• Neal Stephenson’s “It’s All Geek to Me” (via Books, Inq.)
• Widely linked (and, as observed by Scott, apparently outside the NYTBR‘s purview) is this previously unpublished Susan Sontag essay.
• I missed this profile last week, but the Guardian also has a profile of agent Ed Victor.
• Literary pilfering has a long and rich history.
• Charlie Anders offers a brief report of Friday’s R. Crumb opening at the Yerba Buena and later opines that Crumb’s work is “more dated than the music videos from 1930-ish.” While I agree that Crumb’s tendency to reflect the 1960s’ counterculture has cast an undeniable imprint upon his work, I’m wondering if Charlie’s objections are more reflective of a general arts-related problem. A work may reflect a particular period decades later and thus appear “dated,” particularly when the past looms in recent memory. But is it not possible that, a decade or two down the line, it may end up reflecting something bold and innovative? Were Lovecraft’s tales, for examples, “dated” in the 1950s? Were Philip K. Dick’s novels “dated” in the 1980s? Given the ever-shifting nature of time, I’m wondering if “dated” is a valid criticism when discussing art. And I’m hoping to find some time to examine this interesting trajectory of critical reception at length in a future post.
• Two months after Smashing Telly and I rued over opening credits, the Onion has seen fit to rip off the idea.
• Extras is dead. Gervais and Merchant plan a one-off conclusion and that’s it. No third season.
• The Orange Prize longlist has been announced. I’m not sure if Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World was released early enough to make the cut, but if it was, it is utterly criminal that Shriver’s spot was taken up by the ignoble Anne Tyler, who seems to have confused braying melodrama with “observation.” Oh well, at least we can be grateful that Chimamanda Adichie is on the list.
• Jerome Weeks is looking for a job.
• Pete Anderson thinks the Tribune is living up to its literary coverage this week.
• Steve Clackson was kind enough to award me a Thinking Blogger Award, but John Baker uncovers the truth.
• Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books reveals the anti-Harriet Klausner movement.
• Why are three paragraphs devoted to Britney Spears in this San Diego Union-Tribune book review? Surely, there are better representative examples of virginity to draw from.
• How Colette became a writer.
• Mysterious Object at Noon: strangest film in some time?
• On the Purpose of Public Libraries (via Maxine)

• [insert author name]’s [latest book from author] has hit bookstores. It’s criminally underated, and [reviewer who writes somewhat intelligently or has interesting take] has an interesting take on why it’s worth your time.
• Last night, I had a [vaguely personal moment in which I don’t reveal too much of myself to readers, because, based on some of the comments here, I think a few of you are keeping extremely close track of my personal life — for what reason I have no idea]. And it reminded me of [article which probably has nothing to do with moment in question].
• [Person with no real ideas trying to attract attention] is attacking litblogs again! And [first blogger to get upset, because offering you all this content for free can sometimes be a thankless task] has taken him to task. Meanwhile, [more level-headed litblogger who recognizes that this person just wants attention] offers a contrarian take.
• [Wacky news story]. Hey, how about that! [Insert hastily formed witticism in which I apply an overly literal reading to form an incongruous association.]
• [A paragraph of polemical bluster, with at least one ad hominem remark or, failing that, a metaphor that grabs your attention.]
• Sam Tanenhaus has [well, he could have done anything really, if only he actually contacted me directly instead of asking other people about who I am].
• [Sex joke.]
• [Something terrible committed by McSweeney’s or an obscure literary quarterly.]
• And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention [A friend or acquaintance who has done something interesting, must keep this near the end to avoid favoritism]’s thoughtful project, which should blow the lid on [incongruous reference here because I’m overworked and I need more coffee so that I can stay awake, until such moment as I will be able to properly collapse].

And just to be clear on how formulaic this blog is and how much of a tool I am, Random House sends me a $600 weekly paycheck, Penguin arranges for my Fairmont penthouse suite on the weekends, keeping it well-stocked with champagne, caviar and two prostitutes (because I like things exotic, I prefer to fuck midgets and black women), and Soft Skull keeps the Colombian marching power flowing 24/7.

