The photographic case against Sting. (via James Tata)

Here’s what dictionary.com say about the word “crisis”:

1. a stage in a sequence of events at which the trend of all future events, esp. for better or for worse, is determined; turning point.
2. a condition of instability or danger, as in social, economic, political, or international affairs, leading to a decisive change.
3. a dramatic emotional or circumstantial upheaval in a person’s life.
4. Medicine/Medical.
a. the point in the course of a serious disease at which a decisive change occurs, leading either to recovery or to death.
b. the change itself.
5. the point in a play or story at which hostile elements are most tensely opposed to each other.

We can eliminate the medical definition altogether, unless, like me, you count the “book reviews are good for you and blogs are bad for you” nonsense as pathlogical. We can eliminate the first definition because while the column inches are evaporating and whole newspapers are starting to absorb wire copy (read, for example, how much of the current Newsday books section is composed of original, non-Tribune Company content and you will see the marks of cannibal teeth), I cannot believe that book reviewing is dead. If the turning point involves the hypothesized convergence point of print and online, John Freeman, the somewhat diffident moderator for Sunday morning’s panel, certainly didn’t mention much of it. So is this a personal crisis? And if so, why not be candid about this? Perhaps the fifth definition is in order, given the inexplicably hostile look that John Freeman offered to me when, on my way out of the conference room, I reiterated the point that Freeman continued to make throughout the panel: “Remember, John, all voices need to be represented. Email me.”

Item: The two most common words uttered during the Crisis in Book Reviewing panel were “business model.”

Disclaimer: Due to a thundering hangover I was nursing from the previous night’s partying, I arrived twenty-five minutes late. So if there was more priority given to book reviews as an editorial or intellectual crisis, then please let me know. But from all concerned, it appeared that the crisis was more about “gots to get paid” rather than “gots to get read.” I suspect this was one of the reasons why Carlin Romano vociferated from the back how he was disappointed that the conversation was more a collection of middle manager-speak and laid into Heidi Julavits. I suspect this was one of the reasons that Ron Hogan likewise raised hell.

Ergo: I must therefore conclude that the crisis then was about the personal pocketbooks of all involved. And if this was the case, why assemble a group of arts editors (and a few lower tier money people) to talk about a subject outside of their expertise?

There is no time to provide much in the way of context. The day is almost gone. So here is a gonzo precis of what transpired on Sunday morning.

Heidi Julavits: Not fond of less than 4,000 word reviews.

Oscar Villalon: Disagrees. The fate of the book world is linked to the fate of the review world. Decline of the literary world is linked to the decline of criticism. Does not like Consumer Reports squib-like reviews.

Stacey Lewis: Publicist of City Lights Books. What sells books? When a customer comes in and cites a source. Feels very strongly in mainstream book reviews and regional papers. Alas, the book review position is now amalgamated with the arts editor position. The good people lost at the Village Voice Literary Supplement, including Ed Park and Joy Press, always paid attention to City Lights. The new answer? Alternative press and radio.

Maud Newton: The smartest of the panelists. “If I had known this panel was to be called the ‘Crisis in Book Reviewing,’ I would have demurred.” Pointed out that she doesn’t read print newspapers. She and many people 35 and below reading online. How many truly read the paper in print? The blog is just a different form. She doesn’t see the cause and effect relationship. “I’m puzzled by the level of animosity that has on occasion come from newspapers.”

Villalon: “We drink the Kool-Aid.” Openly admits that book review sections don’t have a business model.

Mike Merschel: We need to promote. “We’re taking for granted that the books section will be there” “The print edition is not dead. I don’t think people are aware of the influence it still has.”

Julavits: “The 650 word review is bullshit.” Slight susurration from crowd.

Freeman: “The distinction is the quality of the writing.”

Villalon: It’s never been our goal to sell books. The mass media sets the agenda, but “we in no way tell you what to think.” (I raise my hand here to quibble with this elitist paradox. Alas, I am invisible to the mumbling moderator beating the same two tedious generalizations over and over again. The distinction is in the quality of the argument.)

From the audience: Jerome Weeks! “I never thought I’d be in the position of defending the 800 word review.” Weeks points out that all the critical editorial positions are gone but that the space at the Dallas Morning News is still there. “Yet the paper is making a profit.”

Merschel (the current DMN books editor, by the by): “Let your publishers know.”

Ron quibbles quite rightly about the hyperbolic nature of Freeman’s flummery.

Freeman (resembling Ari Flesicher with hair and not for the first time): “It’s important to have all points of view on there.” The less points of view, the same points over and over.

POT KETTLE BLACK!

Villalon: Astonished that the Chron has lost $330 million since 2001. No online business model. Where did this money go?

