To recap: The Biltons surrounded themselves with “several large piles of books” as they sat on the floor “for a couple of hours” at a Barnes & Noble store. They “lobbed” the books back and forth and photographed pages with their iPhones, then “left the store without buying a thing.”

Only later did Bilton wonder, gosh: “Did we do anything wrong?” He sought out legal experts: “Did we indeed go too far?”

I have never heard of such self-absorbed rudeness or flat-out idiocy in a bookstore and was further incensed when the article revealed that Nick Bilton is the lead technology writer for the Times and author of a book about the future of iPhones, for heaven’s sake. But enough about me.

Defacto Shoplifters

“Yes, you and your wife went too far,” writes Denny Hatch of the website Target Marketing, “And your tacky little iPhones’ theft of copyright wasn’t the half of it.”

Hatch says Bilton was guilty of “de facto shoplifting — taking merchandise off the shelf, using it and then discarding it.”

In the world of direct marketing, this is “the equivalent of the catalog bandit — the woman that orders three party dresses from a catalog, chooses one to wear to the party and then returns all three the next day for a full refund.”

A Treacherous Course

The Biltons not only got away with ruining the merchandise, writes Richard Curtis at [e-reads], a reprinter of out-of-print books.

“By the mere act of clicking their iPhone a dozen times, Nick Bilton and his wife steered a treacherous course between fair use and piracy, between the Copyright Act of 1976 and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” Curtis observes.

Bilton tried to excuse himself by saying that “many people have a cavalier attitude toward using cameras to obtain copyrighted material.”

Curtis huffs, “Cavalier indeed. Our archives are packed with the exploits of ‘cavaliers.’ Up to now the Times has tiptoed around the issue of piracy in the book business …. But the time is approaching when the subject will take center stage, for it is by far the greatest threat to the future of authorship and the success of the e-book industry.”

Infringement Recipe

Perhaps it’s not Bilton’s actions but his article that should be held up to scrutiny, writes Bill Rosenblatt at Copyright and Technology. By describing how easy it is to photograph book pages in a store, Bilton has published an “infringement recipe” that could “induce” readers to do the same. Given the newspaper’s exposure and influence, “would [publishers] have a case against the New York Times?”

Swiping More Than the Bar Code

Of course, readers already have the “recipe” for photographic infringement, and more. As independent-publishing expert Dan Poynter puts it, customers regularly “visit a store, see a book they want, pull out their iPhone, check the price at Amazon and make a one-click order.”

To do this fast (before the staff sees ‘em! bad, bad customers!), iPhone users simply photograph the book and let technology take it from there. As Poynter explains:

“Now Amazon makes the process faster and easier with an iPhone App. With Price Check for iPhone, buyers can photograph the bar code of a book (or any other product), say the product name, or type it in. Amazon will find the product and offer it for sale—often for much less. Point, scan, check, click, done. And Amazon delivers.”

Blatantly Criminal

“If only the problem were just cell phone pilferers,” writes Suzanne White, author of bestselling astrology books. “People today can scan my entire books and put them up for sale all over the Internet — Kindle, Nook, Crook, et al, and nobody stops them. Others try. I try. But we don’t always succeed.”

White says that “Amazon now asks authors placing their books on Kindle to check a box attesting that they own the rights.” But elsewhere, piracy flourishes. One magazine group in France copied an astrology book by White and “pleaded innocence” when she sued. This group “tried to prove I was complicit because I had written horoscopes for one of their magazines. They had very powerful big guns.” She settled for 5000 francs.

In another case, “back in the beginning of Facebook, I found an
app called Chinese Horoscopes that used my text,” White recalls. “It was doing such good business that after much haggling, I eventually went into business with the guy! He had taken the texts quite innocently from a site that claims to ’share copyrights.’ I wrote a stinging how-dare-you letter to the owner who wrote back saying that because the company was offshore, I could do nothing.”

The commercial appeal of nonfiction books makes them vulnerable. “Astrology and Tarot and I Ching or diet or cookbooks and many other subject areas are commercial and easily exploited,” White says. But novels are copied illegally, too, especially in foreign countries.

“Does Stephen King know when his books are pirated in Czech or Hungarian, Chinese or Urdu? I doubt it,” White says. “Neither he nor his publishers can read those languages. Let’s face it. This is the Internet. There is money to be made in pirating any and everywhere. Publishers can’t police it any better than authors can.”

Most egregious for White was a matchmaking site in New York that “used my New Astrology™ book, pasted my photo on the front page …. then wrote to congratulate me! I could not get him to take it down. Instead, he hired someone to rewrite it all, paraphrased my whole book and changed the name of his site, and eventually tried to sell it to me for a million dollars (no lack of chutzpah there). Eventually he went bankrupt.”

(Granted it’s not saying much, but) I’ve never heard of such blatant stealing! It’s so criminal, and yet, as White says, going to court is not an option. “The folks who scan my books and pirate them are not rich people. I would be suing in the dark.”

Watching the Bookstore Go Up in Flames

Here’s another scam that floored me. In his article, “The Price of Now: Why I Hate Bookstores,” Kyle Bylin at Hypebot.com says he read the first chapter of Bilton’s book at a bookstore and was so taken with it that “I didn’t want to wait,” so he bought it right there, knowing “I could buy it cheaper on Amazon.”

He did consider another shortcut: “I’ve heard of people buying books from Barnes & Noble and returning them once their Amazon shipment arrives. I opted not to do that.”

My hero! We’re back to women and their pretty dresses! This scheme involves buying and returning the physical book after using the bookstore as your bag man. And won’t that book feel nice and new to the next customer.

Here’s what went through Bylin’s mind as he bought the book for a higher price in the bookstore than he would have paid at home, ordering it on Amazon: “In my head, I came up with the excuse — that while I’d be content with watching the store go up in flames for their high prices — I did like walking around, browsing, and the experience of holding books before I bought them elsewhere.”

So here’s a reader who understands the perilous situation of bookstores, all right. He’s just so jaded by the Internet that he sees the retail price as “a donation for feeling sorry about reading for free.” This was a real jaw-dropper for me. A … a…. donation? You mean, like a … a …. charity? Because you feel sorry for the bookstore?

Exactly, says Bylin. It’s the bookstore’s fault for overcharging the poor customer: “The instant gratification of getting what I want now, in my hands, something that I can carry home and read: Shouldn’t that be the bonus and not the cost?”

Yes, let’s all remember: The world is here to bring everyone like you instant gratification because today nobody owns anything, really. Copyright law is so “uncharted,” as Curtis says, that tools are everywhere to help you monetize, maximize, and Appize everything you want.

Being Almost That Stupid

And everybody’s in on this scam. even authors like Bilton, muses Poynter. “So,” he writes, “was Bilton’s ‘confession’ a publicity stunt to bring attention to his book?”

That would be hard to figure, since Bilton’s article makes him look so stupid. But maybe fame is fame: If you just get your name out there — even exploit the newspaper that (I guess) employs you — readers will race to buy your book.

But could that have been Bilton’s idea all along? I must say, when I listen to Bilton interviewed on the Internet, he seems far more knowledgeable than the kind of jackass who clogs up the aisles of a bookstore while photographing pages of new books and dumbly wondering, “Did we do anything wrong?”

