Like Harriet M. Welsch, I love sneaking into places. For instance, when they started building a new baseball stadium for the New York Mets in 2007 I just knew I’d have to find a hole in the fence (this is my philosophy of life: every fence has a hole in it somewhere) and explore. I took my daughter Abby early one Sunday morning, and we scored big-time. We even got to stand on the rudimentary pitchers mound and take ...]]>

Like Harriet M. Welsch, I love sneaking into places. For instance, when they started building a new baseball stadium for the New York Mets in 2007 I just knew I’d have to find a hole in the fence (this is my philosophy of life: every fence has a hole in it somewhere) and explore. I took my daughter Abby early one Sunday morning, and we scored big-time. We even got to stand on the rudimentary pitchers mound and take pictures.

Maybe this was my way of marking my space. I’ve been going to Shea Stadium since I was a little kid, and if they’re building a new stadium in the Shea parking lot and turning Shea into a parking lot itself — well, hell, I have trespassing rights. Anyway, the spot looked a whole lot different when we went to see the New York Mets play the Tampa Bay Rays on Friday night. It was a fun game, though I don’t like the new CitiField quite as much as Shea. Shea Stadium was a perfect simple circle, and everybody faced towards the middle. CitiField has more angles, more distractions, more exhibits and shops and restaurants. Anyway, it was strange to be there with 30,000 people and think about how different the spot looked two summers before when we snuck through the fence.

Anyway, the Mets won, and it was a rollicking happy crowd like every time I’ve seen the Mets at home. The best part of the game was after the game when we walked out to the parking lot where Shea used to be and found the old third base. Marking our space again, I guess.

Let’s Go Mets! The Home Run Apple still works, so Queens will be okay.

And now, a parting poem from Frank Messina, talented poet laureate of the New York Mets, author of Full Count: the Book of Mets Poetry, and a fine spoken word poet too.

It Was I, Mrs. Wiley

It was I, Mrs. Wiley
who swiped
your garbage pail lids
and turned them into first, second and third,
It was I who lifted
the welcome mat from your front stoop
-unbeknownst to you-
It was I who proudly placed it down
and crowned it “pitcher’s mound”

The June 21 issue of the New York Times Book Review gets off to an bad start with Katie Roiphe’s front-page review of A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century by Cristina Nehring (the review also briefly discusses Against Love by Laura Kipnis).

The problem with Roiphe’s review is twofold: lack of specificity and excessive credulity. She continually hints at ...]]> (Today’s special guest reviewer is Scott Esposito, founder of The Quarterly Conversation, a literary review, and Conversational Reading, an associated blog.)

The June 21 issue of the New York Times Book Review gets off to an bad start with Katie Roiphe’s front-page review of A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century by Cristina Nehring (the review also briefly discusses Against Love by Laura Kipnis).

The problem with Roiphe’s review is twofold: lack of specificity and excessive credulity. She continually hints at “riveting stories” and “creative interpretations,” yet, as Rolphie presents them, Nehring’s ideas sound as cliched as possible:

Elsewhere, Nehring interrogates our steadfast insistence on balanced, healthy relationships, our readiness to condemn doomed, impossible entanglements. She argues that it may in fact be a sign of health to enter into a relationship that is turbulent, demanding or unorthodox. She praises long-distance relationships, arduous relationships, relationships with men who are elusive, relationships the therapeutic culture adamantly opposes. She asks, “Could it be that the choice of a challenging love object signals strength and resourcefulness rather than insecurity and psychological damage, as we so often hear?”

If Rolphie in fact sees this for the bland attempt to be contrarian that it sounds like, she doesn’t let on. Elsewhere, Rolphie quotes Nehring: “We have been pragmatic and pedestrian about our erotic lives for too long,” and is content to let this remark stand, despite the masses of “hotter sex” books available in any bookstore, as well as the mainstreaming of various sexual devices and techniques considered the purview of perverts and Penthouse readers only a generation or two ago. The review concludes with that most damning of critical responses, faint praise:

Nehring takes on our complaisance, our received ideas, our sloppy assumptions about our most important connections, and for that she deserves our admiration. Even if one doesn’t take her outlandish romantic arguments literally, this is one of those rare books that could make people think about their intimate lives in a new way.

Dennis Lehane’s review of The Secret Speech, the second novel by writer Tom Rob Smith, is purely average. It’s your typical “several grafs of plot summary plus a couple grafs of opinion”; none of the writing is particularly good or bad, with the exception that one character is described as “beset by galactic levels of guilt.” I only remark on it here since it is one of only two full-length fiction reviews in this issue and therefore seems like a precious thing.

