Bronson Pinchot is a freemason? WTF?
Month / June 2006
The Next NBCC Hot Issue: Litbloggers, Boxers or Briefs?
Since I cannot login to the Critical Mass blog without signing up for a Blogger account, here is my response to Mr. Freeman’s flummery:
Mr. Freeman’s objection here is laughably tautological — a transparent attempt to tarnish a medium that he views, rather strangely, as a competitive threat while clinging to a red herring that, in an age when Target bankrolls an entire issue of The New Yorker (in which Critical Mass contributors Celia McGee and Laura Miller, both curiously silent, have appeared), is more Tinkertoy than tinker’s damn on closer examination.
If we are to quibble with picayune forms of income, one might argue that any freelancer employed to review a book for a newspaper also “gets a cut” for the book that she is reviewing — in large part because book review sections frequently run advertisements for the books being reviewed or have the regrettable interference of editors who decide, whether independently or after meetings with the lucre-minded top brass, what is saleable to their readers. Are not these advertisements, which sustain the publication and pay the salaries of the people who author the review, as “unethical” as the meager pennies that flow from the Amazon links? Is not the New York Times‘ recent failure to include a full-length Gilbert Sorrentino obituary “unethical” because the publication will not recognize subjects that certain Sunday morning upper-class basket weavers and golf players (they being the ones who hand over the cash) find comforting and nonconfrontational?
The rule here seems to apply only to the upstarts rather than these hoary hotheads, who lap up scraps like birdbrained predators incapable of observing the dying ecology around them.
Other than the notion here that litbloggers are cutting out the middlemen, I really don’t see what the difference is here. There may not be a traditional separation between sales and editorial. But this doesn’t mean that, with a great deal of alacrity, an enterprising litblogger might find a way to make a new model work while maintaining a certain autonomy which ensures ethical journalism. (I actually agree somewhat with Mr. Freeman about Amazon links embedded within content, but I also note Mr. Orthofer’s remarks on Amazon as an information source.)
Further, the term “buzz marketing” implies that litbloggers are employed to write uncritical and raving puff pieces about books. But this simply isn’t the case at all. Unless Mr. Freeman can point to a specific example of a litblogger taking money from a publisher and writing sullied euphoria along these lines, his assertion here is groundless. But I suspect that a man who mistakes mirth for marketing is a man who has supped too much on gruel.
[UPDATE: More from Bud Parr, Ron Hogan, Sarah Weinman and Scott McKenzie. And, of course, don’t miss Scott and Max’s salvos in the original thread.]
Presbycusis or Presbyterian?
Can you hear it? “The principle behind it is a biological reality that hearing experts refer to as presbycusis, or aging ear. While Miss Musorofiti is not likely to have it, most adults over 40 or 50 seem to have some symptoms, scientists say. While most human communication takes place in a frequency range between 200 and 8,000 hertz (a hertz being the scientific unit of frequency equal to one cycle per second), most adults’ ability to hear frequencies higher than that begins to deteriorate in early middle age.” (via Metafilter)
There is an MP3 attached to the article. I can hear the tone but it’s playing at a constant low volume.
Ignore the Blonde Woman
To riff off of Ron’s points, there is a certain blonde woman prone to making outrageous and spiteful statements. (I will confess that, this weekend, while encountering a prodigious display of the blonde woman’s books in a bookstore, I did turn each and every book around, so that the back cover faced out instead of the front. This was, of course, one of those small civic duties to ensure that innocent customers weren’t unsettled by that hatemonger’s face while sauntering through the bookstore, but instead bore witness to the ass end of the book, which I thought quite appropriate.)
But I will no longer mention her name here. I will no longer pay her any credence whatsoever. Let her howl like Cerberus to the winds of Hades. Let her publishers dump all manner of money into her books. But her spiteful brand of demagogery means nothing to me. Nor should it mean anything to you. Nor should you heed the easy impulses burgeoning within your solar plexus to remark, posthaste, at her latest enmity.
Because, to employ the dog metaphor further, I know the bitch’s days are numbered. I don’t know when. And I don’t know how. But I know that it will happen.
There comes a time in any hatemonger’s career when the lack of substance embedded within his vitriol eventually comes to bite him in the ass. We saw this most recently with Ralph Reed. We saw this a few years ago with Trent Lott. And we shall see this again with the blonde woman. There will come a time in which the sum total of her abuses will be tallied up so that no rational human being, not even the most reactionary, will give her credence.
And on that day, I will stop ignoring her and cite her by name to remind the world exactly how her hateful and nonconstructive thinking was her downfall.
Dave Itzkoff: Well, Crash Courses Are Better Than Glossing Over White Males
It took a little more than three months for Dave Itzkoff to write his second science fiction column (or perhaps the more accurate answer here is that it took that long for Sam Tanenhaus to figure out that the field was a little more substantial than geeks writing stories). This column is slightly better, if only for its mention of the underrated writer Ellen Klages, whose work is often published in the underrated The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (where I first encountered her). But I must inform Mr. Itzkoff of the following realities:
1. Sorry, Dave, but Christopher Rowe is already taken. The marriage, as I understand it, is a healthy one. But what a way to suck up! You even quoted Matt Cheney! So hipster points and a crash course bonus for you! Now if only we can get you lusting after someone who isn’t attached or, better yet, convince you to engage in a dialogue with those who do know something about the subject but who don’t need to flaunt their knowledge like a smug Department of Defense official in the Johnson administration who thinks he knows more about Vietnam than those who are actually there. Who knows, Davie boy? Your column might be worth something more than a man declaring how much he cares about the reactions.
2. Dave, baby, you’re going to have to think outside the pop cultural box. These “intimations of juvenilia” that you think speculative fiction is all about are among the major reasons why we criticized you in the first place. Not only has the genre moved well beyond “juvenilia,” but a “cookie monster” isn’t always what it seems.
3. “Rosenbaum’s imagery will surely embed itself in the invisible architecture of your own memory banks for days after you’ve read it. But when you approach it for the first time, just try to forget that you’ve already been told how it ends.” So this is how Tanenhaus wants you to cover speculative fiction, Dave? Look, I’m nowhere nearly as schooled as my peers, but even I know something about the subject and wouldn’t dare to propose the silly and dismissive phrase “invisible architecture of your own memory banks.” Why, I’d be remiss and downright philistine if I actually declared myself a cultural arbiter on such flimsy pretext. So you read a Nebula anthology and you’re an expert now? Well golly! I mean, can I pin a boutinaire to your lapel, declare myself as your godfather, and send you a gift certificate to Tony Roma’s? There’s some good eatings there, I do declare!
4. Lastly, what can we do to get you and Ron Hogan to kiss and make up? Or does this “I write for the NYTBR now” schtick mean that you won’t talk with the plebs?