Bill Keller to Staff: I Hate Your Books
Bill Keller, the T. Herman Zweibel of New York Times columnists, is back with another edition of "Former NYT Editor Bill Keller Reveals Himself to Be Little Better Than The Average Topeka Capital-Journal Weekly Lifestyle Columnist, in a Spectacle That's Embarrassing for Everyone Involved." Today: Bill Keller uses his enviable national media platform to shit on his own employees' books.
But not before his trademark "Clunky Unrelated Opener Featuring Vague Anti-Twitter Rhetoric and a Bad Joke!"
There was exciting news last month among the Twitterati. Brian Stelter, The New York Times prodigy and master of social media, announced to his 64,373 followers that he is going to write a book. The obvious question: What's up with that?
Hahaha, What's up with that? Bill Keller's finger is so firmly on the pulse of modern slang that if he were to press hard, modern slang's blood would completely stop flowing.
The point that Bill Keller is "getting at" here: lots of NYT journalists take leaves to write books. Then they ceremoniously present those books to Bill Keller, since up until a couple weeks ago he was their boss and everything. Well, he's not their boss any more. So now he's free to tell the truth: he hates your fucking stupid books.
But still the reporters - and editors, too - keep coming to sit in my office among the teetering stacks of Times-written books that I mean to read someday and to listen politely to my description of book-writing Gethsemane, and then they join the cliff-bound lemmings anyway.
Off they go to write books about wars, books about spies, books about diplomacy. Books about basketball, books about China and, coming soon, a book about basketball in China. Half a dozen books exploring aspects of the recent financial meltdown. One (and one more pending) about George W. Bush; one (and another pending) about the Obama family. We do cookbooks, travel books, puzzle books and movie guides. A book explaining the English. A book explaining the French. Books about The New York Times. We do biographies (Whittaker Chambers, Edward Kennedy, Virgil Thomson, Einstein) and memoirs (growing up in Alabama, growing up in Liberia, growing up Catholic). Cancer. Jazz. Physics. Pipe organs. Marriage. The weather.
Two editors were writing books about their dogs. At the same time!
One of those editors writing books about their dogs: Jill Abramson, who just succeeded Bill Keller as NYT editor. Bill Keller isn't saying she's not the sharpest tack in the box, but... she just wrote a book about her fucking dog! You know what Bill Keller is saying? "What's up with that?"
The actual kicker to this week's Bill Keller column, in real life: "Sigh. It will never end." Bill Keller, allow me to introduce you to Anne Heymen. You two have a lot in common.