[tt] NYT review: Lee Siegal: Against the Machine (more)

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Lee Siegal: Against the Machine
New York Times Book Review, 8.2.3
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/books/review/Lanchester-t.html
[Related material appended.]

Log On. Tune Out.
By JOHN LANCHESTER

AGAINST THE MACHINE:
Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob
By Lee Siegel.
182 pp. Spiegel & Grau. $22.95.

One of the oldest and soundest rules in intellectual life is "never
get in a parsing contest with a skunk." It is a principle that the
lively, intelligent, combative cultural critic Lee Siegel forgot in
autumn 2006, when he gave in to the temptation to respond to
comments about him posted on his blog at The New Republic's Web
site. Some of the comments were anonymous and abusive -- featuring
allegations of chromosomal deficiencies and pedophilia -- and Siegel
replied under the pseudonym "sprezzatura," praising his own work and
denouncing his critics ("You couldn't tie Siegel's shoelaces"). When
it emerged that Siegel was sprezzatura, he was pilloried in the
blogosphere, suspended by The New Republic and, "in good American
fashion," he writes, rewarded with the opportunity "to write the
book on Web culture that I'd long wanted to write."

Under the circumstances, no one would expect that new book, "Against
the Machine," to be a valentine to the Internet. The book describes
itself, in its first sentence, as being "about the way the Internet
is reshaping our thoughts about ourselves, other people and the
world around us." The view it takes of that reshaping is an angry,
dark one. Siegel sees the Internet as "the first social environment
to serve the needs of the isolated, elevated, asocial individual."
"Against the Machine" sets out to explore the consequences of that
fact.

There is a variety of Luddite cultural pessimist who sees the
Internet as inherently trivial, a gigantic nonevent in the history
of man. Most Net naysayers are in that camp, but Siegel isn't one of
them. In that sense, he agrees with the Net's boosters and
hucksters. He thinks that "the Internet is possibly the most radical
transformation of private and public life in the history of
humankind." The trouble is that "from the way it is publicly
discussed, you would think that this gigantic jolt to the status quo
had all the consequences of buying a new car." Siegel's mission is
to make his readers think about the negative effects of the Internet
-- its destructive impact on our culture, on our polity and, perhaps
most important, on our sense of ourselves.

The indictment comes with a number of counts. Siegel argues that the
Internet invites people to "carefully craft their privacy into a
marketable, public style." In doing so it creates an environment in
which everything is on display all the time, whether on YouTube, on
Internet dating sites or in the blogosphere. This turns the culture
into a giant popularity contest, an expanded and never-ending
version of high school. "You must sound more like everyone else than
anyone else is able to sound like everyone else," Siegel writes.
Thanks to the Internet, and to shows like "American Idol," we are
encouraged to believe in a phony idea of interactivity, as "all
popular culture aspires to full viewer participation." "Popular
culture," he argues, "used to draw people to what they liked.
Internet culture draws people to what everyone else likes." Siegel
makes the strong point that "what the Internet hypes as
`connectivity' is, in fact, its exact opposite." People sitting on
their own in front of computer screens -- this once would have been
called disconnectedness or atomization. Siegel is blistering on the
"surreal world of Web 2.0, where the rhetoric of democracy, freedom
and access is often a fig leaf for antidemocratic and coercive
rhetoric; where commercial ambitions dress up in the sheep's
clothing of humanistic values; and where, ironically, technology has
turned back the clock from disinterested enjoyment of high and
popular art to a primitive culture of crude, grasping
self-interest."

Most good cultural critics are instinctive moralists, and Siegel is
a fine example of the type. But criticism of this type often leaves
the reader wondering, as James Joyce wondered apropos Wyndham
Lewis's attacks on "Ulysses": Even if all of this argument is
granted as true, how much of the truth is it? How much does it leave
out, and how much could be said on the other side of the story?
Pretty much everyone not madly in love with the Web will agree with
some of what Siegel says about Internet culture. Anonymity may be a
desirable quality for a corporate whistle-blower or a Chinese
political blogger, but it is an almost entirely destructive force in
the online discourse of the West, and Siegel is right to say so. But
there are counterpoints to be made and counterexamples to be offered
at more or less every stage of Siegel's argument. For example,
although Siegel notes that there are "about 70 million blogs in
existence, with between 40,000 and 50,000 being created every day,"
he doesn't point out that most of those blogs aren't in English --
doesn't, in fact, acknowledge the impact of the Internet anywhere
outside America. That, in the context of this discussion, is a
little provincial. If the Internet changes everything, the rest of
the planet has to be part of the story.