Self-run Social Library Places

To be charitable, maybe Nick Bilton and his wife didn’t actively set out to steal. Maybe they simply represent masses of people who have changed their minds about brick-and-mortar stores in the last decade.

Certainly they, and perhaps millions like them, don’t think of bookstores as places to go to buy books. To them, in the 21st century, bookstores are just vehicles for “showcasing books for Amazon,” as Poynter puts it.

If that’s true, surviving bookstores may now be seen as “self-run social library places,” muses Suzanne White, because they offer book clubs, author events, classes, cooking demonstrations, storytelling hours, sidelines and even books lining shelf after shelf.

At these bookstores, observes White, “bookish and other types can meet and greet each other, have coffee and a sandwich and get to know authors, take courses and hear writers talk about their work.”

Wait a minute: That sounds familiar in a way that’s, you know, alarming.

A successful bookstore, White adds, is more like a “bricks-and-mortar social network,” and there it is, the retail/electronic world in reverse: No longer does Amazon need to mimic the retail experience with its “Look inside!” feature and browsing facsimile. Instead, bookstores should now try to be Facebook inside the retail environment, a place where you can import all your “friends” right there in the aisles.

Isn’t that what the Biltons were doing? They could just email those iPhone photos to their contractor, so they didn’t bother about that pesky problem of buying a book or actually reading it.

This is why Bilton’s “infringement recipe” is so seductive! Customers who “hate bookstores” like Bylin at Hypebot don’t want to wait, and you shouldn’t either! You can “like” bookstore displays, Tweet shelf talkers, video author events and order, order, order books from every other resource but the store itself.

The Entitlement of Internet Pricing

Thank heaven many readers agree with Ben Patterson, a reader who left this comment at Hypebot: Along with “paying rent, providing a community gathering spot [and] bringing cultural events into a neighborhood,” brick-and-mortar bookstores are also “responsible for collecting sales tax — all things Amazon does not do.”

And to bookstore hater Bylin himself, Patterson wrote: “I suppose, if you’d rather have a Cash4Gold or PaydayAdvance on every street corner, that is an alternative, but it feels a lot like Internet pricing entitlement is negatively impacting neighborhoods and service.”

My new hero! That is so true: The sense of entitlement people get from pricing things on the Internet has turned consumers into tyrants! That’s why Bilton and his wife felt so righteous camping out in the aisles; and why Bylin has the audacity to pity rather than respect bookstores.

Patterson understands this odd reasoning: Keep the playing field even by charging Amazon sales tax, he says, and people will stop believing that Amazon is somehow ahead of the game by eluding the law.

That’s the real meaning of internet entitlement, I guess. Once you have your smart phone, anything on display in some dumb brick-and-mortar store is all yours for the taking.

According to Bilton’s article, the couple sat down “cross-legged on the floor” and surrounded themselves with “several large piles of books,” which they “lobbed back and forth” (!) for “a couple of hours” (!!) while researching “ideas for a new home that we are planning to buy.”

Isn’t that nice. Whenever you need a library, just go to a bookstore, Bilton suggests. There you can turn new books into used books for all the customers to follow.

Then Bilton and his wife “snapped a dozen pictures of book pages with our iPhones” and “went home without buying a thing.” Very tidy. Bilton does mention that they “placed the books back on the shelf” like the Good Samaritans they see themselves to be.

A Disturbing Idea

But later that night, Bilton was struck by a disturbing idea: “I asked my wife: Did we do anything wrong? And, I wondered, had we broken any laws by photographing those pages?”

So conscientious! After all, those pages were protected by copyright, a very big word for a very important concept. You’d think an explanation of copyright would be the point to an article with the headline: “Can Your Camera Phone Turn You Into a Pirate?”

But no. The authorities Bilton consults compare the use of cell phones that photograph book pages today with the use of Xerox machines that duplicated book pages during the ’70s, and the use of Napster programs that shared music files during the ’90s.

According to these experts, technology has advanced so quickly that copyright laws can’t keep up, so nobody really knows the exact definition of piracy when it comes to cell phone cameras. But Bilton’s journalistic drive demands a deeper truth: Will he get caught?

“Need I worry yet that a phalanx of lawyers will soon grab me between the Home Decor and New Age aisles at Barnes & Noble?”

Well, if I were the two thugs running this chain, I would have thrown the Biltons off the escalator, but you know, bookstore clerks are nice. They allowed this couple to clog the aisles and rummage through new books on the floor because it might have sounded rude to ask them to put their !@#$%^&*! cell phones away.

That leaves readers to ponder a thought by Julia A. Ahrens, associate director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford Law School: “By the time this becomes an issue,” she tells Bilton, “we might not even have bookstores anymore.”

That’s comforting, isn’t it, Nick? One day the same might be said of libraries.

Bookstore Rudeness

I know that bookstores have long been invaded by ill-mannered customers who blithely sit down in the aisles, break the spines of new titles, “lob” books around or — these I could throttle — buy a book on Amazon and bring it into a bookstore to have autographed at an author event.

But Bilton’s article raises new questions about the effect of cell phones on social manners in general. Maybe we’ve all grown accustomed to cell phone users driving erratically or talking loudly on the street or in elevators and restaurants because for some reason, they think their conversation takes precedence over everyone else’s experience.

What I can’t figure out are bookstore customers who blatantly use cell phones to compare prices with Amazon’s while they walk around the New Release table, or worse, take cell phone photos of books they might want to read so they can buy them on Amazon later.

I won’t go into Kindle owners who actually bring … well, you get the point.

This is not just rude behavior; it’s profane. A bookstore offers browsing opportunities and instant camaraderie with staff and authors that we never find on the Internet. There’s something sacred about a place where censorship is fought routinely, unknown authors are welcomed and introduced and young adults who’ve inexplicitly stopped reading are lured back to books they’ll treasure forever. For a customer to interrupt this kind of sacred exchange because they’re so entirely self-involved seems tragic.

Thanking Our Lucky Stars

The Biltons don’t appear to be stupid or cheap — I bet if you asked them, they’d want to contribute to the betterment of bookstores. Then, too, Nick Bilton is the lead technology writer for the New York Times and author of I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works (Crown; 304 pages; $25), a book published last fall about the impact of iPads and smart phones. That makes Bilton an expert. Yet he doesn’t know the meaning of copyright? When he and the missus took advantage of the bookstore staff’s good graces, he had to ask, “Did we do anything wrong?”

So come on, Nicky, get off the phone. Think how you’d feel if somebody photographed your book and blithely departed “without buying a thing.” The future you write about can and should provide Americans with every kind of reading option, most especially the bookstore option.

Here’s one reason: With books, the Internet has ushered in our current era of “the democratization of publishing” in which everybody’s a critic. True, traditional critics at newspapers and magazine may still be influential, but readers give as much or more weight to reviews by bloggers, customers, book clubs and, of course, themselves.

Theater criticism, on the other hand, has remained more parochial and elitist. A handful of trusted reviewers still seems to reign, and among these few, for Broadway shows especially, the New York Times has inordinate power.

Fighting Back

LuPone is both victim and victor to this oddly provincial tendency. She has even been doubly damned: Despite her incredible talent and wildly favorable notices in Europe, LuPone has been the subject of hostile critics in New York not just for a few years but for entire decades.

