Because what I saw of the industry is pretty precisely as Tim lays it out here. The Times book review section was orders of magnitude more influential than any other. (I would say that Oprah is now more influential than the Times, but she only tackles one book at a time, compared with what the Times examines every week.) I don’t have first-hand knowledge of how Times editors handled that influence, but it is inconceivable that they were unaware of it. It is equally inconceivable that they are unaware of how certain reviewers are likely to react to particular books. There may be a surprise now and then, but by and large, they would have known what boundaries they were putting on a debate. They would not, in all likelihood, had Bill Kristol review Bill Clinton’s autobiography; nor would they have had Richard Dawkins review John Paul II’s latest. The Times shapes debate about books in the United States. Full stop. If that’s not a fact, then everyone in bookselling is wrong. It is by no means a monopoly, but it is a singularly influence.

Similarly, publishing is insular and New York-centric. Name a large trade publisher that does not have its headquarters in New York. Ok, there’s Thomas Nelson in Nashville, and, well, that’s it. The history of HarperSanFrancisco shows the trajectory of an attempt to do things differently. (Ditto, as a side note, magazine publishing, with Wired as the key example.) Literary agencies I don’t know so well, but I strongly suspect that they are concentrated where their clients are: New York.

The more I think about it, the stranger this exchange appears. It’s as if a writer for Variety showed up to deny that (1) moviemaking is centered in Los Angeles, that (2) local connections that were not transparent to outsiders played any sort of role in the development of movies, that (3) Variety’s editors had any idea whether (1) and (2) were true, and that (4) the internet is likely to have an impact on any of these conditions. Weird.

Where to start, as you say?

First, as you say, it is good to question. And first and foremost, I’m questioning as a reader and consumer of the NY Times book reviews: both the daily and Sunday reviews. I’m questioning whether the reviews reflect the range of serious opinion about books in American culture, or instead a much narrower kind of literary conversation that’s mostly local to New York. I’m questioning whether those reviews are nearly as interesting to read as they could or should be. I’m questioning the decisions that are made about who ought to write about books in either the daily or Sunday section, and about which books are worth discussing. I’m questioning whether Siegel’s book is a book worth discussing, and whether Maslin and Lanchester were the right people to discuss it.

None of which are questions that involve charges of conspiracy. Simply questions that involve judgment calls on one hand, and on the other, expressions by this reader of dissatisfaction not just with this review, but a number of reviews in the NY Times, largely on grounds of whether I enjoy reading the reviews themselves, or learn much from them.

Next point. There is a New York-centered, and somewhat inward-looking, literary culture with a long history, sometimes glorious and sometimes not so much. Are you seriously questioning that this is true? Or claiming that the Times is largely unaffected by it? To my mind, that would be like saying that the WaPo isn’t affected by its Washington connections in the way it covers national politics as if it were the local sports team. I’m not saying that the NY Times somehow needs to be completely walled off from the New York literary scene, but I am saying that it sometimes very perceivably affected by that world in the decisions that get made about which books matter, and about why and how they matter, in its decisions about to praise, flatter or insult certain books. I’m sure that the editors of both sections know very well what the likely result of certain assignments will be in that respect. If Lee Siegel had been a bilious critic of online discourse writing out of Seattle or Austin or Miami, I don’t think he would have gotten the attention that he got as a person very well known to the NYC literary scene. Because the book is just that banal. Are you telling me that the NYC literary scene isn’t or hasn’t been self-involved, inward-turning, self-promotional, etcetera? As you say, this does indeed happen at Swarthmore and Berkeley: I know it very well. Perhaps that’s why I recognize it in the history of literate discussion in NYC, because it’s a very parallel kind of world to academic discourse and its many petty and incentuous qualities. This is where it would help if you’d know a bit about my track record as a blogger before dropping in here and thinking you’re scoring points on me by implying that I have been looking at the beams in other eyes while ignoring my own. I think scholars often do a very poor job as stewards of relevant conversations that have public importance. The NY Times is or should be America’s newspaper for educated readers, so I think even more than us, you guys have a higher standard to live up to. Not just for making good, interesting choices about reviewers, but for thinking beyond the NYC bubble for determining which books are interesting and worthy of discussion.

