Just...Can't...Stop...

Okay, I said no more Lee Siegel, but Leon Wieseltier's views on the matter as found at the end of The New York Observer's coverage are just too bizarre not to note:

Mr. Wieseltier was sanguine about the situation. He described Mr. Siegel as a “fiendishly gifted critic and an unusually cultivated individual,” and saw the issue more as one having to do with the nature of the Internet itself. “The larger problem, of course, is that we planted our flag over a piece of the Wild West known as the blogosphere. This left us divided against ourselves,” Mr. Wieseltier said. “Since we do make ourselves factually and morally responsible for what appears under our flag, we have to apply the same stringencies to our blogs, too. I don’t like the blogosphere for many reasons; one of them is its assumption that a person’s first thoughts are his best thoughts, which is quite obviously false.”

Seriously? The larger problem is that the blogosphere is the Wild West? Because pre-internet it wasn't possible for people to lie? I was a young kid back before there were blogs, but my understanding is that it was always possible to, say, write a letter to the editor and sign a false name. It's also always seemed to me in my personal history of internet use that it's not especially difficult to avoid lying. Nor do I think anyone in the blogosphere believes that a person's first thoughts are his best thoughts. This is, as they say, quite obviously false.

The striking thing about Siegel's blogging, however, was the unbelievably low quality of his second thoughts. It's one thing to toss off the notion that bloggers are like fascists and then, after getting criticized for it and thinking some more deciding that was an unwise overstatement. Siegel's approach, however, was to think about the issue and pen an elaborate defense of the proposition that Markos was, in fact, a fascist. Similarly with the Kincaid matter. Siegel went from a perhaps thoughtless and sloppy expression of some critical thoughts on Kincaid to an elaborate, yet evidence free, accusation that Kincaid was a pedophile. It's a curious manner of behavior, but one that has everything to do with Siegel's own pathologies -- seemingly a hefty dose of status-anxiety -- and very little to do with the blogosphere as such.

Comments

yeah.

That stuff you were just saying about how it ain't Rumsfeld, it's Bush?

Well, it ain't Siegel. It's Wieseltier and Peretz.

Posted by kid bitzer | September 6, 2006 4:23 PM

They're all just scared to death of the internet, aren't they?

I'm scared of spiders, too. I keep trying to tell people about the arachno-fascists but they just look at me like I'm out of my spezzatura.

Posted by Murph | September 6, 2006 4:34 PM

Yes. What bothers me right now is that more and more people, even in the areas of the blogosphere that I normally enjoy, seem to be quickly forgetting what caused this crash and burn to begin with. It definitely wasn't that Siegel was posting "contrarian" views on cultural or political issues; it wasn't his ludicrous (but perfectly acceptable (rhetorically speaking)) attack on Stewart, Colbert, Kos, Atrios etc.; it wasn't even his outrageous attacks on poster jhschwartz on his own blog (or, for that matter, against Ezra Klein, dragging Ezra's mother into it) that set the whole thing off. No. He was accusing Professor Kincaid of being a pedophile based on nothing but a personal dislike of Kincaid's Slate piece regarding MSM's disproportionate fascination with the JonBenet case.

So when Jhschwartz and others in the talkback section understandably expressed their disgust with this wild accusation, Siegel didn't respond by addressing their comments in the talkback section under his own name, or by e-mailing them as himself. No. Instead, he invented an alter-ego to post comments lavishing Lee Siegel with otherworldly praise and hinting at a widespread commenter's conspiracy against poor Lee, and accusing jhschwartz of being an alias for the editor of n+1. And he also made personal threats (I know who you are... If you knew who I was, you'd be crapping your pants etc.)

And by the way, I normally disagree with pretty much everything this jhschwartz has to say. On most other issues he blurs with Marty Peretz, as far as I'm concerned. But I have to give him kudos for this, even though he doesn't want them, judging from his most recent comments on TNR, and according to the New York Observer.

Posted by frodo | September 6, 2006 6:09 PM

Matt, could you change the typeface font on your site? The text is awfully hard to read. San serif type is fine, but this font is so scrunched up, it's hard to distinguish letters and slows down reading.

Thanks for considering.

Posted by Kim | September 6, 2006 6:13 PM

Frodo - Thanks for the support here, at least. I see I've got to work on you about Israel, however. You see, the land of Israel is like the Shire. . . .

