Say Everything’s official publication/on-sale-in-stores date is July 7, but it’s already received some great coverage I want to acknowledge and tip you off about:
- While in New York I stopped by BusinessWeek for a chat with Steve Baker (whose book The Numerati is pretty fascinating). Here’s the video.
- Steven Levy interviewed me in the July Wired:
Wired: Here’s something I bet a lot of people ask: If blogs are so great, why did you have to write a book?
Rosenberg: It’s an inevitable question, but it’s illogical. When Greil Marcus writes a book about Bob Dylan, do you say to him, “Why’d you write a book? You should have written a song.”
- Paul Kedrosky, the super-sharp econoblogger (and an early pioneer of hosted blogging), wrote: “Rosenberg’s book is funny, authoritative, full of great-great stories and anecdotes, and admirably even-handed.”
- At his Bloggasm site, Simon Owens interviewed me as a followup to the piece he did last year.
- Rafe Colburn, who was blogging before we called it that, wrote two posts (first and second) with his reactions to the book: “It’s pretty clear to me that this book will be seen one day as incredibly important.”
- And there was a lovely starred review in Kirkus Reviews that concluded: “Rosenberg suggests that blogging’s ‘outpouring of human expression’ should ‘delight us.’ This fair and fascinating account should delight as well.”
Post Revisions:
- 4 July, 2009 @ 20:34 [Current Revision] by Scott Rosenberg
- 3 July, 2009 @ 11:01 by Scott Rosenberg
and check out my comments about your book at the post “Say Everything Says It All” on whoisylvia.typepad.com
i couldn’t stop reading it, even while the Tour de France live coverage was on my computer this morning. That’s saying something.
Thank you, Sylvia! I hadn’t yet seen your kind review before I’d written this post.
SAR: “Lifecasting is an alternative where you’re pressing a button and recording everything. But it’s very hard to have an interesting life 24/7. I spent enough years as a theater critic watching Samuel Beckett to believe that.”
Hmmmm. Are you saying what I think you’re saying? That Beckett’s ultra-compressed dramatic poetry–with its hallucinatory sensory deprivation (“Something dripping in my head… Splash, splash, always on the same spot…”)–is akin to a “lifecast” with the camera on some idiot exhibitionist 24/7? Get from behind your monitor! There is a higher despair!
The Beckett quote came out a little incoherently, possibly because I didn’t express it precisely enough or possibly as a result of condensation.
My point (which I hope can be understood intuitively) was pretty simple: Beckett understood (and conveyed) a deep sense of the unbearable monotony of so much of daily life that we have no choice but to bear. I watched (and read) a lot of Beckett. So that informs my skepticism about the value of lifecasting.
So no, Beckett’s art is nothing like a lifecast. But it can help us see why lifecasting might be futile.