It’s great being a corporate pawn. It’s great willingly catering to the mainstream. Literature? You think I really give a crap? In fact, I’m getting a blow job right now as I write this post. Life doesn’t get any better.

I don’t think you can find anyone more venal in our society than litbloggers.

• If the n+1 and McSweeney’s controversies weren’t enough for you, Sarah has raised some important points about the current state of genre-related reviews, asking, “So where are the new passionate voices who think about this genre in ways I haven’t even begun to explore but hope to engage with? Who’s going to come along to counteract antiquated notions of what genre criticism is and what books benefit from more than just a thumbs-up/thumbs-down approach?”
• Times Online: “What is surprising is that such a high percentage of those without a marked talent for any particular profession should think of writing as the solution. One would expect that a certain percentage would imagine they had a talent for medicine, a certain percentage for engineering, and so on. But this is not the case. In our age, if a boy or a girl is untalented, the odds are in favour of their thinking they want to write.”
• I agree with Scott, although I should point out that, if I’m a “hypocrite” for refusing to post private emails on this website (a position that I still adhere to), while simultaneously being entertained by Mark’s series, then so is anyone who laughed at the Aleksey Vayner video. A weak personality attribute, I agree. But nobody’s perfect.
• The thoughtful Dan Wickett has an anthology in the works.
• Paul Collins on the worst pulp novelist ever.
• Sasha Frere-Jones on Nine Inch Nails.
• Glenn Greenwald on Bush’s “literary luncheon.”
• Why are Canadians making so many zombie movies? Answer: It is the rule of zombie movies that a conservative government inspires more of them. Now that Harper is Prime Minister, it is reasonably certain that there will be many more zombie movies, just as the number of zombie movies increased big time under the Reagan and Bush II administrations.
• Erin O’Brien celebrates Naked Couch Day, which was apparently yesterday.
• Online newspaper revenue is growing; print advertising is decreasing.
• The gender disparity on op-ed pages is so bad that there are classes being taught to teach women how to write op-ed columns. (via Bookninja)
• Jenny Crusie asked her readers if they knew how to dispose of a body to ensure that it wouldn’t be found. So far, she’s received 102 responses. The Internet is a frightening place. (via Bill Peschel)

• In the most recent New Yorker: Jonathan Lethem’s “Lucky Alan.” Also, Lethem’s current obsession with copyright, which, as far as I can tell, seems to have originated from this interesting Harper’s essay, continues anew with a cunning plan related to his newest novel.
• Apparently, Fidel Castro met up with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Marquez’s account is here. The two men concluded that the prostate gland is the starting point for all Marxist revolutions.
• Matthew Gray is working on a Google Maps feature of the Earth viewed by literary locations.
• A new pilot called Literary Superstar is being planned. The pilot stars Jenna Elfman. The “superstar” in question is a publicist. No doubt watered down hijinks will ensue, with Elfman inexplicably living in a lavish Central Park West apartment. Because we can certainly count on Hollywood for financial verisimilitude, can’t we?
• Sam Savage is interviewed at Bluestalking Reader.
• J. Peder Zane tries to understand DFW’s baffling Top Ten Books list. Meanwhile, a man foolish enough to gloss over Philip K. Dick’s prose declares literary lists “an obscenity.” (via Sarvas)
• Is Oregon a more ideal place to set up a publisher than New York? (via Brockman)
• John Sutherland sings the praises of Jake Arnott’s Johnny Come Home.
• Litpark talks with Elizabeth Crane.
• Quiet Bubble has some choice words for Woody Allen.
• Like a zombie that keeps getting up after you shoot it several times in the chest with a pump-action shotgun, the damn OJ book is still alive.
• Who’d be a critic? Yeah, good question. Particularly when you’re as dishonest as Meg Rosoff. Apparently, Rosoff “only reviews books I really like. It’s cowardly, I know, but I figure it’s not my job to make people unhappy.” As a critic who tries to remain as honest, discerning, enthusiastic and constructive as I can, as someone who pours blood, sweat and tears into any freelancing assignment, I can’t begin to express my infuriation here. If Rosoff is terrified of making people unhappy, then perhaps she should pursue a career as a publicist, since she clearly prefers the straightforward hand job-as-book review rather than an honest day’s labor. The Literary Saloon has more.