This forced LuPone to re-earn audience regard every time she appeared onstage. For example, thanks to early publicity, tickets for Evita, her first big hit, were sold out so far in advance that LuPone and her co-star Mandy Patinkin had to outlast the sour impact of New York critics who hated her performance. This surprised even LuPone:

“The audience was pissed off the moment they walked into the theatre because they’d spent $35 a ticket on a flop,” she writes. “(Can you imagine how pissed off they’d be today, at $125 a pop?) They sat there scowling at the stage with their arms folded across their chests as if to say, Prove it. We ultimately did.”

Why would New York theater critics single out Patti LuPone? I think it’s because she has always refused to fit a mold. Formally trained at Julliard, adept at everything from Shakespeare to slapstick, she is gifted with a musical range and authority that regularly knocks ‘em out of the balcony, not to mention those rubberized lips that can stretch across Times Square and keep you laughing at (some critics might say) at unorthodox moments.

The Tipping Point

So it was Frank Rich’s negative review in the New York Times, which was published after he saw the London production of Sunset, that lost LuPone the role of Norma Desmond in the New York company. Although British critics loved her, Variety announced that producer Andrew Lloyd Webber wanted to fire LuPone “as soon as the Frank Rich review came out,” she writes. And so he did.

But the tipping point came in 2007 when LuPone opened as Mama Rose in a City Center (off-Broadway) revival of Gypsy. Every night for this brief three-week run, “the audience gave us a standing ovation,” she writes. The entire company, including its producers, was “sure we were going to Broadway.”

Then came Ben Brantley’s back-handed review in the New York Times. At first sounding as though he congratulated LuPone for bringing “a startling lack of diva vanity and even a spark of bona fide mother love” to the character of Rose, Brantley then sliced LuPone to pieces:

“But once you introduce such traits into Mama Rose, the air starts to leak out of her. Ms. LuPone is less a Rose of billboard-size flair and ego than the sort of pushy but likable woman you might compete with at the supermarket for that last perfect sole fillet.”

LuPone writes with her characteristic humor, “Gypsy almost choked to death on that sole fillet.” Suddenly the Broadway management wanted to back out. Producer Roger Berlind actually told LuPone and director Arthur Laurents, “You would have to be crazy to bring Gypsy to Broadway after a review like that.” A single review.

LuPone writes: “The second time he said that to me over the phone, I said, ‘Roger, you give the critics the power. If you don’t want to do [the show], that’s one thing, but if you don’t want to do it because of a critic, then why bother producing anything?”

That about sums up the entire trajectory of quiet outrage that’s been building up against unjustly arrogant reviewers for decades, not only from artists but from the audience that pays to see/read/experience them.

LuPone continued: ” ‘I can’t guarantee you a good review,’ I said. ‘If you look at my history with the New York Times, this is nothing new. I can only do what I do, and you’ve seen that. You’ve seen this extraordinary production and cast, and you’ve seen how the audience reacts. Trust your instincts and don’t give critics the power.’ ”

Go, Go, Go, LuPone

I bet any theatergoing reader mentally stood up after reading that passage and gave LuPone a standing ovation for this statement alone. I certainly did, and do, and thank heaven the story doesn’t end there.

Not only did LuPone convince the producers to carry on, she dug even deeper into the role, threw out the original Jerome Robbins choreography, got Laurents to cancel the reprise of “Small World” (he confessed it only got in there because Ethel Merman “needed something to sing in the second act”) and unleashed her full power when Gypsy did, finally, open on Broadway.

This time, Ben Brantley was impressed. His review in the New York Times was effusive about Patti LuPone “building a bridge for an audience to walk right into one woman’s nervous breakdown” so there is “no separation at all between song and character.”

He even issued a kind of apology: “And yes, that quiet crunching sound you hear is me eating my hat.”

Boooooo, Ben Brantley

Of course, a critic stepping in front of his subject and turning the spotlight on himself is the worst possible error one can make in a review. It brings critical standards to a new low and distracts readers from the work under review. Remember when Brantley reviewed his personal obsession with Julia Roberts rather than her performance onstage? We had to wade through Brantley’s adolescent crush to get to his (by then corrupt) idea of the quality of her performance.

And just recently, in a review of the musical Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Brantley observed that the play proceeds so fast and erratically that it doesn’t allow LuPone time to finish her solo. He added snidely, as though we all remember what happened with Gypsy, “(And woe unto ye who deprive La LuPone of applause.)”

La LuPone. That’s so sophisticated, Ben. How New York audiences allow the New York Times critics to get away with that much power is bewildering.

But, hooray: LuPone got the last laugh, literally, when she won a Tony for playing Rose in Gypsy. Having been nominated for the award rarely and winning only one other time, she left her audience laughing when she got up to accept and said to the world, “It’s such a wonderful gift to be an actor who makes her living working on the Broadway stage — and then every 30 years or so, to pick up one of these.”

So now: What can newspapers do to lure readers back to print?

As our quiz last week suggested,  after our 30-year honeymoon with computers, and 20 solid years on the Internet, people are getting tired of screens and starting to miss the newsprint experience.  It’s time for newspapers to earn their way back into readers’ minds and pocketbooks. Here are some suggestions:

Fight for Your Paper

Everybody’s waiting for publishers to do something — to, in the first place, define the benefits of newspapers that computers can’t offer. If you run a newspaper, the time has come to get out there and tell readers: Our paper publishes the kind of stories in print that you can’t find on the Internet.

This means that the newsprint version will be different from the website version, so you  have to believe in it. If you don’t think that newspapers are far ahead of the Internet in key ways, get outta the biz. 

Create an Aggressive Ad Campaign

Billboards, cable TV, talk radio, buses, cabs and yes. computer banners are waiting for newspapers to re-stake their claim.

Run the most simple kind of ad:

*a giant photo of the morning newspaper invitingly spread out on a kitchen counter or desk,  next to

*a cup of steaming coffee

*a blank computer screen.

*a headline like one of these:

GIVE YOUR EYES A BREAK

NO CLICKS, NO BANNERS, NO POP-UPS, NO NOISE

WE PUT  IT ALL ON THE TABLE

YOUR WRISTS, YOUR EYES, YOUR BACK WILL THANK YOU

TAKE A MINI-VACATION EVERY MORNING

WE PAY PEOPLE TO BRING YOU THE WORLD AT A GLANCE

Get Your Executives Behind It

Start right now to train your executive management to place this campain on a person-to-person level. Get your PR department to book these top guys on the media and lecture circuit. You should join them and speak to groups ranging from Rotary to Wiccan, Unitarian to Morman, book clubs to fight clubs and every school and library in town. (Take the Freedom of Speech-in-jeopardy angle and you’re in.)  Go on talk shows, start blogs, help with charities, sponsor events.

This old-fashioned passionate appeal 1) heightens morale, which is currently in the gutter because you’ve cut your staff to shreds and nobody knows who’ll be terminated next, and 2) it stops general readers from feeling sorry for newspapers as expendible dinosaurs and reestablishes high journalistic standards (and deliciously low entertainment values) that work best in newsprint and promise to enrich daily life.

