We owe Chris a beer. He was right about the I-man.
Best story today is the front page WSJ piece which gives an interesting timeline of what happened. The Journal asked people to vote on whether Imus should be given a second chance in radio. By press time 11,000 had voted — 8400 yays, 2959 nays.
Chad Horbach, Keith Gessen, and Chelsea [Greta Pemberton]
We had visitors today. Marco Roth, Keith Gessen, Mark Greif and Chad Horbach of the hyper cool literary magazine n+1 were in town for a reading and came to our story meeting. Mark Greif was on our Great American Novel show and Keith Gessen was on our 9/11 Literature show.
As you’d expect, they were incredibly smart, but also cute, enthusiastic, and nice. They were smarting a bit from the backlash to their smackdown piece on lit bloggers called “The Blog Reflex.” (Sorry, no links — n+1 doesn’t put their articles online; they’re keepers of a particular old media flame). As I understand it, the piece lamented the devolution of the lit blogging culture. Once, lit bloggers chronicled their reading habits, the n+1ers wrote. They were thoughtful. They were personal. Now lit bloggers are trying to get in on the muckraker game, dishing more gossip about the publishing business than reasoned literary appreciation or criticism. They’ve become freelance publicists.
David with Marco Roth [Greta Pemberton]
We tried to gently suggest that they ought to publish the piece online and accept comments. The n+1ers have fairly strong feelings about their paperbound identity, though they do have a website and they want to take Greta’s blogger bootcamp as a correspondence course. This all led to a predictable conversation about reading habits — paper or plastic? Is it literature if it’s in a different medium? Blah blah blah.
We decided it wouldn’t be an interesting show for us. The guys helped Robin pitch Lumiere and silvio.rabioso‘s show on Jean Baudrillard (we’re sold) and then left excitedly for a hotel room in Amherst where they were going to jump on the beds, watch TV and empty the mini bar.
The guys helped Robin pitch Lumiere and silvio.rabioso’s show on Jean Baudrillard (we’re sold)
Hey! one for the good guys !
“Is it literature if it’s in a different medium?” Let’s start by putting that question to avid readers of Braille…
It’s interesting to see the evolution of this blogsite… Mary’s Notes is a waxing moon. The disjunct (or connection) between the ‘Pitch Us A Show’ thread and the main site is mysterious, a dark ‘new moon’… Suddenly we see photos of people whose faces we’d imagined but never seen, as it were, The Men in The Moon (oh, and Ladies, too!). Some of the slivers of conversation are crescent-shaped pies of bigger pictures, hidden from us. (‘Marco Roth, Keith Gessen, Mark Greif and Chad Horbach of the hyper cool literary magazine n+1 were in town for a reading’… just to drop a typically mysterious nugget here as an example. I keep looking for new patterns in this website, as old ones melt away. (Yeah, my interplanetary moon analogy is pretty lame, but it’s a convenient ‘idea rack’.) And in the future we hear rumors of major overhauls of the website, and the imagination reels… Is the entire Radio Open Source team going to end up a group of avatars sitting in a sim garden in Second Life, IM’ing each other as we wander around looking at virtual art, or clicking on links into YouTube? The evolution of this place is sort of like hot-air ballooning: a little bit scary, somewhat noisy, wildly unpredictible, and a lot of fun — but the whole trip is riddled by a question: Where are we going to come down?????
That was a dumb final question… obviously nobody knows where we are going to come down! And there’s the outside possibility that it may be a very long balloon trip — with the possibility that the balloon may become the first to land on the moon!
Gosh – the walls are so….TEAL! Are you sure you like it? Ugh! I would tone it down… but maybe the color is better in person. Sets off Chelsea’s hair though…
One of the links to http://www.nplusonemag.com/ works, the other doesn’t…so be sure to try them both!
We didn’t choose the wall color, Potter. It was thrust upon us by the previous inhabitants. There was always some talk of repainting, but some how we never got around to it. It’s too dark in the winter, but now I think we think of it as one of the quirky distinguishing characteristics of our humble abode. Hence the name “the Green Room.”
Thanks bft. Fixed!