• Jason Pinter has landed a new gig. This augurs well for St. Martin’s.
• Susan Henderson has kicked off an interesting discussion about writing style. Me? I’d define mine as “thuggish intellectual,” and I’m quite happy with that niche. (via The Publishing Spot)
• I’m not sure what The Nervous Breakdown is exactly, but anything involving Elizabeth Crane can’t be bad.
• Ian Hocking has a step-by-step guide on how to interview David Mitchell. It reminds me very much of the inauspicious debut of The Bat Segundo Show. Thankfully, the interviewing deficiencies were improved upon fifty shows later. (It also helps that Mitchell’s a very nice guy.) (via Splinters)
• Dan Green has an interesting post on how critics misperceived John Updike’s Terrorist. I would agree that Terrorist isn’t one of Updike’s best, but I was equally surprised by the manner in which Updike’s imagery was dismissed by many critics. Is this the grimy underbelly of a critical community more content with psychological realism than an author’s ability to use language to connote mood and feeling?
• Bella Stander has a first-hand account of the NBCC reading.
• A new audio interview with George Saunders.
• Elizabeth Dewberry offers a contrarian take on AWP.
• Sweet Jesus. Tony Pierce is covering SXSW like a madman. (via Pinky’s Paperhaus)
• Should people read speculative fiction because of its predictive powers? Matt Cheney on the subject.
• Gideon Lewis-Kraus talks with Banville. I’m surprised again that Mr. Sarvas is asleep at the wheel on this one, even if he did only just come back from across the Atlantic. It turns out that I’m the one asleep at the wheel. (via Jenny D)
• V.S. Naipaul on collecting other people’s stories. What does that make him? A venture nonfictionalist? (via James Tata)
• Man, when it rains, it pours. The Union Square Cody’s store may be closing. (via Frances)
• Bill Peschel summarizes Scalzi’s book on writing.
• Another year, another Blooker.

• Publishers Weekly reports that total bookstore sales have taken a 1.0% dip in January — this, as retail as a whole rose 4.0%. The question, and perhaps this is something that booksellers might answer here, is whether or not this represents a definitive death knell. Do people feel less inclined to purchase books in January because they are too busy reading the books they received for Christmas?
• Lee Goldberg contends with a nutjob.
• Nick Hornby goes YA. The book will tell the tale of a young boy terrified of saying anything even remotely bad against the books he reads and chronicles his transformation from a writer of promise to a dull and uninteresting person.
• Go Firmin go!
• I try to keep my literary ecstasy at a minimum here, reserving my praise for titles that truly deserve it. But Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World is most definitely worth your time. It may just be my favorite book of 2007 (so far). I’m afraid that I was slow on the draw trying to line up an outlet where I could set forth my thoughts on this ambitious and extremely interesting novel at length, outlining the book’s pitch-perfect observations about relationships and its fascinating riffs upon life choices. Thankfully, Heller McAlpin offers a few reasons why. While I may not get my two hours back from Sliding Doors, I’m very glad that Shriver’s book has made up for that cinematic atrocity.
• Francine Prose has been named the president of PEN. I can’t think of a better person for the job.

• It’s good to know that some newspapers are playing dirty in the needless conflict between newspapers and bloggers. In this case, the St. Augustine Record is trying to smear a local blogger who is critical of local politicians, presumably because the Record reporters lost their ability to question years ago. (via Books, Inq.)
• If reading is at risk, why are teens now buying books in record numbers?
• Ed Brubaker is being hounded because of Captain America. (via The Beat)
• Publishing News: “The average author earns 33% less than the national average wage, according to new research commissioned by the Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society. The study, conducted by Bournmouth University’s Centre for Intellectual Property Policy and Management and based on surveys of 25,000 authors in the UK and Germany paint a bleak picture of authors’ earnings.”
• Are page-turners classics? Does this question even need to be asked? (via Bookshelves of Doom)
• They’re so desperate to dig up dirt on Obama that they’re resorting to parking tickets. That’s nothing. I have it on good authority that Obama once ate the last slice of cake during a party. Can you trust a politician who does this? Didn’t think so. Clearly, the man is evil incarnate.
• If you need to waste hours of your time, you can do no worse than the 50 greatest local television commercials. Norton Furniture occupies the top five slots. And, oh man, there are some gems here.
• Matthew Cheney on Tideland.
• More on the pox called Vox from Maxine.
• And Annalee Newitz has the scoop on Kenneth Eng’s screenplay. Read the frightening results at your own peril.

