Just what the world needed, another award and another award show.

Denis Loy Johnson, of Melville House Publishing, who is a shrewd and savvy fellow and outspoken journalist (and who I first came across when he put out a very useful website called Moby Lives, and who shared my antipathy for a certain fashionable author photographer) has concocted the First Annual Moby Awards: The Best and the Worst of Book Trailers.

(Interestingly, there is neither a fee for entry or an admission price for the event.)

As you may have noticed in following the notices falling under the Our Man in Boston rubric, there appears to be an increase in book trailers (once the exclusive domain of the movie industry), which suggests that as the Moby Awards press release announces, this is “the future of book promotion.” And, I suppose, as we have obviously come to one of those intersections of art and commerce, we will be increasingly faced with the anomaly of awardable trailers for forgettable books. Thus funneling more “more” into the informational shit-stream that floods the cultural landscape.

It’s possible there was a time when one could opt to screen out or ignore what one found useless or silly. It seems we may have long passed that point—how else would my recall be infested with lots of info-garbage, of which I have made zero effort to acquire or retain—such as Michael Jackson’s lifestyle, Tiger Woods’s problems, Brad and Angelina, and so on?

So it goes?