Why are newspapers falling to pieces? There’s a perfect storm of reasons, including the destruction of the diurnal newscycle, the obliteration of their local classified ad market by Craiglist and its ilk, and increases in paper and distribution costs.
Then there’s the fact that they publish crappy, irrelevant opinion articles. Case in point: today’s Whining F***, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post. A few weeks ago, Cohen wrote an Andy Rooneyesque rant about kids today and their crazy tattoos. Today? He complains that Amazon is destroying The Book by trying to “digitize everything in sight” and make us all buy Kindles.
See, Amazon is “inadvertently thinking of ways to make the world worse for children and for the grown-ups who love them to pieces” by, um, offering people options for how they buy and read books (and not trying to end world hunger and/or take Rush Limbaugh off the air: seriously). I support independent bookstores over chain stores; I love the serendipity factor of walking among the shelves of a well-stocked used bookstore.
That said, I really love Amazon’s ability to find virtually any book that I’m looking for, and I love the Kindle’s ability to get me a book within moments of my ordering it, like it did last evening after I read a sample of Jimmy Breslin’s new book, The Good Rat
Here’s my favorite — by which I mean, “most befuddling” — passage from Mr. Cohen’s cranky rant regular column, which was published in one of the largest newspapers in the country:
I used to frequent one in New York — Books and Co., now closed — that recommended certain kinds of books. It led me to Joseph Roth, the great central European writer of the interwar period, and Thomas Bernhard, the eccentric Austrian who so hated his country he wouldn’t permit his plays to be staged there. I read all of Bernhard and all of Roth. What joy — although Bernhard, to tell the truth, was sometimes a bit of a slog.
Can Amazon do anything like that? Does Kessel — “We wake up every day thinking about digital,” he once told the New York Times — even know who Roth was? Roth killed himself in Paris. At least he never knew that one day he might be digitized.
So, while we weren’t looking, Amazon must have updated its store and removed all “you might be interested in” suggestions as well as the reader reviews that offer up just these sorts of associations. Or Richard Cohen is a Whining F***.
Any suggestions for his next column topic?
The column seems to combine an adult variation on the collegiate “I read more obscure and difficult texts and listen to more obscure and difficult music than you, therefore making me more cerebral and intellectually cool than you” theme with “kids today.” That’s a potent form of narcissistic and elitist crankiness!