• I don’t ever want to be accused of shirking any reporting duties pertaining to my literary neighbors up north. So I’d be remiss if I didn’t point you to this year’s Writers’ Trust Award winners. Kenneth Harvey won the $15,000 fiction prize for Inside. And Dragan Todorovic nabbed the non-fiction prize for The Book of Revenge: A Blues for Yugoslavia. Todorovic was forced out of Yugoslavia because he wrote negative essays about Slobodan Milosevic. Which isn’t a hard thing to do. Aside from being a specialist in genocide, the late dictator also had no penis. You might think I’m lying about that last factoid, but I happen to know that the Uncyclopedia would never steer me wrong.
• The Guardian asks, “How old is a young novelist?” That’s a very good quesiton. Granta may be in the business of celebrating the best writers under 40 or under 35. But what of debut novelists like Sam Savage? Or late start biographers like Claire Tomalin? I hereby demand that Granta create the Old Fogey Award, where thirtysomething naifs are barred from the awards ceremony and writers who have spent many years living life and collecting wisdom are rewarded for their labors. Besides, what does age matter anyway? It’s the fiction, stupid.
• Ed Park captures the bibliophile’s dilemma perfectly: “the shelves were maxed out ages ago, and volumes have begun rising from the ground like apartment projects in some totalitarian state.” What Ed doesn’t tell you is that most of us spend considerable time negotiating with mysterious customer service reps about reading our books in installments instead of all of them straight away, as these books insist we must do. There is also talk about how not reading these books right away will affect our reading credit reports. It is only the most disciplined bibliophile who is able to up his limit.
• Tom Lutz: “I don’t want to stir up the dying embers of the theory wars or the culture wars, but why do Prose and Bloom open their guides with attacks against these mythical creatures?” Any visit to an English department or sampling of a graduate course catalog will reveal that fitting literature into neat -isms is the current criteria. Take the courses at San Francisco State University: “The Short Story,” with a course description revealing five -isms alone in a sentence, “Literature and Ecology,” “Language in Context” (which examines how “various aspects of society influence language”), and, instead of teaching at-risk kids the joys of the text itself, we have “Reading Theories and Methods,” which is less about investigating reader response and more concerned with boring kids with theory. It’s not all like this, but these courses are hardly “mythical creatures,” unless you prefer, like Mr. Lutz, to keep your severely uninformed skull cloistered in the sand, pretending, Baudelaire-like, that these courses don’t exist and that they aren’t having an effect upon the way the next generation reads and teaches literature.
• Zelda Music of Golden Proportions.
• 19,000 British men and women have revealed their sexual fantasies. 18,500 involve the missionary position.
• It’s good to know that nipple paint has, at long last, become “kiss-proof and water-resistant.” I was beginning to get worried about the shifty-eyed men in raincoats leaving hotel rooms with colorful streaks on their chins.
• Mikita Brottman probes into The Garfunkel Library. (via Quill and Quire)

• I was extremely bothered by this piece of wankery from the NBCC. And it wasn’t because my “nemesis” Lev Grossman was involved. The NBCC, you see, is hosting a panel on just how gosh darn hard it is to look at them crazy genre spooks that threaten to drive down the neighborhood property values, when the critic’s goal is to remain high-minded. “High-minded,” of course, meaning elitist. After all, the Grand Wizard told us that NOTHING WHATSOEVER OF LITERARY WORTH can come from mysteries, thrillers, romances, science fiction, comic books, mis lit, chick lit, cock lit, cunt lit, or whatever other bullshit lit label affixed to a book.

  For we all know that these books must drink from a different fountain and should do nothing more than carry our suitcases up to our hotel rooms. Thank goodness we all remain liberal about literature, heeding the wisdom of the great D.W. Griffith film classic The Birth of a Novel, as we continue to smile as these books say “Thankya, suh,” after we tip them generously.

