Category / Uncategorized

by Edward Champion

Sign the Petition! Sign Away Your Right to Think Freely!

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!

by Edward Champion

Save the Blogs!

basement.jpg

Pictured above is a basement in Terre Haute. It is within this damp and miserable environment that 26-year-old literary blogger Jerrold Hysteria muses about literature, often mocked and belittled by newspaper critics who cower under desks the minute that they hear the words “Tanenhaus Brownie Watch” or “LATBR Thumbnail.” Mr. Hysteria has received forty-two phone calls from novelist Richard Ford in the past week: all of them collect. Mr. Ford seems to think that Hysteria is the litblog force that caused The Lay of the Land to be considered less worthy than Independence Day. Mr. Ford has a lot of spare time.

Mr. Hysteria, alas, does not have Mr. Ford’s luxuries. Why then would he operate in a basement?

“I don’t know why he pays attention to me,” said Mr. Hysteria by email. “I’ve only read The Sportswriter and didn’t care for it.”

Mr. Hysteria runs the literary blog Richard Ford Ate My Tuna Salad Sandwich and Didn’t Pay His Half of the Check and he is just one of many litbloggers who has been blamed for many of the current problems in literary culture. Mr. Hysteria has a Technorati rating. Mr. Ford does not.

Because of this, Mr. Hysteria, like many other litbloggers, needs your help.

Here is what you can do to save blogs.

1. Please tell Richard Ford to stop calling Mr. Hysteria. This is costing him serious time and money. He lives in a basement.

2. Please tell John Freeman that Mr. Hysteria would like to give him a hug and means no malice.

3. We’re also going to need someone who doesn’t mind traveling to Terre Haute and doesn’t mind basements to give Mr. Hysteria a lap dance.

There will be more published here on what you can do to save the blogs. We’ll be asking major figures, such as Lorrie, the angry chick at Starbuck’s who “doesn’t know what the fuck a blog or a book review is,” to weigh in here in the coming weeks.

This is serious business. There are men over thirty crying about this.

SAVE THE BLOGS! Starting with Mr. Hysteria in Terre Haute.

by Edward Champion

It’s Really All About Andrew Keen’s Ego

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.