On The Skirmish Line
Several rows erupted among lit bloggers in the 24 hour news cycle that ended with Seattle’s abrupt move to northern Arizona ( only temporary, but not a bad idea.) The rationale is obvious: northern Arizona needs a big city. Let the orcas play on First Avenue. There’s plenty of water. Anyway here’s Fight Night.
NaNo: The Rake compares NaNo to eating too many shrimp in too short a time while Eric Rosenfield rips it and Max of The Millions offers a tepid defense. Perhaps these gentlemen have forgotten t-ball wherein the very young and the very short whack balls off a tee. It’s all about the swing, boys, the hand and eye. My goodness did you think Jose Canseco emerged from someone’s laboratory?
Boyz against girlz: Maestro Frank Wilson has a comment thread about novelists, who’s better men or women. Lots of heat expended, but I remember a schoolyard incident where a girl hit the ball and ran directly to third base. Her logic? It’s closer to home. Even in the ensuing hubbub I admired her reasoning. Break some rules!
Finally Ed Champion tackles Kim Bofo for her op-ed piece about free books for bloggers. Kim feels that lit bloggers should reveal all when it comes to books sent by publishers for review. This may be viewed as the purist argument that free books undermine the bloggers’ free will, ensnaring them in the machinations of corporate greed and attendant evil. ( Oh Happy Day.) Food for thought. Your reporter uses his free books to climb to great heights. I can see clearly now. It’s raining.
November 16th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
Excuse me if I don’t understand this argument about free books somehow having a corrupting influence on bloggers’ reviews. For starters, I don’t understand how this corrupting influence acts selectively on bloggers but somehow spares folks who work for the NYT Review of Books.
But even more baffling is the idea that someone will get a book, dislike it, but give it a favorable review because it was…FREE!
It is hard to see how getting free copies of books one dislikes reading is much of a carrot. Is the deal that if you give rave reviews to bad books, they will stop sending them? (First Prize: A week in Moscow! Second Prize: TWO weeks in Moscow!)
My Full Disclosure: I am not a reviewer. I’m not even a blogger. A publisher has never given me a free book, although once long ago I did get six books for $1 when I joined the Book-of-the-Month Club. (It’s a sucker’s deal. You never remember to fill out the little card making your next selection in time, and so they automatically send you their Featured Selection, and you accumulate piles of books you don’t want to read. Sort of like being a reviewer, but more expensive.)