It also doesn't help Siegel's case that he is so angry all the time.
"Against the Machine" is an intemperate book. Siegel is too quick to
attribute mercantile or otherwise venal motives to people with whom
he disagrees, and the range of interesting thinkers at whom he takes
potshots is pretty wide: Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand, David Brooks,
Malcolm Gladwell, Lawrence Lessig and many others. He is hasty, and
at times careless, as in this paragraph on the Lonelygirl15 affair,
a YouTube stunt from 2006 featuring a young actress who turned out
to be represented by the Creative Artists Agency:

"By the time the Lonelygirl hoax was revealed, the country had long
been reeling from a series of public betrayals. Enron officials had
lied to their shareholders. A New York Times reporter named Jayson
Blair had lied to his editors. James Frey had fabricated events in
his best-selling, Oprah-endorsed memoir. Most consequentially, and
outrageously, of all, President Bush had clearly lied to America and
to the world about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq, and also about a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al
Qaeda. You might have expected an exasperated American public, or at
least the American media and blogosphere, to be equally angered by
the revelation that YouTube and MySpace had been infiltrated by
dishonest and powerful vested interests."

The fact that a man as smart as Siegel came to put Lonelygirl15 and
Iraq into the same train of argument is a sign of the Internet's
power to make people lose all sense of perspective. The ramped-up
affect of "Against the Machine," its air of haste and its ad hominem
quality are uncomfortably reminiscent of the blogs Siegel so
dislikes. There are moments when it seems that Siegel is baring
psychic wounds in public, and the reader comes to suspect that he
was much more troubled by his bruising experience with the
blogosphere than he is willing to let on. Why is so much to do with
the Internet -- so much of what's said on it, and so much of what's
said about it, by its advocates and its detractors -- so angry?
"Against the Machine" doesn't solve that mystery. But at least
Siegel signs his arguments with his own name.

John Lanchesters most recent book is a memoir, Family Romance.


Spinning Out Into the Pileup on the Information Superhighway
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/books/17masl.html

Books of The Times
By JANET MASLIN

AGAINST THE MACHINE
Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob
By Lee Siegel
182 pages. Spiegel & Grau. $22.95.

In "Against the Machine," the swaggeringly abrasive cultural critic
Lee Siegel pays a visit to Starbucks. He sits down. He looks around.
And he finds himself surrounded by Internet zombies, laptop-addicted
creatures who have so grievously lost their capacity for human
interaction "that social space has been contracted into isolated
points of wanting, all locked into separate phases of inwardness."
How long until they wake up and smell the coffee?

Mr. Siegel's field trip illustrates several things, not least that
Starbucks is today's most hackneyed reportorial setting. His outing
captures a vision of connectivity that is the precise opposite of
what it appears to be. For him the semblance of a shared Starbucks
experience masks endemic computer-generated isolation, a condition
that has prompted psychic and ethical breakdowns that go well beyond
the collapse of community.

Though Mr. Siegel is hardly the first observer to deem this a
sinister side of Internet culture, he turns out to be an
impressively tough, cogent and furious one. His diatribe would bring
to mind the prescient haranguing style of Pauline Kael, even if Mr.
Siegel, who does not treat his own reputation lightly, were not
trumpeting the phrase "Pauline Kael of the Internet" himself.

In any case, Mr. Siegel has done something in which Ms. Kael once
specialized: nailing an inchoate malaise that we already experience
but cannot easily explain. He asks, in brief, why we are living so
gullibly through what would have been the plot of a science-fiction
movie 15 years ago. Why does the freedom promised by the Internet
feel so regimented and constricting? Why do its forms of democracy
have their totalitarian side? What happens to popular culture when
its sole emphasis is on popularity? How have we gone "from `I love
that thing he does!' to `Look at all those page views!' in just a
few years"? Mr. Siegel links all these questions to a fundamental
assumption about the Internet, one that has been widely posited by
other analysts: that it is a liberating entity, one that generates
endless opportunities for creative endeavor.

