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| Ingathering of the intellectuals - publisher presents bloggers as pamphleteers |
| 2007-01-14 |
| From the Jerusalem Post, so you'll have to register, but it is free, and well worth it for my preferred source of news from Israel. Looong article - 5 pages - but worth your time to wander over and read the whole thing. Betcha didn't know we were contributing to the next wave of intellectual enterprise! ;-) For Adam Bellow (see his PajamasMedia page for his bona fides), who began his career as an editor in one of the first American publishing houses established by Jews in the post-war era, the world of ideas is inherently Jewish. This may explain why he considers even his latest project, publishing thought-provoking pamphlets, a "Jewish" activity. The subject of the first series - the recent war in Lebanon - also speaks to Bellow's long-standing interest in Israel and the fate of the Jews. Bellow believes the ferment in the Middle East is now, and will be, the "engine" of America's intellectual life. "The disarray in our politics is directly related to the disarray in the Middle East and that won't change any time soon," he says. "Israel and the Jews are at the center of this conflict, like it or not." The project, spearheaded by Bellow and his partner David S. Bernstein, is new on two fronts: It marks the return of the pamphleteer, and it draws on the Internet as a source of intellectual fervor. As the title suggests "Blog Digest #1: The Hezbollah War," one of the pamphlets in the first series is a compilation of blog posts. Bellow plans to rely on the blogosphere for many of his future pamphlets. "I've decided to do it in a way that marries an 18th-century literary form to a 21st-century digital technology," he says. "Seems to me we have not only an opportunity but an obligation to go back to the origins of our own ideas and to democratize the debate and public conversation." The $4 pamphlets - small, staple-bound books - are Bellow's latest attempt to drive intellectual debate in the US and are being paid for with money he inherited from his father, Saul Bellow, the 1976 Nobel literature laureate. Bellow modeled his project on the Little Blue Books of the 1920s, a series of small staple-bound books published by the Halderman-Julius Publishing Company in Kansas. Halderman and his wife set out to publish low-priced pocketbooks that were intended to lure the ranks of the working and educated classes. Like its predecessor, Bellow's pamphlet series can easily fit into a back pocket and can be read in one sitting, on a break from work, or sipping a cappuccino. "In these matters less is more," says Steve Wasserman, former editor of The Los Angeles Times Book Review. "In a world in which people think they are too busy to read a book, to read smaller books seems entirely seductive, and if it leads people to further exploration of ideas, it's for the good." Bellow has been involved in the world of ideas for a long time. Having studied with Alan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, which became a kind of bible for the conservative intellectual revolt, he went on to publish the vanguard of younger generation conservative intellectuals, such as Richard J. Hernstein and Charles Murray, authors of the widely debated book The Bell Curve. He was also the editor of Deborah E. Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust, one of the first books about Holocaust denial, that led to a much publicized lawsuit by David Irving, whom she referred to in the book as a Holocaust denier. As an editor Bellow has sparked controversy, in part for rejecting the dominant "liberal" or left-leaning New York Jewish intellectual tradition he grew up with on the Upper West Side of New York, for a still Jewish, but more conservative line of thought. But, politics aside, Bellow is a self-designated heir to a European approach to publishing that looks to publishers to drive intellectual debate, against the more passive and safe American model, which he calls "publishing in the rearview mirror. "I had been groomed as the heir to this tradition, very much a Jewish immigrant enterprise," says Bellow, who began his career at the Free Press under the wing of Erwin Glikes, known for having published some of the most prestigious intellectual figures. "From the start I wanted to be driving debate in this country, and books always seemed to be the main engine of debate." In the 1990s, however, the book industry came under attack. The rise of a mass market for books over the last 20 years pushed the publishing industry in unparalleled ways. The pressure for higher profit margins and the rise of chain bookstores that have the potential to sell large quantities of books have made it increasingly difficult to publish books that aren't best-sellers. "Many books that come to me as an editor, I recognize as not viable because who really wants to spend $27 on a book arguing that [Herbert] Hoover was a great president after all," Bellow says. For the last decade, Bellow has been looking for a way to make ideas viable again. Some years ago he decided that the solution to the problem was to