  I was prepared to respond to the wholesale arrogance and anti-intellectual nature of this panel and the fact that, aside from genre-friendly EW critic Jennifer Reese, John Freeman didn’t have the good sense to, oh say, get a regular mystery columnist on the panel to discuss many sides of the issue. He seemed more content to stack the deck against genre.

  Thankfully, Jennifer Weiner has done my work for me. This is a useless panel that practices needless segregation. The NBCC stands for “National Book Critics Circle.” Last I heard, tomes that fell outside mainstream literary fiction were books too.

• Joshua Ferris discovers the Hold Steady two years after everybody else has. Next year, Ferris plans on raving about how great LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge” is.
• Colleen Mondor emailed Scarlett Thomas and collected her correspondence into a thoughtful interview with one of today’s most underrated writers.
• I love these kids. (via Gwenda)
• Callie has more on the “to MFA or not to MFA” controversy.
• Jessa Crispin, with typical insouciant ignorance, suggests, “Pick up any other book review section — particular in Chicago [sic] — tear off the header, and you would have no idea where it came from.” Well, that’s just plain wrong. For example, I doubt you’d ever see the sentences, “The drinks mounted frightfully: a pale ale, a lager, a few beers, several gin-and-French cocktails, a double shot of gin (drunk from a toothbrush glass). I began to feel a bit lightheaded myself, and still the river flowed on: wine, gin and lime juice, more beer, whisky,” in the NYTBR (at least not under Tanenhaus’s watch).

  I think any person who follows the book review sections can probably guess where the above sentences came from. While I agree that there’s something of a homogeneity in current book review coverage (i.e., an apparent moratorium on fun and enthusiasm, which I’m doing my best to uproot with my own contributions), even an elementary literary enthusiast would be hard-pressed to look at a piece written by Daniel Mendelsohn, Liesl Schillinger, Laura Miller, David Orr, or the ever-thoughtful Ed Park and claim that it came from somebody else.

• RIP Jean Baudrillard. Wow, there are no words. There is no reality. I will post a roundup when reactions come in.
• A.L. Kennedy on the Granta list. (via Bookninja)
• Newsweek asked readers the five books they’ve always wanted to read but haven’t gotten around to. Here are the top choices. (via Classical Bookworm)
• The beginning of the end.
• Who knew that Farnham’s Freehold was so “controversial?” I’m all for this bizarre Heinlein novel, which I first read when I was thirteen, being reissued, but I’m wondering if Heinlein is becoming so passe that publishers will resort to anything to draw attention.
• In Praise of Ethel Muggs.
• Maud conducts a fascinating contest.
• If you’re a writer who needs a day job, Justine Larbalesiter has been soliciting queries on this point.

• Mike Ponder: “I’d say I am a businessman. A businessman who was lucky enough to have the talent to paint.” Ah, but what is talent when your true calling is generating money? It’s true that poet Wallace Stevens was an insurance man and it would be naive in the extreme to suggest that artists give up their day jobs and shirk their breadwinning duties. But does the true artist spend nearly moment possible producing art first and foremost, no matter what the circumstances? More advice from Ponder: “At the end of the day, if you are going to be successful as an artist you have to be successful as a businessman.” If this is true, then why doesn’t Thomas Pynchon taking meetings?
• Jonathan Lethem talks with theoretical cosmologist Janna Levin. Video also available.
• It seems that scrotum-shock isn’t confined to the States. The Hamas Education Ministry is removing Palestinian folk tales from school libraries because of “sexual innuendo.” Of course, an offhand reference to genitals is far less suggestive than a Mae West line and certainly less pernicious than a schoolyard taunt. But what’s even crazier is that Hamas has not only removed the book in question, but destroyed 1,500 copies.
• Are Oscar Ameringer’s literary contributions being overlooked in Oklahoma because of his politics?
• Nilanjana S Roy: “They have the air of seasoned explorers, emerging from the rain forest of literature with advice about how to avoid media pythons, the malarial interview (where you speak in a kind of delirium that lasts until you see what you’ve said the next morning in the paper) and other hazards of the festival life. The festival enthusiasts are the ones who’re comfortable leading the life of rockstars on a long world tour, sans the groupies and the psychedelic drugs.” I can report with some authority that authors are not immune to groupies and psychedelic drugs. And I’m certain that Alice Denham can agree.
• Rose Wilder Lane, overlooked literary journalist?
• Gwenda’s reports of bad AWP fashion have been memorialized by Carolyn Kellogg, although it would seem that Tayari Jones was the exception.
• The horrors of 1980s stickers. (via Quiddity)
• Seamus Kearney makes the case for epilogues.
• 30 dead at a Baghdad book market.
• Joshua Ferris observes that, of Granta’s recently announced Best Young American Novelists, 15 of 21 had MFAs. Maybe this was one of the reasons I wasn’t nearly as excited about Granta’s list as I wanted to be. In the end, isn’t good writing not about workshops, but about sitting on your ass and trying to write the best damn story you can? Personally, I find greater value showing my work to people I trust instead of sitting in front of a bunch of emaciated students who are more driven by uninformed envy than collective no-bullshit encouragement. An open environment in which you can count upon people to tell you the truth is far better than a stuffed classroom in which the same textbook tropes are encouraged. I feel the sorriest for bleary-eyed editors looking for something different.