Carlin Romano: See introduction. Also, fiery words about the fact that young people do read print. Objecting to corporate nonsense.

Melissa Turner [incoming features editor for the Atlanta Journal Constitution]: I have drunk the Kool-Aid.

(What I’m thinking right now as I continue to raise my hand. Do you really want to be confessing that you’re drinking the Kool-Aid when you are likewise complaining about a crisis? I never get a chance to address this question.)

Villalon: On young readers, “if you try to be hip, they will never ever read you.”

(Third question now in noggin: If you don’t write with a fresh voice, they will never ever read you. Alas, I am not among Freeman’s “all points of view,” because he’s a frightened hypocrite.)

Julavits: Smartly advises that we need to embrace that book reviewing is a labor of love.

Various conversations with swell people as panel closes. I mention something to Oscar Villalon (just to help him out) about POD newsstands being one solution. For the most part, everyone is very kind and affable.

I hope to get my final BEA panel report sometime tomorrow, which will thoroughly document the NBCC “Crisis in Book Reviewing” panel on Sunday morning. The problem is that I am contending with deadlines and an influx of boxes. But bear with me.

With Tanenhaus’s disappearance before the Q&A session, the conversation became smarter and more relaxed, with John Leonard offering fascinating tales of his NYTBR tenure. As I entered the room, just after setting up a conversation with Nigel Beale that regrettably never happened, Levi Asher was in full force, asking the question I had intended (and he intended) to put to Tanenhaus, pondering the ethically dubious assignment of Henry Kissinger reviewing a Dean Acheson biography.

John Leonard offered an interesting anecdote in response to Levi’s question. He noted that one of the contributing factors that led to him leaving the NYTBR was one notoriously protracted piece of vetting. A review of one of Kissinger’s memoirs had quibbled over Kissinger’s claim that he had only one sleepless night during the course of his career (this sleepless night was before his secret trip to China).

Leonard continued to object to what he styled “performance art criticism.” He evoked Isaiah Berlin, suggesting that critics should simply quote the writer he is reviewing and to think like a writer in service of the book.

Leonard kept the interesting anecdotes coming. He noted a case where he, as book editor, received a telephone call from the hotshot attorney Melvin Belli asked to review a book called Judges in America, because Belli insisted to Leonard that he could offer some interesting words on the subject of American magistrates. Leonard commissioned the review and received an entertaining and favorable piece from Belli. What Leonard did not know, until a reporter from the Philly Inquirer had called him, was that Belli was a friend of the author and had posed with him in a photograph. Leonard ended up writing an essay called “Suckered,” in which he confessed how Belli had bamboozled him. None of this, Leonard insisted, was funny.

There were other theoretical rules on ethics offered by Leonard: One could never trust a poet, because a poet would wait for decades. Leonard jocularly insisted that all poets behave badly.

Prose objected to the common reviewing notion that if a reviewer does not like a book’s characters, there is no way that the reviewer could like the book.

Romano, becoming an increasingly amusing gadfly, then suggested that the world could use less of “Kakutani killing babies in cribs.”

With only a few minutes left, there was then a regrettably long soliloquy from a former reviewer who didn’t really have a question, but had much to say about the visual nature of the book review. Leonard, with Romano’s peremptory calls to this gentleman to offer a question, was gracious enough to answer it. He bemoaned “the misery that graphics have brought into the world.” He pointed out that under his watch, the NYTBR turned out a 70 page section every week. Since those days, graphics have caused book reviews to lose about a third of the words that they once had.

Ulin also suggested that there was no space in the pages, but that he had plans to institute Letters to the Editor on the LATBR website.

On the subject of authors responding to reviews, Ulin said that he usually didn’t permit the reviewer to respond. Leonard added that it was “almost always a mistake for an author to write that letter.” Offering yet another amusing anecdote, he pointed to a case where Alfred Kazin had left a long letter in response to a Joan Didion review, accusing Didion of being “a young whipper snipper,” inter alia. Leonard permitted Didion to respond. She answered with only five words: “Oh come off it, Alfred.”

And from here, the delightful panel ended.

It was a great pleasure to see so many experienced and committed editors in the same room. And I was particularly honored to listen to John Leonard’s wise words, in large part because I’ve spent many hours in dark microfilm rooms getting lost in the NYTBR pages edited during his tenure. It is the very editorial quality that Leonard insisted upon which has made me so frequently disappointed (and vocal) in Sam Tanenhaus’s abject results over the past three years. But if the NYTBR is a hopeless cause, so long as oily editorial interlopers willingly steer great vessels into literary reefs, it was a relief to learn that there remain committed editors and writers who actually care very much about ethics and less about stunt writing, much less stunt crises.