As anyone who makes movies or writes plays or performs music or publishes books knows -- waiting for the reviews is agony, a recurring nightmare.

With good reviews, a reviewee remembers which newspaper or magazine published the positive notice, but not necessarily the name of the reviewer. But with a negative review, you remember the name of the name of the critic forever. Trust me.

So the 29-year-old writer Jaime Clarke, whose satirical novel We're So Famous has just been published in the U.S., was particularly upset by the bad review he got in Publishers Weekly.

Publishers Weekly is a magazine that pretty much everyone in America who publishes or sells books looks at -- and which reviews several dozen forthcoming books each week. Reviews them very briefly, and anonymously.

Therefore, when Clarke got his negative review - it called We're So Famous "puerile" and "not clever" - he had no idea on which individual he should focus his rage and loathing.

So Clarke decided to transmute his indignation over an anonymous review - an anonymous review, by the way, of a book about celebrity -- into a publicity stunt: Clarke has offered a $1000 reward to anyone who will tell him the name of his negative reviewer. Which is, by the way, about ten times what the reviewer was paid for reviewing the book.

As far as I know, Clarke has not paid the bounty: his anonymous bad reviewer remains anonymous.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Well, American culture has always been ambivalent about anonymity.

On the one hand, there's the 6th Amendment to the constitution, which says, "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall…be confronted with the witnesses against him."

On the other hand, the tradition of literary disguises is also venerable. Benjamin Franklin wrote under the pseudonym Richard Saunders, and three of his fellow founding fathers published the Federalist papers as the work of "Publius."

But during final decades of this most recent century, anonymity and pseudonymity rapidly fell out of fashion. To be unwilling to sign a piece of writing with one's real name came across as variously squirrelly, pretentious, mock-humble, and/or generally un-American. And not coincidentally, of course, the late 20th century was an age of literally shameless egomania -- the "me" decade, the 1970s, was merely the beginning of the ongoing Me Era. In the modern age, no one's light is hidden under a bushel.

So if we start the 21st century with mixed feelings about anonymity, technology has ratcheted up that ambivalence to a new level. Consider the Internet. The attraction for millions of contentious email flamers, flirty chat-room chatterers and pornography downloaders is the Internet's anonymity - the Net allows social interaction without social risk or social responsibility. Today, not writers, but almost everyone else has a pseudonym - it's called a screen name.

But for journalists and other professional writers, the great virtue of the Net is supposed to be the ability it affords to interact directly with one's audience. But are emails from anoynymous and pseudonymous audience members really such a blow for openness and cultural democracy?

Maybe - but in this medium, radio, tit for tat reciprocity isn't possible. Because I couldn't be anonymous even if I wanted to be.

In other words - this is Kurt Andersen, in Studio 360.