bring back the pamphlet. "I knew many writers who would be delighted to express their views in 10,000 words - less than a book, but longer than a magazine article," he says. "There are many people bursting with provocative ideas that they are passionate about, but which they have no outlet for because no magazine will give them the scope, and no publisher will take a gamble." After September 11 the Internet exploded with talk about ideas. Unlike any other event in recent history, Americans and others were looking for a way to explain the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. And in the two years following, blogs emerged as a powerful forum for discourse. Bloggers across the world opened up the opportunity for large-scale, democratic debate. [And] Bellow saw the blogosphere as an opportunity. [He decided to] bring his skills as an editor to the blog world. Bellow's idea is to provide an editorial filter to the blogosphere and give the ideas discussed there a "semi-permanent" form - more permanent than the Internet but less than a traditional book - in a series of small, paperback pamphlets. "I consider myself to be doing something analogous to what bloggers have done in relation to the news media - a popular revolt against the monopoly power of big journalism," he says. "No one has really done that in publishing." Bellow had been reading popular American blogger Michael Totten's blog Middle East Journal since shortly before the "Beirut Spring," when protests in Lebanon led to the end of Syria's military's occupation. In one of their many conversations, Totten told Bellow: "If you want to know what is going on in the Middle East, you won't get it from the media." Bellow took Totten's advice to heart and hired him to edit two of the first three pamphlets. The series includes "Blog Digest #1: The Hezbollah War," a compilation of some of the many blog posts by Lebanese and Israeli bloggers written during the war; "Hassan Nasrallah: In His Own Words," speeches and writings translated into English; and "Everything Could Explode at Any Moment," dispatches from the Lebanese-Israeli front by Totten. "What I really like about the Internet is that it liberates the individual's voice," Bellow says. "It doesn't matter who you are, or what your education is - if you have a voice, it will come through." The trouble is that individual voices often get lost in the sea of voices that is the Internet. But that's precisely where Bellow finds his niche. The problem is not quality, but rather how to weed through the sheer quantity of words to reach the pot of gold. His job, as he sees it, is to compile the best of what exists on the Internet. "There is a lot of material that deserves to be published that would be interesting to read in print," he says. To do that he hires experts in a particular field to edit the pamphlets. The business model is an editorial democracy: bloggers are being given their own imprints for a limited time. Philip Roth did this successfully in the 1980s by introducing Americans to Eastern European writers. Readers trusted Roth to guide them through a new literature they otherwise would not have been exposed to. The current release is "Best Recipes from the Jewish Blogosphere," edited by Judith Weiss, who blogs at keshertalk.com. Later this month Bellow and his partner plan to release "Embrace the Suck: A Pocket Guide to Milspeak," a dictionary of military slang and jargon coming out of Iraq edited by Austin Bay, a blogger and retired colonel. Further projects include a possible collection of writings by female Arab bloggers and testimony from people who have escaped from the North Korean gulag. "There is no limit to the amount of material we can publish," Bellow says. And here's his website. I've some shopping to do! ;-) |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #3 Better do it while he/they still can. WORLDNEWS/FREEREPUBLIC > TERRORISTS USING GOOGLE EARTH [Net] MAPS TO PLAN ATTACKS. LUCIANNE/OTHER > Continuing calls from US Pols to regulate-monitor Internet + Gooogle. LUCIANNE/FREEREPUBLIC > USDOD CAN SEARCH BANK RECORDS OF KNOWN [SUSPECTED?] TERRORISTS. ACLU p.o'd at alleged Gubmint violations of rights of privacy. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2007-01-14 23:39 |
| #2 It remains to be seen, phil_b. He's putting his own money into the venture, and is selling only via his website and Amazon.com thus far, to keep the overhead low. Mr. Bellow's tale of how he became a conservative. I wonder if I should start thinking of myself as a New York conservative? |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2007-01-14 19:51 |
| #1 Whilst I am not convinced for the need for dead tree versions, he is quite right about blogs being very much like the 18th century pamphleteers who, for the most part, were polemicists openly promoting a particular position. Their works circulated by hand/referral and were crucial to the explosion of ideas in the (English) Enlightenment, where almost anyone (well at least the middle classes) could promote their views and the consumers decided who to read and believe. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2007-01-14 19:41 |