer Googling to simply asking for information, or who fail to use the telephone.) To chastise others for how they use technology is to similarly chastise others for what kind of sexuality they practice.

Stephen Elliott, in this case, is full of shit.

Here are the most popular Segundo podcasts from the last month.

10. Dana Spiotta
9. Amy Sedaris
8. Nina Hartley
7. Jennifer Weiner
6. The May Queen Panel
5. Paula Kamen
4. Rupert Thomson, Edward Falco, Megan Sullivan & Scott Esposito (because of Virginia Tech?)
3. Amanda Filipacchi & Kevin Smokler
2. Erica Jong
1. Lydia Millet (big Japanese audience, apparently, probably due to the nuclear bomb themes in Oh Pure and Radiant Heart)

Either there’s something off with my stats or it seems that there are a lot of people out there who want to listen to smart women.

David Lynch, incidentally, is just behind Spiotta, which surprised the hell out of me.

The Segundo audience seems to be holding at around 3,000-5,000 per show and there seem to be a lot of listeners in France. Which presumably makes me the Jerry Lewis of podcasting. But I thank all people who have listened to the shows, and remain somewhat baffled that there’s such an audience for this.

BBC: “He asked for the ‘media circus’ to end and hoped it would not detract from the message of preventing AIDS.”

(This is the first in a series of posts addressing Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur.)

It won’t hit bookstores until June 5, but Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur needs to be thoroughly addressed, at the risk of drawing attention to Mr. Keen’s rapacious craving for attention. Mr. Keen, a one-time “leading visionary in the audio business with almost ten years of experience as an entrepreneur, salesman and writer in the industry”, will be appearing on a panel with several other bloggers at The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, presumably railing against the apparent evils of the current Web climate that he describes in his book. Never mind that Keen prefers speculative broad brushes and tenuous examples, of which more anon, to support his “polemic about the destructive impact of the digital revolution on our culture, economy, and values.” Yeah, it’s all a bit melodramatic, but then, with Keen, one doesn’t expect a nuanced argument.

Keen’s arrogant posturing, which serves in lieu of a reasoned examination of the opposition, begins quite early in the book, on page 2, when he clinks glasses with a web “evangelist” at a Web 2.0 mixer curious about Keen’s book. The evangelist asks what it’s about, offering the perfectly reasonable assertion, “So it’s Huxley meets the digital age.” But, instead of informing this evangelist about his book’s details or even clarifying where he stands, Keen tells his readers that “I knew we were toasting the wrong Huxley,” boasting about T.H. Huxley’s infinite monkey theorem, but he doesn’t bother to let this “evangelist” in. Passive-aggressive arguments along these lines, it seems, are Keen’s specialty.

Apparently, Keen’s ontological tipping point arose because of O’Reilly Media. Keen tells us that, while attending FOO camp, an impromptu meeting of the minds arranged by O’Reilly, “I marched into camp a member of the cult; two days later, feeling queasy, I left an unbeliever.” What caused this apostasy? A mere word uttered by FOO campers, “democratization,” was enough to send Keen quietly raging against “the emptiness at the heart of our conversation.” Keen never investigates what this language might mean, and never stops to consider that general terms are often a place to initiate conversation. Instead, he insists that “[w]e weren’t just there to talk about new media; we were the new media. The event was a beta version of the Web 2.0 revolution, where Wikipedia met MySpace met YouTube.” Never mind that, according to John Battelle, reporting in CNN, there was no agenda at a January 2004 FOO camp until Friday night, “when the attendees made one up on the fly.” A 2005 ZDNet article observed that FOO Camp’s purpose is “to give anyone who wants to come a chance to be around likeminded people and, perhaps, come up with some great new ideas.” If Keen is objecting to the elite feel of FOO Camp (the event is invite-only), then I might understand where he’s coming from. But it is perfectly clear from all documentation that FOO Camp is a brainstorming session among carefully selected attendees — an elitist approach that is hardly the “infinite monkeys” exemplar that Keen is alluding to. In other words, instead of asking questions to understand the climate he’s in, Keen opts to remain an island, perhaps unaware of John Donne’s words on solipsistic temper tantrums.

