Content Concerns

Lit-bloggers! YOU SUCK. Y'all PARASITES should start coming up with your own content instead of sucking off the mainstream media.

Take the last 24 hours, for instance. Pitiful! This is all the orignal content I could find.

• This shitty essay on AS Byatt and Githa Hariharan
• This reductionist dialog between two emerging writers and two lit-bloggers
• This worthless and totally unoriginal review of Orhan Pamuk's Snow
• This highly parasitical consideration of the short story collection In the Palace of Repose
• All these worthless posts on Don Quixote
• This super-shitty profile of Dan Wickett
• The review of My Life in the CIA that is just screaming PARASITE!!!
• This pointless coverage of the National Magazine Awards
• This godawful ongoing review of New York City Independent bookstores
• All these shitty, parasitical posts that I can barely understand, but I know are parasitical
• This ridiculously pointless post on something called a "networked bibliography"
• This shit-city review of Divided Kingdom
• Don't even get me started on how unbearably paraSHITical this is
• CR's own completely execrable review of Andrew Sean Greer

All in all, it has been a most shitty, parasitical 24 hours in the litblogosphere. God knows we are headed for collapse. If we keep sucking the mainstream media dry, it will be used up quicker than OPEC's oil reserves, and then we will be stuck talking about nothing at all because, as this post clearly demonstrates, we are incapable of coming up with our own content, parasites that we are.

Comments

[Max]

AMEN!

[Bud Parr]

Well Done!

[ben vershbow]

I've always thought of Conversational Reading as one of the few lit blogs that is able to think on multiple levels. First and foremost, you are talking about books. But you are not afraid to delve into larger questions concerning the way books are inevitably changing as we shift from being a print civilization to a civilization of the computer, of the network etc. Those are precisely the questions we are concerned with on our blog, and I've been very pleased that our two worlds have happily collided on numerous occasions.

But now I'm puzzled. The "ridiculously pointless" post about bibliographies that you mention.. this deals with important issues concerning the fundamental way humans organize knowledge, how books are referenced - even how books are written. I thought you might have picked up on that.

I hope we have not lost you as a sober, inquisitive part of the conversation. If, in fact, your scatalogical screed was meant as satire, I'm afraid it fell a little too heavily to succeed.

[Scott]

Ben,

I think if:book is a great blog and the "ridiculously pointless" remark was 100% satire. If it was too strong for your tastes, well, certain remarks got me pissed off. I'll be more chill tomorrow.

[bookdwarf]

parashitical is my new favorite word.

[ben vershbow]

Upon second reading, I admit it comes across differently. Bravo! I'd thought you'd simply gone off your meds or something. It appears I'd gone off mine.

[derik]

Well done, Scott.

[Bud Parr]

Oh, yes, Parashitical! Does that qualify as a portmanteau word?

[Darby]

If blog posts could rock, this one would be metal.

[amcorrea]

Portmanteau it is! It has Humpty's requisite "two meanings packed up into one word."

Thanks, Scott. I needed that! :)

Sounds like someone can't see the forest for the trees...

[ogic]

This is the third time I've come back here to check for new comments, and I just have to say that every time I read the original post, I laugh a little harder. Thanks for the fits of giggles, Scott!

[gwenda]

(laughing too hard to come up with a parasite joke)

[The Happy Booker]

Perfect response. Mind if I link to it? (because i am unable to come up with my own super-shitty content!) THB

[Anne]

Confirming the mainstream's impression of litbloggers, I guess, I have nothing clever to add here but will just weigh in to agree with the consensus: I'm as parashitical as can be and so glad now to have a word for it. Thanking you, and grateful for the rebuttal. Bravo! Thanks, Scott!

[jai]

I love it. But isn't that the postmodern condition to be parasitical? and you've epitomized it.