He is quick to insist that most of those opportunities boil down to
business matters, and that "the Internet's vision of `consumers' as
`producers' has turned inner life into an advanced type of
commodity." At the risk of harping heavily on this central point,
Mr. Siegel provides example after example of how surreptitiously
this process of co-option works.

He shows, for instance, how the fan of a television show can be led
to a Web site where the show can be approached in a supposedly
interactive fashion. " `Which character are you most like?' " he
asks, citing a question posed about "Grey's Anatomy." And
parenthetically: "(You'll also have to read an ad for a vaccine
against genital warts. Ask your doctor if it's right for you.)"

The price of such diversions is, in Mr. Siegel's succinct appraisal,
devastating. It turns our passive, private, spontaneous appreciation
of popular culture into something active, public and market-driven.
It leads us to confuse self-expression (which is, of course, all
about us) with art (which more generously "speaks to us even though
it doesn't know we're there"). It has created what Mr. Siegel calls
the first true mass culture, though he cites critics who in 1957
worried about how culture could be degraded by the masses. Culture
for the masses, he says, was a worry of the past. Culture by the
masses is what is being born in the present and will shape the
future.

Peppering his argument with potshots at writers (among them Mark
Dery and Malcolm Gladwell) who view any of these developments
enthusiastically, Mr. Siegel both defines and decries an array of
current misconceptions. We are being persuaded that information and
knowledge are interchangeable, he claims, when they are not; we
would have citizen heart surgeons if information were all that
mattered. And mainstream news outlets, which Mr. Siegel is otherwise
delighted to assail (his love-hate relationship with The New York
Times is particularly intense), suddenly look worthwhile to him by
virtue of their real, earned authority. Better the old press than
the new tyranny of bloggers. Their self-interest, he says, makes
them more mainstream than any standard news source could possibly
be.

The vindictiveness and disproportionate influence of the blogosphere
is a particularly sore subject. Who is it that "rewrote history,
made anonymous accusations, hired and elevated hacks and phonies,
ruined reputations at will, and airbrushed suddenly unwanted
associates out of documents and photographs"? Mr. Siegel's immediate
answer is Stalin. But he alleges that the new power players of the
blogosphere have appropriated similar powers.

Mr. Siegel himself became a great big blog-attack casualty when, in
what he wishfully calls "my rollicking misadventure in the online
world," he was caught pseudonymously praising himself on the Web
site of The New Republic, where he had been a particularly savage
and reckless blogger. One of the improbable virtues of "Against the
Machine" is that it presents a rigorously sane, fair and
illuminating incarnation of its more often hotheaded author.

But Mr. Siegel is still Mr. Siegel, which is to say that he isn't
shy. So the reader can learn more about him than the reader might
want to know. His example of how the Web finds the banal in the
formerly forbidden? Masochism.com. His avatar in the spooky online
game Second Life? Delbert, a guy in a red fedora. His example of an
eBay experience? Sit back with him and shop for a watch, or graze at
match.com. "I take a sip of coffee and consider," he writes.
"Various options are before me."

At moments like this "Against the Machine" is dangerously close to
revisiting that lazy, figurative Starbucks. But far more often it
brings dead-on accuracy to depicting the quietly insinuating ways in
which the Internet can blow your mind. And it announces exactly
what's wrong with this picture.


New Republic Suspends an Editor for Attacks on Blog
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/04/technology/04republic.html

By MARIA ASPAN

A senior editor at The New Republic was suspended and his blog was
shut down on Friday after revelations that he was involved in
anonymously attacking readers who criticized his posts.

Lee Siegel, creator of the Lee Siegel on Culture blog for tnr.com,
was suspended indefinitely from the magazine after a reader accused
him of using a sock puppet, or Internet alias, to attack his critics
in the comments section of his blog. An editors apology replaced the
blog on the Web site, announcing that the blog would no longer be
published and noting that The New Republic deeply regretted
misleading its readers.

Franklin Foer, the New Republics editor, said in an interview that
he first became aware of the accusations against Mr. Siegel on
Thursday afternoon, after a colleague noticed a comment in the
Talkback section of Mr. Siegels blog that accused him of using the
alias sprezzatura to defend his articles and assail his critics.

