Michiko Kakutani at the New York Times reviews Andrew Keen’s book on the evils of Web 2.0. I wanted to recommend The Cult of the Amateur after I read it; many of the points that Keen raises therein are absolutely correct (such as the one I touched on in an earlier post). The digressions kept me from it.

. . .Mr. Keen wanders off his subject in the later chapters of the book–to deliver some generic, moralistic rants against Internet evils like online gambling and online pornography. . .

The Washington Post has a review of Mark Slouka’s The Visible World.

It is a rare thing for a novel to split open the illusion of narrative–like one of those 17th- century anatomical drawings where the corpse helpfully holds back the flaps of his own stomach–to reveal the underlying mechanics of creation, memory and desire.

In the recent fraud trial of Laura Albert, author of Sarah, the writer was found to have “strayed beyond the normal limits of pseudonymous invention.” There has been a great deal of hot air bellowed forth about the case, framing the issue as art versus commerce. It is hardly that, and in fact is simply fraud. I have little trouble agreeing with the jury’s verdict, though I wish that courts were just as eager to punish corporations that have committed fraud (as most do as a matter of course). As an example of how the media has twisted the JT LeRoy case to make it something sexy, CNN ran on its Web site a non-scientific poll asking whether authors should be able to use pseudonyms, something that was never questioned and had nothing at all to do with the coverage of the legal proceedings to which it was attached.

No, this site has not been dormant since March. I have been very busy writing and editing and have not had the time to track things literary, so from April to today I used this place as a kind of log of my reading. Though I am still busy, I miss, if only for memory’s sake, having a collection of the literary tidbits onto which I stumble. Onward and upward, then. Huzzah!

Not recommended.

Recommended.

Not recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Recommended.