Toni Bentley’s review of The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters is a good example of a review that would have been fine if it was better edited. The book is about harems and Western explorers’ interaction with them, a topic not difficult to say at least a few interesting things about. Bentley does just that and quotes the book’s interesting thesis: “most of the world [pre-20th century] still subscribed to what I have been calling the harem culture, and in only the few countries of the West, the small peninsular domain of Christendom, did a different attitude prevail.”

So far so good, although a little more than halfway through, the review loses focus entirely and just becomes a series of unrelated paragraphs. It probably could have been a fine review, but the length draws attention to the loss of focus; additionally Bentley, a dancer and author of books about dance, is way out of her depth here, and it shows. There are also an alarming number of annoying parentheticals, such as “It is not news that Christianity, with its Virgin Birth (just to start things off right), has had little interest in exploring human sexual desire or potential. Sexual energy is way too out of control even for the most committed Christians (see the Holy Trinity of Bakker, Swaggart and Haggard).” As a final note, none of the book’s illustrations are discussed, perhaps forgivable in a review of another book, but not in one of a book about harems.

Ginia Bellafante’s review of the novel The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (our second and last full-length fiction review), starts off annoyingly enough with a paragraph devoted to gossiping about the million dollar advance paid to the author. But after that first graf the review is actually rather good. It seems that author Reif Larsen has written something like a cross between the pomo novel of information and What Maisie Knew. That Bellafante gives a sense of this without dull plot summary or a lapse of critical opinion is fine work. Her negative review feels merited and her observations feel precise: “Roland Barthes made distinctions between those texts so micromanaged that they ensured reader passivity and those texts, active texts, that invited a greater degree of participation. The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet merely creates the illusion of choice.”

However, I disagree with Bellafante that one of the plagues of MFA programs is that they produce writers who don’t “aim to mean much” with their books. I have no idea if MFA programs produce writers of this type or not, but if they do, that’s a good thing. I’ll take one writer who just cares about the craft of fiction over ten trying to make their novel “meaningful.” Good art creates its own meaning, by virtue of being good art.

Ross Douthat’s review of Digital Barbarism, a nonfiction work by the novelist Mark Helprin, is interesting, largely because Helprin is one of very few public intellectuals to try and argue that American copyright law doesn’t go far enough in protecting intellectual property. However, we cannot count on Douthat to present the other side of this issue; for instance, his statement that “a more latitudinarian copyright regime” as “a cause celebre for a certain class of Internetista” is a ridiculous mischaracterization of a widespread movement backed by far more than a few over-active bloggers and cranky professors.

Unfortunately it’s tough to find much of either side of the argument here. In his review, Douthat seems more interested in demeaning bloggers and commenters on websites than actually outlining what Helprin says or explaining exactly which people and ideas Helprin is arguing for or against (other than the obvious boogeyman, Lawrence Lessig). In other words, this is more like one of the op-eds that Douthat has been hired to write than a book review. The closest Douthat gets to giving us a flavor of Helprin’s argument is this sentence:

Helprin worries, plausibly, that the spirit of perpetual acceleration threatens to carry all before it, frenzying our politics, barbarizing our language and depriving us of the kind of artistic greatness that isn’t available on Twitter feeds.

Douthat is, of course, entitled to his beliefs (and he seems to believe that this sentence is largely accurate), but he does those beliefs no service by not even acknowledging the staleness of what Helprin says or the straw men that have been erected here. Much as I disagree with Douthat’s politics, though, at least his writing is far more engaging and professional than a lot of what Sam Tanenhaus seems –judging by this issue — to permit in his review of books.

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow’s “Fiction Chronicle” (covering four new novels) reads roughly like publisher’s copy found on the back of new paperbacks. I understand that 300 words isn’t a whole lot of space to write about a book, but there’s a right way to do a 300-word review and a wrong way. These are wrong. For an idea of what can be accomplished in 300 words, see this review (among other successes) in the recent Review of Contemporary Fiction. But to return to the Times, the “Fiction Chronicle” does do me the service of presenting absolute worst book title I have read this week: “The Exchange Rate Between Love and Money.” And from the same book comes this quote-worthy line: “How do you make love to something that’s not even in the animal kingdom?”

Maurice Isserman’s short essay on Michael Harrington and his groundbreaking study of poverty in America, The Other America, is lucid, engaging, and appreciated. It’s a nice example of how a review of books can keep important works from the past in the conversation, and Isserman’s fine piece is only marred by the sentence that opens its final paragraph: “Today the poor are no longer invisible, thanks to writers like William Julius Wilson, Alex Kotlowitz and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and to a popular culture that has young people in middle-class suburbs emulating the styles of the inner city.” I must disagree: of course America’s poor are still very much unnoticed today, and if they are more seen now than before that owes more to unmitigated disasters like Hurricane Katrina than the work of journalists or (quite condescendingly) the decision of the children of the well-off to wear overpriced simulacra of the clothes worn in certain inner-city neighborhoods.

