The Guardian: “Film companies in Hollywood are employing a brain scientist at California Institute of Technology to measure reactions to films so they can tailor them more closely to our unconscious needs. Steven Quartz, a lab director at CalTech is pioneering the use of ‘neuromarketing’, using brain scanning technology to do market research. ‘We wanted to look at how the brain processes emotions and, since movies induce emotions so powerfully, they were an effective way of doing that,” says Quartz. “Out of that grew the awareness that it would be a good way of seeing how people respond to movies.'” (via Ryan)

Mark offers a report from BookExpo. Mark reports that he and Ron should be on C-SPAN tomorrow. According to the BookTV schedule, the Book Babes panel will air 4:30 PM-5:30 PM ET, 3:30 PM-4:30 PM CT on Saturday, June 5.

In the next forty-eight hours, I’ll be (a) taking a short breather and (b) manacled to the computer finishing the latest draft of Wrestling an Alligator. What this means is no blogging and no sex during a sizable portion of this time. Let it be noted in the great annals of history that I focused and did my duty, sacrificing great joys for questionable art.

I also have a tremendous email backlog to respond to. And if I haven’t responded to you yet, I plan on doing so sometime before Sunday. Needless to say, you folks are sweet, endearing, and I’m continually amazed by your effusive outpourings. Even that crazed Caitlin Flanagan from Wichita who wanted to cut one of my fingers off had nothing less than love and the best interests in his heart. I will get back to you all eventually.

Tom Gibson has broken the world record for continuously watching television. Gibson stayed up for two days, only stopping to go for 15-minute bathroom breaks every eight hours. He existed on a diet of sausage rolls, ham and cheese sandwiches, and sugary drinks.

It would be criminal for me to neglect mentioning that Carrie A.A. Frye is guest-blogging at Maud’s this week. Of course, the fact that she mentioned this place several times yesterday has nothing to do with the current plug. Whether she’ll regale us with an additional reference to her tangerine muumuu or ditties involving ancillary chromatic raiment (outside of hot pants and the red-sequined top) remains to be seen. For the nonce, Ms. Frye plans to instigate discussions on Ann Patchett’s recent memoir, shortly after addressing thirty or so people (some of them named Ted). To all the boys out there waiting for the scoop, pop in those Tic-Tacs and prepare to serenade the gal with some Villa-Lobos.

Bob Baker of the L.A. Times has accused America of a major crime: alliteration. Baker also reports that he lost all abilities to feel the joy of language sometime in the late 1990s.

Sarah has alerted me to this Observer piece, whereby the Bizarro world of Caitlin Flanagan is laid out again for those who haven’t kept track. In Rachel Donadio’s article, a certain cocktail recipe was referred to. I wish to assure all readers that the recipe was designed exclusively for determined drinkers looking for a little something off the beaten track. The Pentagon was not involved in the concoction of the recipe. In fact, national reports indicate that the Caitlin Flanagan is now being served in more than a few disreputable establishments and that it has not been a success. If anything, it has furthered sales of Pepto-Bismol. As such, like any horrible beverage idea, the drinker should devote no more than a few minutes, and preferably no time at all, to its namesake.

On a somewhat related note, one should never drink alone in one’s house. Particularly after writing a piece for the New Yorker. Recommendation: perhaps listening and boogeying to some George Thorogood instead.

Of course, a few theories have been tossed around about Ms. Flanagan — specifically, strange nouns. Is she a wit? Perhaps, but only if you find trivializing the service sector tantamount to a well-delivered bon mot from Oscar Wilde. Is she a wag? It depends really on who’s the dog, and it would seem that nannies are. Of course, they are too busy wagging their butts trying to contend with a privleged mother’s child. Is she a delight? Probably not, given that she’s provoked so many calm, amicable and affectionate souls to anger. Is she an utterly maddening interlocutor? Well, she’s utterly maddening. But interlocutors can be found in the pages of bad translations of Russian literature, not around the hallowed grounds of Central Park West. Although her strange questions to Ms. Donadio (“How old are you? What do you think I mean?”) lend credence to a paranoid type. We leave better minds to draw more astute conclusions.

Regular Reluctant visitors may remember my query a few weeks ago about the possible existence of a gene causing the Hemingway family to spontaneously take their clothes off. Fortunately, the able team at The Literary Dick has attempted an answer to my question. One doctor declared the question a weird one. While the Genome Project hasn’t yet been consulted, the Literary Dick speculates that until such a gene can be demonstrated, it cannot possibly exist. There are additional possibilities over whether this might be a nature vs. nurture argument. But I leave the able scholars of nudism to unravel potential genetic dispositions.

