Dear Ed,

Please nominate me for a Bloggies Award. I would do it myself but I think it may help if it came from someone else. I don’t care what category. I just want one of those neat banners to post on my site. If I win, I’ll be sure to thank you and provide a link back to you on my site.

Yours in Christ,

A. Nom

It is generally concluded that writers are professional liars (and, in at least one case, overhyped dupes who manage to fool the literary world). However, when a writer pens a memoir, is there not a certain expectation of truth? Even if the details are fudged a bit here and there, or entirely fabricated, shouldn’t a memoir writer ground his story in some rudimentary reality?

The Smoking Gun launched a six-week investigation and found that James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces, had fabricated many elements of his alleged criminal past. Frey, it seems, managed to fool Oprah (and, admittedly, this litblogger). What’s interesting is that instead of responding directly to the allegations, Frey remarked that this was the “latest attempt to discredit me….I stand by my book, and my life, and I won’t dignify this bullshit with any sort of further response.”

According to TSG, Frey’s been dignifying it all in other ways. He had the court records pertaining to several incidents purged. There were no records from the prosecuting attorney, who kept a record “on any case that came in whether or not it resulted in felony charges.” Despite daily episodes of recurrent vomiting and bleeding and addiction, Frey somehow managed to graduate from Denison University in four years. But most interestingly, the alleged “cracked-out” incident that threw Frey into rehab simply involved Frey with an open bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon. No billy cubs flung, no .29 blood-alcohol content, and certainly no crack.

When we consider that Frey originally tried to sell his memoir as a novel, one wonders precisely whether much of A Million Little Pieces was actually changed. Indeed, in hindsight, it’s quite interesting to see how trusting the literary world was of Frey’s astonishing memoir, which was billed as the tell-all memoir to end all tell-all memoirs. Has the publishing atmosphere proven so antiseptic in its subject matter that only a sensationalized memoir can polarize its attentions?

[UPDATE: Amazingly, this whole question of “the truth” has inspired Neal Pollack to serve up the funniest thing he’s written since he became a humorless family man and told people to shut up about a conflict that has been almost universally acknowledged as a bona-fide clusterfuck without reasonable justification. Perhaps there’s hope for Pollack yet!]

If you have written a post begging your readership to nominate you for the Bloggies, then please do us all a favor. Stop blogging. You’re part of the problem.

Because blogging isn’t a popularity contest. If you are not offending at least one reader or writing something that causes your readership to think, if you are not taking advantage of this alternative medium to do something worthwhile and different, the things that other mediums can’t do because they need advertising and readers, then I hope you’ll spend the rest of your days without an Internet connection working at a small-town newspaper banging out a weekly gardening column that offends no one.

I’ve been blogging in some form or another for the past seven years. Maybe more. So I’ve seen all five years of the Bloggies nonsense. Will someone please tell me just what exactly these awards have done to further humankind? Have they expanded blogging in any way? Have they provoked meaningful discussion? No. The Bloggies is nothing less than a big SXSW circlejerk, the online equivalent of a UHF fishing show that you’ve watched for the hundredth time. The same fishermen, growing older and specializing in catching the same fish, using the same techniques, saying the same things. Let’s look at the names. Jeffrey Zeldman. Evan Williams. Jason Kottke. Nothing against them, but yawn.

If you’re a person into blogging to win hits and influence people instead of saying no to constantly checking your Technorati rating or your stats, then I wonder how you can ever find pleasure in the form. Blogging as a stepping stone to a career? Helpful, yes, but hardly the cure-all answer. Why not just focus on realistic goals that lead you straight to the career instead of sneaking in posts during your day job? If you want to be a journalist, get a job on a paper. If you want a book deal, write a book and carefully market it. If you want to be a legitimate pundit, go to grad school and “publish or perish” in journals. But don’t automatically assume that your blog gives you immediate credentials. And don’t think that it entitles to anything. As we all learned back during the 2004 political convention coverage, it was the bloggers who proved to be the laziest reporters of the bunch, offering reports about as substantial as a Field & Stream cover story. Of course, if you do want to practice journalism through a blog, then stop railing against the mainstream media about how superior you are and do the fucking legwork. Back up your shit, yo. Make phone calls, talk to people, get multiple sides of the story. That’s what you can do in this medium that the big papers can’t.

