Category / Blogging

by Edward Champion

The Last Word on Bob Hoover

Over at Scott’s, Kevin has observed that newspapermen often ignore the rebuttals.  In an effort to test Bob Hoover by his own standards and demonstrate just how slovenly we litbloggers can be, I note the following:

 1.  Bob Hoover’s Career

First off, this biography reveals that Hoover isn’t all that different from litbloggers.  For one thing, it appears that he started off as a volunteer book critic for the now defunct Pittsburgh Press.  Well, aren’t litbloggers the volunteer book critics of the Internet? 

I am not certain that boasting about covering “Sesame Street on Ice” constitutes real journalism.  Unless of course Hoover wrote a 4,000 word investigative piece revealing that the skater playing Big Bird was a methadone addict.  But then I’m not a man to pass judgment, given that I have a great fondness for Grover.  

The most mysterious personal detail is that Hoover “has a degree in English from Ohio University.”  What does this mean exactly?  Is it a vocational degree?  An A.A.?  A certificate of attendance printed in English?  A thermometer purchased in the Ohio University bookstore?  Bob Hoover is apparently a man of mystery. Why also does Bob Hoover mention that he “worked at newspapers” but fails to mention any names?  For all we know, the man could have been some guy off the street who put in a few hours a week calling local merchants up for advertising space.

2.  Bob Hoover as Journalistic Torchbearer

Bud’s already provided several examples, but because Bob Hoover’s silliness must be exposed in full, here are some of Mr. Hoover’s inaccuracies.  It seems that, contrary to Hoover’s claims, the Pittsburgh’s Post-Gazette‘s “hawk-eye standards” don’t seem to be practiced nearly as much as Hoover attests.

1. In an online chat, Bob Hoover fails to properly capitalize “MP3.” He also offers this sentence: “The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh can download books on its own mp3 player [sic] which you can borrow.” Mr. Hoover also seems unaware of such basic grammatical rules as the direct object and the indirect object.

2. France is already part of “the Western canon.” There’s no reason to “expand” the Western canon to include a nation already well-established in Europe.

3. Claim: “Mr. Thompson’s contribution to American letters is substantially less than Mr. Bellow’s.” Apparently, Hoover hasn’t heard of gonzo journalism or tracked its development, much less paid attention to the remarkable league of HST imitators, which would suggest that Thompson’s contributions were far more than “substantially less.”

4. Claim: “The current rivals of the newspaper book sections are Oprah, the Internet and the brief puffy reviews found in celebrity-entertainment weeklies.” What planet does this guy live on? Does anyone really read People Magazine for the book reviews?

5. Bob Hoover’s headline: “Mr., Mrs. Chabon tell all.” Aside from the fact that an ampersand is as good as a comma (and more grammatically sound), Michael Chabon’s wife is named Ayelet Waldman, not Mrs. Chabon.

And that’s just after spending about 15 minutes sifting through the Bob Hoover archives. 

Of course, to coin a Hooverism, fair is fair.  Some people wrote in and lambasted me for calling Pittsburgh a “small town.”  Certainly, any city with a population of 334,000 isn’t a “small town.”  And you’ll find me on Market Square this weekend, getting dutifully horse-whipped with Bob Hoover.  I apologize for my confusion, but Bob Hoover’s prose style reminded me very much of the PennySaver articles I used to read to stave off boredom as a Sacramento teenager. 

But if it’s any consolation, folks, I’m rooting for Pittsburgh this Sunday.  Go Steelers!

by Edward Champion

Can Actors Get Fired for Blogging on the Clock?

From a Rainn Wilson interview: “Yeah, we have working computers on the set, though the internet connection can be really bad. A lot of times, if we’re just doing background work, if they’re shooting a scene with Steve Carell [in the foreground], we have time to play around with [our web sites]. I’ll try to think of something from an upcoming episode, or just keep track of funny observations that I write as Dwight. Yeah. It’s a virtual reality set, people are working on their Web sites all the time. Everyone has their MySpace thing going.”

The Dwight blog is here.

by Edward Champion

“Civil and Courteous” or Simply Listening?

At the Les Blogs conference, an altercation occurred between Mena Trott and Ben Metcalfe. (Video of the encounter can be found here.) Ms. Trott had urged bloggers to be civil and courteous during her speech. And Mr. Metcalfe, feeling that Trott’s statements didn’t hold water, typed “this is bullshit” into an IRC backchannel that was being simultaneously broadcast. Metcalfe was then called an asshole and singled out publicly by Trott as the panel was happening. But Metcalfe, unfazed, still challenged Trott on her points, noting that in the real world, people often aren’t always nice and that bloggers, as a whole, needed to develop thicker skins if they expected their discourse to hold water.

Trott has reproduced her speech here. And it seems curiously similar in tone and phrasing to a certain essay that was debated in the literary world a few years ago.

Given that Trott is on record as letting loose all manner of profanity on Metcalfe, I find her meet-cute “Can’t we all just get along?” nonsense incongruous with her message, particularly when she specifically singled out Metcalfe and urged him to stand up, a clear attempt to humiliate him that, in this case, failed completely. (Fortunately, it appears that the two had a conversation sometime after the panel to clear the waters. Likely most reports chronicling this scrape will omit this fact.)

It should be noted that, outside the interconnected world, audiences are likely to exchange similar thoughts about a speaker on a piece of paper or through a whisper uttered to an adjacent audience member in the heat of the moment. I don’t believe that any of this is intended to malign or slander the speaker, but to frame the speaker’s words into some kind of immediate context with which to take in the information and understand the speaker better.

The only difference here between a note or a whisper and Metcalfe’s offhand comment is that the latter was publicly broadcast and, despite all claims to the contrary about “thick skin” and the like by Trott, taken personally.

What this incident (and the respective reactions) proves is that blogging has a long way to go before it is even remotely similar to real-world conversations. (Why was the IRC backchannel publicly projected, for example? Are we so enamored with technology that we have lost the ability to preserve basic levels of human communication?) And until it makes some substantial developments along these lines, there is no reason to expect the non-blogging audience, which, lest we all forget, remains a substantial bloc of the human population, to jump on the bandwagon. While it is true that the comments allow for an almost immediate feedback (a distinct advantage to print journalism), perhaps there truly is an incompatibility between blogging and real-world conversation, given that the desire to break into the top ranks of Technorati often outweighs the thoughts and feelings of the blog entries posted. Oscar Wilde was more prescient than he realized when he said, “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

The chief problem with this medium is that even smart people like Trott seem incapable of adjusting their mind set to determine what a dissenter’s “This is bullshit” might be all about and not take it personally. I don’t believe setting tonal limits is the answer. But I don’t believe that trying to lambaste your opponents in public over some picayune point of exploration is really the answer either.[1]

The answer involves bloggers being more skillful “listeners” rather than “talkers,” shifting the emphasis to one that permits the participants to maintain a malleable mind set for multiple perspectives and an outsider to see very clearly how all of these perspectives match up. And if the medium hopes to evolve, then it needs to stop being concerned with hits and statistics and become more concerned with bringing people together in a way that doesn’t demand some ridiculous level of commitment from the participants (one of the reasons why most social network sites have proven a bust, in my view). For the litblog scene, I think Bud Parr’s MetaxuCafe may be more of a revolutionary stroke along these lines than even Parr suspects.

One thing that’s clear to me: It’s decidedly unhealthy to let a point of contention get in the way of maintaining a civil discussion, particularly when it concerns issues that challenge the status quo, or to mistake the caustic quality of a message with the temperament of the messenger.

[1] Full confession: This blogger is sometimes guilty of this.

PlayPlay

Listen: Play in new window | Download