• I would like to join my fellow bloggers in denouncing the provincial specifics of book review editors. This is, after all, a more pressing issue than the number of column inches available and the quality of coverage. I demand that all book review editors live in the same town, 365 days a year! No vacations! No retreats! Not even BEA! This is the only way that we can be absolutely sure of a book review editor’s integrity! To step foot outside of Chicago or Atlanta for even a week is to commit a journalistic disgrace that can never be forgiven. Of course, there are other things to denounce here. It’s almost as bad as being a Chicago blogger writing a blog post from Washington, DC. But we forgive bloggers because they are all based in Terre Haute.
• Paris Hilton’s prison diaries. (via Bookninja)
• Rub-a-dub-dub. Books in a tub.
• Jennifer Weiner on Cormac’s Oprah appearance.
• It’s a beautiful statue in the neighborhood. (via Jeff)
• A radio interview with Sherman Alexie.
• It appears that Patricia Cornwall is attempting to stop anyone from spreading rumors and accusations about her on the Internet.
• So go figure. Ian McEwan takes questions from readers and then proceeds to openly insult them: “Publishers seem to be very keyed up to embrace the Internet, but I don’t have much time for the kind of site where readers do all the reviewing. Reviewing takes expertise, wisdom and judgment. I am not much fond of the notion that anyone’s view is as good as anyone else’s.” Okay, Ian, we get that you’re an elitist. If that’s the case, why subject yourself to the rabble of Time readers? Ain’t that a big hypocritical? Or do you truly feel that such sad interlocutory specimens as “When you are writing a book, do you expect it to influence your readers in a certain way?” are somehow better because they came from a magazine reader (as opposed to someone from the Internet, who may very well have offered the “expertise, wisdom and judgment” you call for)?
• Annalee Newitz on the problems with Wikipedia: “Besides, who is to say what is ‘notable’ or not? Lutheran ministers? Bisexual Marxists? Hopefully, both. For me, the Utopianism of Wikipedia comes from its status as a truly Democratic people’s encyclopedia—nothing is too minor to be in it. Everything should noteworthy, as long as it is true and primary sources are listed. If we take this position, we avoid the pitfalls of 19th-century chroniclers, who kept little information about women and people of color in archives because of course those groups were hardly ‘notable.’ Yet now historians and curious people bang their heads against walls because so much history was lost via those ‘deletions.'”
• Apparently, it’s big news to Marc Ramirez that African-Americans are interested in culture. Wow, who knew?
• What goes into a great translation? (via Orthofer)

My review of Richard Bachman’s Blaze appears in today’s Los Angeles Times.

Thank you, Gillian Reagan, for revealing the horrible truth! Writing is tough work. There is more pain angst per square inch in Brooklyn than in any other place in the world. This is not because writers suffer any more than anyone else. It is because writers, by and large, have tremendous chips on their shoulders and bitch about inconsequential things more than anybody else.

I, Edward Champion, am a writer. And I am here to tell you how miserable my life is. I have not secured a deal with any publishing house as of yet, but I have been writing the Great American Novel for 67 years now. Never mind that I am younger than that number. That’s the number I’m sticking with. It’s the number that a man in the streets told me to stick with when I gave him a ten dollar bill. I’ll let all the grad students sort it out when my novel is, at long last, unveiled to the public.

As it so happens, I was one of the original writers to be featured in the article. Gillian Reagan and I talked for twenty minutes, in person with her photographer. I told her that I would pose, looking as if I had just got out of bed and holding a mug of coffee with a hand vacillating between manly and dainty, my right eye slightly more closed than my left eye (I offered to get in a bar brawl for the sake of photographic journalism), with handwritten pages of my novel on the table. The novel is now in its 132nd draft. All of this could be done at a Hungarian bakery. Gillian, with her trusted photographic colleague Elena Seibert, took one look at my pate and told me that she needed a writer who had floppy black hair. I had no hair. I had decided to shave it all for BEA: my failed attempt to be a bald ass-kicking motherfucker. Gillian then offered me a lollipop, which I accepted, and then kicked me without warning in the crotch. She said to me, “Who loves ya, baby? Nobody!” I pleaded with Gillian to get a quote in her piece. I groveled. I offered free-form cunnilingus. At the very least she could get an “Ouch!” with me in a minor paragraph for this remarkably long piece. But it was not to be. Nathan Englander had more hair than I did. And he always looked as if he had just arisen from bed. Plus, he was better at free-form cunnilingus.