Posted by jhschwartz | September 6, 2006 6:41 PM

Heh! I would argue with you on TNR, but they don't allow non-subscribers to join in... No, I enjoy your posts, and the other posters on TNR, even though I often disagree fervently. I do however think that their coverage of Israel and the ME in general is less than objective and far less than constructive. (Well, it's largely an opinion magazine, so I guess that's OK). But that being said, TNR's intense love affair with the invasion of Iraq bothers me far more than their coverage of the Israel/Palestine/Lebanon issue.

Posted by frodo | September 6, 2006 6:56 PM

So subscribe! It's like $30 for an on-line account. We could use more lefties to keep us honest (people have started to throw around liberal as an epithet over there!).

Posted by jhschwartz | September 6, 2006 7:03 PM

So now we know! "jhschwartz" is the all-purpose sock-puppet for TNR's marketing department. Yes, this whole "Lee Siegel" thing was just some clever conspiracy to attract more subscribers to TNR ;-)

Posted by frodo | September 6, 2006 7:46 PM

It's rather funny hearing Leon W. of the magazine that published a couple of dozen fantasies by Stephen Glass as fact denouncing the low quality of the blogosphere. Glass would have been exposed as a liar much earlier these days due to bloggers.

Posted by Steve Sailer | September 6, 2006 8:17 PM

This Lee Siegel thing reminds me that one of the things I've noticed over the years that was quite surprising to me is that lots of prominent opinionators aren't -- how shall we put this? -- quite right in the head.

Posted by Steve Sailer | September 6, 2006 8:20 PM

Why is it that so many print journalists seem to assume that blogs are designed to replace what they do? Very few serious bloggers actually seem to think that blog posts are going to replace essays. If they did, why would so many of them write op eds and other longer, more structred things from time to time? Its a different form with some different purposes, although Leon's idea that all blogs are just people spraying thoughts on a page is kind of silly.

Of course, the ironic thing is that if you look back at a lot of Siegel's pre-blog writings a lot of them do seem to be kind of first thoughts. What editor let that Uma Thurman piece run anyway?

Posted by Gabe | September 6, 2006 9:49 PM

From a phone interview, as quoted in the Observer piece:

“And I’m especially sorry that I embarrassed a magazine that was nourishing me as an intellectual, long before it began publishing me as a journalist.”

Jesus Christ, the guy actually talks that way.

Posted by Tom Crippen | September 6, 2006 10:14 PM

Christopher Hitchens hates Lee Siegel and vice versa. I had no idea. (http://hitchensweb.com/Siegel.htm)

How does Atrios factor this into his world view?

Posted by Tom Crippen | September 6, 2006 10:27 PM

Frodo, you seem like a samrt guy, and you're making solid points, so why do you use the illiterate abbreviation "MSM"? Please stop -- it makes you look like a cretin.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | September 6, 2006 10:51 PM

This Lee Siegel thing reminds me that one of the things I've noticed over the years that was quite surprising to me is that lots of prominent opinionators aren't -- how shall we put this? -- quite right in the head.

Ah, perhaps that's because some are tenderly cultivated intellectual flowers, shielded from uncouth opinions and harsh and spontaneous critical intercourse by fawning patrons like Leon Wieseltier.

This also isn't the first time a denizen of the blogophobic world has reluctantly taken to blogging, and then proceeded to lose his bearings and self-restraint entirely. It is almost as though the simplicity and directness of the medium is too powerful for them, and the combination of liberation from cant and structural disorientation causes them to forget their house training.

By the way, Wieseltier's fear of blogs apparently leads him to conceive of the blogosphere as a single individual - something capable of making assumptions:

"I don’t like the blogosphere for many reasons; one of them is its assumption that a person’s first thoughts are his best thoughts"

I really must seek an audience with this Mr. Blogosphere, and ask him how dare he make these invidious assumptions.

I only write blog comments now; but I had a blog once. Some of my posts were on very current events and were relatively quick responses to some recent happening. But others were on topics I had been thinking hard about for years. In the blogs I read I find much of the same mix. And for those posts that are quick responses, I don't see how that is substantially different from the newspaper editorial page editor who must produce an editorial on today's important event for the next day's newspaper - or how it differs from off the cuff water cooler conversation of the sort that must occur even in in the offices of the New Republic. Some blogs are indeed little but sprawling, national water cooler converstions. So what?

