Archives for February 2004

Janet Maslin holds forth in today’s New York Times about events likely–or not–to follow the opening of The Passion of the Christ:

In Bernardo Bertolucci’s new film, “The Dreamers,” three nubile cin

Of all the many things that make blogging a truly new medium, the most important is linking. As I remarked in my much-discussed notes on blogging, “Blogs without links aren’t blogs.” Linking transforms individual blogs into a larger community–a blogosphere–whose members freely share ideas and readers with one another, and in so doing increase their own value.

One of the most fascinating aspects of blogging is the unexpected speed with which it has evolved into a collective “gatekeeper” for traditional media–a way of sifting through tons of dirt and finding the gems. I now “read” most magazines and newspapers not directly but by way of links, some of the best of which come from artsjournal.com, “About Last Night”‘s invaluable host. (You can read it by clicking on the artsjournal.com logo in the upper-left-hand corner of this page.) It was because of artsjournal.com, for example, that I became aware of yesterday’s Women’s Wear Daily story about how magazine newsstand sales are plummeting:

According to official figures released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, out of the 472 magazines it tracks, 319 reported newsstand declines and their combined newsstand sales fell 5.9 percent (3.3 million copies), not counting new titles reporting sales for the first time.

The big picture looks even worse for magazines too small to be counted by the ABC. According to the International Periodical Distributors Association, which tracks 95 percent of all magazines, net unit sales fell 13.4 percent in the second half of 2003 compared with the previous year, and that’s after sales dropped 12.9 percent in the first half (when there was a war on).

“You can’t blame Iraq, and you can’t blame the economy…. Well, I guess you can, but how long can you keep doing that?” said Chip Block, vice chairman of the subscription fulfillment company USApubs.

Nowhere in the story does the author suggest that blogging might be pulling newsstand sales downward–but I have no doubt that it is. In fact, my guess is that the emergence of blogging will transform the periodical business beyond recognition, as more people come to rely on links as their primary means of reading most magazines.

Links being as important as they are, it strikes me that bloggers ought to be scrupulous about giving credit where credit is due–and not merely to the original publication, either. I don’t read Women’s Wear Daily, I read artsjournal.com, and it would have been implicitly dishonest for me to mention that WWD story without also mentioning how I found out about it in the first place.

Here’s how Our Girl and I decide when and where to give credit:

(1) If a story has already been widely linked throughout the blogosphere, we don’t usually attempt to give credit for the original link. (Aside from everything else, we don’t always know who spotted it first.)

(2) If the story appeared in a widely read print-media publication such as the New York Times, we generally don’t give credit, either–that is, unless the blogger in question dug a tidbit out of that publication that might otherwise have gone overlooked, or enhanced its interest by commenting on it in a memorable way.

(3) In all other cases, we credit the blogsource. (The formula I most often use is “Courtesy of blogsource.com…”)

Do we slip up on occasion? Sure. I often bookmark stories cherrypicked from the blogosphere, and by the time I get around to looking at the bookmarks, I’ve sometimes forgotten where I found them. But that’s a mistake, not a policy. Whenever we can, we credit the source.

This isn’t merely a matter of common courtesy, or even collegiality. OGIC and I don’t give credit to such fellow bloggers as Supermaud, Sarah, Lizzie, Cinetrix, and Chicha
just to be chummy (though that’s part of the fun). We do it because we want you to read them, too. The potential audience for litblogs and arts blogs is infinitely larger than the number of people currently reading them. The more such blogs you visit on a regular basis, the more interested you’ll become in the larger phenomenon of blogging, and–we hope–the more often you’ll come back to dance with the one who brung you.

Repeat after me: Giving credit to blogsources for borrowed links is good for everybody in the blogosphere.

Not all bloggers feel this way. Certain of our colleagues are bad–a few notoriously so–about giving credit to other bloggers. I’ll name no names, but I will say that the stingy practice of link-poaching has lately come in for quite a bit of backstage criticism.

Needless to say, others can and will do as they please. That’s in the nature of the blogosphere. But at “About Last Night,” we believe that the larger interests of litblogging and arts blogging are best served by crediting the sources of our links, and we strongly recommend that our fellow bloggers do the same thing.

