This Lee Siegel thing is an example. What Siegel doesn’t understand is that the web is a tool of our imprisonment or liberation. It’s all a click away; a different point of view; different subject.

And the fact that one of the 2 good things Siegel listed was “amazon” puts him on the hit-list of the biblio-mafia… but enough of this.

Siegel is best ignored, best forgotten (you know the old adage ” not press is bad press”)… Let’s see this thread die and any literary sepuku Seigel does is of the equivalent of the cat-lady-at-the-corner-of-the-street.

Can we talk about books, not book critics, or whatever the hell Siegel is supposed to be (author? no! What?). What about that “Knockemstiff” by Polack; or the translation of Bolano’s epic “2666″…?

“That’s a fine conceit,” responded Siegel. “That’s one of the things that makes you a great novelist. Your negative capability.”’

Presumably Siegel meant his supposed n.c. allowed him to have a flexible relationship with the net. What’s actually funny about the remark is that his book on the net is (as reviewed) devoid of that quality.

“Brown and Dilke walked with me and back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”

— John Keats, 21 December 1817.

I read up about him and his book and realized that he was just playing the contrary game for fun and profit. Of course I would have walked right into an ambush with the TV cameras rolling so they could sit back and watch a blogger be destroyed.The TV and radio media don’t REALLY want to cover themselves but they are happy to show a dust up of two people fighting it out about the internet.

The internet has sucked billions of dollars out of the world of print and the record business. Soon it will suck more out of the TV and movie business. When we start sucking money out of the radio industry they will hit back, and hard. We need to prepare for it. They will bring out anyone who can make an “Internet Bad, Books/TV/Radio good” argument, because this person supports their economic model. They support a world that has been questioned by us. Keen appealed to this group that is being questioned by people on the Internet.

I’m not an intellectual. I’m not a good debater. I don’t enjoy arguing for arguing sake. I’m much more interested in figuring out how to move people to action and to make an impact through my words and deeds.

And luckily my desire to stay private saved me in this case. If I indulged in my desire to be ON TV I would have been chewed up and spit out by Keen.

I appreciate the reasons why you did not destroy Siegel, but I do like to read how people who ARE intellectual and DO enjoy arguing for arguing sake take these people down. I learn a lot. You are doing the rest of us a favor when you show the logic holes, when you explain why he didn’t make a case for his views because if you don’t do it these people go onto be quoted by other people who CAN’T and WON’T attack them. Rush Limbaugh is not an intellectual. He is not a journalist. Yet he creates lots of narratives and provides them to the world so they can be repeated over and over until he forces us to discuss them. And the media listen to him (and Drudge) and think “This is what the American people want to be discussing!”

One group that is especially important to reach are TV and Radio producers. Right Wing TV and radio producers especially. They have a greater influence that most people realize.

The press have abdicated their responsibility to debate the people in power. Right wing tv and radio have NEVER even believed that it is their job to question the people in power. Instead they feel it is their job to question the people who question the people in power. And they get away with it by calling it “entertainment”

I look to smarter people like you on the internet and better writers than me to help me put these people in their place with solid logic and rhetorical skills. I look to you for good metaphors and stories to use when I’m trying to create new narratives for the press to use.

I see that in this story about Siegel that he (like lots of talk radio hosts) aren’t willing to play by the rules of intelligent debate. And when that happens you realize that you can’t just destroy his arguments you need to go out side of the frame and work to point out the overall problems with the person.

I felt that the next step is to remove the financial support from these people. I feel that they are very bad for society and our discourse. And since there is absolutely no desire for them to have a real conversation I feel I have no need to apologize for my efforts to take away their financial support. I rejected the fiction of “fair and balanced” and the fiction that they want to have a conversation.

It’s just business to them, but for the true believers it is a source of pat arguments that they use to make their terrible choices in leaders and policy real.

One thing that I would love for the intellectuals here to do is to think about how to get to Feith and Yoo. You might be able to argue with them at book signings. Don’t settle for his convoluted reasons for the war. He is an professor and an intellectual (or at least he plays one) and he needs to be challenged as such. And for those of you who know that you can beat him in and argument and you then realize that it just doesn’t matter, he will get away with it, start thinking about how to hold him accountable in other fashions.

Since I’m not trained in the skill of rhetoric, I’ll be looking at where he is violating the ethics code of Georgetown. I’ve asked people to uncover Yoo’s conflicts of interest with the university and money. But it would be nice to also have people working to beat their reasons and their actions. Because there are a bunch of people who aren’t a smart who have large microphones who will keep pushing the lies.

Not being able to control how and by whom he’s seen and responded to must have been really terrifying for him. It isn’t much of a wonder he tried to game the conversation.

Negative capability isn’t even applicable to non-fiction work; it’s the capacity of a novelist to lose himself/herself in her or her work, so that the “author” becomes imperceptible to the reader.

“What does that mean?” is an eminently reasonable response to any non sequitir tossed triumphantly into a discussion.

Poor, poor Lee Siegel. He’s his own worst enemy. He hates us all because he hates himself so much and blames us all for that.

Took me two minutes to write this post. That’s literally all the time I’m going to spend this year thinking about Lee Siegel, assclown.

“Nature? Don’t get me started about Nature! Animals are using every inch of it as their personal toilet!”
;-P