Jeff Bercovici, over at Portfolio, was supposed to interview Lee Siegel about his book, Against the Machine, a book that Ari Melber reviewed for us a couple weeks back.

Before the interview could happen, though, and without warning, Bercovici got an e-mail from Siegel’s publicist:

Hi Jeff,

I’m afraid I need to cancel this interview. I didn’t realize that you had written negatively about Lee on your Portfolio blog.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Lucy

The ‘negative’ post is hardly a scathing diatribe; Bercovici noted that, in an appearance on The Daily Show to promote Against the Machine, Jon Stewart didn’t ask Siegel at all about how he created a sock puppet persona to defend himself against negative attacks. This is the entire reason that Siegel wrote the book in the first place, and would seem to be a worthy topic of conversation.

In our paper, Melber pretty deftly mocked Siegel’s inability to take criticism:

Lee Siegel wants to tell you why he doesn’t like the internet. But wait, you might protest, all this new-media talk is tiresome. Well, shut up: Lee Siegel is not interested in your opinion. This isn’t some dirty blog, where the author’s prose mingles with commenters’ “thuggish anonymity,” but serious work by a cultural critic lamenting the State of Online Discourse.

I know that this is a lot of space to be giving a couple of blog posts—on Portfolio, for Christ’s sake!—but I’m kind of fascinated with Siegel, because he’s so desperately hoping for the resurrection of the concrete wall that existed for so long between readers and writers, and it’s just never going to happen. What’s he going to do with himself? It’s kind of like watching an old newspaper fade into irrelevance, only it’s an arrogant human being instead, which makes it a lot more fun.