Here endeth the lesson. We return you now to our regularly scheduled program.

In case you haven’t heard (it’s all over the blogosphere), Naomi Wolf says that Harold Bloom sexually harassed her while she was an undergraduate at Yale. The accusation reportedly appears in an article by Wolf scheduled for publication in the next issue of New York. For now, Rachel Donadio summed up the story in this week’s New York Observer, throwing in for good measure a typically incendiary quote from Camille Paglia:

“I just feel it’s indecent that if Naomi Wolf did not have the courage to pursue the matter at the time, or in the 1990’s, and put her own reputation on the line, then to bring all of this down on a man who is in his 70’s and has health problems–who has become a culture hero to readers in the humanities around the world–to drag him into a

If you’ve always wondered what I look like in the flesh, come to the 92nd Street Y this Sunday night and see for yourself. The occasion is “Norman Podhoretz in Conversation with Terry Teachout.” Says the press release:

Norman Podhoretz is an acclaimed author of nine books on subjects ranging from contemporary literature to foreign policy and was editor-in-chief of Commentary for 35 years. His most recent book is The Norman Podhoretz Reader: A Selection of His Writings from the 1950s through the 1990s. Terry Teachout is the music critic of Commentary and a contributor to Time and The Washington Post, among other publications….They will discuss the intersections of politics and culture in the last half century.

The jousting begins at eight o’clock. For more information, or to order a ticket, go here.

“Meanwhile, if I were endowed with wealth, I should start a great advertising campaign in all the principal newspapers. The advertisements would consist of one short sentence, printed in huge block letters–a sentence that I once heard spoken by a husband to a wife: ‘My dear, nothing in this world is worth buying.'”

Max Beerbohm, Mainly on the Air

Without exception, my friends are puzzled by my more than occasional practice of reading biographies from back to front. It puzzles me, too, even though I’ve been doing it for years, and I can’t offer any explanation, however theoretical, for a habit that at first, second, and third glances makes no sense. All I can tell you is that for some reason not yet accessible to introspection, I often prefer to read about a person’s life in reverse chronological order, starting with his death and working backwards to his birth.

That’s strange enough, I suppose, but here’s something even stranger: I read Jeffrey Meyers’ Somerset Maugham: A Life starting with the source notes, after which I read the book itself from last page to first. Once finished, I re-read it in the normal fashion. All this took two days, and now I’m ready for another book.

My guess is that two passes through Somerset Maugham: A Life will be quite enough, not because Maugham’s life wasn’t interesting but because Jeffrey Meyers’ biography is of the sort typically described by tactful critics as “workmanlike.” The same thing could have been said of his previous biographies of (pause for deep breath) Orwell, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, and Robert Frost. Those are just the ones I’ve read, but there are plenty of others, Meyers being a full-time professional biographer, and here as before, his writing is unfussy but unstylish, his criticism not very insightful. If a great biography is the literary equivalent of a ten-course dinner prepared by a master chef, then Somerset Maugham: A Life is more like one of those freeze-dried meals dished up to astronauts: perfectly edible, even tasty if you’re hungry enough, but more functional than enjoyable. Meyers’ book-reportish summing-up of Maugham’s career will show you what I mean:

Maugham’s current reputation has eclipsed that of his old rivals: Shaw, Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy. More versatile than any modern writer, he wrote outstanding works in every genre: plays, stories and novels, essays, travel books and autobiographies. His exotic settings, engaging characters and riveting plots, his clear style, skillful technique and sardonic narrator, his dramatic flair and grasp of irony continue to attract a wide audience.

Oh, dear.

It occurs to me that reading such a book backwards might be my subconscious way of making it more aesthetically appealing. It definitely adds a touch of suspense, since you keep running into mysterious characters along the way who aren’t fully identified until much later on. But if that’s why I do it, why on earth did I start with the footnotes this time around? Perhaps that’s simply a deformation professionelle of a practicing biographer. I happen to like footnotes, so much so that I made a point of tucking a few choice anecdotes into the notes for The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken in order to ensure that those who shared my taste would be pleasantly surprised by their perseverance.

