POINTING A FINGER

Terry Teachout, a fellow ArtsJournal.com blogger, wrote an item yesterday -- lectured like a schoolmarm is more like it -- about the importance of using links in a Weblog and the good practice of crediting them. The tone recalls Mr. Rogers:

Repeat after me: Giving credit to blogsources for borrowed links is good for everybody in the blogosphere.

Not all bloggers feel this way. Certain of our colleagues are bad -- a few notoriously so -- about giving credit to other bloggers. I'll name no names, but I will say that the stingy practice of link-poaching has lately come in for quite a bit of backstage criticism.

Given his broad-brush "name no names" comment, I don't know whom he means. But since he mentions "certain of our colleagues," I have to wonder whether he's pointing a finger at bloggers here at ArtsJournal.com. If so, I take exception. I don't poach links and I give credit where due. If he means bloggers on the Web-at-large, I wish he would say so. ArtsJournal.com readers are bound to conclude that he's looking around his neighborhood and means his colleagues here, even if he didn't.

Postscript: Terry cleared the mist from my windshield with his item, posted this morning (Monday), for which my thanks. Had I been following Bookslut I suppose I might have deduced whom he meant. I actually don't mind link-poaching as much as Terry does, maybe because I'm not part of their pissing match. But I regret my intemperate "schoolmarm" characterization, especially since Bookslut picked up on it, uncredited -- eh eh. (Thanks for the links, Terry.)

February 22, 2004 1:01 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by CriticalMASS published on February 22, 2004 1:01 AM.

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