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.

Ever since discovering radio evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in Kevin Starr’s invaluable California history books years ago, I’ve long been fascinated by her. McPherson is often a forgotten historical figure: a woman who built up a mass audience by preaching her gospel through the radio, but who didn’t entirely hold herself to the same standards, which involved a decidedly less pure “kidnapping” that had troubling evidential contradictions. She created the Angelus Temple, a $1.5 million edifice financed entirely by donations and still existing today. She proved so charismatic that she even charmed H.L. Mencken.

In fact, I have a file with notes and an outline for a play centered around her staged disappearance from Venice Beach. One of these days, I will find the time to write it.

The kidnapping got serious press and even inspired Upton Sinclair to compose a poem. McPherson emerged later in Mexico, claiming that she had hiked many miles back to civilization. Alas, there were no scuff marks on her shoes. There was McPherson’s troubling involvement with a married man — an engineer by the name of Kenneth G. Ormiston. Ormiston, however, was a gentleman and kept his tongue firmly unflapped. Despite the shaky evidence available to a grand jury and public scrutiny over this “publicity stunt,” McPherson’s ministry carried on.

For those who wish to learn more about this fascinating pioneer, there’s now a new biography available about McPherson from Matthew Sutton, which John Updike has reviewed in the latest issue of the New Yorker.

• Amy Finnerty: “Martin Amis excels at descriptions of creepy men–sweaty misogynists, soused lowlifes, and thugs.” Ms. Finnerty says this like it’s a bad thing!
• A reminder: fireworks on Sunday, if you’re in Los Angeles.
• Colleen illustrates the history of the science fiction label, as kick-started by this Jason Silverman piece.
• William Gibson on Borges (Thanks, Keith!)
• Churches are now slamming the doors on sex offenders. (via The Other)
• Over at the LBC, I’ve put up a guide to cultural references in Sacco & Vanzetti Are Dead. A podcast with Mr. Binelli, in which the Mr. Binelli and I talked as the sun set behind the edifice of the Phoenix Hotel, will follow tomorrow. Somehow, while we were talking about knife-throwing and films, the 1986 Anthony Michael Hall film Out of Bounds even came up in our conversation. But do sift around the LBC site and you’ll find a lot more.
• At the Huffington Post, Art Winslow sums up various newspaper closings. Norman Spinrad even shows up in the comments. (via Book/daddy)

Scott Esposito, who before moving to Mexico was once referred to in certain quarters as the Sexiest Man in Oakland and who remains, at least according to certain reports, a polite decliner of French kisses, has made his debut in the Philly Inquirer. He reviews Robert Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives.

John Freeman on blogs: “It’s one thing to accept advertising money: that’s what has kept papers afloat for years. It’s quite another to make a commission off the very object you are purporting to criticize.” (Emphasis in original)

John Freeman while criticizing newspapers: “#4) Join the NBCC. If you’re a working critic and have published three reviews (online or in print) over the past five years, join us — the more voices we have behind us, the greater our chances will be at preserving the cultural dialogue in this country.”

And here’s more nonsense from Freeman: “But in the struggle for bragging rights something gets lost: the awareness that for every lit-blogger who has been serving up opinions daily since 1998, there are five books editors who were around when Toni Morrison’s first book landed on their desk in 1970, and are no longer.”

Who’s the one really boasting here? I certainly harbor no illusion that I was the first person writing about books. If you want to get down to the nitty-gritty, there were critics reviewing books decades before the NBCC. What should matter here is where the media environment is right now and what all of us can do to maintain and preserve book coverage. As I suggested on Monday, it’s “a united front, whereby literary and “sub-literary” enthusiasts of all stripes, print and online, litblogger and journalist, campaign on behalf of literary coverage in as many conduits as possible.” It seems to me that Freeman doesn’t seem to be aware of how similar his posturing is to online hubris.

UPDATE: In his latest column, the always dependable Scott McLemee addresses the book reviewing problem on many fronts, pointing out persuasively why online media, academic librarians and university-press folks should support book review sections and sign the petition, while also revealing Freeman insisting that Critical Mass is the “blog of record” for literary and publishing news.

Howard Hendrix: “I’m also opposed to the increasing presence in our organization of webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free. A scab is someone who works for less than union wages or on non-union terms; more broadly, a scab is someone who feathers his own nest and advances his own career by undercutting the efforts of his fellow workers to gain better pay and working conditions for all. Webscabs claim they’re just posting their books for free in an attempt to market and publicize them, but to my mind they’re undercutting those of us who aren’t giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work.”

This comes from Howard Hendrix, the current Vice President of the Science Fiction Writers of America, who has clarified his comments by later observing that “webscabs” was “too incendiary a term” and stating:

I think the jury is still very much out, however, on whether such free online fulltext [sic] offerings will prove to be salutary or deleterious to the writing profession as a whole. We’re still in the early stages of this transition, and data remains insufficient.

Roger Ebert: “We spend too much time hiding illness. There is an assumption that I must always look the same. I hope to look better than I look now. But I’m not going to miss my festival.”

(via Sarah)

Jesus. Journalist-popular historian David Halberstam has died in a car crash. Halberstam was the author of The Best and the Brightest, one of the first books I ever read about Vietnam, as well as a great overview of the Eisenhower era, The Fifties, and a very compelling history of journalism called The Powers That Be. Halberstam had a remarkable gift of explaining intricate bureaucratic behavior and its effect upon cultural events in a clear and concise way. Sometimes, this meant substituting “us” and “our” for the United States (as he did in War in a Time of Peace) to get his point across to a popular American reading audience.

I never got the chance to see him speak or to interview him. And I’ll certainly miss him. This is a staggering loss. He was one of the authors I read in my early twenties who taught me that politics and history were as rich in American tradition as our cultural lifeblood. He was that very rare author who, like the historian Will Durant, had faith in the common reader to get excited about history. All of us, I suppose, start out as common readers. And for me, Halberstam was one of those central figures I encountered so happily in libraries. Like Vonnegut’s recent passing, I feel as if a dear friend who helped to show me bigger things has departed and there is nothing I can do to express my gratitude. In this age of microhistories and popular histories that prefer gossip items to substantive interconnections, I can’t think of anyone who could take Halberstam’s place.