For this reason, I was amused to find this testy paragraph in the source notes for Somerset Maugham: A Life:

In his will Maugham specified that none of his unpublished writings should be printed after his death and that no assistance should be given to his biographer. Though the Royal Literary Fund has received all his royalties, they felt no moral or legal obligation to follow the terms of his bequest, and contravened his will by authorizing a biography and by granting permission to publish his letters. Donors who leave money to the fund should be warned that the explicit terms of their will may be completely ignored.

Now that’s my idea of a really superior footnote, well worth digging out of the back matter of a biography. Here’s another:

In a presentation copy of a 1948 reprint of Ashenden, Maugham wrote: “To Raymond Chandler, who has given the author of this book both in sickness and in health, many hours of undiluted happiness.”

Meyers even throws in a bit of dish. This note, for instance, refers to a now-forgotten writer by the name of David Posner who as a young man seduced the elderly Maugham:

Posner–who later married, published some poetry and died in 1985–was drawn to elderly homosexual writers. He once told me that he had courted Thomas Mann in Princeton.

Max Beerbohm could have spun a whole essay out of those two sentences.

As that last note suggests, Maugham led a life generously seasoned with scandal, but he’s not the sort of semi-obscure author who deserves to be remembered only for his sex life. Though I wouldn’t call him a Great Writer by any means, he did turn out a dozen or so first-class short stories whose astringent disillusion and plain, direct prose are as satisfying as a salty snack (I especially like “The Outstation” and “The Alien Corn”), as well as one of the very best comic novels of the twentieth century, Cakes and Ale, whose first sentence can be found in the “Opening Lines, Great” section of my electronic commonplace book: “I have noticed that when someone asks for you on the telephone and, finding you out, leaves a message begging you to call him up the moment you come in, and it’s important, the matter is more often important to him than to you.” How could you not keep on reading after that?

Such a minor master surely deserves to be memorialized in a decent biography, and Somerset Maugham: A Life, if less than scintillating, fills the bill with just enough room to spare. Meyers even manages to find room for a charming Maugham anecdote that I’d never heard. Fittingly, it’s about Cakes and Ale:

He liked it the best of all his books and, when looking for something good to read one evening, remarked: “What a pity that I wrote Cakes and Ale. It would be the very thing.”

Yes, there’s a footnote.

Home for a couple of hours in between Big Bill and Fiddler on the Roof (yes, this is a two-performance day, God help me). Instead of taking a nap, which is what I originally had in mind, I was seized by guilt and decided to catch up on my blogmail, and now it’s all answered, except for a few pieces that (A) require more thought or (B) will eventually get posted on the blog.

How about that? Are you impressed? This do I for my true readers. And now…a shower. Followed by a cab. Followed by Fiddler on the Roof, about which I’ll be writing in next Friday’s Wall Street Journal.

That’s my life. Sounds crazy, no?

Once I wake up, I’ll catch up, but it’s already been drawn to my attention that OGIC and I crashed a very nice party. According to the Literary Saloon:

In this week’s issue (of 19-26 February) of Time Out NY Maureen Shelly offers a literary weblog overview (the article is apparently not available online.) The weblogs she features are: the Literary Saloon, Bookslut
(“a favorite among young writers”), Maud Newton
(“covers a stunningly broad range of literary news”), About Last Night (“offers a more sophisticated take on the book biz”), Beatrice
(“Hogan maintains a civil tone in his critiques, thereby upping his credibility factor”), and the registration-requiring Publishers Lunch.

Needless to say, all the aforementioned blogs are to be found in “Sites to See,” along with plenty of others that are no less deserving of your attention. We admit to being especially pleased, though, to share space with Supermaud, if only because she promised to go see the Milton Avery show at the Phillips Collection in Washington this weekend, then come back and tell us all about it. She’s so cool.

Oh, yes, in case you were wondering, I haven’t opened my mailbox yet. I can’t get up the nerve. Nor have I caught up with my blogwatching. But I will, once I get another chunk of the Balanchine book written, not to mention a full night’s sleep, which I need most desperately. Right at this moment I feel like Leon Trotsky, post-axe.

See you Saturday.