Gary Rosen’s review of of The Age of the Unthinkable is a quick, clean, and successful deflating of a book that sounds pretentious, self-satisfied, and ultimately not even one-eighth as innovative as the author would hope (think of an aspiring Tom Friedman). It’s a lean, taut review, and the editors of the Review should aspire to cut down some of the more bloated pieces in their publication to resemble Rosen’s.

Megan Marshall’s review of We Two by Gillian Gill is perfectly adequate and more or less bored me. So are, and did, Liz Robbins’s review of A Terrible Splendor (which, in addition to having a dreadful title, sounds like a dreadful book) and Marilyn Stasio’s roundup of crime novels.

“Inside the List” informs me that something called the The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane debuted in the #2 spot for hardcover fiction, which does nothing to change my impression of the state of fiction in this country. The #1 spot is occupied by some Dean Koontz book about a novelist and a critic fighting to the death over a review. Does anyone honestly care?

“Paperback Row” seems to be mostly obsessed with memoirs with awful conceits (”Gilmour, a film critic, allowed his troubled 15-year-old son to drop out of school on the condition that he watch three movies a week of Gilmour’s choosing.”) and the kind of petit cultural crit that should have remained a feature article in some glossy magazine. The inclusion at the end of Paul Auster’s previous work of fiction reminds me that he’s been publishing a lot of books lately.

In the letters section it’s nice to see Ezra E. Fitz from Brentwood, Tennessee, sticking up for translators.

I don’t have much to say about the “Editors’ Choice” list, except to note its lack of diversity.

And rounding out this issue, the less that is said about the “Up Front: Dennis Lehane” by “The Editors,” the better.

Not counting the “Fiction Chronicle,” this week’s issue of the Review covered 2 works of literary fiction, an abysmal performance by virtually any standard. All in all, the fiction coverage in this issue has done nothing to sway me from my belief that the Review is virtually irrelevant for anyone who seriously cares about literature in this country.

Oddly enough, the nonfiction coverage in this issue of the Review gives me a renewed appreciation for Bookforum. True, that publication has seriously downgraded its fiction coverage over the past year, but at least the nonfiction coverage found therein is something that doesn’t consistently insult the intelligence of educated adults. And even the fiction coverage, in its weakened state, is infinitely preferable to what I read in this issue of the Review.

I suppose if I were to grade this issue I could give it a “C,” in the sense that this is probably not much better and not much worse than the reviews of books still extant in the nation’s newspapers. However, if I were to grade the issue based on the standard that the Review sets for itself as the nation’s pre-eminent and most important weekly review of books, then I’d have to say that it’s failing to meet its expectations.

(This is chapter 22 of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry.)

My satisfaction with the response to Notes From Underground didn’t last very long. It’s a strange thing to suddenly get public attention, especially if you are a shy or quasi-Asperger’s person as I generally am. Being noticed is both addictive and repellent.

As slight as my brushes with “web celebrity” were during the middle and late years of the 90s, they always left me feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed. It’s ...]]>

(This is chapter 22 of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry.)

My satisfaction with the response to Notes From Underground didn’t last very long. It’s a strange thing to suddenly get public attention, especially if you are a shy or quasi-Asperger’s person as I generally am. Being noticed is both addictive and repellent.

As slight as my brushes with “web celebrity” were during the middle and late years of the 90s, they always left me feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed. It’s easy to see why big celebrities like Lindsay Lohan or Any Winehouse or Michael Jackson or Britney Spears go stark-raving insane. I don’t know how they manage to deal with fame every day. It enervated me just to get my name in WIRED magazine twice.

By the time the Notes From Underground clamor died down I’d sold about 350 copies, nowhere near enough to break even, and despite the good reviews I felt very discouraged. The truth is, there’s nothing like a small taste of success to make a guy feel like a real failure. It’s only when you reach for something far away, sometimes, that you discover your own limits, or your own fatal flaws.

What, I tried to remember, had I been working so hard for the past four years? I knew I was aiming towards some grand literary vision, but I didn’t seem to have achieved my goal. I had spent the last four years running myself ragged, pouring my heart out into a Beat Generation website, then a tribute to the borough of Queens, then a hectic literary anthology, and then a goddam movie …! Nobody could accuse me of not putting in the hours. But what was it all for?

