Bookdwarf has been invited to join the LitBlog Co-Op. I find them funny because LBC also stands for Long Beach Crips, but the important thing is that they’re getting serious press both here and abroad.
I, meanwhile, labor in obscurity. Next week will see me visiting the school I had named after me. I need to sort them out: they’ve been mispronouncing my damn name. Obviously the implements of adjustment will be my shiny new Weber Style fork and tongs.
You ever see something coming, and know it’s a horrible idea, and it’s going to happen anyway? Like the release of the (ghostwritten) “in her own words” story of Amber Frey and Scott Peterson to inevitably negative reviews: “As compelling and dramatic as a coiled dog turd baking in the summer sun,” says Flak Magazine. You knew, from the moment she appeared on the national stage, that the book would be written, and published, and advertised, and bought. And that nobody would think it was a good idea, but that they’d do it anyway. Because that’s what is done.
Or maybe A Charles Dickens Theme Park, where, presumably, entry fees will be collected directly from your pockets by charmingly malnourished orphans. Oh, nobody on the board of directors thinks it’ll make money or bring people in to Kent, but they can’t quite bring themselves to criticize the legacy of Dickens– or the ideas of the guy who proposed the project, since he’s someone’s boss or uncle or father-in-law. The fact that an abandoned, burned-out Dickens theme park, populated by homeless teenage alcoholics, really will be Dickensian, never really came up. Huh.
Being a technical writer is not a glamorous or well-paid profession, although it requires the sort of knowledge and attention to detail which can be of use in more glamorous and/or remunerative professions. That is why I am not surprised to see that those who have an ideological interest in lying to children are those who flock to the field, and why I am not surprised to see this sort of blatant lie showing up in our classroom materials.
All I can say is, the right is making it a full-time job just to teach children which lies they’re learning in school. A six year old can tell that most advertisements are lies, but they have to get to about sixteen before they realize they’ve been lied to in school all their lives.
My schedule is hectic beyond words this week but I want to take time out for the periodic Secretly Ironic Awards for Technology Journalism:
The Junket Award goes to someone who attended Brainshare during a warm spell but came away with the impression that it was “icy,” because he appears to have spent the conference skiing in the nearby mountains: Eric Doyle for the Guardian. He manages to be condescending, insulting, and inaccurate, all at once. Congrats on the trifecta, buddy!
And the Bring-a-Pencil award goes to Elizabeth Millard of Enterprise Linux IT (a.k.a. CIO Today), which (before correction) managed to discuss the brand of Novell Linux Desktop while calling it “Novell Desktop System,” obviously confusing it with the Sun Java Desktop System. She also managed to ignore the “SUSE LINUX” in “SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server” while pointing out the increase in Novell branding on Open Enterprise Server, and overlooked the “Powered by SUSE LINUX” tagline on every copy of Novell Linux Desktop. The much-heralded death of journalism seems to have been caused by a lack of taking some notes and doing some fact-checking. This article gets a special bonus for consulting the notoriously misleading Yankee Group hack Laura DiDio.
To both of you, congratulations: you are the reason that journalists have a bad reputation.
The gold standard of authenticity has mentioned Bookdwarf in an article about meta-criticism and reviews of book reviews (the dwarf has been doing a rundown of the Globe book reviews recently). The article seems to imply that this is getting a little bit too meta, but I think that if the book reviews have enough weight, they’re worthy of criticism. Besides, I haven’t got time to read them all– much less the books– so I can at least keep up by reading summaries of reviews of books I might want to argue about at cocktail parties.
On a vaguely related note, I heard a great bossa-nova version of Love will Tear us Apart last week, but now that I’ve looked up the review, and found that Pitchfork is ambivalent about it, I’m not so sure I should follow up. Still, bossa-nova Joy Division! This will go great with my collection of Blue Monday covers.
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A journalist and writer that I truly admire and respect, John Fleck, has the following comment:
“One of the things that smart journalists learn… is intellectual humility. The thing I love about [former tech journalist, now media commentator] Dan Gilmor (who I thought was a good tech journalist) was the way he honestly believed that his readers frequently knew more than he did.”
The notion of a journalist thinking she is in a position to tell the people she’s covering how they ought to do what it is that they do is just frankly bizarre.
He’s right, as usual. There are good tech journalists– usually good writers who cover technology. Most, however, are just uninformed and baseless opinions masquerading as thought. In other words, they’re like this blog– except they demand to be taken seriously and get paid for it.
Sometimes, I read articles in the technology press, and I think, hell, I could do better than that in my spare time. And then I think, oh, I have.
In technology, people who can’t or don’t invent or build things can work on assisting, researching, documenting, translating, illustrating, managing, integrating, debugging, or promoting them. If they can’t do any of those things, they have one last resort.
There are many words for this activity, none of them positive. If there were any legitimacy to it, perhaps it would have attracted greater talents. But it seems that most people that have some sort of communicative talent and an understanding of technology become technical writers, marketers, PR flaks, even (ugh) advertisers or science fiction writers. Those without a talent for words or numbers become technology journalists.
Pity them.
Secretly Ironic, now updated up to twice as much, or more, as other blogs. Spring is coming. I walked to work in the drizzle today and it felt good.
I am determined to finish my projects on time, both extracurricular and otherwise. Hence the posting as much as half, or perhaps less, or more, frequently than usual.
“Chasing the dragon” now means going to China to get rich quick in the hot new free market. But when I was little, it was used in rock lyrics and comic strips to refer to getting high. Apparently drugs were cool or something when I was young. These days, though, alcohol is my anti-drug.
Secretly Ironic 