As for whether the NY Times is wary of online discourse. First, let me note that I’m talking about a wider kind of hostility among the literati towards online writing, which Siegel gives a certain kind of (crude) voice to. Second, you want to talk about “paroxysms of rage”, which I don’t think is a good description of the emotional tone of my essay above, then I feel I can talk about what I see as the emotional tone of your own response–the hot scorn, the lack of engagement with the conversations you’re dropping into, the characterization of this blog as a “death spiral” that prefers a “sledge-hammer” style. I’m not exactly impressed with your open, welcoming view of online writing.

I think you may have more “grumpy colleagues” than you let on, moreover. There is a huge difference between dropping huge sums into publishing a newspaper online and accepting the longer-term implications about how online writing is changing what newspapers publish, and about how it should change what they publish. I don’t think conventional op-ed punditry offers much added value as long as it draws from the same narrow band of conventional wisdom and punditry, and I think cultural criticism is going to have to figure out how to go beyond the relatively self-confirming, inward-turning logic of old literary cultures to achieve its relevance.

Where oh where to start? As noted above, the Times often assigns double-reviews. Seigel is a serious thinker, his book deals with an the great cultural/sociological/technological sea change of our age–the internet–and apparently it has excited some readers into paroxysms of rage.

First things first: As some readers noted above, the Lanchester review is in fact fairly negative, even if the writer employs wry turns of phrase rather than the sledge-hammer style preferred by death spiral bloggers.

But then we get to the nub of this busines. It’s not that the Times was or was not critical of this book, it’s that the Book Review is “fairly corrupt” a “conspiratorial and incestuous” world.

Wow. Do tell. So what’s the evidence offered? More or less … nothing. This isn’t to argue that every review is a wise one, or to argue against the notion that books and reviewers are sometimes mismatched or that reviewers sometimes work out grudges in unseemly ways in print. I’m sure that never, ever, happens at Berkeley or Swarthmore. (This is not to argue, by the way, that the NYT Book Review is beyond criticism. It’s good that readers question the assignment of reviews and the like. But it’s also worth keeping in mind that the book review section, along with the NY Review of Books and The Boston Book Review and the TLS, is one of the few forums left for serious discussion of books for a mass audience).

Ah, but the blog post does not stop here. Then we are told that other nub of the problem is that the New York Times “sees itself as one of the leaders of the charge against new media…. ”

Double wow. And the evidence adduced here? An unnamed New York Times reporter once told our fair professor that he was unhappy with the internet. But this conspiracy theory runs aground on a shoal of fact. Speaking as (full disclosure) a New York Times reporter, I can testify that the New York Times is pouring vast sums into the internet, on the wise assumption that the web is the future. As well, this opening to the web has already offered more space for opinions from outside the time, more space for reviews, more space for the glorious cacaphonous world that is “out there”.

And save for a few of our grumpier colleages, most of us are fascinated by the web and in fact read blogs like this one regularly. Not to mention that on a very ego-centric and parochial level, I would like to see this grand enterprise continue and frankly I’d be perfectly happy if my stories were transmitted via the tooth fillings of Swarthmore and Berkeley professors.

But of course this is all so very fact based. And conspiracy theories are so much more fun.

But you’re also right that for the moment, marketing through online channels isn’t going to carry much weight. I did point out to a group of academic publishers last year that when they’ve got a title that is potentially of interest to both scholars and a small mass-market, they might want to look to create events of the sort that Crooked Timber has hosted around particular books. And I’m guessing that when Cory Doctorow writes something up at Boing Boing, it gives a sales boost comparable to a favorable write-up in the old media (though that’s usually for something that would never get a write-up in the old media, and that’s part of the problem.)

A problem of web-based reviewing is how quickly it goes into really small divisions; specialists in, say, DC-centric mysteries all talking to each other. But aggregation? And diversity of topics?

There’s a further challenge of obscurity snobbery, in which the least accessible books (whether in literary terms or in actual availability) become the most praised, something like the problem in criticism of popular music — if someone other than the critic has heard of it, it’s by definition a sellout and thus no good.

Sorry this is a little incoherent, I’ll be off the cold medicine in a day or two and better able to argue.