And what had I gained? An empty bank account, an alienated marriage, and a frustrating day job with the media flunkies of midtown Manhattan. I was slightly known in the literary world, but only as an oddity, a member of the fringe. Yeah, I was really rocking the house.

I could not decide, at this time, whether Literary Kicks was helping or hindering me. I often considered shutting it down and starting something else fresh. There wasn’t really much to Literary Kicks at this time — it was still the same flat HTML site it had been since 1994, all the files hand-coded using the ‘vi’ editor. I updated “Beat News” about once a month. There was no commenting, no community, no “Action Poetry”.

I sometimes asked my stepfather Gene for business advice, and he suggested I transform the site into something commercial, perhaps an online version of Writer’s Digest. The idea didn’t thrill me.

The online content business was struggling badly all over Silicon Alley in 1998. It’s funny that the late 1990’s are now remembered for the rollicking dot-com stock market, which people imagine was flying high every day of the week during these years.

In fact, even at the very height of dot-com mania, Internet stocks were considered highly suspect, and often sold at depressed prices. What’s now remembered as a fast-moving dot-com stock market actually only moved fast at unpredictable moments, in sudden fits, starts and spurts. Painful failures and disappointments were rampant at every level of the growing Internet industry.

For a year and a half I’d been looking forward to the initial public offering of NetGravity, the advertising software company I’d been closely involved with as one of the first end users. The IPO was finally scheduled for June 1998, and I was granted a valuable “friends and family” offer to buy 1000 shares at the opening price, which was wavering between $9 and $10. It was on deals like this that early investors in companies like Netscape and Amazon scored big on a popular stock’s opening day.

But as NetGravity’s IPO day approached my friends in the company sadly told me “the stock’s not hot”. Wall Street wasn’t going for it. NetGravity was in the advertising sector, but investors wanted e-commerce plays. I bought 500 shares of the stock, which opened with a fizzle, flipped them immediately on Gene’s good advice, and netted about $200 for all my trouble. Some bonanza.

Online content was just not hot in 1998, and this was especially true at Time Inc. New Media/Pathfinder, though we kept plugging away. My team (C++ programmer Diane King and data analyst Ken Gerstein) and I launched an exciting new service to help the ad sales team, the User Profile Server, a primitive attempt to support ad targeting through real-time cookie-based user profiling. It was an exciting piece of software and a true feat of engineering that took nine months of hard work, and yet it’s the sad truth that we never closed a single deal based on our ability to target ads. Another great moment in Pathfinder history.

In early 1998 we got a new technology chief, Igor Shindel. The buzz about Igor was that he was a “turnaround guy”, expert at managing troubled software departments, which basically meant he was going to whip our scatter-brained asses back into marching formation. This was fine with me. I was bored with surfing the web in my office, and I wanted to work on something cool. But I didn’t want to manage the ad technology team anymore, so I asked Igor Shindel for a new responsibility.

My best idea was to rebuild our web server architecture so that our magazine properties could have URLs like “Time.com” and “People.com” (instead of our embarrassing “Pathfinder.com”). I also wanted to get rid of the long strings of random characters that made our URLs look silly. These long random character strings were a painful remnant of the unused e-commerce/personalization software originally installed by Open Market, which was still active on the site because we were afraid of what might break if we shut it off.

We were simply carrying around too much baggage in our web server operations, and I put together a Powerpoint proposal for a project to rebuild the entire platform from scratch. We would throw Open Market out and rebuild with Netscape or Apache software. Because my proposed architecture would allow magazines to have distinct URLs, I had the support of influential people within the organization, like Hala Makowska, a brash and charming People magazine editor who ran the popular “People Online” section of the website and saw Pathfinder as a pointless bureaucracy that gave her nothing and constantly held her back. All the magazine editors were angry about our shoddy server capabilities and performance, and I really thought my proposal had a chance.

I was invited into Igor Shindel’s office about a week after I emailed the proposal around. He closed the door with the clinical grimness of a surgeon and told me it wasn’t going to happen. Jorgen Wahlsten, the guy who’d been managing our web server operations since Pathfinder was born, was against my plan, and Igor couldn’t take the risk of Jorgen walking out in anger.

I liked Jorgen Wahlsten a lot, and so did everybody else. He was a very nice and smart guy with a professorial demeanor and a Swedish accent, and he was an awesomely talented techie. But it was obvious, to me and to many others, that after four years of wrestling with our web servers he’d been soundly beaten to the ground. He’d run out of ideas and given up hope, and our physical racks were a hopeless mess and he just kept patching bugs. It was clearly time to throw the guy a life preserver, give him a Rubik’s cube or something to relax with, and bring in some new blood on the server farm.