That comment, posted by a reader named jhschwartz on Aug. 27, said
that sprezzatura appears only to weigh in on TNR forums to admonish
and taunt posters who dislike Lee Siegel before concluding, I would
say with 99% confidence that sprezzatura is a Siegel alias.

We launched an investigation, Mr. Foer said. He added that he was
confident that sprezzaturas posts were written with Mr. Siegels full
cooperation, but declined to say whether the alias was used by Mr.
Siegel himself because the affair was still under investigation. As
soon as the facts of the case became clear to me on Friday, we
closed down the blog and made an announcement. Mr. Foer said that
while he liked to see blog posts before they were published, Mr.
Siegel did not have an editor assigned to his blog entries.

In a statement by e-mail, Mr. Siegel said, Im sorry about my prank,
which was certainly not designed to harm a magazine that has been my
happy intellectual home for many years.

Other bloggers noted the disclosure about Mr. Siegel. Ezra Klein, a
blogger who had tangled with him, wrote in his blog on Friday, The
temptation to create a new persona and rally support for yourself in
comments can be almost overwhelming. But Mr. Klein said that most
bloggers resist the urge, take the lashing and move on.

Mr. Siegel became a polarizing figure, coining the term blogofascism
in the midst of a debate over The New Republics support of Senator
Joseph I. Lieberman in the Connecticut primary.

The user named sprezzatura, an Italian term for studied
carelessness, posted comments that were hyperbolic even in the
blogging environment. After readers criticized Mr. Siegel for his
post about the host of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart, sprezzatura
wrote: Siegel is brave, brilliant and wittier than Stewart will ever
be. Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep. (A later
comment deplored other readers inability to withstand a difference
in taste without resorting to personal insult.)

Mr. Siegel is not the first mainstream blogger to use an Internet
alias or the first to be unmasked. In April, The Los Angeles Times
suspended the blog of a reporter, Michael A. Hiltzik, after he
admitted using aliases on his own blog and other Web sites. Mr. Foer
said that as print publications engage the Internet, it can be
difficult to clearly define and apply journalistic principles.
Obviously, this all happened in a newer medium where the rules are
more ambiguous, he said. But we simply dont tolerate the misleading
of our readers.


Bye-Bye Blogger
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/magazine/17wwln_q4.html

Questions for Lee Siegel
Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON

Q: As one of the countrys most eloquent and acid-tongued cultural
critics, what is it like to be so sharply criticized in public
yourself? Your blog for The New Republic was terminated this month
after you deceived readers, using a pseudonym to post comments in
which you belittled your enemies and praised yourself as brave,
brilliant and wittier than [Jon] Stewart will ever be.

Of course it was wrong, and I am sorry I did it. I lost my footing
and foolishly answered my anonymous detractors with misplaced
satire.

You took as your pseudonym Sprezzatura, which means what exactly?

Its the art of doing something difficult with the appearance of no
effort.

Did you feel that you were doing something ethically questionable
when you posted, for instance, a comment by Sprezzatura that carried
the headline Siegel Is My Hero?

Every man is a hero to his alias. No, it never occurred to me at the
time that I was doing something wrong. There are other people who
appear anonymously on Web sites; they do battle with their
detractors. Anonymity is a universal convention of the blogosphere,
and the wicked expedience is that you can speak without
consequences. What was wrong about it is that I did it under the
aegis of The New Republic, as a senior editor of the magazine.

But beyond the breach of your journalistic compact, dont you think
its intellectually lame to express ones opinions anonymously?

I do indeed. Everyone seems to be fleeing from the responsibilities
that come from being who you are. I think that is why the
blogosphere is thriving. It allows people to develop a fantasy self.

You yourself comfortably adopted a false persona when you had
Sprezzatura comment about one of your critics that he couldnt tie
Siegels shoelaces. Doesnt that show great immaturity on your part?

I am too childlike to be immature.

Is that just doublespeak?

No, Im saying it under my own name.

Artists are allowed to be ill-mannered brutes without diminishing
the quality of their work, but shouldnt critics be balanced and
self-analyzed individuals?

Of course they should. Im thoroughly analyzed. I can show you the
receipts. But as Sprezzatura, I wasnt practicing criticism. I was
indulging my temperament and abandoning my intellect. Look, putting
a polemicist like myself in the blogosphere is like putting someone
with an obesity problem in a chocolate factory.

What are you talking about?

