The Book Club Blog

Who or what is Blue Mantle Pursivant ?

2005-05-20T10:37:00.000Z

For those who may have missed it, Simon Carr raises this question on page 7 of the Independent, 18 May. Could a member of the book club possibly shed light on this mystery ?

Boris Vian's, L’Écome des Jours, 1947 ('Froth on the Daydream'/'Mood Indigo'/'Foam of the Daze' - The Book Club's chosen book for the month ahead

2005-05-03T07:40:00.000Z

Andrea Dworkin RIP

2005-04-12T07:10:00.000Z

Anti-porn crusader Dworkin dies, - BBC
Feminist writer Andrea Dworkin dies - Swissinfo
Andrea Dworkin, feminist iconoclast, dies at 59 - New Zealand Herald
Feminist Andrea Dworkin Dies at 58 - Associated Press

Andrea Dworkin (born 26 September 1946 in Camden, New Jersey; died 9 April 2005) was an American radical feminist and writer.

Dworkin produced numerous books, articles and speeches. She was known mostly for her work on pornography, prostitution, and male violence against women. More than many other critics of pornography, she linked it directly to rape and violence. She was notable in general for attempting to link sexual issues to the larger structures in society. According to her, sexual behavior itself is a cause of inequality between men and women.

However, she also wrote about the class perspective on feminism, in books such as Right-Wing Women.

Dworkin, together with the feminist lawyer Catharine MacKinnon, drafted a proposal for a law that defined pornography as a civil rights violation against women, and allowed women to sue the producers and distributors of pornography in a civil court for damages. In 1983 the law was passed in Indianapolis, but was subsequently overturned as unconstitutional by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in 1985. The Supreme Court of the United States later upheld the lower court's ruling in American Booksellers Association, Inc. v. Hudnut.

In 1965, Dworkin was arrested during an anti-Vietnam War protest and sent to the Women's House of Detention. Her testimony of the experience was reported around the world. The prison is now closed.

Her works were highly controversial and she was heavily critizised from both sides of the political spectrum. Her ideas have been critised as a threat to family values by the right. At the other end of the spectrum, many continue to see her as a proponent of censorship and as exceedingly hostile towards free expression of sex.

Pornographic cartoons of Dworkin have appeared in Hustler, resulting in her suing the magazine.

At the end of her life, Dworkin lived in Washington, DC with her life partner John Stoltenberg, who was also a feminist activist.

Bibliography

Nonfiction

Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant (2002)
Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation (2000)
Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women (1997)
Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females (1991)
Letters from a War Zone: Writings, 1976-1987 (1988)
Intercourse (1988)
Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women's Equality (1988)
Pornography—Men Possessing Women (1981)
Our Blood: Prophesies and Discourses on Sexual Politics (1976)
Woman Hating (1974)

Fiction

Mercy (1990)
Ice and Fire (1986)
The New Woman's Broken Heart: Short Stories (1980)

- Professor Lisa Jardine is professor of Renaissance Studies and dean of the Faculty of Arts at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London and Honorary Fellow of King's College, Cambridge.
- Centre For Medieval & Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London
- Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS
- Department of History at Queen Mary, University of London.
- BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | Review | Lisa Jardine
- An interview with Lisa Jardine - Channel 4 History
This interview with Lisa Jardine was carried out by Oxford Film & Television for the Channel 4 programme The Great Fire of London.

Bloggers in the news

2005-04-11T08:04:00.000Z

Blogs Incensed Over Pulitzer Photo Award
New York Times - USA
There's always second-guessing when it comes to the Pulitzer Prize. But when The Associated Press was given the award for breaking ...

Behold, the wizard of blogs
Los Angeles Times (subscription) - CA,USA
... As a co-editor of one of the Web's most popular blogs, BoingBoing.net, Jardin is the cyberpunk babe who ferrets out odd blips of pop culture to amuse the more...

Celebrity etiquette. . . indeed

2005-04-10T09:00:00.000Z

Improve your branding with the help of a classic writer - join a book club
Polly Vernon
Sunday April 10, 2005

Observer

General Election watch

2005-04-04T13:00:00.000Z

With the announcement of the date of the General Election set for today (though now postponed until tomorrow following events in Rome) The Guardian has unveiled its new Election 2005 blog.

Pope John Paul II (May 18, 1920 – April 2, 2005) - RIP

2005-04-03T10:30:00.000Z

Karol Józef Wojtyła(May 18, 1920 – April 2, 2005) was Pope from October 16, 1978 until his death.

The Web Remebers Pope John Paul II, Guardian Newsblog, Neil McIntosh, April 3 2005

Pope links, BuzzMachine, by Jeff Jarvis

Breakfast with David Frost, BBC One

I know what I use mine for...

2005-04-01T10:00:00.000Z

Gmail is one today.

A salient point from The Guardian in the ongoing debate regarding the adjustment of the established print media to the ongoing 'blog revolution'

2005-04-01T08:30:00.000Z

"News sites must embrace blogs, says Guardian," Posted: 31 March 2005 By: Jemima Kiss, Online Journalism News: Journalism.co.uk - THE ESSENTIAL SITE FOR JOURNALISTS.

"Blogs are an important editorial innovation that must be embraced by the news industry, according to Guardian Unlimited's assistant editor Neil McIntosh.

Outlining a few of the issues presented by the blogging phenomenon at the Blogs in Action conference at London's Poland Club last week, Mr McIntosh said blogs are just the beginning of a wave of exciting journalistic publishing techniques.

"Blogging has had a big impact on journalism and that will grow," he said. "In four years' time we'll be using even more exciting stuff - a million miles from the monolithic systems we use now."

Mr McIntosh said two issues are particularly difficult for news sites to overcome when exploring the blog format.

First, the blogosphere is very hostile towards journalists and the mainstream media - as demonstrated by the Rathergate episode last year. US broadcaster CBS sacked four employees after bloggers helped to expose flaws in a story about President Bush's war record." There seems to be the impression that mainstream news sites publishing blogs is a bit like watching a vicar disco dance," said Mr McIntosh." Blogs are an editorial innovation, and it's important that we pursue them for that reason. But a blog launch isn't a blog launch without sarcastic comments saying they shouldn't be there."

Second, editors often approach blogs in the wrong way. "They lean back in their chairs and ask: 'what can blogs do for me when I'm trying to build a brand that will last for 100 years?' Bloggers are undermining that business case," added Mr McIntosh."Being an innovator and pushing boundaries is the future," said Mr McIntosh. "You either do that - or accept that where we are now is as good as it gets. The Guardian is reluctant to do that."The Guardian's first experiment with blogs was back in 2000, as a repository of links to the rest of the web." It's important to show discussion elsewhere on the web, but that is daring for news sites."Editors can be terrified at the prospect of allowing blogging journalists to publish unedited writing, but Mr McIntosh insisted that the quality of work on the Guardian's blogs is as high as the rest of the site."