I made a last minute plea, pointing out that I could wear a wig.

“We need natural hair. Nathan Englander hair,” said Elena, who threatened to kick me in the crotch again. Because, you know, Gillian normally did that sort of thing and she wanted to see how it felt.

But I was rebuffed by the Observer crew. So I am reduced to confessing the horrible life I lead on these pages.

To wit:

I’ve been working on the aforementioned novel for over 67 years.

I have never won $5.4 million, but I could live in a trailer at any time for the remainder of my life.

I just barely paid my Am-Ex bill, but I have never sex blogged. Perhaps I should try this and write a novel so that I will have some reason to give Am-Ex if I cannot pay my bill.

My diet consists of water and occasional saltine crackers. I do this because I will be emotionally crippled if I have to eat one square meal over the course of a week or if I Super Size anything.

I wake up feeling pain. I go to bed feeling pain. Every time I laugh or feel happy, I feel pain. Pain is necessary to writing in the same way that a seat is unnecessary on a bicycle. You can, indeed you must, sit where the seat should be and feel blunt metal tubing up your posterior. This is what writing is all about. Laziness. Ennui. Remorse. Stupidity.

I have lost track of all my friends. I can’t remember any of their first names anymore. I call each and every one of them “Bob,” including the sexy women. They still give me dirty looks.

I look down and see that I am wearing three shoes. How did this happen? I just woke up. I haven’t left the apartment in years. How did I get two shoes on my left foot? Did someone put these on when I was asleep?

And then there’s the self-loathing. I hate myself more than anyone — even John Freeman — hates me. So there.

I plan to barricade myself in a Lower East Side apartment with Rachel Sklar so that we will both finish our novels. Perhaps she will ask me to perform free-form cunnilingus. There, we will guzzle Diet Coke together and immerse ourselves in Jewry.

If you have at least one job, you should probably have two more.

I didn’t realize that I had money for ham sandwiches and Oreos. Perhaps ham sandwiches and Oreos will make me happier than paying the rent.

I’m going to cry. And then I’m going to cry again.

Thank you, Gillian Reagan. My crotch is sore from your swift and unnecessary kicks. But I will still pose and put on a wig, if you need me to. Perhaps it will make me less morose. Perhaps I will finish my novel and then feel morose again as I write another one.

• I am currently surrounded by many boxes, which arrived today. I cannot recommend FedEx Home Delivery enough, should you decide to move cross country. My trusty desktop computer, the box I’ve deemed the Command Center, is almost hooked up. (Apologies for grammatical gaffes to those who have been kind enough to point them out. The laptop, which I’ve been using for pretty much everything in the past week, is very much the secondary computer.) And I’ll be very close to boogeying here once the desk arrives this week. In the meantime, here is a roundup of BEA reports.
• The Literary Dish serves up The Unofficial BEA Story, covering the African-American publishing end of the conference. (I don’t know if this content was aggregated from somewhere else, but I’m glad it’s posted somewhere.)
• Patrick Carbidge has Part I and Part II.
• Vegan Cupcakes.
• Megan Sullivan is convinced that it’s all about long days and long nights. Plus, she managed to meet Philip Roth.
• Critical Mass has posted a report on the crisis panel.
• Buzz Girl has pictures. As does Mary Reagan.
• Detailed diaries from Dan Wickett.
• Jim Winter confesses he’s a trade show virgin.
• World Unleashed’s list of hot galleys.
• A BEA Omnibus from Mark, with links elsewhere.
• Russell Simmons even showed up.
• David R. Godine avoided conversations about baseball.
• There are apparently budget hotels that are iPod themed. Whether podcasts were siphoned into each room through hidden speakers is anyone’s guess.
• The Post BEA (Sausage) Links Edition.
• Lou Anders: “BEA is lived on your feet, fueled by Starbucks, and endured by great conversations….”
• I did notice more comics booths this year. The Beat has a roundup on that end.
• More links from Oxford University Press.
• I will try and go through upcoming titles at some point this week or next. This year, instead of interviewing publicists at the big publishers, I opted to spend most of my floor time around the smaller publishers. On Sunday, I grabbed every catalog I could. I now have half a suitcase filled with them.
• The number of overly safe titles and lackluster galleys really surprised me this year. Perhaps it’s the shakeup from the Perseus restructuring or declining sales, but, while there were galleys that excited me (and I had no idea that I was as much of an enthusiast of Richard Russo until I saw the galley of his next book), there weren’t many that wowed me the way they had in previous years. Of course, the proof is ultimately in the books. I will say, however, that, of the larger houses, Bloomsbury and Grove/Atlantic seem to have the best pickings. And it was great to see Small Beer maintaining a booth this year.
• More later.

