The end of Twitter as a source of news

Nothing in recent memory has made me feel better about newspapers than Twitter's reporting of Osama bin Laden's death.

Like much of the world, I learned of bin Laden's death on Twitter, and that initial excitement carried the thrill of a whispered rumor. But that's all it carried. It took me about thirty seconds to realize that nothing I wanted to know about his death — its consequences and ramifications, primarily, but also its circumstances and, secondarily, the reactions in the U.S. of people most affected by the 9/11 attacks — could or would ever be available on Twitter in a form useful to me.

For that I'll have to turn to newspapers, magazines (television, too, I suppose) and their online imitators. So, while social media may be a useful canary in a coal mine for news organizations and for the reading, listening and watching public, they're nothing more than starting points for news. If Twitter offers news, I want something else. I want the story.

***

I am reading or have just read two novels from the 1970s that turn at least in part on disillusionment with the degree to which life has become a big spectacle. One is J.G. Ballard's Crash, and the other is Fatale by Jean-Patrick Manchette, newly available in English translation  from New York Review of Books (and including a blurb from Philadelphia's own Duane Swierczynski).

I thought of both as I read an article in my newspaper about Twitter and bin Laden's death that quotes a social news editor of the Huffington Post thus:

“At one time, they all would have had to go the White House or ground zero or a baseball game. But now people could stay at their houses and be part of this outpouring of emotion and the conversation.”

Ballard would have shuddered — if he didn't laugh his ass off.

***

Just had a chat with two colleagues about the bogus Martin Luther King quotation. Back when Twitter was taken seriously, we would have had to exchange Tweets. But now we could gather together, for real, in person, and talk about how the entire world has been suckered by social media.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

A little Crash

I thought of writing about death in J.G. Ballard's Crash, about why the 1973 novel's handling of the subject might interest crime readers and writers, though Crash is no crime novel (or if it is, the crime is unpunished vehicular homicide).

But too much else is going on in the book — obsession, eroticism, technology,  technological and erotic obsession, eroticized technology, Elizabeth Taylor — for me to start asking what it all means. So for now, here's a passage that might give our celebrity-obsessed age pause:

"As one of the first of the new-style TV scientists, Vaughan had combined a high degree of personal glamour — heavy black hair over a scarred face, an American combat jacket — with an aggressive lecture-theatre manner and complete conviction in his subject matter ... Vaughan had projected a potent image, almost that of a scientist as hoodlum, driving about from laboratory to television centre on a high-powered motorcycle. Literate, ambitious and adept at self-publicity, he was saved from being no more than a pushy careerist with a Ph.D. by a strain of naive idealism ..."

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Deadlier than the mail: A list of books received

I'm suffering a surfeit of newly acquired books. They've come new, and they've come secondhand. They've come from bookshops in New York, Philadelphia, and Montreal, and by mail from authors, publishers and publicists. Today I found a crime novel on the window sill at my local bakery with a sign that said: "Take me. I'm free."

I enter a contest to win a book, my correct answer is not the one drawn, but the author sends me the book anyway as a consolation prize.

They're comics and they're traditional books, and they're by Garry Disher, Georges Simenon, Jason Aaron, Greg Rucka, and the authors I wrote about here. And it all leaves me with a vertigo of indecision over what to read next.

Some notes from my browsing:

• Bang-up openings to new novels from Wallace Stroby and Rebecca Cantrell.

• The latest trade paperback collection of Scalped is blessedly free of the behind-the-scenes gimmicks that bulk up the size and price of special, ultimate, mega, super, premium, prestige, deluxe, and definitive editions of many comics. The reader gets nothing but hard-hitting story.

• Queen and Country: The Definitive Edition, Volume 4 is not so blessedly free, but it's a fine book anyway, with exciting back stories for key characters and, as always in this series, settings recent enough to lend a frisson of immediacy. Espionage fiction exists after the Cold War.
  

But the following, from Crash by J.G. Ballard, may be my favorite of the lot:

"He thought of the crashes of honeymoon couples, seated together after their impacts with the rear suspension units of runaway sugar-tankers."

Now, off on dinner break — with four books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011