The interactivity is the real bonus. Journalists engage with comments from readers, and that's much better than if they don't believe people are reading their stuff."The exchange of views promoted by blogs is indeed a growing phenomenon. One story on the Guardian site during last November's US election triggered 800 comments. In addition, blogs often generate ideas for the editorial team, and the Guardian has recruited writers for the newspaper based on their accurate and well-written comments for the site's blogs.

Mr McIntosh also talked about the recently-launched Observer blog, which describes the editorial decisions and processes behind the production of the Sunday newspaper. He rejected a comment that the blog was a marketing exercise for the paper."The marketing department was not consulted at any point. If we were going to do that, our games blog probably has much more potential in terms of its market and audience for ads.""All blogs do something slightly different, and Rafael Behr [Observer web editor] made the decision to have something that lifts the lid on these processes," he said."

Melinda and Melinda

2005-03-29T07:58:00.000Z

Woody Allen's latest film grasps at greatness, decides to take itself too seriously instead.

The Sunday Times appears committed to discrediting blogs

2005-03-13T08:30:00.000Z

The Times/News International/News Corporation Limited shows no sign of appreciating the various potential of blogs as they are now being put to use across the internet. But seems content to make a mockery of the blogosphere and its participants. It makes you wonder why these journalists don't just turn off the internet and go and do something less boring instead. Sitting at their desks, writing misleading and uninformed articles bemoaning the efforts of what they imagine to be a unified tribe of "bloggers," is really of so little use to anyone that its hard to imagine why they bother. Cue the usual negative stereotypes and run VT.

The inner world of Joe Blogs: "Everything you never wanted to know about your fellow citizens’ banal daily lives is accessible to you now on the internet,"Allan Brown, The Sunday Times, March 13, 2005

“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything,” wrote Oscar Wilde in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, “except what is worth knowing.”
Few things bear this out more convincingly than the world of blogging (or, as it winsomely styles itself, the blogosphere). While older readers adjust their ear trumpets, it is perhaps worth pointing out that blogging is the increasingly popular pastime of placing one’s daily diary on the internet, the term blog being a contraction of “web log”.
"Unconstrained by the need to be interesting in any way whatsoever, blogs are the background radiation of the intellectual realm, the white noise of the collective unconscious, scrolling out their narratives whether anybody wishes to read them or not."
"In one sense a Warholian tribute to the fascination of banality, blogs confirm Martin Amis’s claim that where once it was thought that everyone had a book in them, that book has now become an autobiography."
"As astonishing as it is to think that computer geeks might shy from human contact, bloggers, it seems, can be a furtive and elusive bunch, preferring the one-way mirror of their controlled solitude to the messy complexities of real people."
"As with the Google search engine, simplistic page designs are considered to be almost a badge of honour to bloggers: most just feature text, rolling and rambling down the page without interruption from such crowd-pleasing features as pictures. The medium is the message — and both can seem exquisitely dull."
"A one-man Central Office of Information, (Martin) Frost has clearly devoted his life to blogging, with results that make you wonder nervously what he might have done had the internet never been invented."
"The rest, on the other hand, simply make you ponder the processes that denied the bloggers the quotient of recognition and acknowledgment that prevent normal people’s diaries from escaping their desk drawers. "
"Blogs are electronic megaphones, and they turn what was once personal and anecdotal into tiny stitches in the vast tapestry of common knowledge. Virtually none of it is of any use to a reader. But read enough of them, and you suspect that the end-user is the last thing blogging is about."

Update (24th March):
- A good round-up of the responses to Allan Brown's article can be found here:
Sunday Times Scotland doesnae like bloggers, Independence :A personal blog for Scottish independence, by Stuart Dickson. 13 March, 2005
"Allan Brown, the dead-tree journalist assigned by Sunday Times Scotland's Ecosse supplement to scribble a story about Scottish blogging, does not like what he finds. We should not be too surprised. Bloggers, and especially political bloggers, are going to seriously challenge the hegemony of dead-wood newspapers in the foreseeable future....Lordy. And some journalists wonder why they are widely considered to be the rejected spermatozoa of Satan.Bye bye Sunday Times Scotland. When dead-tree media do finally choke on their own expulsions I will not be greetin at the burial."

Simon Jenkins takes up the baton - Bloggers versus the media continued

2005-03-12T19:29:00.000Z

Simon Jenkins has followed the recent example of Iain Duncan Smith and written an article on blogging in one of the internet's free to read publications produced by the so-called "Mainstream Media."
Background:
- Times columnist Simon Jenkins to join the Guardian, January 27, 2005
- He is currently writing a book on politics, to be published by Allen Lane (January 27, 2005?)

Simon Jenkins, "Under my keyboard the desk shakes. The bloggers are on the march," The Times, March 11, 2005
-"What is clear is that the blogosphere has taken the press temporarily by storm... Newpapers have been upstaged successively by the teleprinter, radio, television and now the internet. Each barbarian wave arrives at the gates of Rome and claims to be "resetting the agenda". Each assimilates into the local population."
- "These people claim to be the unofficial legislators of free opinion. They quake, rant, muckrake, scream like 17th-century Puritans. Most of the blog sites regurgitate and spin what the mainstream media (dismissively the “MSM”) has spent millions finding and checking.
- "Most are fanatically conservative. All you need is a taste for exhibitionism and a fancy name: mediabistro (BCB - a networking service for journalists), FishBowlDC (BCB - Bloggers blag way into White House, Times, 8 March, 2005), wonkette. One Yahoo blogger, Ted Rall, (BCB - America's hardest-hitting editorial cartoonist for Universal Press Syndicate, is an award-winning commentator who also works as an illustrator, columnist, and radio commentator.) gives warning of the blogosphere: “A new sheriff’s in town. He’s drunk. He’s mean, and he works for the bad guys.” The web is the Bushites’ revenge on the liberal media establishment. A blog polarises or dies."
- "Yet the ground did shake under me. Earlier threats to the press came from new conduits of news and information. Today’s goes to the heart of my trade. It peddles opinion. I can pretend to occupy a higher plane. I can try pleading factual accuracy, consistency, uncorruptibility and a quote or two from Shakespeare.
- "But in truth I too am a blogger, snatching at some item of passing news to argue a case and persuade. And I charge for it. The blogger does it for nothing. I am on my mettle as never before."
- "So move over, Caxton, the mystery is no more. The whistle-blowers, e-babies, inside-outers, wonkettes, quacks and cranks have globalised Speakers’ Corner. They have rebuilt the Tower of Babel and put microphones on top of it. Amid the noise, a still small voice of reason will still be heard. But it may require the help of Microsoft, not dead trees."