Distinguish the Print Version from the Website Version

Maybe adjustments have been made inside newspaper offices all along, but we readers can’t see them. It’s as though newspaper publishers have given up on the print version, as though  they’re waiting for the day when advertising for the paper’s website covers the bills better than advertising for the print version. By the time they’ll have to close down the latter (with more  poor-us/not-our-fault press releases),  a world of innovations and ideas will have mowed them down.

But if you bring a new identity to the print version now; if you provide absolutely essential news in the morning paper that doesn’t exist on the website version (wait for a day or two; then post), you’ll have a fighting chance. And you have to believe in that chance to keep your present circulation and convince new readers to subscribe.

Make the Print Version Invaluable

Here are some examples: 

Invest in In-Depth Articles

Let’s admit it – computers have made us a nation of impatient readers. We  rarely finish lengthy pieces because of the pressure to scroll fast and click away to the next new thing.  Besides, nobody likes reading longish material on a screen  (with the exception of books on E-readers and iPhones; another story).

On the other hand, settling into a longer piece in the morning paper is a delicious prospect. It’s like reading the New Yorker when you give yourself some privacy and time away from noisy and invasive screens. Articles in the print version  don’t have to be very long – it’s just that they’re juicier, more thoughtful, more substantial, more knowlegable, even memorable.

(This is one of the things you’ll have to sell to younger readers who’ve never had the newspaper experience, but once they start looking forward to the originality and fresh writing of in-depth stories,  they’ll be hooked.)

So let the newspaper’s website handle the flow fast-breaking news and changing opinion. Publish the better written,  in-depth articles – undercover, investigative pieces are a natural — in the printed newspaper and let people savor the writing for a day or two. Then post it.

Return the At-a-Glance Feature

I can’t believe how often a fascinating chart or map appears on the Internet but is too big to fit on the computer screen. The only option is to explore it in sections, which the computer enlarges for you, but I’m always disappointed that I can’t see the big picture.

A recent example is the revealing illustration called “Big Bangs” that’s spread across page 71 of the July 2009 issue of Fast Company magazine. (That’s the issue with another I-look-like-an-alien-but-try-not-to-notice photo of Jeff Bezos on the cover).

This multi-branched family tree follows the first breakthroughs in communication from the “Primordial Ooze” at the bottom (e.g., Gutenberg, rotary phones, radios, etc.,)  through the branching out of subsets (8 tracks! PDAs! clamshell phones!) and the flowering of  present day electronics (iPhone, Kindle, Wii/Xbox, MacBook) in the leafy top.

“Big Bangs” is an ingenious way to see historical connections you might have missed otherwise, but there’s a huge disappointment for computer users: You can’t find it on the Internet!

Oh, parts are revealed, depending on what gadget your cursor touches, but you can’t see the whole mesmerizing vision at once because it’s too big for the screen. Even if  the illustrator tried to squeeze it all on, you’d strain your neck leaning forward to read the tiny labels, and then the experience wouldn’t be fun or informative. It would be work.

So this is one thing newspapers can do that the Internet can’t. Newspapers can spread out their great newsprint wings and give us the big picture of just about anything that matters. They can provide a single at-a-glance feature that tells us more in a few minutes about the way things work than a blog like mine can do (obviously) in the above six paragraphs.

Bridge the Gap to the Internet

An entire team of reporters should be exploring the Internet for little known, completely enthralling and absolutely indispensable websites serving every kind of interest. Nothing obvious here: These websites are so intriguing by themselves that a whole page of them will grab the reader’s attention and make life richer to boot.

Again you need the advantage of the in-print edition’s big fat physical pages; and you can incorporate the irreverence of Internet writing to kick a little s— around in the descriptions of each website, complete with accompanying screen grabs and maybe a customer quote or two. This kind of section can instantly become the One Thing Advertisers Adore: a page readers will cut out, save, discuss and return to for months.

Again, you can post the text in its many parts on the website version a few days later. But you start with the in-print version because every publication of, say, Can’t-Miss URLS is such a natural for the one- or two-page spreads only newsprint can provide.

Hire Local Bloggers

To cut costs, most newspapers have foolishly downsized their top writers and are now junking up the pages with wire service news and syndicated features. As a result, the newsprint paper becomes a joke by any journalistic standard, and subscribers cancel in droves.

As a former Writer’s Guild member, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but now that publishers have sabotaged the labor landscape, why not exploit the absolute treasure trove of independent contractors that exists all over the Internet?

I’m talking about the kind of gifted bloggers who would love to write for the in-print version, and for pennies, because it’s still true that the local newspaper, if it’s any good, sets the standard for everybody else. You want fresh and original material for the morning paper? These guys are already doing it. They’re available, adventurous and affordable.

And don’t re-run their blogs in your pages! You need a fresh take on everything in the newsprint editions. Establish new “beats,” explore neglected neighborhoods, investigate unheralded but worthy causes, profile City Hall eccentrics and, beef up the sports/business/arts section with differently gifted writers whose contributions cqn be vital.

Relish (Don’t Abandon) the Print Experience

My own paper (the San Francisco Chronicle) missed a huge opportunity by leaving a hole where its famous columnist, Herb Caen, wrote a daily column for about 60 years. Caen liked to bill himself “Mr. San Francisco” and appeared to be everywhere at once – at opera openings, baseball games, murder scenes, dinner parties, corporate boards and every closet you never wanted the world to know you were in. A lot of people didn’t like him but everybody read him, for one thing because he could be very funny and for another because he loved San Francisco so much that he made everybody teary whenever he wrote mawkishly about it.

Why the Chronicle didn’t try to fill that hole over the past dozen years since his death is a puzzle. I have a feeling editors said, Oh, no one can replace him, we can’t soil his memory, he was one-in-a-million, and so forth (all of which surely sent Caen rolling in his grave).

But while the appeal of “Mr. San Francisco” went out with Fred Astaire movies, the continuing wonder is that the function of a column like Herb Caen’s is timeless: Every item in celebrated the “only in San Francisco” phenomenon that drew every reader into the same socialized stew, as it were – that ongoing sense of community that you rarely feel for some reason (well, I don’t) on newspaper websites. (Interestingly you get it in spades on networking sites like Facebook and Tweeter.)

That’s what we would lose if we abandon the print experience as far as newspapers are concerned. When you live in a town, when you’re conscious of local issues, when you vote, when you learn about a new restaurant or theater or school in the neighborhood, you want a place that centralizes all that potboiling citizenry stuff and keeps serving it up afresh. Very often it takes a big, beautiful sheet of real estate called the morning newspaper to make sense of modern life, and that’s what newspaper publishers have got to reinvent, support with real money and believe in today.

One Last Example

It was nice to see that  New York Times article about a newspaper like the Seattle Times doing well, even if  “Resurgent as a Solo Act” meant the Times boost its circulation by gobbling up the competition. The question now is, will the Times remain worthy of those readers. Will it give them something extra, or even more important, something essential that they can’t get on the Internet? 

As mentioned last week, I don’t blame authors for blowing up at reviewers who spoil the ending or otherwise ruin the experience for the very readers they’re supposed to serve.

This is a time when newspapers are trying to win back readers by saying, “Don’t bother with those slovenly customer reviews on Amazon! We have professional reviewers for you. We pay them for their skills. You can trust what they say.”