Michiko on DFW: “These moments, sadly, are engulfed by reams and reams of stream-of-consciousness musings that may be intermittently amusing or disturbing but that in the end feel more like the sort of free-associative ramblings served up in an analyst’s office than between the covers of a book. Mr. Wallace’s previous work shows that he possesses a heightened gift for what the musician Robert Plant once called the ‘deep and meaningless.’ But in these pages it more often feels like the shallow and self-conscious.”

Count the adjectives in those last two sentences.

Some guy named Ben Brown is guest-blogging at Bookslut this week. All we know is that Mr. Brown may or may not be Neal Pollack and that he has slept with everyone at 826 Valencia. He does, however, possess an important skill: the man can insert breaks between paragraphs. We wish Mr. Brown well on his temporary journey and we will be reading him with delight. We encourage you to send incriminating photos to benbrown@gmail.com.

Ron‘s located the ultimate creative matchup: Jack Kirby and The Prisoner.

Elmore Leonard is writing his next novel for teens. His new book, A Coyote’s in the House, assumes “a coyote-eat-cat reality.” Leonard decided upon this formula after concluding that Madonna’s “cat-eat-coyote fantasy,” Jay Leno’s “cat-eat-dog quasi-reality” and Billy Crystal’s “ants-eat-anteater delusion” weren’t premises that could sustain the attention spans of young readers.

Biographer William Manchester, who recently handed over the reins to Paul Reid to finish the third book of The Last Lion, his highly lauded Winston Churchill series, has passed away at 82.

826 Valencia has published Waiting to Be Heard, which features several stories by teenagers who took the classes. As the Chronicle reports, one of the young writers, 18 year old Courtney King, grew up in the Bayview-Hunters Point area. The book was funded by the Isabel Allende Foundation. Dave Eggers has claimed that the 826 Valencia students offered “professional editing” when assembling the book.

The British have announced that they no longer feel inferior to U.S. novelists. The sudden burst in UK hubris, however, had much to do with noted American novelist John Updike singling out UK minority writers — an option, according to the Guardian, apparently outside the purview of the typical Brit reader or the average Fleet Street hack.

Rasputin: “Moveon.org, I love you, but seriously, what is this shit? You’re handing out fliers, trying to get people to go see The Day After Tomorrow? Maybe you should reconsider?”

Sarah, the grand gal single-handedly responsible for getting me to read four Ian Rankin novels in the past month, has moved to a new domain. Go check it out. And to answer Ms. Roy’s concerns about blogs about underground streetcred, we mentioned “colostomy bag” before 8AM. Surely, this counts for something.

1. Above all, don’t panic. Going back to work isn’t as dreadful as it seems. Keep in mind that you essentially have a four-day workweek ahead of you. Your co-workers will be sympathetic to your readjustment. And if they aren’t, invent an imaginary newspaper article pointing out how holidays lead to temporary malaise extending into across the midweek swath into Wednesday. You can get away with this, because, quite frankly, nobody read the papers over the weekend.

2. Yes, there’s a ridiculous email backlog and there weren’t as many books finished as you had hoped. Yes, you may have even succombed to paying for that silly Roland Emmerich eco-disaster movie or perhaps engaged in the horrors of television. But the good news is that you can go back to your routine, such as it was. People in general will be slower, thanks in part to the overall lack of holidays in the United States of America, and the strange turn of fortune that momentarily granted the public a three-day weekend (that is, if they were lucky not to be working in the service sector).

3. When in doubt, resort to coffee. Its efficacy can never be underestimated. This woozy Tuesday isn’t unlike a hangover, what with your body drooping out of bed and your shirt being slightly more difficult to put on. But the good news is that if you didn’t drink last night and slept horribly, the coffee will have an even greater effect than before.

4. You can always relax again. Either tonight or next weekend. However, keep in mind that this time, it might be prudent to accomplish something, if only to make up for the debauchery.

5. Please know that it was perfectly fine for you to lounge about the living room while other people paid homage to the deaths of soldiers.

6. If you saw that eco-disaster movie, know that Dennis Quaid will eventually slip from your mind.

7. When in doubt, sexual release, whether solo or with another partner, is a pretty solid cure-all, particularly during lunch hour.

8. If you’re terrified by the idea of cooking tonight, keep in mind that there is probably a good deal of food in the fridge that you can reheat. Your overcompensatory zeal in the food department, together with such ubiquitous technology as the microwave oven, should get you through dinner tonight.

9. Set at least two goals that you must accomplish before bedtime. Make these modest goals. Things like balancing your checkbook or reading a Dr. Seuss book. You can save the loftier accomplishments (climbing Kilmanjaro on Wednesday, performing philanthropic CPR on a colostomy bag on Thursday) for later.