- Which has been pretty thoroughly dissected and rebutted (Fisked) in typical fashion by the Daily Ablution:
The Daily Ablution, "Who's Quaking Now?" March 11, 2005
"Nonsense. A successful blog needn't polarise. A blog interests, informs and entertains or dies - much like a newspaper columnist."
"Journalists who are accurate and honest have little to fear - the facts will out. Their less capable (and less truthful) colleagues risk the humiliation of public ridicule."
"And for me, that - not quaking, ranting or screaming - is what media criticism blogging is all about."

- Harry's Place has also considered Jenkin's article: Quacks and Cranks, 11 March, 2005.
- Jenkins: "The problem for conventional journalism is to prove that such qualities as newsgathering and reliability are worth more than a scream of opinion, enough to get people to part with money. I notice how often blogs refer to items witnessed on television or read in The New York Times. Someone must gather this stuff, check it, source it, write and edit it." - Harry: "Well, of course. We bloggers all know that we need quality articles in the papers in order to have something to discuss. So does Simon Jenkins I would imagine. After all, what would columnists like him write about if there were no reporters to create actual news for him to respond to?
But bloggers, the better ones anyway, do carry out research. They check the sources of newspaper articles, they leave links so that readers can check out their source material."
- Harry: "While American blogs react against the small-c conservatism of the US media, British blogs have, on the whole, been much less interested in the shock-horror reporting that dominates the British papers."
"So while the British press have been obsessed with who has been shagging who at the Spectator or where Charles and Camilla are going to tie the knot, most of the blogs I read have been discussing democratisation in the Middle East. Exactly who is dumbing down discourse?"

- "The Lonely Defense of the MSM," Running Scared: Observations of a former Republican
- "Most bloggers are probably going to take his essay as yet another "bash the bloggers" attack story. I would suggest that Jenkins is different - far more thoughtful, recognizing reality, and offering criticism which often has the ring of truth."
- "I think it's unfair to describe the blogosphere as uniformly conservative. However, if you look at which blogs get all of the attention from the supposedly "liberal" MSM, you can see why. Powerline is easily ten times as well known as Atrios among non-blog readers. It's sad that this is the type of brush being used to paint all bloggers, but understandable at the same time."
- "Owning a computer and starting a free blogger account doesn't immediately put you on the same team with Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts jr."
- "Newspapers cost money and blogs are free. This is not an accident. The old axiom is still true... you get what you pay for in most cases."

- I wonder why Jazz Shaw is still paying for his newspapers. Hasn't the internet made newspapers free to read (once you've bought a PC and paid for a connection - though WiFi networks mean you can often log on for nothing once you've paid £30.00 or so for the relevant gadget), and before the internet came along I seem to remember newspapers being freely available to read at the library which is free to join or simply walk into off the street.

Dave Allen (6 July 1936 - 10 March 2005) RIP - "Don't mourn for me now, don't mourn for me never - I'm going to do nothing for ever and ever."

2005-03-12T08:30:00.000Z

Irish comic and satirist Dave Allen died in his sleep on Thursday. "Goodnight, thank you, and may your god go with you."

His target was hypocrisy about sex and religion — and he regularly ridiculed his Roman Catholic roots. The former journalist (he had a brief stint as a reporter on The Drogheda Argus) had his first taste of television came on the BBC talent show New Faces in 1959. He toured Australia in 1963 and was invited to host his own TV chatshow, Tonight with Dave Allen. It ran for 18 months, despite a controversial episode in which he discussed the merits of masturbation with guests Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. He returned to the UK in 1964 and the first episode of the British version of Tonight with Dave Allen went on air four years later. In 1971, BBC2 commissioned Dave Allen at Large, a mixture of straight-to-camera monologues and sketches.
With his background in journalism, Allen's style as a comic emphasised information, presented with a surreal slant. Some called him the "Irish Lenny Bruce" and he was considered one of the first alternative comedians, telling risqué jokes about sex and religion, and his use of strong language even led to questions being asked in the House of Commons. Asked to describe himself in an interview in 1998, he said: "I'm a grumpy old fuck with a sense of humour." He once quipped: “You spend your life working to a point where you don’t have to work. When you reach that point, people say, ‘Why aren’t you working’?”

- He stopped smoking "60 a day" in the 1980s, saying he was fed up with "paying people to kill me."

- On the West End stage:

"In case you wonder what I do," he would tell the audience, "I tend to stroll around and chat. I'd be grateful if you'd refrain from doing the same."

- On TV, his genius was to hold audiences with random observations, such as "Skin is very interesting," spinning into a full-blown but well-honed monologue, with the odd forbidden word. This got him into hot water, especially after he raved on about how lives were dominated by time:

"We spend our lives on the run: we get up by the clock, eat and sleep by the clock, get up again, go to work - and then we retire. And what do they give us? A fucking clock."

Robert Haywood, a Tory MP, tabled a Commons question asking the then Home Secretary, David Waddington, to raise the incident with the BBC.
Allen, ever urbane and relaxed, remarked: "Language is there to be used. If you sanitise it, you take everything out of it."

- Ian Davidson, a writer who worked for a decade with Allen, said: "He had so much anger, especially against the priesthood - and that was where he got his energy. He also had a keen sense of the absurd.
"I enjoyed the tales about how he lost part of his finger. I could always tell they were lies. No one knows how he really lost part of his finger." (Allen made a comedy prop of his left index finger — where only a stump remained after a childhood accident.)

- Barry Cryer: "He was so serious and committed, but he proved you could be serious and funny he was our Bill Hicks."

- Frank Skinner: “Dave Allen was a classy, intelligent comic. He was awesome. His punchlines came between swigs.”

- Eddie Izzard said: "He was an original. He carved his own path. I think he was the first alternative stand-up to have his own show on TV, and he was a torch-bearer for all the excellent Irish comics who have followed in recent years.
"I’m glad that his material has just been released on DVD, as it can now be added to the British/Irish library of comedy greats."

-Alan Yentob, said: "I am very shocked and sad to hear of Dave’s death. There was no-one like him - the stool, the smile, the cigarette, the hand gesture, the slow burn. He was a master storyteller, a real original."

- Rik Mayall said: "I’m deeply saddened to hear of Dave Allen’s death. He was an absolute hero from childhood."