Another reason not to underestimate Not in Brooklyn Ed. He’s live blogged the Oprah-Cormac interview.

The photographic case against Sting. (via James Tata)

Here’s what dictionary.com say about the word “crisis”:

1. a stage in a sequence of events at which the trend of all future events, esp. for better or for worse, is determined; turning point.
2. a condition of instability or danger, as in social, economic, political, or international affairs, leading to a decisive change.
3. a dramatic emotional or circumstantial upheaval in a person’s life.
4. Medicine/Medical.
a. the point in the course of a serious disease at which a decisive change occurs, leading either to recovery or to death.
b. the change itself.
5. the point in a play or story at which hostile elements are most tensely opposed to each other.

We can eliminate the medical definition altogether, unless, like me, you count the “book reviews are good for you and blogs are bad for you” nonsense as pathlogical. We can eliminate the first definition because while the column inches are evaporating and whole newspapers are starting to absorb wire copy (read, for example, how much of the current Newsday books section is composed of original, non-Tribune Company content and you will see the marks of cannibal teeth), I cannot believe that book reviewing is dead. If the turning point involves the hypothesized convergence point of print and online, John Freeman, the somewhat diffident moderator for Sunday morning’s panel, certainly didn’t mention much of it. So is this a personal crisis? And if so, why not be candid about this? Perhaps the fifth definition is in order, given the inexplicably hostile look that John Freeman offered to me when, on my way out of the conference room, I reiterated the point that Freeman continued to make throughout the panel: “Remember, John, all voices need to be represented. Email me.”

Item: The two most common words uttered during the Crisis in Book Reviewing panel were “business model.”

Disclaimer: Due to a thundering hangover I was nursing from the previous night’s partying, I arrived twenty-five minutes late. So if there was more priority given to book reviews as an editorial or intellectual crisis, then please let me know. But from all concerned, it appeared that the crisis was more about “gots to get paid” rather than “gots to get read.” I suspect this was one of the reasons why Carlin Romano vociferated from the back how he was disappointed that the conversation was more a collection of middle manager-speak and laid into Heidi Julavits. I suspect this was one of the reasons that Ron Hogan likewise raised hell.

Ergo: I must therefore conclude that the crisis then was about the personal pocketbooks of all involved. And if this was the case, why assemble a group of arts editors (and a few lower tier money people) to talk about a subject outside of their expertise?

There is no time to provide much in the way of context. The day is almost gone. So here is a gonzo precis of what transpired on Sunday morning.

Heidi Julavits: Not fond of less than 4,000 word reviews.

Oscar Villalon: Disagrees. The fate of the book world is linked to the fate of the review world. Decline of the literary world is linked to the decline of criticism. Does not like Consumer Reports squib-like reviews.

Stacey Lewis: Publicist of City Lights Books. What sells books? When a customer comes in and cites a source. Feels very strongly in mainstream book reviews and regional papers. Alas, the book review position is now amalgamated with the arts editor position. The good people lost at the Village Voice Literary Supplement, including Ed Park and Joy Press, always paid attention to City Lights. The new answer? Alternative press and radio.

Maud Newton: The smartest of the panelists. “If I had known this panel was to be called the ‘Crisis in Book Reviewing,’ I would have demurred.” Pointed out that she doesn’t read print newspapers. She and many people 35 and below reading online. How many truly read the paper in print? The blog is just a different form. She doesn’t see the cause and effect relationship. “I’m puzzled by the level of animosity that has on occasion come from newspapers.”

Villalon: “We drink the Kool-Aid.” Openly admits that book review sections don’t have a business model.