• Heidi Benson has a definitive report on the LATBR‘s current state: The Book Review will lose four pages and merge with an eight-page opinion section. It could launch as soon as this month. These are unsettling developments to say the least.
• Much to my regret, I was too fried this weekend to attend Wondercon. (I plan to do penance by vigorously reporting at the forthcoming APE.) But Newsarama has a definitive roundup.
• A new installment of The Quarterly Conversation is up, with Dan Green tackling Orhan Pamuk and Scott Esposito raving about Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
• Is Jonathan Lethem competing with Chris Ware in the “I am insignificant!” department? (via Sarah
• Dan Wickett has returned from AWP and he’s offering a farrago of reports right now.
• Stepping in for Mr. Sarvas this week is Joshua Ferris.
• Anastasia Sky: 84 year old first-time novelist.
• Something a bit worthwhile in the NYTBR: Russell Banks on Kundera.
• Giles Foden responds to the whole “Martin Amis as Britain’s greatest living author” controversy, revealing that Amanda Ross, responsible for picking such questionable titles as a Robbie Williams biography for the Richard & Judy Book Club, hates the word “literary.” Well, I’m not fond of anti-intellectuals who are more fond of bullshit labels than a book’s innards, but you don’t hear me complaining.
• Patrick Leigh Fermor is learning to type at 92.
• An interview with Scott McCloud. (via LHB)
• Russian journalist Ivan Safronov plunged to his death from his apartment building. This makes him the 14th journalist to die under mysterious circumstances under Putin.
• Laura Miller on Un Lun Dun. I have enjoyed Miller’s reviews in the past. But I’m troubled by her Malcolm Jones-like pronouncement, “I’d never been able to get past the first chapter or so of the books I’ve tried.” Again, I must ask if today’s book reviewers are lazier than previous generations. It’s one thing if a critic didn’t care for a book, but if a critic is being paid to review something, is it not a critic’s obligation to remark only upon books that she has read? These revelations reflect badly on the reviewer and badly on the pub. Miller dismisses Miéville’s style in these earlier as “half-baked” and “callow,” but it seems to me that if she didn’t read Perdido Street Station and The Scar in full, then Miller’s modifiers are best applied to her own review, particularly since this idle speculation comes with no supportive examples.
• In the UK, Jane Austen is more popular than Jesus. (via Quill & Quire)
• Bruce Sterling on the dot-green boom.
• Me too!
• Linda Richards on Travels in the Scriptorium.
• I’m not very impressed with the new Arcade Fire album, but I need to give it at least two more listens before offering a definitive assessment.
• Mis lit? This is preposterous. Is there someone holding a gun to the Independent‘s editors demanding more trend pieces?