- Television producer Paul Jackson, who became friends with Allen after working with him at ITV, remembered the comedian as a "fabulous storyteller".
"You remember his love of argument and complexity," Mr Jackson said yesterday. "He told stories not jokes and through those stories he observed human nature so precisely and was angry at the things in life that should make you angry. He railed against the stupidity of the world and gave voice to a lot of things people think but don't say."

- Allen's agent for 27 years, Vivienne Clore, said the comedian had been unwell over Christmas, but had recovered and was not suffering any life-threatening illnesses. He was still considering new projects at the time of his death and enjoying his garden at his home in west London. He would have been "pissed off" to be described as in semi-retirement.
"He had a natural curiosity about everything and everyone and would build up a close relationship with everyone he worked with."

- Obituaries: Guardian; Telegraph; Scotsman; BBC Report; BBC Tributes; Sun;
- Dave Allen - in his own words - Guardian
- Links: Screen Online biography

Book Club Blog Link Log

2005-03-06T17:25:00.000Z

- Tim Worstall's third weekly BritBlog Roundup has been posted. Check it out!
- Richard Ingrams Diary, Observer, 6th March. What's wrong at the BBC/ The unintended consequence of extending maternity leave/ Blunkett's Online University no longer exists.

- Camille Paglia, "Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s", published in the classics and humanities journal Arion in winter 2003.
- From Camille Paglia (wikipedia)
"One day in New York that summer (1968), she happened to run into Catherine Deneuve on Fifth Avenue and found herself "stalking" her through Saks Fifth Avenue."
- "The North American intellectual tradition," Camille Paglia, Salon, March 04, 2000
"To hell with European philosophers: The breakthroughs of non-European thinkers are the 1960s' greatest legacy."
- From Salon's Ask Camille:
"The brothel episodes in Luis Buñuel's "Belle de Jour" (1967), starring the gorgeously luminous Catherine Deneuve, introduced me to the now widely publicized fact that men of wealth and power often frequent prostitutes for lavish role-reversal scenarios, where the male is abased and enslaved. It's a Babylonian version of penance and absolution."
- Fax Off and Die You Bitch! - The Paglia/Burchill fax war
- The Modern Review, 1991-1999

- PAGLIA WARNS INTERNET: ONLY ART LASTS, Drudge Report Exclusive, 6, March, 2005
""In our voracious 24-hour news cycles, we're rafting down the roaring river of media. It's exciting and exhilarating, but it's good to remember that SOME things last--and they're in art!""
- Harold Bloom/Naomi Wolf - Craig Brown, Telegraph, 28 Feb, 2004
- Wolf/Paglia, Jemima Lewis, Telegraph, 22, February , 2004
- Jackie Danicki, Talking blogs in the City of Angels
"I got a cab back to where I am staying in Park La Brea. Along the way, the driver asked me what I do. “Have you heard of blogs?” I asked. “Of course I’ve heard of blogs!” he replied. “That’s all we hear on the radio all day in our cabs, the conservatives and the liberals are all blogging and it’s all blog-this and blog-that. It’s pretty interesting.”"

Blogging and Campaign finance reform

2005-03-04T10:50:00.000Z

- As Talon News undergoes a review of operations in light of the recent controversy surrounding the case of James Guckert/Jeff Gannon it appears that political activity on the internet and political blogging are posing serious dilemmas for the Federal Election Commission as it seeks a way to define whether a blog post or a hyperlink on a blog to a candidate's website or indeed, their blog, amounts to a campaign contribution, and what the monetary value of such a contribution should be. How exciting!

- Declan McCullagh, "The coming crackdown on blogging" (interview with Bradley Smith one of the six commissioners at the Federal Election Commission which is beginning the process of extending a 2002 campaign finance law to the Internet), CNet/News.com, Mar. 3).
- "Bradley Smith says that the freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over. In just a few months, he warns, bloggers and news organizations could risk the wrath of the federal government if they improperly link to a campaign's Web site. Even forwarding a political candidate's press release to a mailing list, depending on the details, could be punished by fines."
- Smith: "I don't think the Democratic commissioners are sitting around saying that the Internet is working to the advantage of the Republicans."
- Smith: "The judge's decision is in no way limited to ads. She says that any coordinated activity over the Internet would need to be regulated, as a minimum. The problem with coordinated activity over the Internet is that it will strike, as a minimum, Internet reporting services.
They're exempt from regulation only because of the press exemption. But people have been arguing that the Internet doesn't fit under the press exemption. It becomes a really complex issue that would strike deep into the heart of the Internet and the bloggers who are writing out there today."

(CNET Editor's note: federal law limits the press exemption to a "broadcasting station, newspaper, magazine or other periodical publication.")
- (via Jon; via Overlawyered.com)
- McCain-Feingold

A Call to Keyboards for the Pajamahadin - "What is to be done?"

2005-03-03T08:28:00.000Z

In the wake of non-blogging Iain Duncan Smith's bizarre recognition of the potential of blogs to jettison Michael Howard into Number 10 (?!), John Lloyd's misplaced fears about the threat of blogging to "public-spirited journalism, Jackie Danicki's doubts about an LSE panel's understanding or appreciation of the blogosphere, and bemusement and resignation among some British bloggers at the failure of British blogs to follow the trailblazing example of their American cousins and rise up and be counted - comes an exhortation to British bloggers to take their responsibilities more seriously.

- The bloggers shall inherit the Gonzo, Paul Carr, Guardian, Monday February 28, 2005
- Bloggers: It's time for the weird to turn pro, Tai Pei Times, By Paul Carr, THE GUARDIAN , LONDON Thursday, Mar 03, 2005,Page 9.

- Paul Carr is editor-in-chief of the Friday Project (www.thefridayproject.co.uk).
Endorsement from an old friend:
"The Friday Thing is so good it's stopping me from doing a bunk of a Friday afternoon." - Annie Blinkhorn (The Erotic Review)
- He points out that he has nothing to do with The Friday Night Project - the questionable CH4 television programme hosted by Jimmy Carr (presumable no relation).

- This chap seems to be on our wavelenghth. But what does he think the Book Club Blog has been doing?