How dare you question my authority! Seriously, the blogosphere
strips argument of logic and rhetoric down to the naked emotion
behind it.

Your new book, Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the
Imagination, fortunately does not lack for logic or rhetoric, not to
mention nuanced and witty considerations of everything from Dante to
Sex and the City. Can you explain the title?

Falling upwards is a physical impossibility, and anyone who works
with the imagination is in the impossibility business. The other
meaning is that what our dominant culture considers falling or
failure is, in the realm of art making, often a triumph of character
or spirit. For example, there is such a madness to become famous.
Obscurity is the new poverty. People dont seem able to bear being
unknown. But obscurity and struggle are the artists Harvard and
Yale.

Anonymous bloggers are also saddled with obscurity, which I doubt
you would similarly glorify.

Thats right. In their case, anonymity is obscuritys rash. At least
for those who practice incessant character assassination, which
represents a good portion of the blogosphere, they vent out of the
pain of being unacknowledged.

The title Falling Upwards seems to have acquired an additional and
unintended meaning now that you yourself have taken a professional
fall.

Just a couple of feet. I didnt fall out the window. I fell off my
chair. I fell from my chair onto the floor.

Which suggests you were not at a great height to begin with.

No, but it is a very beautiful chair.


Lee Siegel: Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination 
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/books/review/Wood.t.html

Praise and Blame
By MICHAEL WOOD

FALLING UPWARDS
Essays in Defense of the Imagination.
By Lee Siegel.
337 pp. Basic Books. $25.

The novel is collapsing into memoir, Lee Siegel tells us in his
introduction to this collection of alternately pugnacious and
sentimental essays. More and more novels and plays are based on real
events, or on earlier novels and plays. Once upon a time in America,
the creative worlds ranks were ordered according to personal gifts
and idiosyncrasy, audacity and the capacity for self-reinvention.
Now, in New York, you go to a literary, artistic or intellectual
party and you encounter the same pecking order that exists in the
conventional world. We turn our lives into trashy art and become
suspicious of all art that wont cater to our simplest, most easily
gratified needs. And no one, it seems, is worrying about this. We
hear nothing about how the individual work of art in our time, in
the particulars of its form and content, has assimilated not just
the values of commercial society, but the vast supple consciousness
that a universal spirit of commercialism fosters: get your own, and
get it fast, and do it behind a virtuous appearance and with an
optimistic air.

Much of this argument is too shallow to be wrong. The novel is
collapsing into memoir only if you pay no attention to what many
good novelists are doing, and a person who thinks best-selling
novels, like The Da Vinci Code, read like actual histories needs to
read a little more history. The attractive opposite of the
contemporary pecking order is not another pecking order, but a realm
where pecking is not the main issue. And if you are seeking audacity
or a resistance to convention, perhaps a New York party is not the
best place to start, even if you could float back into the early
days of The Partisan Review. Still, Siegel has a point. There is a
lot of expensive trash in the culture, and a lot of easy virtue. And
good books and films do get ignored or sidelined.

Siegel tells us that he had always been a reader as a child, but
turned more purposefully to books when his father became unemployed.
Hamlet, Raskolnikov, Cordelia, Ahab, Darcy, Hurstwood: The incidents
in those characters lives never stood humiliatingly alone, trapped
behind the bars of monotone facts. ... Art imprismed me in its
extenuating colors, and the multiplicity of truth of morals to be
drawn set me free. This is a touching passage, although the imagery
makes it hard not to hear imprismed as imprisoned, and there is a
clue to the limits of Siegels criticism here. He is never free of
the feeling of not being free. He uses high art to attack his low
contemporaries, and what he calls life to attack everyone else who
writes about art. There is nothing literary about an effective
novel, he absurdly writes, and Chekhov makes us want to talk not
about literature ... but about life itself.

Lets not pause over the use of the word literary as a term of abuse
there have been good philistine critics at least since Dr. Johnson.
And in spite of the floppy vocabulary above, Siegel is quite acute
about art he considers close to life, and writes better when he gets
down to details.

Here he is, for example, on a Russian painting, Kramskois Christ in
the Wilderness (1872): Kramskois Jesus has the demeanor of a modern,
urban man. Anomie enshrouds him. No supernatural phenomena appear
around this Christ; his temptations come from within, and they take
the form of familiar anguish and doubt. He is clasping his hands
tightly between his knees, like a humble petitioner in a
bureaucratic waiting room. ... He could be sitting crisis-ridden in
a St. Petersburg park.