Mike Merschel: We need to promote. “We’re taking for granted that the books section will be there” “The print edition is not dead. I don’t think people are aware of the influence it still has.”

Julavits: “The 650 word review is bullshit.” Slight susurration from crowd.

Freeman: “The distinction is the quality of the writing.”

Villalon: It’s never been our goal to sell books. The mass media sets the agenda, but “we in no way tell you what to think.” (I raise my hand here to quibble with this elitist paradox. Alas, I am invisible to the mumbling moderator beating the same two tedious generalizations over and over again. The distinction is in the quality of the argument.)

From the audience: Jerome Weeks! “I never thought I’d be in the position of defending the 800 word review.” Weeks points out that all the critical editorial positions are gone but that the space at the Dallas Morning News is still there. “Yet the paper is making a profit.”

Merschel (the current DMN books editor, by the by): “Let your publishers know.”

Ron quibbles quite rightly about the hyperbolic nature of Freeman’s flummery.

Freeman (resembling Ari Flesicher with hair and not for the first time): “It’s important to have all points of view on there.” The less points of view, the same points over and over.

POT KETTLE BLACK!

Villalon: Astonished that the Chron has lost $330 million since 2001. No online business model. Where did this money go?

Carlin Romano: See introduction. Also, fiery words about the fact that young people do read print. Objecting to corporate nonsense.

Melissa Turner [incoming features editor for the Atlanta Journal Constitution]: I have drunk the Kool-Aid.

(What I’m thinking right now as I continue to raise my hand. Do you really want to be confessing that you’re drinking the Kool-Aid when you are likewise complaining about a crisis? I never get a chance to address this question.)

Villalon: On young readers, “if you try to be hip, they will never ever read you.”

(Third question now in noggin: If you don’t write with a fresh voice, they will never ever read you. Alas, I am not among Freeman’s “all points of view,” because he’s a frightened hypocrite.)

Julavits: Smartly advises that we need to embrace that book reviewing is a labor of love.

Various conversations with swell people as panel closes. I mention something to Oscar Villalon (just to help him out) about POD newsstands being one solution. For the most part, everyone is very kind and affable.

I hope to get my final BEA panel report sometime tomorrow, which will thoroughly document the NBCC “Crisis in Book Reviewing” panel on Sunday morning. The problem is that I am contending with deadlines and an influx of boxes. But bear with me.

With Tanenhaus’s disappearance before the Q&A session, the conversation became smarter and more relaxed, with John Leonard offering fascinating tales of his NYTBR tenure. As I entered the room, just after setting up a conversation with Nigel Beale that regrettably never happened, Levi Asher was in full force, asking the question I had intended (and he intended) to put to Tanenhaus, pondering the ethically dubious assignment of Henry Kissinger reviewing a Dean Acheson biography.

John Leonard offered an interesting anecdote in response to Levi’s question. He noted that one of the contributing factors that led to him leaving the NYTBR was one notoriously protracted piece of vetting. A review of one of Kissinger’s memoirs had quibbled over Kissinger’s claim that he had only one sleepless night during the course of his career (this sleepless night was before his secret trip to China).

Leonard continued to object to what he styled “performance art criticism.” He evoked Isaiah Berlin, suggesting that critics should simply quote the writer he is reviewing and to think like a writer in service of the book.

Leonard kept the interesting anecdotes coming. He noted a case where he, as book editor, received a telephone call from the hotshot attorney Melvin Belli asked to review a book called Judges in America, because Belli insisted to Leonard that he could offer some interesting words on the subject of American magistrates. Leonard commissioned the review and received an entertaining and favorable piece from Belli. What Leonard did not know, until a reporter from the Philly Inquirer had called him, was that Belli was a friend of the author and had posed with him in a photograph. Leonard ended up writing an essay called “Suckered,” in which he confessed how Belli had bamboozled him. None of this, Leonard insisted, was funny.

There were other theoretical rules on ethics offered by Leonard: One could never trust a poet, because a poet would wait for decades. Leonard jocularly insisted that all poets behave badly.

Prose objected to the common reviewing notion that if a reviewer does not like a book’s characters, there is no way that the reviewer could like the book.

Romano, becoming an increasingly amusing gadfly, then suggested that the world could use less of “Kakutani killing babies in cribs.”