It is from this example that Keen bemoans the “great seduction” of Web 2.0, suggesting that “the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.” This premise would no doubt make Keen and the n+1 boys common allies, for Keen fails to cite any specific examples of these “superficial observations” and “shrill opinion.” Instead, Keen opts for online work representing an “undermining of truth,” pointing to “Al Gore’s Penguin Army” (which Keen misidentifies as “Al Gore’s Army of Penguins,” even though he claims that this is the “exact” title) rightly identifying it as a video originating from the DCI Group, an oil lobbying firm, as uncovered by the Wall Street Journal, representing disingenuous propaganda. But if YouTube represents an “undermining of truth” in toto, then what are we to make of this disturbing video of police brutality at UCLA from last year, which spawned protests and Los Angeles Times coverage? Surely, this demonstrates that the rise of technology is equally beneficial in bringing awareness to underreported issues.

Keen then takes blogs to task for being “vehicles for veiled corporate propaganda and deception” and for “becoming the battlefield on which public relations spin doctors are waging their propaganda war.” Well, that’s certainly news to this blogger. Again, Keen is more taken with the uniform notion that blogs are represented by a handful of blogs that have conducted questionable ethics. But if bloggers are all such shameless shills, why then have there been efforts to create codes of ethics? The issue of transparency and its concomitant criteria isn’t a new one. Why hasn’t Keen considered these efforts in his book (which was authored before the Kathy Sierra incident)? Surely, even accounting for Keen’s complaints, this represents a medium working to apply better standards to its form. Well, that’s where Keen’s ongoing postpartum wankage (his book is pregnant with hasty generalizations) comes to play, where a statement from Tim O’Reilly (see a pattern here?), instead of the code of conduct in question, becomes the launching point for a typical Keen tirade dismissing O’Reilly as “a libertarian spokesman for the NRA.”

Keen does have a point in suggesting that Wikipedia isn’t the experiment it’s cracked up to be, in the sense that this open communal structure has proven, at times, disastrous. (See the unfortunate case of John Seigenthaler, remarkably uncited in Keen’s polemic.) I can also partially agree with Keen’s concerns about blind faith in Google when he writes:

We pour our innermost secrets into this all-powerful search engine through the tens of millions of questions we enter daily. Google knows more about our habits, our interests, our desires than our friends, our loved ones, and our shrink combined.

The problem here, however, is the melodramatic second sentence. Keen’s premise, of Google knowing everything about our personal habits, presumes that every user is typing in queries that pertain to the most intimate feelings they are experiencing. A more judicious thinker might consider (as Keen does not) the case of Robert James Petrick, who was found guilty of first-degree murder after the prosecution entered into evidence what he had searched for on Google. (He had entered the terms “neck,” “snap,” and “break” before committing the murder.) But in a world in which the truly inveterate criminals can use Tor and FoxyProxy to hide their search terms, is this as much of an issue as Keen claims it to be? Further, Keen offers no hard evidence to support his idea that Google search terms are equal to the skeletons in our closet. He merely assumes that every individual is willing to type in their darkest secrets into a random engine and reveal things about themselves that they won’t reveal elsewhere. So we must assume that because Patrick typed in his search terms, this represents all users. This premise isn’t provable in a logical argument. Any statistics or logic student knows that this is a secundum quid proposition.

Keen then takes Lawrence Lessig, William Gibson, and EFF advocates to task for their cutting-and-pasting of technology, without, of course, mentioning the legal remedy of the cease-and-desist letter. He writes:

The value once placed on a book by a great author is being challenged by the dream of a collective hyperlinked community of authors who endlessly annotate and revise it, forever conversing with each other in a never-ending loop of self-references.

