22nd
Elegy for titlepage.tv: What Went Wrong? And Who’s to Blame?
Amid growing, entirely justified hysteria about toxic climate change in the literary ecosystem, as book review sections across the United States are shuttered, when the nation’s rivers of lyricism taste of the piss of critics addled by their own bile, while scheming illiterate frauds of criminal descent turn their pseudo-literary exercises in vacancy into high-stakes con games, what may have been the last, best, revolutionary hope to save New York corporate publishing and to promote or even innovate American literature in general seems to have been snuffed out in the cradle.
I speak, of course, of the web-based book chat show that for six weeks this spring touched the hearts and enlightened the minds of hundreds around the world, convening every seven days four authors of new books seeming to have very little to do with each other except that they were novels that took place somewhere or they were books about something or something naughty or the authors weren’t American or hadn’t written books before, filming said scribes in a style that recalled the best of the nouvelle vague: titlepage.tv.
After episode 6 (“National Obsessions”), featuring Ben Nugent of the all-powerful Brooklyn Literary 100, which went live in June, no further episodes have emerged, and the square on the homepage that previously featured enthralling thirty-second previews of future issues now shows a quite humorous rendition of “Who’s on First” animated with topography.
We can only assume that a giant whole has been poked in the fabric of American literary publicity. Here are some theories as to what went wrong:
1. The host feared that the quality of the first six episodes could no longer be matched and shut down production when he felt the program had reached an unsurpassable peak.
2. Word got out that the writers appearing on the show instantly attained fame commensurate with that of Hollywood’s blockbuster actors and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama and started to refuse to appear on the show in the hopes of retaining the privacy necessary to craft their prose or poetry.
3. They ran out of money because they used too many cameras.
Whatever the truth is, we’ve lost something that could have saved something else that definitely seems to be in grave danger!
—Brown