• Robert Birnbaum talks with Martin Amis for the fifth time. Lots of good stuff, including Amis describing how to hit the reader over the head on a character’s race.
• RIP Arthur Schlesinger, although turning Barbra Streisand on to The Economist is the least of his achievements.
• Good Man Park reports that a new issue of The Believer is out, with a Stephen Elliott essay on breaking up available online.
• Yes, screw the bloggies! Happy seven years, Quiddity!
• It’s been linked all over the place, but it’s still worth your time: ephemera from Children of Men.
• Some info on the forthcoming National album. (via LHB)
• Open Letters Monthly is now set up to review the reviewers. (via Mike Harrison)
• Michael Blowhard on the state of interviewing.
• More silly narcissism charges. I’m beginning to wonder, in light of all these allegations leveled at technology, if complaining about what others do with their lives is itself a form of narcissism. Look, someone else could be an intense Scrabble player and spend all of their spare time talking about it. But I’m not going to call them “narcissistic.” Enthusiastic, maybe. Sometimes so wrapped up in their interests that they sometimes forget to eat, sleep, or socially interact, okay. But it does not follow that these folks think about anything but their own interests. Could it be that the “Narcissism!” hues and cries are a new backlash against geeks? (via Speedy Snail)
• Good on this girl. (via Chasing Ray)
• Matthew Tiffany on What is the What: “I read a page, two maybe, at night before the words begin to dance and I drool. I haven’t been reading in traffic, or on lunch break. Then I thought that it was the subject matter; not giving me enough of an escape from the everyday. Which is absurd, because Deng in a refugee camp in Ethiopia is pretty damn far from my everyday.”
• Callie on being a writer again.
• Fuck the FBI. This is ridiculous. (via Maud)

• Terry Teachout fell hard for San Francisco.
• Still believe that comics are trivial? PW reports that graphic novel sales increased 12% from 2006 to 2005. Comics aren’t going away anytime soon. And if you haven’t embraced them, or at least investigated them, by now, you may as well be using a Telex instead of a fax machine.
• Several early Hitchcock films have been released to DVD.
• RIP Fons Rademakers.
• RIP Lothar-Guenther Buchheim.
• RIP Sham Lal.
• In a recent “state of the union” address, Random House CEO Gail Rebuck declares just how hard the market is for all publishers. Talk of digitization and e-books is now in the air.
• Is Martin Amis Britain’s greatest living author? (via Bookninja)
• The Gray Lady has opened its wedding pages to user-generated videos. Of course, the only way to make these even remotely interesting is to open the floodgates for honeymoon night footage.
• Apparently, Ohio is good for something.
• Goodness, you people need to get laid more.
• David Denby: “‘Syriana’ made sense in the end, but you practically needed a database to sort out the story elements; the movie became a weird formal experiment, testing the audience’s endurance and patience.” Speak for yourself, Denby. If Denby is advocating an end to nontraditional cinematic narratives (and I suspect that he is), I don’t know why this man continues to review movies. Denby’s hostility towards multilayered narratives seems less predicated upon aesthetics and more rooted in intellectual indolence. The New Yorker editors should demand better, posthaste.
• Ron Silliman: “The Departed is a more complex, more compelling film than either Babel or The Queen, even if it lacks the social importance of the former or the challenge of making a film where so little happens on the surface of things.”
• DFW name-checked on The Office. (Thanks also to Tito for alerting me to this, but the damn East Coasters beat us to the punch.)

• My attentions have been diverted towards this year’s Oscar blog, but I’ll do my best at playing double-duty. (Triple, if I count deadlines.)
• Graham Greene noir.
• Apparently, Andrea Levy has conquered America. I knew the Brits would retaliate back for the Boston Tea Party sooner or later.
• Normally, I’m a big fan of lists. (Hence, these roundups, which are presented to you in lists.) But this may be going a bit overboard.
• As an aside, does the phrase “reading challenge” sound like a game from The Price is Right?
• The neuroscience behind flaming. (via Bookninja)
• Norman Spinrad on “The Doomsday Machine”.
• Clive James on Brazil. (via Ghost in the Machine)
• This year’s Booker judging panel. (via Reading Matters)
• T.S. Eliot remix MP3s.
• George Takei on Tim Hardaway.
• The Funniest Robots. (via Quiddity)
• Email is worse for you than drugs. Guess I’ll take up speedballs then.
• New Scientist: “Sleep also helps us to extract themes and rules from the masses of information we soak up during the day.” Speaking for myself, I don’t know if my dreams of wild orgies with 1940s noir queens is really a matter of “extracting information.”