This is a quite ridiculous, for this assumes that books are now in the process of becoming extinct, or perhaps in danger of becoming extinct. The value is being challenged? We’re all still paying $24.95 for John Updike’s latest. A trip to any bookstore reveals thousands of books that are quite permanent and unsullied by annotations. And besides, what’s so wrong with scribbling or highlighting in the margins? Is Keen unfamiliar with H.J. Jackson’s charming book Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, in which Jackson pored through numerous books to detect the patterns of marginalia? To offer one example of marginalia’s benefits:

One of the rare cases I have been fortunate enough to find of a barely literate but, on the evidence, adult reader shows similar features. Listed in the Bibliography under “Wesley,” it is actually a heavily used collection of American and English sermons of the later eighteenth century. All the notes are in pencil and by the same uninformed hand. One or two notes in the body of text (“Salvation” as the subject of one of the sermons, for instance) indicate that the owner understood its contents, but practically all the writing is on the front and back flyleaves and endpapers and has nothing to do with the sermons. (19-20)

So we have here an example of the great “challenge” centuries before the Internet even existed: a sermon book in which notes were made to understand the contents, not unlike this Against the Day wiki, in which various individuals are trying to understand Pynchon’s mammoth novel, tracking its many references and coming together to understand Pynchon’s work in much the same way as the illiterate reader recognized “Salvation.” It is by no means foolproof, but the oblique connections might offer partial succor to a reader eager to look up Pynchon’s many references in a library.

Does not the wiki then represent the natural technological extension of marginalia? And what makes this “collective hyperlinked community” any different from the students who have, over the years, offered notes in the margins, sold their books back to campus bookstores, and in turn passed these books on to other students? Shall we slap them on the wrists too?

Keen then assaults Kevin Kelly’s “Scan This Book!” — that article cited and feared by John Updike — and deliberately misinterprets Kelly’s vision of “the liquid version” of books, paraphrasing, “In Kelly’s view, the act of cutting and pasting and linking and annotating a text is as important or more so than the writing of the book in the first place.”

But here’s what Kelly really wrote:

The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

There’s a fundamental difference between one page “reading” another page and annotations being, in Keen’s decidedly unkeen comprehension, “as important or more so” than a book. Nowhere in the article does Kelly suggest that palpable books as we know it should disappear. And Keen fails to understand that Kelly is not advocating a replacement, but a version of a book that one may or may not choose to annotate as one wishes.

It is from this remarkably clumsy set of assertions that keen declares war on “the advent of the cult of the amateur,” as gleaned through blogs and presumably all those idiots who deign to come online to deconstruct Pynchon. He concludes that all this is “thereby distorting, if not outrightly corrupting, our national civic conversation.” This assumes that the “national civic conversation” is exclusively founded upon online activities. A July 2006 PEW/Internet study (PDF) would suggest otherwise. At last count, 57 million American adults are reading blogs. That’s quite an impressive number, but what of the other 200 million American adults who aren’t reading blogs? Again, Keen rides that happy secundum quid wagon.

Needless to say, I’m only up to page 31. And I have considerably more to say about the book’s balance. Stay tuned.

Print is Dead: “In talking about the drawbacks to having the Book Review now appear mostly online, instead of in the actual newspaper, John Freeman from the NBCC states that ‘you can’t bring an online book page into the bath.’ This seems to me even more silly than Atwood’s claim simply because most book reviews aren’t immersive experiences. Instead, they’re created expressly for the purpose of consumption in one sitting. In fact, most reviews are tailor-made for digital delivery since short pieces are easily consumed on handheld screens or laptops. But Freeman seems to think that the fact that most of the Book Review appears online means that it somehow suffers from a ‘lack of portability,’ when it’s actually exactly the other way around. Digital content can be accessed in a myriad of ways, on dozens of devices and gadgets anywhere in the world (not to mention that it can be available forever in archives). Paper is a perishable object bound to a single location that can be easily misplaced, ripped or stained. Whereas content on a website is always there, forever unsullied and pristine, waiting for someone — anyone, anywhere — to touch a few keys and access its knowledge. However, according to Freeman, this is all a drawback. I guess he doesn’t want utility, connectivity, and interactivity; he just wants it to be water proof.”

There are reports surfacing that Sam Tanenhaus has attended tonight’s Edgar Awards ceremony.

Also, it would appear that there are some rebels working against the live-blogging ban.