"The story had broken too late to catch the morning papers, so the first I heard of the death of the greatest journalist ever was from a list of search results."
I tried to write an instant obituary of sorts for the Friday Thing but as I started surfing for background information, I realised that there was no point. Hundreds of ezines and blogs had already begun chronicling the life of the great man, linking to snippets of his work, and considering why he might choose to take his own life at this time.
The world needed Thompson most during the Nixon era - and he delivered, in spades. If, 30 years on, we still have not found a replacement, then that is the world's failing, not his. But the bloggers do have a point - no matter what Will Self's nocturnal fantasies might lead him to believe, there is no obvious heir to the Gonzo throne.
And yet consider Thompson's modus operandi. He was fiercely opinionated; he documented almost every aspect of his life, as if not committing something to paper meant it had not really happened; he used the power of the fax to get answers from people in power (the equivalent today would be email); he consumed the media as if his life depended on it, tearing it apart and writing up the results for a potential audience of millions ... If he wasn't the archetypal blogger I don't know who was.
With the traditional media, particularly in the US, rapidly turning to unquestioning mush, and blogs being responsible for more and more muckraking and story-breaking, Thompson's death is the perfect time for bloggers to be recognised as the nearest thing we have to Gonzo journalism. There is just one problem - with very few exceptions, bloggers are embarrassingly, pathetically lazy. When Thompson got excited by a story, he would get on a plane and make himself part of it.
How could he know what was really going on if he never left his "heavily fortified compound" in Woody Creek? And yet hand most bloggers a tip on a silver platter and they will publish it verbatim, without so much as follow-up phonecall.

- You reckon?

Of course, there are good reasons why bloggers can not be as dedicated as Thompson was. Firstly, Thompson was paid for his work while bloggers do it for love and the occasional Paypal donation. Secondly, Thompson had press accreditation to major events while bloggers do not.

Sites such as Gawker and Wonkette have shown that advertisers are more than willing to pay handsomely for first-person online journalism, especially if it is edgy and has a unique voice.
And that is before you consider the spin-off opportunities that have been realised by the likes of the Baghdad Blogger and Belle de Jour.
And as for access - anyone with a decent audience and even cursory blagging skills can get accreditation to cover almost anything (our writers were gaining access to ministers and arms fairs months before anyone had heard of us). The money and access are there for the taking - you have just got to want them."

"It is time for bloggers Bloggers, or pajamahidin as they've been called, to start taking their responsibilities seriously. That means putting on their reporting shoes, leaving their bedrooms, buying a notepad and throwing themselves into covering the stories that no one in the traditional media would dare to, or care to.
US President George W Bush is our former US president Richard Nixon, Google is our Rolling Stone, the going has got weird -- and it's time for the weird to turn pro."

Update:
- Mystery surrounds HST's last typed word: "Counselor", Guardian, March 3, 2005
-

Bloggers, the Main Stream Media, and a tale of two Presidents

2005-03-02T00:06:00.000Z

Harry at Harry's Place ("Bloggers v The Media" plus interesting comment discussion) reacts to last night's LSE Media Group Event 'The Fall and Fall of Journalism' which set out to:

"explore the challenges presented to traditional media by the new breed of "citizen reporters", bloggers and "nearly journalists". Following on from recent discussions in the press sparked by John Lloyd, editor of the FT Magazine's claim that journalists live in a "parallel universe" and The Guardian's follow-up article "Do They Mean Us?" where over 50 people, those who allegedly 'run Britain', were asked the simple question "What do you think of journalists?" the debate will seek to expose an industry where the values of credibility and trust have been undermined not only by consolidation among news providers but also by a lack of respect for accuracy."

Harry notes that Jackie Danicki attended the event and was clearly not very impressed with the standard of the debate and the panel's understanding of the nature of blogs the and ways in which they interact with and complement existing journalism and media.

Danicki's excellent article is entitled "The Fall and Fall of Blogging Debate in Britain" and deserves to be read and digested in full by anyone interested in understanding the potential and future of blogging, particularly in Britain, where it seems to have some catching up to do with developments, and the understanding and appreciation of them, elsewhere.

Danicki': "If everyone’s main concern was the truth and how we get to it....what seemed to be missing was a basic understanding of exactly how and why blogs really are fundamentally different from traditional journalism."
"What no one on the panel seemed willing to point out, if they did indeed know it, was that the aim of bloggers is not to replace traditional journalists. While definitely not a collective, as some panel members seemed to believe, the blogosphere is made up of individuals whose motivations for revealing truth and correcting untruth are not borne of a desire to bring down the media."
"What really gets to people is sloppy reporting, spin presented as fact, and audiences being misled.
"The internet is not a broadcast channel, but a two-way conversation whose one-to-many information distribution differs significantly and inherently from that of traditional media."

- Further consideration by Mike Fealty at SLUGGER O'TOOLE Notes on Northern Ireland politics and culture.
- More from Martin Stabe - part 1, part 2.
- Harry's Place Q&A with John Lloyd

Harry asks an interesting question:
"Just where has this notion that blogs are out to try and compete with or replace mainstream journalism come from?"
and makes the point that:
"Political blogging is much more about politics than media. If we must compare it to anything I'd say it most closely ressembles the old pamphleteer tradition. People putting out ideas and looking for like-minded people to join in discussion and activity. Personally I really couldn't give a hoot about the 'role of blogs in a pluralist media' or whatever. To me blogging is my way of being involved in politics and having my say - and I like it. And from that point of view blogging also works. After all this blog gets more hits in a week than Socialist Worker has readers and we don't even have to send students out to stand in front of Sainsbury's on a Saturday morning."
Concluding that
"In the end, while there is huge potential for people in politics, business, education and many other areas, a blog is a piece of software and you can do what you want with it. People will take it or leave it."

Which all makes perfect sense.

This is interesting in light of recent considerations on the Book Club Blog regarding differences between the British and America blogospheres, that were partly stimulated by Iain Duncan Smith's recent piece in the Guardian in which he suggested that blogging could provide a means by which to reinvigorate British conservatism.

A politically conscious blogosphere does appear to have evolved more rapidly in America than in Britain, as evinced by the recent fates of Dan Rather, Eason Jordan and James Guckert/Jeff Gannon. Numerous prominent individual bloggers, and the ever spiralling networks emanating out from and back towards them, have emerged from the medium in the US to make visible impacts on the national political debate the equal of which have not been apparent in the UK.

To such an extent that Richard Wolffe, writing in the current issue of Newsweek, reports that when President Bush recently confronted his Russian counterpart about the freedom of the press in Russia, Putin shot back with an attack of his own: "We didn't criticize you when you fired those reporters at CBS." Wolffe goes on to say that:
"It's not clear how well Putin understands the controversy that led to the dismissal of four CBS journalists over the discredited report on Bush's National Guard service. Yet it's all too clear how Putin sees the relationship between Bush and the American media—just like his own."