With only a few minutes left, there was then a regrettably long soliloquy from a former reviewer who didn’t really have a question, but had much to say about the visual nature of the book review. Leonard, with Romano’s peremptory calls to this gentleman to offer a question, was gracious enough to answer it. He bemoaned “the misery that graphics have brought into the world.” He pointed out that under his watch, the NYTBR turned out a 70 page section every week. Since those days, graphics have caused book reviews to lose about a third of the words that they once had.

Ulin also suggested that there was no space in the pages, but that he had plans to institute Letters to the Editor on the LATBR website.

On the subject of authors responding to reviews, Ulin said that he usually didn’t permit the reviewer to respond. Leonard added that it was “almost always a mistake for an author to write that letter.” Offering yet another amusing anecdote, he pointed to a case where Alfred Kazin had left a long letter in response to a Joan Didion review, accusing Didion of being “a young whipper snipper,” inter alia. Leonard permitted Didion to respond. She answered with only five words: “Oh come off it, Alfred.”

And from here, the delightful panel ended.

It was a great pleasure to see so many experienced and committed editors in the same room. And I was particularly honored to listen to John Leonard’s wise words, in large part because I’ve spent many hours in dark microfilm rooms getting lost in the NYTBR pages edited during his tenure. It is the very editorial quality that Leonard insisted upon which has made me so frequently disappointed (and vocal) in Sam Tanenhaus’s abject results over the past three years. But if the NYTBR is a hopeless cause, so long as oily editorial interlopers willingly steer great vessels into literary reefs, it was a relief to learn that there remain committed editors and writers who actually care very much about ethics and less about stunt writing, much less stunt crises.

Due the apparently interminable “moving to Brooklyn” operation, if you’ve emailed me through the main account, I’m not going to be able to answer your email until late in the week. My grand apologies to this. If I met you at BEA, it was a great pleasure. If I didn’t meet you at BEA, we’ll hook up next time and email in the meantime. I will respond to your messages as soon as I can. Thank you for your patience and again my greatest apologies.

A new edition of The Quarterly Conversation has left the building. Lots of good stuff inside, including Lance Olsen on Don DeLillo, a highly quirky review of the New Murakami by John Fox, and Derik Badman on Markson’s newest.

• Bud Parr has video of the ethics and book reviewing panel.
• Scott Esposito talks with Chad Post (who, I learned has a new forthcoming press).
• Maxine returns to the Philly Inquirer pages, reviewing Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, which serves as a thoughtful antidote to useless cockamamie.
• I am reading Bleak Housse right now, among perhaps thirty-three others. Scott Horton has revisited the book at Harper’s. (via Maud)
• Ron Hogan finds a frightening way to merge McCartney album cover photos, lolcats and BEA.
• “The Democracy of Don Quixote” (via Orthofer)
• Robert Birnbaum talks with Nathan Englander.
• RIP Mark Harris.
• Adam Golaski on active reading. (via Dan Green)
• “I think MySpace and You Tube and all the blogs are really the coming thing now.” You can always count on publishers to be a few years behind the curve.
• John Leonard on Yiddish Policemen’s Union.
• Jill Owens talks with Lionel Shriver (via Barking Kitten)
• I’m with Across the East River Ed): Jenny D’s delightful sandwich enthusiasm has me shuffling through numerous Victorian fictive exemplars.

It was originally billed as a conversation between Carlin Romano and John Leonard. The prospect of seeing these two dutiful and distinguished critics discuss a subject as important as book reviewing ethics was enough to secure my attendance. Then more names were added, including Sam Tanenhaus, who showed his clear commitment to ethics not long ago by having John Dean review Mark Felt’s book, the dignified David Ulin, the often needlessly maligned Francine Prose, and the Hitch himself. Then the operation was mysteriously taken over by the NBCC and John Freeman became “introducer.” Which, I suppose, is a bit like all those fourth-tier actors who got offed during Police Squad‘s opening credits. But no matter.