And here he is on Jane Austens sentences: Like her self-deceived
heroines, they are usually a little blind. They bear hints of their
own impending amplification, qualification, contradiction. ... We
feel propelled by a coming displacement of meaning.

In these essays drawn from the pages of The New Republic, Harpers
and other publications, Siegel celebrates Harry Potter, John Updike,
The Sopranos and Kubricks Eyes Wide Shut, and excoriates queer
theory and Barbara Kingsolver. In a wildly anachronistic and
Americanized reading of Dante, he manages an interesting diagnosis
of a form of egoism that hides from the self: The truth is ... few
people want to read honest self-description. A full, unsparing
account of ones self would be a full, unsparing and perhaps
unbearable exposure of social and political and cultural reality. It
would include not just our stories and afflictions and memories but
our ability to injure and to deceive, to hurt and to kill.

Siegel knows how to praise and to blame, but he cant do both at the
same time. Supple, for him, always means shifty, never means
graceful. Of course, he would be right to note the slack in
sentences like the following: Yellow ribbons swelled from suburban
front doors. ... But this folklore, a prayer of godspeed to the
killers, allowed no possibility that the vanquished might also be
human. Its the difference between a more perfectly ordered world as
shiny as a new pair of shoes and that precious, dirty, fraying old
pair of sneakers (one of which lies hidden in shadows under the bed)
that poets call the human heart. But we know, in our heart of
hearts, that there are times when we must follow our instincts, obey
our intuition, take advice from the deepest part of ourselves.

No decent critic would miss the mush and self-congratulation here
but isnt there also, struggling among these rather helpless and
maudlin verbal gestures, an attempt to say something that matters?
Siegel might conceivably agree, since although the first sentence
comes from Kingsolver, the other two are his own.

We need to return to the story of the child who began to read so
eagerly and found so many morals in literature. Is this tale true?
Why would we ask? People get fired, children step up their reading.
And if it isnt true if Siegels father never lost his job and Siegel
had read only Barbara Kingsolver before he went to college what
would we think? What should we think? That mere anecdote doesnt
matter either way, perhaps, but Siegel doesnt believe we are capable
of leaving the life of gossip alone, and goes to extraordinary
lengths to prove his point. In a later essay the one in which he
skewers Kingsolver for writing so facilely about lost people among
other sins the father is brutal as well as unemployed, the mother is
sluttish and occasionally incestuous, a sister has brain damage, and
a brother is an addict, who fortunately gets straightened out by his
caring black wife. There is also an uncle who has been in jail,
whose companion is H.I.V. positive. I have a pretty good life now,
Siegel writes, but I cannot forget those nights the ones when every
wounded family member was either crying or whimpering or screaming
or sobbing or weeping or banging on the wall.

Quite a chorus, and even the dimmest of us will suspect there is
something wrong with this scenario. I thought, for instance, that
Siegel had been reading too many memoirs too purposefully. But no.
He was just lying. I made everything up, he explains. I meant it to
be satire. I have passed beyond the boundary of good taste, and I
apologize to anyone I have offended, since I know that the
situations I described happen. He sacrificed his own stylistic
dignity in order to teach us a lesson. But what lesson? That we
shouldnt boast about our sufferings, even the real ones, and perhaps
especially not the real ones? That suffering is in fashion, and that
Calamity Writing, as Siegel calls it, is bad news? That suffering in
writing becomes real only when the writing is really good? Siegels
own explicit moral is slightly different: The actuality and the
complexity of suffering: that is precisely my point. A fine point,
but surely the thick-edged satire manages only to mangle and bury
the qualities it seeks to defend?

Michael Wood teaches English and comparative literature at
Princeton. His most recent book is Literature and the Taste of
Knowledge.


Lee Siegel: Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/books/review/James-t.html

TV Guide
By Caryn James

NOT REMOTELY CONTROLLED
Notes on Television.
By Lee Siegel.
353 pp. Basic Books. Paper, $15.95.