It was suggested to me that perhaps "Putin hasn't been reading up on his blogging (or his John Lloyd)" in light of Lloyd's recent article on blogging in the FT (25th February, 2005) - "The anti-people plot" - in which he compares the populist (both rightist and leftist) anti-establishment message that has long informed tabloid journalism in Germany, Italy, America, Britain and Australia to the spirit that now informs the world of blogs. Lloyd points out that blogs "can also take left and right colouring," but echoing Iain Duncan Smith's analysis, he suggests that they "have recently seemed more influential when on the right." Indeed, having argued that the US blogosphere is predominantly engaged in a war on the mainstream media - "the elite, snobbish, anti-people target of choice" - Lloyd concludes that:
"”The truth will set you free!” was once a motto on socialist and trade union banners. It has now been taken up by the right, and it is changing the face of journalism."

All of which got me thinking that President Putin may well understand US blogging campaigns to oust "liberal" figures in the "mainstream media" better than Newsweek's Richard Wolfe would like his readership to believe.

It has been widely reported just how adept Karl Rove has become at exploiting unconventional methods for the purposes of manipulating coverage of the Bush White House, setting the national agenda, and generally silencing or dispensing with those critical of the neo-con mantra.
In the way that Newt Gingrich understood the rise of a populist new right across the dials of American talk radio during the 1990s, Rove appears to understand the blogosphere and the terrain of mass sensibilities far better than any opposite number in the Democrat ranks.
Current Republican hegemony is not simply accounted for by the lack of cohesiveness and unity on the left or the fact that the left's message is more complicated and detailed than that of the right. It was ever so. Though these factors clearly play their role in making the job of Rove, his salaried bloggers and planted White House journalists, far easier than it should be.

No. What has really aided the Bush Whitehouse in its bid to take control of and dominate the political debate in America, and with it the recent election, has been their affinity with, insight into, and organisational skills in responding to the emergence of the blogosphere's new journalism.

Given the context, this is naturally populist, and predominantly right wing, "independent," and libertarian in the American tradition of suspicion for elites, cosmopolitanism, corporations, authority and the nuances of a liberal education and mind.

Sure, there are liberal bloggers too, but they tend to reinforce the minority message emanating from the universities, the "cities" of the coastal extremities, and to a degree the sophisticated analysis available from the establishment's "liberal press" and "national television corporations." Demographically speaking though, and in terms of the popular majority that swept the White House, the majority of politically conscious and active Americans are more inclined to sympathies similarly and equally critical of liberal bloggers and the "mainstream media."
This is where the Bush brand of pseudo-Reaganite neo-conservatism comes into its own. For just as Reagan lived the life of a Hollywood king blessed with the trappings of wealth and privilege far removed from the reality of ordinary Americans, yet propelled himself to power as a democratic, egalitarian man of, and friend to the American people, so the same is true of his successors.

They went to the same universities, trained for the same professions, run similar corporations, and live much the same day to day lives as their political opponents, and yet the mandarins of Bush Republicanism set themselves politically in contradistinction to the institutions they inhabit.

They are the outsiders on the inside, and in so being are able to concur and resonate with the will of the true populist outsiders of the blogosphere, who may in fact actually be just as much a part of the American establishment as they are.

For whilst professional journalists seem keen to identify a lack of professionalism, education, and fact-checking scrupulousness on the part of bloggers, the bloggers who have succeeded in building up substantial enough readerships, in the thoroughly democratic and fundamentally competitive world of free-to-read online personal publishing, to have themselves heard above the cacophony and make an impact on the national consciousess, are just as likely academics, lawyers, businessman and very often professional journalists themselves who have found a conduit through which they are able to better express themselves more eloquently, more substantively and more forcefully than ever before or any place else.

This has meant that whereas the conclusion of the Watergate scandal marked the high water-mark of the mainstream liberal news media's ability to uncover corruption amidst America's political class, so the fates of CBS news anchor Dan Rather and CNN head of news Eason Jordan demonstrate the extent to which the scrutiny applied to figures of authority by Woodward and Bernstein has been embraced by the subsequent generation and democratised in its applicability by the blogosphere, ironically more often than not in service to those suspicious of the motives of its traditional practitioners. The sons of Nixon can thus avenge their father's slayers.

The nature and extent of press freedoms and state control of the media in the United States and Russia are almost incomparably different. President Putin does not have to contend with a vital democratic tradition and inalienable penchant for public debate stretching back almost 230 years to the founding of the American Republic, and still further to the public meeting halls and church sermons of the colonies and beyond. Likewise, President Bush is not wrestling a nascent democratic culture into being in the shadow of a decomposing bureaucratic structure of totalitarian state censorship and control. It is almost absurd for the two men to engage in a discourse that in any way equates their different contexts.

However, in responding to being confronted by Bush with regard to the freedom of the press in Russia, by reminding the American President that "We didn't criticize you when you fired those reporters at CBS," Vladimir Putin was not as far wide of the mark as the President and his place-men in the press would have the world believe. Indeed, far from demonstrating his ignorance of the blogosphere and the nuanced possibilities it offers up for enhancing democratic political systems, Putin was perhaps revealing his appreciation of the way in which ruling elites within democracies are able to interact with their masses in order to perpetuate a system in which they manage both to serve and control them. For as I suspect Mr Bush and Mr Putin are both profoundly aware, the tail very rarely wags the dog.

Update:
- Bobbie Johnson, "Posting for profit," Guardian, Thursday February 24, 2005.
"As weblogs soar in number and influence, their business potential lands many in the money."
"It's possible for an individual, skillful blogger to have income from a blog," says Adriana Cronin-Lukas, a consultant for fledgling firm the Big Blog Company (www.bigblogcompany.net), and a serious weblogging evangelist. "But ultimately it is the communications aspect of the blog that brings money in - by blogging about a company or expertise."

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville is the Book Club's newly chosen book

2005-02-26T09:09:00.000Z

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

The Independent considers Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood essential reading for British school children

2005-02-24T08:30:00.000Z

What books should our children read? The Independent, 24 February 2005.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) has decided to launch a public debate on what classroom English in the 21st century should be.

Sue Horner, head of English at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA):
"We thought that rather than just tinker with it we would think hard about it, and how it will look in the future. We don't have a view. We are saying: 'What do you think about this, then?' It is a completely new way for us to work."

In response, The Independent proposes a cannon of 20 authors deemed essential school reading. The only one of whom to have featured as the author of one of our chosen Book Club Books is Murakami. And he certainly wasn't on the curriculum when I was at school.