Uh huh. That would be fine if  these same critics weren’t violating every rule in the criticism handbook (not that there is one) about, you know,  blabbing key details that happen midway or stepping in front of the material to point at themselves or digressing endlessly until the subject of review (could be a movie or play, too) dies on the vine of TMI (too much information).

Giving Away the Ending

Here’s the kind of language I hate: After a long and thoughtful review of a certain movie (I’m not going to mention titles),  the otherwise fastidious Andrew Sarris of the New York Observer gives the whole thing away by writing: “In the end, Maggie is reconciled with Tom as he and Sarah take their child away for further treatment.” That’s great Mr. Sarris: In one swoop of betrayal, you’ve just told us the battling couple gets back together, there’s hope for the child and there’s no reason for readers to stick around for the ending.

Or this: “When it ends, in shocking carnage, the teenage mind briefly and improbably makes perfect sense.” This from another writer yet, Chandra Prasad, giving thumbnail reviews of her favorite books to The Week magazine. Don’t you think in a 45-word review you could talk about something else you liked about this book?

This one kills me: “Mr. Hely doesn’t know how to end this book. In the final chapters he torpedoes Pete’s cynicism in ways that will disappoint anyone who was enjoying the jaundiced humor.” First of all, NYT reviewer Janet Maslin who should be ashamed,  it’s not the business of critics to guess what the author does or does not know how to do.Second, there’s nothing more deflating for the reader than to learn that all the humor leading up to the end is going to fall flat.

Even a hint at the way a story ends wrecks the entire experience. Readers find themselves anticipating what’s coming rather than enjoy what’s unfolding. As much as I admire the usually disciplined Michiko Kakutani in the daily New York times,  I could not believe her comment that a first novel is “flawed by a predictable and unsatisfying ending.” Oh, how ruinously hath the seed been planted!  It’s hard to get hooked on a novel knowing it’s going to be “unsatisfying” in the end!

Here’s Rule #1 of the (nonexistent) Critical Writing Handbook:  If you want to say something about an ending, or really anything that happens after the first chapter, don’t even allude to the part in the story where it occurs. Make your point but stay away from the timing. In the Prasad case, the critic might say, “the author is capable of shocking carnage, and ….” or in the Kakutani review, “the narrative can be predictable and sometimes unsatisfying, but overall…”

Ruining the Story

And what a let-down to say the least is Maria Russo’s Sunday NYTBR review of a collection of related stories about a couple’s relationship:  “When, in the collection’s last story … the lovers appear to have drifted back together, even the most hardened cynic might grant them a smile.” Why, you rat, thinks the reader. You want to see a “hardened cynic?” Keep writing.

And I don’t care if it’s a trade magazine like Publishers Weekly reviewing a passing romance by Danielle Steel. There’s something  criminal about a review that says the author  “offers a satisfying twist at book’s end that most readers won’t see coming.” Yeah, well, they will now.

Then there are reviewers like Rex Reed (such a veteran! what a pity!) who announce that they won’t give away the ending but proceed to do just that.    “No spoilers,” says  Reed in the Observer,  “but things take some tragic left turn and two lives are needlessly lost … ” Oh, Rex, honey, two people die in the end? Granted, it may happen that the story forecasts the two deaths early on, so it won’t be a surprise to the viewer. But Rex, you have to deal with the reader now. Even the appearance of spoiling the ending (two people dead, Rex!) spoils the review now.

Here’s another I-promise-not-to-give-the-ending-away-until-I-decide-to-ruin-it review, this one from Ruthe Stein of the San Francisco Chronicle: “All that can be said about their sojourn without giving away too much is that Carlos brings out the recklessness in Jessie and that she is the only one who boards the next Trans-Siberian train ….” That’s a classic example of “giving away too much.”

The One-Eye-Closed Reading

Critics have become so irresponsible that I find myself looking at reviews with one eye closed. As soon as I see “When it ends,” or “Eventually,” or “The downturn begins,” or “In the end,” or even “Over the course of the book,” or “Midway through,” down goes the eyelid and skim goes the remaining eye skimming through the review while I find myself thinking, these guys should be shot.

For example, if you didn’t cover that eyeball, you’d have inadvertently zeroed in on a key detail that would poison the whole experience when Christopher Isherwood of all people (usually so meticulous!) wrote this paragraph in the New York Times:  “The play’s unconvincing conclusion, which finds the president agreeing to take the noble step of presiding over the marriage of his speechwriter …” And ploink, the knife was in! It doesn’t matter if the play was lousy! What matters is the readers’ experience, sitting in the theater  waiting for the president to make that decision from the rise of the curtain until the play’s “unconvincing” end.

You can’t even trust the venerable standard bearers of good critical writing, as for instance staff writers at the New Yorker. On a welcome-back sidebar to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” Richard Brody tells us that the James Stewart character meets a lookalike of the woman he thinks is dead, “dresses her up as the late object of his obsession, and then discovers that she’s the same woman.” No, man, NO. Don’t tell ‘em it’s not that Kim Novak can’t act! (Excuse me.) What a huge disservice to readers! I shouldn’t have to point out Rule #632(c), but there’s the chance that even one person out there hasn’t seen the movie, so you can’t give anything away!

I wonder too sometimes if some critics think the work under review is so dense that nothing spilled about key scenes will be remembered. Wrong, wrong wrong. Here is (again I’m sorry to say) a Michiko Kakutani piece that I call a “runaway review,” meaning she can’t help herself! She wants to show you how dense the writing can be so she just pours out the guts of the story:

“A boy and a girl…run away from home and for six years find refuge with a mannish pig rustler and her notorious husband. That boy’s granddaughter develops a wild crush on the local troublemaker, who will one day steal her great uncle’s magical fiddle, which appeared to him in a dream. A man assembles a world class stamp collection while living in the little town of Pluto, only to find that his obsession leads to his undoing. For years a judge carries on a passionate affair with an older woman, who ends up marrying a local developer, who buys the judge’s beloved house with the intention of stripping it bare. A charismatic boy becomes a dangerous cult leader, enslaving his wife, a snake handler, who plots to liberate herself and their children from his thrall.”

Gad, that’s unfair. This is the reviewer showing off. The eye glazes over and we think the book’s going to be a snore, despite the fact that MK is writing  an extremely favorable review. However if we do stay awake and we do follow the paragraph, important aspects of the story will be revealed that are going to drain the spirit and the enjoyment and the importance right out of the book.

The Me, Me, Me Review

Rule #326(p): Reviewing books is a service to the reader. We don’t write reviews for the publisher or author (god knows) or bookseller. We don’t write for posterity and we absolutely do not write to parade ourselves around in a diary or a confessional or a personal tell-all. The charge for daily and Sunday critics is to remember that we are on the front lines of the whole process of literary criticism. After our reviews have been published, these works are given lengthier and more considered  treatment in literary journals and academic  publications, and if they stand the test of time, in books and in classrooms, in discussion groups and at dinner tables right into eternity.

So what we must not do is waste the reader’s time by inserting ourselves into the process, as that in-print narcissist Ben Brantley repeatedly does with theater reviews for the New York Times. For example, in his  “review” of a play with Julia Roberts in a starring role, Brantley wastes much of the space being distracted by Julia Roberts’ fame and how “deeply, disturbingly beautiful” she is in person. Right there, you’re wasting (and ruining) our time, Ben: Not everyone feels how “deeply disturbingly beautiful” she is and, in fact, most people want to give her credit for taking this role in a live play and are trying not to be distracted by her fame. So we depend on you to stick to stay the critical course.