But perhaps I am too quick to dismiss Wieseltier's fears. Although blogging itself will never be a threat to thinkers of substance who have important ideas to contribute, and who will always find some medium that puts them in contact with those readers who seek substance, the blogs do perhaps pose a threat to some of the fading grandees of the print opinion game.

Much of what passed just a short time ago for sagacious opinion in our society has been starkly revealed as the pretentious and sophistical fodder of ill-infomed dilletantes. And much of the old school punditry now seems hoplessly bound around by weird canons of conventional piety, discrete silences and a sort of cultivated ignorance, formality and and intellectual dishonesty mistakenly characterized as "civility." Deficiencies that were once only weakly intuited by readers before are now embarrasingly obvious. Some of the writers of printed opinion have seen their stature deflate rapidly, and their work has been shredded to bits in better infomed blogospheric discussions that revealed the work of these writers as the windy bunkum and falderal it always was.

This is not to say that the writers of prominent blogs do not suffer from deficiencies of their own. They abound. But they are harder to cover up, because if a prominent blogger says something ignorant or stupid, dozens of others who have actually done serious homework on the topic in question, and bring some level of real expertise to the matter, jump on the offending opinion, and the necessary corrective knowledge is quickly injected into the national blogospheric discussion. It's this new level of accountability and immediate correction that the pampered pundits can't accept.

Posted by Dan Kervick | September 7, 2006 12:50 AM

And what the hell does this mean anyway?

He described Mr. Siegel as a “fiendishly gifted critic and an unusually cultivated individual,”

Unusually cultivated? This is actually what I always found aggravating about Siegel's writing even before the blog. He had the tone of a man looking down on the foolish little people below him.

Posted by Gabe | September 7, 2006 4:30 AM

Gabe wrote,"This is actually what I always found aggravating about Siegel's writing even before the blog. He had the tone of a man looking down on the foolish little people below him."

Isn't that the tone of the whole TNR enterprise? I imagine that there is some kind of elaborate initiation ceremony for their writers -- maybe they anoint them is some special oil which is supposed to give them insight far above the common herd.

But really the strangest thing is that it wasn't just TNR that hired that nutty egomaniac Siegel. Slate and the Nation also hired him as their critic. Think of how many people there are that would love to write art criticism and are at least as qualified as Siegel. I would say there would to be at least 100 of them that could write as well or better...and every one of them would be likely be more sane and pleasant to work with. And yet somehow crazy Lee got all these jobs... My only explanation is that these publications are run by a small
clique and the credo of this clique is that no one outside the clique is worth listening to.

Posted by peep | September 7, 2006 9:51 AM

My only explanation is that these publications are run by a small clique and the credo of this clique is that no one outside the clique is worth listening to.

Yes, that is definitely the case. Altho to be fair, under Adam Shatz The Nation's books & the arts section has cast a much wider net.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | September 7, 2006 10:19 AM

I actually do think that Siegel is an unusually gifted critic, especially of television. This does not contradict having a swollen and tender ego, in fact it may be associated with it. The blogosphere lynch mob that seems to have formed around this seems to be reacting more to the tone of his blog (which was not at all his best work, he should have focused on considered criticism) rather than the quality of his essays.

Posted by MQ | September 7, 2006 2:05 PM

MQ, I suppose you have every right to your opinion about Siegel's critical work but it is worth noting that arguably the beginnings of Siegel's spectacular decline was the blog-ire aroused by his published screed against The Daily Show (http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w060227&s=siegel022706). I'd certainly welcome any less than fauning criticism of TDS or Jon Stewart (I only watch the show occassionally now due to, in my opinion, a general decline in quality since its heyday a few years ago), but I think it is starkly apparent from Siegel's portrayal of the show that either 1) Siegel has barely watched it 2) he doesn't get the jokes or 3) He's intentionally misrepresenting the nature of its humor in order to write one of TNR's patented contrarian articles attacking anything and everything liberals consider of value. I'll take Leon Weiseltier at his word and assume that 2) at least is unlikely. But even if either 1) or 3) is true it casts great aspersions on his quality as a critic. I think it was this early case of obvious hackery that initially aroused the attention of his detractors on the internet. Tone I'm sure matters, but that's about as substantive an objection as one can have in the world of cultural criticism.

Posted by TKS | September 9, 2006 7:06 PM