Shakespeare: King Lear / Romeo and Juliet
John Donne
The Romantic poets: Keats/Coleridge/ Wordsworth
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations
Anton Chekhov: Short stories
TS Eliot
F Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Virginia Woolf: To The Lighthouse
George Orwell: Animal Farm
Alan Paton: Cry, the Beloved Country
Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
Primo Levi: If This Is a Man
William Golding: Lord of the Flies
Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
VS Naipaul: A House for Mr Biswas
Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children (1980)
Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987)
Haruki Murakami: Norwegian Wood (1987)

Hunter S Thompson RIP

2005-02-21T10:55:00.000Z

Hunter S. Thompson has shot himself dead at 67. Guardian Times Scotsman New York Times Times obituary
- The Great Thompson Hunt
- YOUNG DOCTOR THOMPSON, Esquire article, Excerpt from Hunter, The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson, by E. Jean Carroll

Literary Kicks: "Hunter S. Thompson, who carried the beat romanticism of Jack Kerouac, the political conviction of Allen Ginsberg and the acidic skepticism of William S. Burroughs into the world of popular journalism, died a Hemingway-esque death in Colorado on February 20, 2005."

- Guardian - Newsblog: A product of his own chutzpah: "According to his Wikipedia entry, Thompson "is generally regarded as the grandfather of the blogging movement" - a statement that's news to me but which, presumably, refers to blogs' tendency to place the author and his prejudices at the heart of the narrative, just as he did, rather than to any propensity on the part of bloggers to consume vast amounts of narcotics."
- Daily Kos's clarifies idea of HST as inspiration for bloggers
"Thompson was known for a style that he described as "gonzo journalism," a form of "new journalism." It was based on the idea that fidelity to fact did not always blaze the way to truth.
Instead, "gonzo journalism" and its practitioners suggested that a deeper truth could be found in the ambiguous zones between fact and fiction.
"Objective journalism is one of the main reasons that American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long," Thompson told interviewers in a characteristic pronouncement on both institutions.
"You can't be objective about Nixon," he said. "How can you be objective about Clinton?"Hunter S. Thompson -- the world's first blogger."

*I suppose that makes you know who's Belle de Jour a work of pure gonzo.
**A book buyers guide to purchasing a work of gonzo non-fiction. THE SEARCH FOR HUNTER S. THOMPSON, S.E. Munday 1998.

- Blogcritics.org review of Hunter S. Thompson's Hey Rube : Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness Modern History from the Sports Desk

"The essays in Hey Rube are collected from his weekly column for ESPN Magazine over the last three years. They're very short essays, usually 300-500 words, and they're ostensibly about sports. In actuality they're about whatever Thomspon felt like writing about at the time, and basically weave together three threads of narrative, his personal life, his political observations, and his opinions on various aspects of sport.
Thompson had his start in journalism as a sports writer before he diverged into mostly politics and surrealistic personal narrative. To some degree these essays take him back to his roots, but heavily filtered through his gonzo style where everything is grist for his mill."

- ESPN Hunter S. Thompson Hey Rube Archive
- From Hunter S. Thompson's Hey Rube column "Jack Kerouac and the Football Hall of Fame"
"It was midnight on Sunday when my telephone rang. My nerves were raw, and my eyes were swollen from an overdose of pure Ozone, which had blinded me many hours earlier when I tampered with input-jets at the swimming pool.
But the phone kept ringing, and I recognized the singular voice of my friend James Irsay, who was calling to tell me not to worry about his star running back, Edgerrin James, not showing up for the Indianapolis Colts' summer football camp.
"It's nothing to worry about, Hunter," said Irsay, who owns the Colts and a few other things -- including the original scroll/manuscript of Jack Kerouac's legendary "Beat Generation" novel, On The Road. ... I had called him to check out some rumors about the "mysterious disappearance" of his 22-year-old NFL rushing champ, who is crucial to the Colts' Super Bowl plans for 2002(....)

Maybe I will wear a blue and white No. 32 jersey when football season rolls around this year. It will make me feel happy and confident.

Indeed. But that is another long story that we don't have time for now.
... Maybe later, when we talk about Jack Kerouac again. He was a football star, in his youth, just like me.
Some things never change, eh?
But time flies, and I am going blind again, from that evil Ozone water -- or maybe it's just the daylight. ... Of course! All Vampires go blind when the sun comes up.
So why worry? Everybody needs a few hours of good sleep now and then. And tonight I will be able to see everything that moves, from here to as far as the Crow flies. Ho ho. "

Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005)
"America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."

On me 'ead son - Beckhams have accidentally given their new son a surname as his first name

2005-02-21T09:34:00.000Z

BBC - "Cruz is a common surname in Spain and South America, but is an unusual first name, according to Lola Oria, Spanish language tutor at Oxford University.
She said Cruz is actually an old-fashioned girl's name, adding: "It is quite a strange thing to do to a little boy.""

What's happening in the British blogosphere?

2005-02-20T23:07:00.000Z

Tim Worstall "It's All Obvious or Trivial Except..." has compiled his first BritBlog Roundup to try to find out.

Pseudonymous Escort In White House Journalist Scandal? You couldn't make it up, but I had considered the possibility.

2005-02-20T08:30:00.000Z

James Guckert/Jeff Gannon: "I use a pseudonym because my real name is very difficult to pronounce, to remember and to spell."
CNN's Anderson Cooper: "How is James so much harder than Jeff."
(Video)

What was Iain Duncan Smith saying yesterday about the power of blogging to "ignite many new forces of conservatism"? Today's papers are awash with reports of the gay prostitution scandal hitting the Bush White House. Just how do you get a White House press pass with an alias?

- White House's loyal reporter once worked as gay hooker, By Andrew Buncombe in Washington, 20 February 2005 The Independent.
"Such an unlikely possibility emerged this week after a right-wing reporter who used an alias to obtain a White House press pass was revealed to possess something of a saucy past. Bloggers revealed that Jeff Gannon, real name James Guckert, had previously worked as a $200-an-hour gay prostitute who advertised himself on a series of websites with names such as hotmilitary stud.com. Mr Guckert has resigned from his job as a reporter for the conservative online news site Talon News, owned by a Texas Republican."
"On one now notorious occasion, Mr Guckert, 32, asked Mr Bush how he was going to be able to work with the Democrats leadership which "appear to have divorced them- selves from reality."
"...some are speculating that Mr Guckert's previous incarnation may have been what secured him preferential treatment from one or more officials within the White House. "

