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.