But no. That’s just the start of the reviewer’s need to step in the spotlight. He continues:

“I feel a strong need to confess something: My name is Ben, and I am a Juliaholic. Ms. Roberts, after all, is one of the few real movie stars — and I mean Movie Stars, like the kind MGM used to mint in the 1930s — to have come out of Hollywood in the last several decades. Lord knows, she isn’t a versatile film actress….” and he goes on about her “feral beauty,” her “Everywoman” character and her similarity to “a down-home Garbo.”

Even there I’d like to brain the guy (a “down-home Garbo,” ick. Save it for “My Best Friend’s Wedding.”) But lo, there is more. “While I blush to admit it, she is one of the few celebrities who occasionally show up (to my great annoyance) in cameo roles in my dreams.”

Your great annoyance? Honey, you should be sitting here.

Brantley’s point, as it turns out, is that Julia Roberts isn’t very good, in fact is terrible,  in the role, but it kills Brantley to let us in on the essential critical details. So he keeps trying to digress during the nuts and bolts of reviewing by dropping in asides like “Fellow Juliaholics can skip this part if they like.” (I’ll say.)  Brantley works so hard amidst his adoration (“ah, those cheekbones!”) to find the “few seconds” in Roberts’ acting that he can legitimately call “absolutely charming” that  all we ever learn is how infuriating a reviewer can be when he makes himself  the star of his review.

Generally, professional critics loathe the kind of customer reviews you find on Amazon and other Internet outlets because after all, these are amateurs; they don’t know the principles of critical writing, and they leave out important stuff. But the irony (aside from the fact that customer reviews are bubbling with the energy of critical writing that most professionals have turned into pedantry) is that people write customer reviews as though they’re talking to a dear friend. Most of them would never give away the ending or the salient parts of a book or movie because that would spoil the friend’s enjoyment of the story.

If reviewing is that simple (and it is), why do the so-called professionals ruin the experience for the rest of us?

1. How To Say ‘Up Yours’: Alice Hoffman

Well, if I were Alice Hoffman, I’d go bonkers myself over the way modern critics not only give away too much plot in the novels they review (and the movies, plays, etc.) but seem determined to spoil the ending.

Hoffman is in the news because she Twittered out her anger in 27 different Tweets about a mixed-to-negative Boston Globe review by Roberta Silman of her new book, “The Story Sisters” (Shaye Areheart/Crown; 325 pages; $25).

Granted, Hoffman got a bit carried away by calling Silman a “moron” and insisting that “any idiot can be a critic” (hey!), and she got a bit vindictive by giving out Silman’s private email and phone number so that readers can “tell her what u think of snarky critics.”

Hoffman has apologized for responding “strongly” in the “heat of the moment” and says she’s “sorry if I offended anyone,” which is the usual code for “my publisher won’t let me say ‘up yours.’ ”

But  I think we should listen to Hoffman’s more important and far-reaching statement — one that is true of way too many reviews these days — about being “dismayed” because  the review “gave away the plot of the novel.”

Two Reviewers Give It Away

Which many reviews today often do. Silman refers to “the secret that is the linchpin of the book” and then appears to disclose it. She describes key plot points in Part Two, which is way too far in the book to follow the heart of the novel’s story. She tells us how the book ends by naming the “only” character who “is given a chance to grow,” by revealing the two estranged characters whom we’re hoping will bond but find “no resolution,” and divulging the hero-turned-drug addict who’s institutionalized but “does bear a child and reform,” yet “never really matures.”

No wonder Hoffman went off her feed. I bet she was already smarting from a similar debacle at the Washington Post, where critic Wendy Smith not only follows the development of a key character far too long and with too much detail, she  then drops the bomb that the character is “responsible for a death that estranges her from the family, but a series of poignant scenes shows her tentative attempts to reconnect.” Smith spoils the end of the book by telling us about “this radiant finale” in which a wedding in Paris provides the sisters with “a tender opportunity to reconcile.”

Let me just say, too, that it doesn’t matter if any of these salient details are provided at the beginning of the book. It is the reviewer’s charge never to even seem to give the book away, to step in front of the material, to plant a seed in the reader’s mind (she does “reform”) that will one day spoil a fresh reading of the text. (More about this next week.)

The Fall of Lit Crit

I have a theory that the standards of literary criticism have fallen in direct proportion to the “democratization” of publishing and blogging on the Internet. Stands to reason, no? Those first customer reviews on Amazon years ago weren’t (and for the most part still aren’t) notable for their professionalism, heaven knows. But  boy, did they have energy (still do) and how ebulliently they make themselves heard. Read four or five of ‘em and you glean enough about the book to know if it’s for you.  At the same time, these charged-up contributors feel they are part of a reading family and would never spoil the fun of others by giving away key aspects of a book. So you can scroll through customer reviews on just about any website without having to keep one eye closed, which I find myself doing with so-called professional criticism of everything from books to movies to theater.

2. Blogging for Revenge: Alain de Botton

In this case I have to say as a reader, what in heck was the New York Times Book Review thinking of last Sunday when a wretched piece of bad writing showed up disguised as a book review of “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” by Alain de Botton (Pantheon; 327 pages; $26)?

You’d think a book with a straightforward title like that would be easy to describe, but no. I read the full-page review by Caleb Crain three times and I still didn’t know what it was about. Crain accuses de Botton of mockery, condescension, mean-spiritedness, superficial judgment and spite, but he never tells us the “initial goal” of the book, except to say the author “has already lost track of (it)” by Chapter 3.

Of course if I were advising de Botton, I would have tied him to a chair before allowing him to write a vitriolic message to Crain for all on the Internet to see. This part especially is regrettable: “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.”

But I would have spread out the red carpet for de Botton to say this: “I genuinely hope that you will find yourself on the receiving end of such a daft review some time very soon — so that you can grow up and start to take some responsibility for your work as a reviewer.”

Responsible Reviewing

Exactly. While embittered authors are hardly the first person the world attends when it comes to instruction about responsible book reviewing, hysterical former critics at least are louder, so tune in next week when we explore the dreaded but often amusing hilarities of lousy critical writing that junks up the litosphere so much these days.

And no, I haven’t read either of the book’s in question. I want to review the reviews, and ponder  why literary criticism, even at its most blunt and hurried form, as in a newspaper or blog (as opposed to a lengthy New Yorker piece or later academic journal) can be useful, relevant and valued by your everyday reader.

More next week.

P.S. and DRIB (don’t read if busy):

An example of responsible critical writing would be Sukhdev Sandhu’s coherent and engrossing review in The Daily Telegraph from England.

There we discover that de Botton is not just a “British essayist” as NYTBR reviewer Crain dismissively puts it (for crying out loud! readers will remember him as author of the elegant and delectably humorous “How Proust Can Change Your Life” and “The Consolations of Philosophy”! It’s the responsibility of the reviewer to point this out).

