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4.1.05

Culturally Speaking #59: The One with Not a Single Graphic

By Sarah Stodola

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Note: I did originally write the following passage for this column, however because of its time-sensitive nature it was published on the site this past Tuesday.  I'm publishing it here again because it seems like a good idea...

The New York Times has printed another article on book blogs (although this one also incorporates music blogs).  Its author, Sarah Boxer, complains that "[t]he traditional objects of culture - books, movies, art - are becoming ever more distant. In their place are reviews of reviews, museums of museums and many, many lists."  What every single employee of the Times seems to be failing to realize is that it isn't that "reviews of reviews" and "lists" are all that's out there on the web; it's simply the only thing they bother to cover.

As I mentioned in my recent Gothamist interview, it's a shame that book blogs are getting so much coverage, not because they don't provide a valuable service, but because they are completely obstructing the mainstream media's line of vision to the actual literature that is being published on the web.  The Times and other publications cover book blogs as if they are the only literary presence on the web -- it's the cyber version of heaping attention on the New York Review of Books and Times Literary Supplement while failing to acknowledge the existence of The Paris Review and McSweeney's.

I would just once -- JUST ONCE! -- like to see the Times print an article on the websites that actually are creating literature, instead of the websites that just manage to mention literature (or the coverage of literature...it's a very deep well after awhile); Eclectica, Fiction Warehouse, Eyeshot, and Pindeldyboz, to name just a few, really do deserve mainstream coverage.  And to deny them that coverage in favor of book blogs -- websites that have never purported to actually create literature -- is to miss out on online literature altogether.  It's no wonder that Sarah Boxer thinks that the "Web is not really a web after all. It is a list of lists."  It seems she has never dared click on any of the links to the real literature that some of the very fine book blogs she mentions list.

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The realities of selling the film rights to your book...

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I have to acknowledge that I've never read Adam Smith.  But according to this article, he is not the progenitor of laissez faire economics that I have always understood him to be.

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The reason the death toll for American soldiers is so "low" in Iraq is because of one simple development: medical technology.  Apparently, soldiers with the exact same wounds as in Iraq, had they occurred 30 or 50 years ago, would have died in far greater numbers.

This is good, in a way.

But it also means that there is far greater harm being done to Americans in Iraq than what we hear about, because it is standard procedure for the media to report only deaths, not injuries.

For example, in the Vietnam War, about one in four injured soldiers died.  So if that were the case in Iraq today, almost 4,000 soldiers would have died by now.  And just because a wounded soldier lives doesn't mean he is going to live well, because a majority of these wounds produce lifelong repercussions.

Click here for the last Culturally Speaking.

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Sarah Stodola is the Executive Editor of Me Three.  She can be contacted here.

© 2005 Me Three