For god’s sake, stop encouraging crap like the Bloggies, which is nothing less than a bunch of insular nonsense motivated by charisma rather than content. I should point out that the only person who had the balls to turn down a Bloggies award was Noah Grey. He recognized the hypocrisy and rejected it. (And long before those able pups Trotted into filthy lucre, Noah Grey laid down the framework for gradual evoloution of the software which guided this medium through Greymatter. The man understood community.)

So in conclusion: Fuck the Bloggies. Fuck it hard.

This has been a public service announcement.

The cat is out of the bag. This post marks the end of Return of the Reluctant.

If you’ve been paying attention to Publisher’s Lunch, I’m happy to report that I’ve received a $750,000 advance for my debut novel, Blog Days. Apparently, the name “Return of the Reluctant” now means something beyond the blogosphere. My name is being susurrated at cocktail parties. I’m getting more blowjob offers from random strangers than ever before. Hell, even Christopher Hitchens wants to blow me, but then he didn’t bother to check my political dossier and he’s in desperate need of attention. But it’s the thought that counts. And of course, a gentleman never kisses and tells. If I had been hired by Nick Denton right now, then I would definitely inform him to go summer where the sun don’t shine. (In fact, just for the hell of it, because financial emancipation unfurls the opportunity for a certain truth, I will. You heard me, Denton! Summer!)

Anyway, after the success of my groundbreaking essay “After Blog Life,” it has been decided by certain big names that what the world really needs is a salable and poorly plotted novel about a 31 year old prematurely balding, San Francisco-based litblogger trying to figure out what to do with his life, but finding a TV movie-friendly existential direction through the plot device of a man named Cat Stigmata and several podcasts produced for a better tomorrow. The marketing people have asked me to gain weight and develop perky man-boobs for my bookstore appearances, while also making tedious references to sodomy throughout the text. Because, you know, that’s the cute and hip thing to do. Normally, I wouldn’t do this. But hell why argue with hype when there’s so much cash on the table? The good news is that, despite my criticisms of Sam Tanenhaus, the New York Times has been effectively “bought.” They’ll be covering me with at least six articles during the week the novel comes out.

If you people hadn’t enjoyed my site so much, none of this would have happened. Of course, Return of the Reluctant will continue in another form. Two women, whom I understand are both Amish and nymphomaniacs, plan to take over the site while I spend my free time blowing spitballs at the people standing in the unemployment line. In fact, I may even take some of the $750,000 and form spitballs from these George Washingtons.

But before I officially retire from blogging and become an overpaid hack (Tito Perez and Scott Esposito have accepted the positions of personal assistant and part-time pamperer, respectively), let me offer you an excerpt from one of the chapters, all in the interest of filling up the coffers:

Excerpt

Newtonette emailed me today. She said that she’d meet me in New York and discuss what percentages of the “litblogosphere” we owned. So that’s what all this “web log” business boiled down to! That’s why Mink Sorvo and Leela Lulumi were such good friends with her. In the end, it didn’t boil down to Technorati ratings or the emails you answered from attention-starved writers. It came down to brass balls and the deals brokered in Brooklyn dives.

I was new to this “web log” business. So I agreed to the terms. So long as I didn’t venture into New York, so long as I stayed on my side of the United States, Newtonette and I wouldn’t scuffle. There would be no Farrar, Strauss and Giroux building destroyed. There would be no Peck-Crouch style brawl captured by the New York Daily News. Newtonette injected a microscopic pellet into my neck and told me that the pellete would explode, releasing poison into my bloodstream if I didn’t leave New York within 24 hours. So I caught the next plane out of Kennedy and I fell asleep watching an in-flight movie of Uwe Boll’s Alone in the Dark.

I woke up when the plane landed in SFO and my mind was racing. I was still suspicius about Mink Sorvo. The man was everywhere, although I didn’t pay attention to what Steve Peanutsize and Justine Extra-Crispy said about him. What Newtonette didn’t know was tht I had formed a pact with Extra-Crispy: a complex agreement that made the Stalin-Hitler Pact look like an eight year old’s party invitation.

I caught on really quick. You betrayed your colleagues or you got yourself sodomized.

I’m pleased to announce that our Young, Roving Correspondent will be talking with the five nominees for this quarter’s round of LBC goodness. The podcasts will first be released in five installments at the LBC site and will then be edited into two or three Segundo shows. More information about what the LBC is up to this quarter can be found here.