Watch This: World Cup Soccer in Africa: Who Really Wins?

An hour or so after the World Cup ended—and congratulations to Spain; that was a fantastic goal—I popped a documentary that I’d received last month, World Cup Soccer in Africa: Who Really Wins?, into the DVD player and started watching. One of the themes that I’d been noticing in the Cup coverage was the idea that South Africa was “proving” that it was capable of hosting an international sporting event of this magnitude; American media were particularly falling over themselves in these last few days to enthuse about what a wonderful time they’d had and how beautifully everything had gone. This documentary casts the issue in a slightly different light: It doesn’t question whether South Africa could handle the Cup, and it doesn’t deny that doing so will bring lots of international prestige. What it does ask is: Is it worth the cost?

The film’s most significant line of attack is on the $1.7 billion-dollar project to build multiple stadia across a nation still in need of more components of a basic civic infrastructure, like hospitals and schools—in one case, a local school was actually displaced by a new stadium. Several of the commentators and activists interviewed point out that these arenas, built to FIFA specifications as to what constitutes a world-class football venue, are grossly oversized for South Africa’s regional sporting needs; the term “white elephant” is introduced reluctantly at first, but is used with greter regularity once the theme is introduced. From there, the big question is: What happens to South Africa after FIFA collects its television revenues and sponsorship fees and leaves the country? What, if any, long-term economic benefit will South Africa see from hosting the Cup? (The argument is not one-sided; the filmmakers do allow those who believe South African tourism will last beyond the tournament their say, and though Archbishop Desmond Tutu acknowledges that the situation is not perfect, he pitches this as a major step forward for the country.)

Here’s the trailer…

11 July 2010 | watch this |

Does Fake Controversy Sell Book Reviews?

A few days ago, I read an article on Slate by my former colleague Emily Gould about blogs using feminist outrage to jack up pageviews, which was prompted by her reflections on the running feud between Jezebel, the feminist-themed wing of Gawker Media, and The Daily Show, a prominent example of what she describes as “[the] tendency to tap into the market force of what I’ve come to think of as ‘outrage world,'” which is to say, “regularly occurring firestorms… ignited by writers who are pushing readers to feel what the writers claim is righteously indignant rage but which is actually just petty jealousy, cleverly marketed as feminism.” Stoke that rage, the argument goes, and you get people adding their two cents in the comments, then circling back to see what everybody else is saying…

The idea of provocative statements calculated to stir up controversy reminded me of a suspicion I’d long held towards the New York Times Book Review, in the days before I stopped reading it regularly, which I once described in GalleyCat as “encouraging its contributors to make outrageously provocative assertions… for the sake of the buzz they generate rather than for the sake of advancing a genuine literary sensibility.” (Examples of what I meant include certain contributions from Lee Siegel and Leon Wieseltier… definitely Leon Wieseltier.) And I was reminded of that tendency by two separate blog posts this week—first, by Richard Rushfield’s questioning of the NYTBR review panning his wife Nicole LaPorte’s The Men Who Would Be King, where he flat-out posits that the Review may be “a home of vicious attack pieces;” second, by Katie Rosman’s rebuttal to the NYTBR pan of her memoir, a review that makes her wonder if “whether the reader is served by critics selected for their biases.”

(Disclosure time: The Men Who Would Be King was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt during my brief employment there, and while I’m not intimately familiar with every page, I liked the parts I read. And I haven’t read any of Rosman’s If You Knew Suzy, but I know Dana Jennings, the Times journalist who reviewed her book, because I interviewed him two years ago, after which, on occasion, he recommended books and CDs to me which I consistently found to my liking, so if he says a book isn’t good, it gives me pause.)

It’s been said that you should never respond publicly to a negative review because it never ends well; Rosman’s overlong attempt to prove that getting a bad review in the New York Times doesn’t bother her has, at least to this reader, the complete opposite effect. (Rushfield’s argument about the unacknowledged biases of LaPorte’s detractor is better constructed, and plays the wounded victim card significantly less.) And discussions I’ve had with friends about Emily’s article reinforced the point that not every controversy-generating article is cynically crafted with provocation in mind. It seems more, as I said in my first quote, like a matter of overarching editorial sensibility, a deliberate attempt to cultivate extreme, or extremely stated, opinions, perhaps all the better for being sincerely held, with the ultimate aim of being noticed for publishing extreme opinions. Which may, in the case of the New York Times Book Review, actually be an excellent strategy for warding off the indifference with which most other book review sections seem to be regarded (outside of their local audiences and publicists who would still like to see their books reviewed). But is what’s good for the Book Review (which, keep in mind, I haven’t read regularly in well over a year, so maybe it’s no longer like I remember it, although Rushfield and Rosman don’t give me much reason to believe it’s changed) good for books?

9 July 2010 | uncategorized |