- The mole, the US media and a White House coup - The reporter who wasn't is part of a wider press scandal, writes Paul Harris in New York Sunday February 20, 2005 The Observer
"But the Gannon affair, which has shocked much of America's political establishment, is just the latest scandal in the media establishment. Newspapers including the New York Times and USA Today have been hit by plagiarism and forgery scandals."
"On the internet, the mainstream media is derided and scorned. One question is dominating US newsrooms and television studios: ignored, scandalised and now corrupted, just what is America's mainstream media for anymore? "
"If, during the Clinton administration, a fake reporter from a Democrat front organisation, using a false name, had been exposed as attending White House press conferences it would have been a national scandal. If he had then been shown to be a gay prostitute, the scandal could have threatened a Democrat presidency. With 'Gannon' and Bush there has been no such outcry. The mainstream media has approached the story warily, while right-wing organisations such as Fox News have largely ignored it.
That has created a vacuum in the US media. It is a space being filled by 'bloggers' from both left and right who write personal journals, or weblogs, on the internet."
"Unlike Britain, where political blogs are barely part of the debate, internet sites in America are seen as a vital political tool."
"Conservative bloggers have taken two big scalps recently (Rather/Eason) ....The left has also had victories. It was not the mainstream media that exposed Gannon, but left-wing website Media Matters for America which enlisted other liberal bloggers to help. All the significant breaks in the story emerged online, forcing Gannon to resign, reveal his real name and go into hiding. "
"Some commentators see the emergence of blogging as a media force as a liberating phenomenon. Unlike the mainstream media, blogging is cheap, easy and open to anyone regardless of qualification or background or money."
"Others see it as part of the trend towards partisan journalism. Spearheaded by the nakedly right-wing Fox News, journalism in America has come to resemble a political shouting match rather than any form of debate of the issues."
"The media is in the midst of a transformation which the Bush administration is keen to foster. They have discovered that a partisan and atomised media can be controlled, manipulated and used to an unprecedented degree. "
"The old-fashioned mainstream media is disappearing. 'Once that pattern is put in place, it is going to be hard to break,' said Jack Lule, a journalism professor at Lehigh University. "

All very bizarre. Particularly since, when the presidential inauguration recently overshadowed the coinciding Belle de Jour book launch party, amidst fresh Deepthroat speculation, I wondered whether:
"...What the world needs is a fresh sexual imbroglio at the WhiteHouse to offset the imminent armageddon. Maybe the Guardian newsblog should recruit Belle to go undercover as an intern or somesuch and bring George down. Now that would make a good blog/book. It might even out-do the last anonymous person to precipitate an impeachment scandal and maybe even shift a few papers. I wonder if Belle's anonymity could remain in tact for as long as Deep Throat's."
Extract from an email (Fri, 21 Jan 2005 14:11:38)

Daily Kos is obviously covering developments:
"Why isn't every major network in the country investigating a security breach, forget anything else. How could the FBI, for 17 years I was chairman of the Judiciary Committee, the ranking member. I've read more FBI reports than I ever wanted to know. How could that happen and no one had any idea who this guy was?... The Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate should be investigating it. The House Judiciary should be investigating it. And if it were the other party in charge, it would be investigated." Senator Joe Biden (D-DE)
- What Is GannonGuckert's Next Move?
- Sex, Lies & The White House Press Office - Part I (BlogCritics)
- Sex, Lies & the White House Press Office - Part II (BlogCritics)
- Gannon Speaks (BlogCritics)
"Why would they be looking into a person's sexual history? Is that what we're going to do to reporters now? Is there some kind of litmus test for reporters? Is it right to hold someone's sexuality against them?"

Hear Joe Biden on Bill Maher's HBO show discussing Jeff Gannon and the Bush Mandate with Robin Williams and Leslie Stahl (Video)
- Real Time with Bill Maher
- CNN Jeff Gannon - A questioner questioned (Video) (via corked bats)

- Jeff Gannon (aka James Dale Guckert) Wikipedia
- Bloggers get their claws into Talon Sunday February 13, 2005 The Observer

GOD IS NOWHERE. GOD IS NOW HERE. Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland

2005-02-17T17:38:00.000Z

- Coupland.com - Douglas Coupland's Official Site

- The Coupland File : The site about Douglas Coupland
- Douglas_Coupland - Wikipedia
- The Morning News - Robert Birnbaum v. Douglas Coupland, September 2003
DC: "As there are more and more people on the planet and information becomes more transparent and more pervasive, the tokens of authenticity that we look for become ever smaller…"
- Douglas Coupland (1961- ) The Guardian
"Did you know? He refuses to own furniture and is an avid meteorite collector."
- The Bogus Tribute Blog to Douglas Coupland
Douglas Coupland in conversation with Naomi Klein, Black Book (Winter 2004) PART 1, Part 2.
DC: "The only tenable viewpoints of the present I've been able to find come from Eric Hobsbawm, a British intellectual who wrote extensively from Marxist stance. While my background is utterly nondoctrinaire, I have noted that once Marxism became a historical novelty, it oddly became genuinely relevant. Marxism is a structured ideology based on the creation of wealth, the nature of "ownership," and the links of wealth to collective social welfare. It remains eerily precise in decodifying the shifting matrices of capital that define our era. This, in spite of 1989, September 11, 2001, and, as this is a fashion magazine, the intractability of acid-wash denim on the former East German style consciousness."
- From Fear To Eternity, Spike Magazine, Chris Mitchell emails Douglas Coupland about fame, the future and the problem with American chocolate.
"your 20s are muck and shit and painand loneliness and horror"
"the only decisions that matter are those madein the face of eternity"
- All the lonely people - Artist and Generation X novelist Douglas Coupland talks about disaster movies, Google, and his new book, Eleanor Rigby. (Outtakes from an interview that appears in the February 1, 2005, issue of The Advocate)
DC: "As of last month I began doing this body of work which is explicitly about books. The Hornet’s Nests, for example. Which is literally...I’m addicted to Law & Order. But I feel guilty just sitting there doing nothing. Curse you, Dick Wolf! And so I thought, Well, I might as well chew up pages while I’m watching TV. So I chew them up and then weave them together to make these nests. That’s about cellulose. That’s about taking a book out of cultural time and putting it into Darwinian or archaeological time. That becomes about the way that cultural information is passed forward or isn’t passed forward. "
DC: "Someone told me once that irony is like country-and-western music, that only 20% of the population actually gets irony. Which means there’s 80% of the population out there who are taking everything at face value. I mean, I have a hunch you understand irony quite well. But I can imagine if you had to take the world at face value, and you had no safety valve of irony to help you reconcile opposites that coexist, you’d go nuts. I think ironic and unironic can coexist; I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive."
- Reality Bites (1994):
Lelaina: Can you define "irony"?
Troy Dyer: It's when the actual meaning is the complete opposite from the literal meaning.
- IMDB Generation X

A previously published article resurfaces in The Chicago Tribune

2005-02-17T12:37:00.000Z

An idea whose time has come: A new forum (blogging) inspires old (books), By Joshua Kurlantzick, New York Times News Service, Published February 17, 2005
- Also Blogosphere dispatches - BeachNotes, Wednesday, February 09, 2005
- Book In You, Daniel Radosh, The New Yorker, 2004-05-24.