Nor is the book simply an extended essay.  De Botton “has set out,” as Sandhu puts it, “to write ‘a hymn to the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the modern workplace and, not least, its extraordinary claim to be able to provide us, alongside love, with the principal source of life’s meaning.’ ” A hymn! One needn’t have read de Botton to adjust expectations and even thrill a little bit at the possibility of changing our lens on an often drab subject.

Sandhu — who, by the way, can be negatively critical about the book under review — also shows us that de Botton writes far more comprehensively and compassionately than Crane ever lets on, ranging in subject interest, for example, from accountants and rocket scientists to electricity installers, career counselors, entrepreneurs and many others from many different countries.

Sandhu not only “gets” de Botton as a critic is supposed to do – mostly his humor! the NYTBR critic repeatedly misses de Botton’s penchant for the wry, dry subtle aside!  — he backs up most of his assertions with evidence, meaning quotes from the book that are more than thoughtful, in de Botton’s way: they are intriguing, chewy, and re-readable.

Sandhu writes, “Of an outstandingly successful but abrasive and self-regarding industrialist, de Botton observes: ‘a certain kind of intelligence may at heart be nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.’ ”

(Although Hoffman has deleted her tweets, I’ve used various blog sources for the quotes including Edward Campion 6/28 and Galley Cat.)

BRANDING OUR CHILDREN

Last week’s New York Times arts section had a story about a travel writer with an autistic son whose “wild temper tantrums” abated only when he was riding a horse.   

The travel writer had a bent for nonWestern medical traditions, so he and his wife took their son to Mongolia where shamans and horses helped the boy achieve “an amazing ‘recovery’ and ‘healing,’ ” or so the Times quotes the dad. He also said his son’s temper tantrums “all but disappeared” after the trip.

The story is meant to be inspiring, and it is, except for the many business deals that seem to trump and the son’s role in it all. For example:

1) the travel writer dad is well connected in NY, so before the trip he got a $1-million-plus advance from Little, Brown based on a 37-page proposal about the “prospective adventure.”  

2) Dad also took a filmmaker along to create a documentary. 

3) He made YouTube video of himself and his son riding a horse that “stoked interest” in the book’s auction. 

4) He optioned the feature film rights to the producers who made “Lord of the Rings” and “Golden Compass” — with himself as scriptwriter.

5) He says part of the advance is going to a ranch he’s founded to treat autistic kids who like horses. 

HOW THE BIG BOYS DO IT

I’m sure this travel writer dad started out with the idea of helping his son, and hey, maybe he needed to finance the trip so he started pulling deals together. It’s just worrisome to see every related industry kick in to make this a million-dollar sure thing with the boy as a much-scrutinized cog. Perhaps Dad realized he needed the PR value of creating the charity ranch in case somebody accuses him of exploiting both his son and autism. 

At the same time, the NYT article is written as a kind of a model scenario for writers. It says, This Is The Way the Big Boys Do It.  Don’t wait until you write the book or even know how your story ends. Build your power base now. Start the marketing process now. Remember Elizabeth Gilbert? She was writing magazine articles about exotic spas for the rich before jotting down a similar of “prospective adventure” submission, which earned her a sizeable advance that paid for an all-expenses trip around the world and resulted in “Eat Pray Love.”

A LESSON FROM “SIX FEET UNDER”

Let’s just hope the little boy appreciates all this and doesn’t, you know, mess things up. Remember the Rachel Griffiths character and her brother in the HBO series, “Six Feet Under” a while back? As the story unfolds, we learn that these two were the subject of a best-selling book by their psychologist parents who apparently told the world about every single foible, fear and dysfunction their  children experienced from birth. 

Now in their 30s when we meet them, the adult children not only have serious psychological problems, they can’t take a step without somebody recognizing their name and exclaiming, “Oh, it’s you! Did you ever get over that case of genital warts (or gambling addiction or dyslexia or whatever it was –pardon paraphrasing)?”Because of their parents’ book, their privacy has long been destroyed, and as a result they have no sense of identity, are filled with resentment and could blow up at any time (as the brother does). Meanwhile their parents have made a pile of money, enjoy immense fame and sympathy and blame the kids for not moving past the attention from the book that “spoiled” them in the first place.

A BANDWAGON APPROACH

I’m not saying the travel writer is using his son in the same way, but who knows what the long-term effect of this well-oiled marketing/publishing/documentary/YouTube/movie/charity ranch operation will be? He’s autistic, for heaven’s sake. He’s already isolated from our reality and not very trusting of adults, and who can blame him?  I can’t bring myself to mention his name for fear of contributing even slightly to a system that is grounding his experience into marketable hairballs that he’ll be pressured to cough up for the rest of his life. 

And it’s not as though dad and mom can take him to a place free commercial pressures or fans: Foreign rights alone have already been sold in 17 countries (and counting).

This is hardly the first time that merger mania of parent corporations ends up promoting this bandwagon approach to packaging a saleable product and/or  book. What I will never understand is how slavishly everybody working for those corporations mouths all the tidy platitudes that cover their bets.

Here for example is the head of Little, Brown explaining why his publishing house made the “rare” move of spending $1 million before the book was written  and ordering an even rarer first printing of 150,000 copies:

“It just touched so many points of interest – helping to heal an autistic child, traveling under difficult circumstances…(and) the chances you’ll take for love.” 

Translation: “It just touched so many points of interest –YouTube, Hollywood, the documentary, the charity ranch, soaring rates of autism….and the love of any book publisher for all the green-lighted systems that will do the work for us.”

“MARLEY AND ME”?

Then there’s the humor part. Little, Brown, sent out a brochure to booksellers describing “The Horse Boy” as combining “the adventure and optimism of ‘Three Cups of Tea’ with the powerful connection between man and animal that readers loved in ‘Marley and Me.’ “

“Marley and Me”? Wait a minute. I was sure the brochure was going to refer to Temple Grandin’s “Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior.” I mean, that’s really thoughtful and documented and moving — but no. Let’s not throw the wrench of something too complicated into this giant machine with its simple and  simplistic “high concept” story.

“Marley and Me,” after all, was a huge bestseller and a huge movie – another example of How the Big Boys Do It – and it concerned an enormously popular subject (dogs) that might, in the right context, slop over some of its fad appeal to the growing interest in alternative treatments of autism. 

Room for Love?

I’m not saying the shaman approach is wrong. In fact, I’m hoping  the documentary-maker and the YouTube video director and the Hollywood dealmakers all took a step back so this little boy could connect with somebody real – not only a shaman whose prayers might truly have a healing influence but someone [a parent?] who loved him unconditionally and stayed with him after the spotlight was removed. 

If the boy was jerked away from the shaman to be photographed on a horse with his dad in a mawkish picture (below) suitable in someone’s eyes for a jacket illustration, and then hustled off to the van so the travel party could get to the next shaman and the next horse and the next photo op, well, let’s hope the boy was truly on his way to “recovery” as his dad told the NY Times.

We learn that the author has recently carted his son, now 7, off to Namibia to meet with more shamans, so who knows? Maybe there’ll be a sequel.

I think what grates me the most is that New York Times article taking its place right on schedule by giving this multi-tentacled project its blessing. You want to know why newspapers are dying? Well, they aren’t trustworthy. They sound like Entertainment Tonight. They don’t probe enough. 