Before the panel began, I saw John Freeman outside the room. There had been an offer to meet for drinks to discuss our differences and come to some civil consensus, which Freeman had rebuffed. Freeman never had the decency, much less the masculinity implied by his surname, to say yes or no. Such is the Freeman Paradox, which doesn’t subscribe to Lincoln’s advice about keeping your enemies close. Only days later, during the Sunday morning hysteria-as-panel depicting a “crisis,” John Freeman publicly declared into the microphone (three times by my count, although I showed up late: the tally may have been higher) that it was essential to have all voices represented. Well, not my voice. And I’m an NBCC member. I raised my hand for a good twenty minutes at this second Freeman-attended panel. I should also note that in response to the aforementioned drink invite, Freeman forwarded my email to Yahoo Customer Care, as if I was some garden-variety spammer.

Some of this needless passive aggression on Freeman’s part may explain a few pedantic preoccupations on my part. But I enter it into the public record in the interest of total transparency, an editorial quality that Freeman appears incapable of.

But I’m nothing if not a tenacious guy and I figured this was an opportunity to get a détente started.

“It’s a pleasure meeting you again,” I said, alluding to our previous attendance in high school.

“Wh…wh…who are you?” said the baffled NBCC president.

I told him my name. Freeman’s eyes widened. He began to shake. He stepped back a half step. He wanted desperately to run away. I certainly hadn’t stabbed anybody. But that’s what Freeman’s reaction reminded me of: a bystander witnessing a shocking crime scene.

“I have nothing against you. So why are we at war?” I asked. “Can you not agree that we’re on the same side?”

“Uh…yeah,” said Freeman. “We’re both at the same panel.”

“Then why don’t you return my emails? We should be working together.”

“I…uh…uh…I get a lot of email.”

I do too, John.

Freeman then scurried away. It was a decidedly unpresidential run.

At least Bud got somewhere with Michael Dirda (I can also attest that Dirda is an opinionated listener rather than a literary fascist). But I mention all this because Freeman simply will not respond to email or face-to-face efforts at resolution. I have tried everything. I confess that I’m a bit angry about this. Not because I give two shits about whether Freeman hates me or not, but because his failure to take a position or to have a civilized conversation with a perceived opponent is deeply dishonest. At the LBC Party, I was very happy to meet Marydell, who has taken some of my posts and positions to task. And that’s fine. I don’t expect people to agree with everything I have to say. And it’s always beneficial to have people examine where my arguments fall flat or where I am uninformed. A good thinker accepts those impassioned people kind enough to quibble with his arguments. The kind of rebellion that Jefferson liked now and then.

I will eventually summarize this panel, but in considering book reviewing ethics as a whole, I must likewise ask whether it is ethical for a president of an organization like the NBCC to remain so stubborn, so unilateral, and so clearly incapable of taking a stand (yes or no for drinks, John?) when one of his members is simply trying to clear the air.

This all comes out right now because, over the course of BEA, I was astonished to learn that writers and critics I admire, people who are far smarter than me and who can write far better than I can, read my blog on a daily basis and have apparently done so for quite a while. In writing this post, I may be misperceived as a hubristic bastard. But I hope this gets at some larger truth about how ridiculous this mess with Freeman is, how the print vs. online “battle” is a grand sham predicated on needless dick wars, and how Freeman (and his older and oilier counterpart Sam Tanenhaus) display the kind of personality disorder traits that aren’t helpful at all.

But more later.