Who is the audience for not-quite-current television reviews, none
old enough to be historical and few new enough to seem fresh? We can
leave that little problem to Lee Siegels publisher, and note what
this collection makes emphatically clear: Siegels valuable role as a
cultural provocateur, tossing off intellectual grenades about the
social tyranny of money or the failures of the Bush administration
while ostensibly defending the dumb sitcom Joey or skewering the hit
My Name Is Earl.

Written between 2003 and 2006, when Siegel was the television critic
and a cultural blogger for The New Republic, the essays in Not
Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television are not meant to be
intellectually rigorous, as the books expectation-lowering subtitle
makes plain. They dont begin to approach a sustained argument about
the complex way television both shapes and reflects society.

But at their best, Siegels scattershot observations offer a kind of
drive-by brilliance. Writing about Extras, the smart Ricky Gervais
comedy about would-be stars, he accounts for the rise of celebrity
do-gooders who meddle in world events: they are filling a void left
by Bushs fraudulence and incompetence, he says. (He doesnt mention
the celebrities names; would Bono have taken too much space?)

Siegel is shrewd about the way the CSI franchise represents the
triumph of the money culture. If you can afford all those high-tech
forensic gizmos, you can buy your way to crime solving.

And an essay about Thirty Days Morgan Spurlocks series inspired by
his film Super Size Me, about how unhealthy it is to live on a diet
of McDonalds describes Spurlock and his role model, Michael Moore,
so astutely that they are decimated with a couple of withering
phrases. They use the old fig-leaf-of-virtue gambit, Siegel says,
hiding a conniving ego behind an oozing conscience.

Often, though, he wildly overstates his case or ignores inconvenient
evidence. He attacks Steven Bochcos Iraq drama, Over There, for its
graphic violence, offering the stock response that Americans are so
overwhelmed by all this carnage in relentless dispatches from Iraq
that theyre not ready to be entertained by more. But television news
presents such tentative, skittish images of the war that the public
can hardly be overwhelmed by them; Over There was more detailed,
maybe more realistic. (Siegel was right about one thing: the series
was a huge flop.)

He can be savvy about televisions economic motives and obsession
with demographics but doesnt bother with those practicalities when
theyd undercut some high-blown theory. He makes a murky argument
that the chief cause of reality television is a cynical public that
has come to associate artistic pretense with entrepreneurial
misrepresentation. This is not only clunky writing; its a
ridiculously blinkered conclusion. The chief cause of reality
programming could be Mark Burnett, the man behind Survivor,
something to consider even if youre mining television for cultural
significance.

And Siegel presses too hard, and unconvincingly, on the idea that
the culture is in revolt against images of perfection. He uses the
obsessive-compulsive detective hero of Monk as an example, quickly
brushing aside an entire industry of self-help, get-rich and
makeover television gurus. Yet even in the midst of this wrongheaded
argument he can drop in a dazzling aside, writing that George W.
Bush was elected not despite but because of his bumbling, displayed
with a regular guys conspiratorial wink that made him the antidote
to sizzle and buzz and plastic candidate clones.

Given his many strengths, its too bad Siegel is tone-deaf about Jon
Stewart. In a 2004 essay included here, he is cranky about comedians
shaping the political conversation, and condescending about Stewarts
humor. The book doesnt include the 2006 piece that briefly dragged
Siegel into the news. That essay, an open letter to Stewart, berates
him for being less a comedian than a conduit to a young audience and
asks, Has being Mr. Civic-Minded Serious Satirist of Our Debased
Public Life merely become a successful shtick for you? The article
provoked many online attacks and a passionate defense from a poster
called Sprezzatura a name that turned out to be a false identity (a
sock puppet) for Siegel himself, who was suspended from the magazine
for the ruse. The fuss shouldnt obscure a different problem. Siegel
never grapples with the essential questions: Why is Stewart so
popular, and what does that mean?

Complaining about Stewarts now-established influence instead of
analyzing it is just one reason these essays sometimes seem creaky.
Siegels argument that a glut of comedies about actors demonstrates a
rising suspicion of art loses all urgency when you know that four of
the five shows he mentions died fast. (And the hit, Entourage, is
less about art than about being a Hollywood insider.) Thats the
problem with collecting the recent work of a provocateur: It lands
in a curious time warp, addressing cultural moments even as they
slip away.

Caryn James is critic at large for The Times and the author of the
novels Glorie and What Caroline Knew.