I said all this to Igor, sputtering in frustration as I sat in his office about how sure I was that I could do a better job managing our web servers. Igor shook his head and smiled and offered me a consolation prize.

There was a big project in the air, a content syndication deal code-named “Bell Canada”. Content syndication was one of the hot trends on Silicon Alley, and we were leading the wave with an ambitious deal that was just about to close with Bell Canada to produce a custom subscriber-only web entertainment system for their new DSL home service.

The reason this was a big deal was the whopper price tag. For some reason (none of us could figure it out), Bell Canada was willing to pay us two million dollars to launch this beast, and another million a year to maintain it. The whole thing didn’t quite make sense, but I was appointed the software manager for the Bell Canada project, with two young developers on my team.

The Bell Canada project interested me for a few reasons. I wanted to learn about this hot new thing called XML that I was reading about on websites and in InfoWorld magazine. This was a new protocol for storing and exchanging data, amounting to the first really major change in the technology of data management since the invention of SQL in 1970. Content syndication would be a good opportunity to get my hands dirty with some real XML. I was also looking forward to doing some work with Macromedia Flash, which would be the basis of our user experience.

I also liked the project chief, a somewhat crusty but vigorous old salt Time magazine veteran named Dick Duncan. He was a big talker and a rainmaker, and he’d been responsible for roping the Bell Canada guys into the deal at the beginning. He had a proud sea captain’s bark and a gung-ho attitude that was refreshing to see around the office. I thought we might get along very well together.

And then … surreally, magically, as if in a slowly unrolling dream … the Bell Canada project began to softly and steadily disintegrate into yet another cosmic clusterfuck, just as bad as Personal Edition had been, as if we’d never learned any lesson, another complete mess. As soon as the project began I discovered that Dick Duncan hated my guts, because I was one of those smarmy tech guys with the short pants and the skateboards (even though it wasn’t me with the skateboard, that was Aaron Costa, who he hated just as much). He chewed me out and yelled at me a lot, and then the whole project fell apart into a big crazy mass when suddenly Bell Canada announced that they weren’t going to buy the package after all. It had all, apparently, been a misunderstanding.

I guess I got the last laugh at Dick “Captain Ahab” Duncan on the crazy day that Bell Canada fell apart. It didn’t feel great at the time. I wish I’d gotten a chance to get the last yell.

I knew it was time for me to move on from Time Inc. I needed a new frontier. But something kept calling me back every day. I think it was the ghost of Henry Luce.

I started thinking a lot about Henry Luce, the founder of Time and Time Inc., after I read his biography in the spring of 1998. He’d been a bright young Yale graduate when he founded the newsweekly with a friend in 1923. Time magazine became quickly known for its brash voice, rapid-fire prose style, skepticism, sarcasm and curiosity for unusual topics.

Henry Luce was an earnest Christian and a strong believer in a virulent American military presence around the world. I don’t agree with most of his politics, but I admire him for his dedication to journalistic innovation, and for the gusto with which he worked. When he and Briton Hadden founded the magazine, they explained that they would try to report without prejudice, but then listed six “prejudices” they would allow themselves to be influenced by:

1. A belief that the world is round and an admiration of the statesman’s “view of the world”.
2. A general distrust of the present tendency toward increasing interference by government.
3. A prejudice against the rising cost of government.
4. Faith in the things which money cannot buy.
5. Respect for the old, particularly in manners.
6. An interest in the new, particularly in ideas.

Henry Luce died in 1967, but I felt his spirit in the elevators (where, it was said, he liked to pray), in the grand hallways of the nicer floors, in the magazines themselves (Fortune, it was said, was Luce’s favorite). I guess I admired Henry Luce because I couldn’t think of anything I’d enjoy more than creating a publishing empire. I decided to start praying harder when I was in the elevators alone.

Did I mention that the dot-com stock market moved in fits and starts and spurts? Something big was about to happen. For no discernible reason that anyone could detect, online content was about to briefly become the hottest property on Wall Street, and I was about to step onto the wildest roller coaster ride of my career. Pathfinder, it turns out, was just an apprenticeship for the next stop on my journey.

But first I had to find my way out of this morass and to my next destination.

When I was young, I used to go to the public library and head straight for the “P” aisle in the fiction section. Then I would wander through the stacks until I came to Proust. I would gaze with awe at the seven volumes of the work that was called, at that time, Remembrance of Things Past. I would take a volume off the shelf, leaf through it, and put it back. The strange sounding titles, Swann’s Way, Within a Budding Grove, The ...]]>