In 1999 I wrote two short, topical essays a month for the Web site FEED. I thought, then, that I'd re-examine these pieces a year later to see what had been on my mind and to see if I still agreed with what I'd written. Here they are. Take a look at my 1999 Journal for this month, below, and join me in the Wicked Pavilion to discuss it.

9 March, 1999

However depressing, it wasn't much of a shocker when the news broke last month that everybody's favorite online bookseller has been fixing their "complete Amazon.com editorial review treatment" of new books, including a listing in the popular, staff-driven "What We're Reading" category, based on bribes from the publishers. (Reviewing in general has long ceased to be anything but a mutant appendage of the PR industry, but apparently at Amazon the very idea of an "authoritative" book review handed down from on high is too old-media, hence gimmicks like the "What We're Reading" list.) Meanwhile, as critics have been decrying the crooked interbreeding of search engines, advertising, and book reviews, and as Amazon struggles to cope with the damage wrought by the recent iceberg of bad publicity, a bizarre example of digital-age poetic justice has broken out below decks, in the Customer Reviews section.

Anyone familiar with the typical Amazon.com Customer Review—of, say, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho—is all too used to reading sentences like this one: "With Manhattan as a backdrop, all of Patrick Bateman's good looks, shiatsu massages, Evian, Comme des Garcon facial products, and unbeliveable [sic] wardrobe will not be enough to stop him from becoming a monster in his spare time who enjoys tourchering [sic] Sharpeis, and all sorts of other human pets." Sickened by this kind of insipid commentary, a revolutionary cadre of Amazon.com denizens has infiltrated the Customer Reviews bulletin board for Daddy's Cap is on Backwards, a collection of cartoonist Bil Keane's "Family Circus" strips, and applied every radical interpretation imaginable. In recent weeks, the underemployed post-grad subculture has been abuzz with the news; e-mails with the subject line "Check this out before Amazon gets wind of it!" have been flying back and forth across the country.

"Keane has been following the same outdated left-wing intellectual formula since the start of the Cold War. Each of his one panel cartoons are so filled with subtexts and post-Leninist commentary in the decay of capitalism that you are almost compelled to shout, 'Hey, get with the rest of the world! Socialism is dead!'" cries one hard-line critic. Others read Keane's banal, family-friendly comic strip as a "dramatic, painful portrait of the American family, caught in the jaws of the bear-trap that is 20th century capitalism," "an amazing pastiche of modern angst," and a masterpiece in the genre of "burb noir." As if these examples were not already excellent proof that the web-business mantra "Content good, free content better" is a fallacy, there's more. Keane is a "stubborn iconoclast of a nearly Kantian refusal to deny subjectivity any positionality other than a rather liminal objectivity," insists one acolyte. Another muses on the elderly cartoonist's ability to follow "the travails of a country without mystery, without science, without theatre; through a morass of deeply etched black dotted lines."

This kind of tongue-in-cheek expression of hermeneutic vertigo is harmless enough, but the self-referential bulletin board activity has begun to mushroom into unwieldy metalevels. Most gleefully subversive are those mock Customer Reviews which ape authentic ones. One "patrickbateman" penned a reappropriated review of American Psycho in which Keane becomes "a literary authority on the lives of the infinitely wealthy," and his creation Jeffy becomes a misogynistic serial killer. Yet another disparages the "cash-and-carry theory crowd" for making light of such an important text, and on it goes.

Although all this reviewer mutiny will end up getting squirreled away in the Amazon archives, it does have some lasting value: it exemplifies just the sort of democratic activity that could restore to the medium—and by extension, to Amazon—its once-anarchic integrity.

24 March, 1999

In the "Story" section of the April issue of Harper's, novelist Leslie Epstein's English-mangling nonagenarian alter ego Leib Goldkorn becomes obsessed with real-life New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani. Imagining her to be an enormous blond Finn, he writes to thank her for having favorably reviewed his book 12 years earlier; Kakutani agrees to meet with him. When Goldkorn arrives at the restaurant, however, he ignores the "black-haired Oriental" who smiles shyly and waves at him ("I have no time to engage, with this Nipponese cleansing lady, in banter"), and calamity ensues. It's funny stuff, but is there something larger at work here? Goldkorn, after all, is hardly the only member of the American literary scene given to wild speculation about the elusive reviewer's personal life.

When Kakutani won the Pulitzer Prize last year, she was savaged by her fellow critics, who denounced her for being too cranky and ungenerous, particularly toward any novel (according to Salon's Dwight Garner) "that—sexually, morally—puts some sweat on her brow." In another article, Garner noted that Kakutani's Pynchon-like solitudinarianism "has piqued interest in her to the straining point." How sweaty or accessible a book reviewer may be, one would like to believe, should have absolutely nothing to do with her craft. Of course, if she were writing for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, we wouldn't be assessing her "craft" in the first place. But Kakutani's allure reflects more than her obvious cultural power. What is it about her that inspires this kind of reaction?

One clue may lie in an ersatz confessional essay, entitled "I Am Michiko Kakutani," which was published last year on the Web site of David Eggers' journal McSweeney's. The article's author, supposedly an undistinguished white man, reveals that "the brilliant, acerbic, reclusive, rarely photographed lynx-like New York Times book critic and Pulitzer winner" is his alter ego, part of his ongoing mission to "expose American culture for the simpering, self-referential, pretentious fraud that it is!" There is plenty more of this kind of thing, leading one to believe that the true target of this satire is not the culture of breathless interest which surrounds Kakutani, but the reviewer herself. She takes her role as cultural mandarin, one is supposed to infer, too seriously. In bashing Philip Roth and John Updike for being dirty old men, for example, she proves how remote from ordinary human affairs she is. Small wonder, then, that we laugh when Epstein has Goldkorn shout "Kakutani! Let us have a coition!"

To be sure, the Times takes Kakutani too seriously. In the citation that accompanied the submission of her criticism to the Pulitzer jury, she is described as employing a Keatsian "negative capability" by which "she leaves herself—her biases, her preoccupations, her past history—out of her reviews, and presents us with something close to a pure critical intelligence: fearless, disinterested, and responsive." This is just award-speak, though; surely Kakutani doesn't believe that she's a medium for the pure spirit of criticism. Or does she? It seems Kakutani has become, despite what appear to be her best efforts to the contrary, precisely the kind of self-reflexive media celebrity she's spent the past 16 years deflating. Or is her victimization at the hands of novelists, critics, and assorted wise-asses just the final proof of everything she has been saying all along?