True, some evidence of journalistic principle does emerge. A mother and doctor/author (of “Autism’s False Prophets”) say they are skeptical of anecdotal evidence and warn that the son’s behavioral changes could be temporary. But overall, the tone of the piece is congratulatory, even cloying. Other doctors “who have worked with autistic patients say a child can make big leaps in development,” the article goes on vaguely, “and that stories like [this one] can provide inspiration to families.” Might as well have come off a press release.

Even the title of the book, “The Horse Boy,” has a phony ring to it.  Remember the last time a brief submission earned the author a $3.5 million advance from a publisher? Why, of course, that was “The Horse Whisperer,” and what a winning combo-title it was! Now “The Horse Boy” is here to ride on those very coat tails. They say publishing’s a crap shoot? They mean childhood, don’t they?

#2:  PUBLISHERS LEAVING NEW YORK

[Part Two]

What a piece of work is mainstream book publishing in New York! Yesterday’s column looked at how remote and exclusive it’s become, how isolated from the rest of the country. The National Book Awards fiasco was cited as a humorous example, but two other influences (see below) demonstrate how serious the stakes have become.

Philip Roth Makes a Demand

I admit another side of me is saying about the National Book Awards debacle, So they had a little party (all right, a big party) — you don’t have to make a federal case out of it. Life in book publishing is not easy, and these people work hard to survive, so give ‘em a break. It was just one night.

Right. It’s what that one night represents that we should look at – indeed what Philip Roth has been railing against with his Nathan Zuckerman novels for years. That same Page Six mentality that turns the arts into a gossip machine has moved the focus of publishing away from books that are literature and put the spotlight on the authors who create literature. Roth doesn’t mean we’re honoring authors more than books – quite the contrary. He means we’re exploiting famous authors by writing biographies that deliciously and salaciously accent their hidden pasts, their secret inspirations, their dark side. It’s more lucrative to do that, he says, than to publish serious literary works.

In Roth’s latest novel, “Exit Ghost,” he especially indicts “cultural journalism” as presented and practiced by the New York Times.

“Cultural journalism is tabloid gossip disguised as an interest in ‘the arts,’ ” a character protests in a letter to the Times, “and everything that it touches is contracted into what it is not. Who is the celebrity, what is the price, what is the scandal? What transgression has the writer committed, and not against the exigencies of literary aesthetics but against his or her daughter, son, mother, father, spouse, lover, friend, publisher, or pet?”

If you don’t believe mainstream publishers would rather dish the author than sell the book, Zuckerman steps up to supply two examples. First there was “dubious scholarly speculation” about Nathaniel Hawthorne having an incestuous relationship with his sister. It’s nothing but a rumor, mind you, but it persists. And what if it were fact – would it inform or hinder our appreciation and understanding of Hawthorne’s books? Well, what would that matter if your intention is never to read Hawthorne but to sell the heck out of a biography that scandalizes. Why, you might even get a blurb from Anna Wintour. That great Hawthorne scholar.

Then, too, look at Ernest Hemingway, says Roth’s letter-writer. Hemingway’s memory was maligned when a modern-day “cultural journalist” interviewed people in Michigan and their descendants ”who are said to have been models for the characters” in Hemingway’s early stories. When they told the journalist they felt “badly served by Ernest Hemingway,” their feelings were “taken more seriously than the fiction because they’re easier for your cultural journalist to talk about than the fiction.”

The NBA organizers bought into that same gossip-mill approach. Did the world hear about the literary wonders of the NBA winners or about the names of the quasi-famous who attended? The organizers could not see the problem because they’re trapped inside the mainstream.

(And of course Philip Roth loves to have his fun with us, having spent his career constructing his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman and then taunting “cultural journalists” and publishers for asking, gosh, is Zuckerman really Philip Roth disguised? Just by pondering the question, we reveal ourselves to be more interested in gossipy facts about the author than in the fiction he creates. Too bad the colossal ego in all Roth books has its own obvious needs, but we won’t go into that now.)

What to do about this? Here are a few suggestions.

Rebuild from the Bottom Up

When the Nobel Prize judge Horace Engdahl said that American writers and publishers were too insular, a lot of literary folk accused Engdahl and the Nobel Committee of being anti-American, thus launching an embarrassing pissing match that got us nowhere.

One unassailable lesson got lost in the shuffle: American writers and the mainstream publishing community “don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. When publishers refuse to enter the world’s literary conversation, their “ignorance is restraining.”

Whaaaa? (as the Latin lover in Astaire/Rogers movies and “The Drowsy Chaperone” says so noisily and comically when he pretends to be taken by surprise.) Americans don’t publish many works in translation?

Not by a long shot. The steady decrease of translated books coming out of mainstream publishing is “a national crisis,” the literature director of the National Endowment of the Arts told the New York Times. Salman Rushdie looked at the number in 2004 (874 translated books out of 185,000 total) and called it “shocking.”

Moreover, it’s been proven that the only way writers of other countries can become known in the world is to be translated into English. So when mainstream publishers in New York avoid publishing works in translation, “we are the clogged artery,” says the chair of PEN’s translation committee – “[we] prevent authors from reaching readers anywhere outside their own country.”

It’s true that translated books used to be harder to sell. But today, thanks to the Internet, English-reading book buyers who love translated works are easier to identify and target. One feels that mainstream publishers would like to stick their toe in international waters, but according to the New York Times, they simply have “no staff editors who read foreign languages,” so they have “hesitated to rely on the advice of outsiders.”

Well, surely that can be rectified.

Wouldn’t any publisher consider it a plus if a prospective assistant editor came to the job interview with a reading fluency in at least one foreign language? During college the candidate could have studied the classics in that language, traveled in that country and read all the promising modern authors. If hired, the new editorial assistant could comb through the foreign country’s publishing lists, acquire advance copies, investigate the U.S. market for prospective works in translation and write up Readers Reports that would be reviewed by a senior editor. This would be good training for the editorial assistant and it would sure breathe new life into an industry struggling to match the literary demands of the world.

Hire enough of these editors, nurture sales reps and marketing executives with similar expertise, and maybe the house will not only look worldwide for authors to translate but learn how to market them to Americans who are hungry for foreign writers. If you think these readers are too small in number to make publishing works in translation profitable, remember the audience for books by Middle East authors was zilch before 9/11 and has grown fantastically since. If that’s too tidy an example, I remember a lone paperback editor who started a reading craze in the 1970s by publishing Latin American authors aside from Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

And wouldn’t it be great if mainstream houses required prospective editorial and marketing assistants to have worked in bookstores outside (far outside) New York, maybe during summers and holidays while in college, and to have carved out an area of literary interest for which they can demonstrate real expertise?

Bringing in new influences from the ground up is not only a way to open the horizons of mainstream publishers. It’s a way to turn our attention back to the work we all want to do, and that is to attend the publication of books we believe in, from the most literary to the most commercial. It’s a way to fight captivity by corporate pressures and faraway owners. It’s a way to establish our own literary standards and strive to live up to them no matter where the house is located or who/what controls it.

Once again if I’m in the dark and this is already happening, I’d love to hear about it. Maybe Manhattan will freeze over before mainstream book publishers ever set foot off the island. But breaking out of literary prison can take many forms, some barely visible right now, and can only spread like the “good viruses” of our new Internet Age. Thoughts welcomed (you can send anonymously, too) at pat@holtuncensored.com.