• I am currently holed up with several fine ladies and bottles of Heineken and then I will hit the town. This is the way to spend an early Saturday night. I am contemplating removing my shirt.
• Not many people ran away from me today. In fact, I suspect many people lingered because of my previous post. Perhaps they feared being reported running away. Whatever the case, there were many fine conversations. Only a handful of people ran away. So I will report no more individuals who scurried along such lines. I will only report the silly person at Duke University Press who saw the Bat Segundo business card and told me in very humorless language that she did not specialize in books about bats. I told this person that I had previously interviewed one of her authors for the show and that she might want to read the not so fine print that specified that I was not, in fact, a small mammal enthusiast — at least not in any zealous, rabid-eyed form. She rolled her eyes and I left. I am beginning to understand that there are reasons why small presses stay pretty small.
• I’m particularly troubled by the Jim Crow treatment given to African-American-based publishing houses. They are all relegated to one area of the floor. I walked down this floor and found myself the only Caucasian person there. I looked for two water fountains, but I’m pleased to report that I found pleasant people.
• The big booths (in particular, the Simon & Schuster crowd, who resemble the most vapid B&T hipsters one might find outside of Central Park West; it can’t be an accident that these selfsame schmucks are also the house who want to take away auctorial rights with this lifetime scam) are filled, for the most part, with the most austere and humorless people one can find in the publishing industry. Thankfully, there are fun guys like Chris Artis who scurry such efforts against bonhomie.
• Contrary to Mr. Sarvas’ previous gripes against him, Steve Wasserman is actually a lot of fun. He’ll be making a Segundo appearance when the BEA podcasts go up.
• Many thanks to Small Beer’s Kelly Link and Gavin Grant for the energy-inducing chocolate that helped me through the late afternoon.
• If you want a whitewashed report of yesterday’s ethics panel, look no further than those trusty spin doctors at the NBCC. My own considerably more detailed report will follow.
• At sometime around 3PM, John Lithgow needed to eat a sandwich. I thought immediately of what Dr. Emilio Lizardo would say. I had hoped to laugh-a while I could. I would impersonate a monkey boy or a transvestite. But there was no time. At 3PM, Lithgow needed to eat a sandwich. And when a man needs to eat a sandwich, you don’t interview him, particularly when you associate him with silly roles.
• I’m off to attend more parties. I’m hoping to get up three panel reports on Sunday. I apologize for my delay. Again, at Javits, it’s a case of bamboozling journalists who deign to use wi-fi. But hopefully these bulleted reports will suffice in the meantime.

I’ll offer my own report of Bud Parr’s blogging panel later, once I have had the time to log and arrange my extensive notes. But for the moment, I must respond to Michael Rogers, who appears to be a wuss of letters more content to bitch about the warmth (we’re all feeling it, fella; shut up and deal) than offering a report on events. If Rogers had paid less attention to what he styles “self-aggrandizing” and more attention to Anne Fernald’s excellent points of what blogging can do, then he might have had less of a shaggy dog column on his hands.

• The crooked bastards at Javits want $29.95/day for wi-fi. And if you think I’m paying that much for wireless, you’ve got to be fucking kidding. The problem then becomes what to do in between the crazy period on the floor that ends at 5PM and the partying that begins at 7PM. Keep in mind that you have subway/cab traveling time, just enough minutes to wolf down some dinner (if you’re lucky), and barely enough time to offer reports. But here are some things I noticed.
• I met John Freeman for the first time in many years today — the first time since high school at any rate. It was an effort to break the ice, to stop the needless strife between print and online, to think about the future and work together. He didn’t recognize me. He quite literally convulsed when I told him I was Ed Champion. Maybe he was alarmed by the bandage on my head. I don’t know. (I’ll get to the bandage in a minute.) Whatever the case, if Freeman’s quick sprint away from me is any indication of his diplomatic skills, I don’t think he’s interested too much in reconciliation. But I will keep trying. Even if Freeman continues to run away from me.
• Colson Whitehead also ran away from me twice at the LBC Party last night, but at least he had the decency to shake my hand.
• Richard Nash didn’t run away from me, but the two of us shouted “Fucking Brooklyn!” many times. So I think we’re on good terms.
• John Leonard didn’t run away from me, but I’m happy to report that he is as nice as he is intelligent. More on the Ethics in Book Reviewing Panel later.
• As far as I know, no women ran away from me. Maybe this is a guy thing.
• One of the most hilarious moments of the day was kicking around the Tin House martini offering (note to Tin House: you’re going to need to work on the martini mix) with Steve Wasserman and David Ulin. Believe it or not, Wasserman and Hitch go way back. I’ll have more to report later.
• Chad Post did not run away from me. In fact, I ran into him three times today. Just as I did last year. (He doesn’t know about the third time. I ran away myself, fearing overexposure.)
• The boys at The Millions haven’t run away from me. Nor has Mr. Sarvas, despite his rather amazing meeting schedule, which presumably prohibits running away.
• Yes, there is a bandage on my head. While walking to Javits, my head collided against a sign post. There was a Peckinpah-like gush of blood. I was in the middle of nowhere without a bandage. I panicked, but later applied a bandage, which was a great litmus test. Some people avoided me, fearing the bandage. Others thought me something of a renegade.
• Must dash for parties. Must run away. More later.