• Yesterday, I felt a man’s bicep in a hotel room. I’m not lying about this. This man, who will appear very soon on The Bat Segundo Show insisted that I do this, and who was I to turn him down? When a man makes a convincing case for why you should feel his bicep, my position is to throw caution to the wind and live dangerously.
• Speaking of which, Chris Lehmann talks with Martin Amis and asks him the real questions, such as what it was like to sleep with Tina Brown. I’m not sure what bearing this has on Amis as a writer, but if Lehmann is going to lower the bar like this, fair is fair. I’ll accept his needless and gossipy question as legitimate journalism the minute he tells us whether his wife takes it up the ass.
• Stephen Colbert has a comic book alter ego?
• Audrey Niffenegger has followed up The Time Traveler’s Wife with a graphic novel.
• Sarah has been hosting a roundtable for Patrick Anderson’s The Triumph of the Thriller.
• Hey, Brockman, what’s up with the penis references of late?
• The Office: a spec script by David Mamet. (via Gwenda)
• Michael Dirda on Clark Ashton Smith.
• Bookblog: “I’ve read a few interviews [Valentino Achak Deng]’s done along with Eggers, but I’m interested in what he’s like without having Eggers around.” This is a very good observation.
• Pete Anderson initiates St. Baldrick’s again. Help him out. It’s for a good cause.
• Frances Dinkelspiel and other Berkeley bloggers can be found in the latest Daily Californian.
• Behold! The latest Tournament of Books. I still don’t understand the purpose of the white chicken in the red circle. No doubt this is a deeply symbolic gesture on the part of Kevin Guilfoile. Or perhaps he and the Morning News gang came up with the whole idea at a KFC (the only restaurant that could accommodate the meager ToB catering budget).
• If you’re a Lovecraft fan visiting Providence, this is a handy article. (via Maud)
• A remembrance of Elizabeth Jolley.
• Five freaky Muppet videos.

• One week, she’s giving marital advice to the Beckhams; the next week, she’s polluting the television medium with her drivel. I remain convinced that there is no way to get the media to stop paying attention to Jackie Collins (including me, apparently).
• Someone must also ask this: when was the last time David Denby was enthusiastic about film? Presumably, “the spectacle of dying” also explains Denby’s recumbent work of late. Denby has offered very thoughtful reviews in the past, but someone needs to whip the man into shape. David Remnick, it is your duty to unleash a horde of ball-busting editors on Denby before March!
• Don’t entirely discount hasty reading. I can agree with Ms. Waters that some books, such as David Markson’s Going Down (which I am now reading), simply cannot be read fast. But if Ms. Waters honestly believes that the average reader should diagram every single sentence and deconstruct the fuck out of every volume, then I have to wonder just how she has fun on a Saturday night. Is not the joy of reading predicated upon leaving some spontaneity or ambiguity to the reader? I’m not suggesting that books should be construed as mere entertainments, but if the process of understanding literature is not engaging on some level (hopefully with a modicum of fun), then what hope for tomorrow’s grad students? Besides, who is Ms. Waters to dictate just how any individual reader reads? One of the joys of reading is returning to a book a second or third time, realizing that a particular passage from a book you haven’t touched in six years is calling you in the dead of night, lending some aid or reference to another unsolved and entirely unrelated mystery.
• I don’t know if I mentioned this already, but Scott McLemee is now blogging, although I must reprimand him for using “thorough” and “Wikipedia” in the same sentence.
• Oh, grow some balls, Gerry Adams. (via Elegant Variation)
• Dan Wickett’s Dzanc Books is starting to pump out a few titles. Set for 2008: a Yannick Murphy short story collection and a volume from Peter Markus.
• Matthew Tiffany has scored a future interview with Dave Eggers and Valentino Deng. Failure to engage Mr. Eggers on his inexplicable flip-flopping will be duly observed, Mr. Tiffany. Go get ’em, tiger. Nobody else has the balls. (Well, I would, but Eggers has refused multiple interview requests.)
• I’d like to agree with Levi (somewhat) concerning bloggers “loathing” the NYTBR. I don’t “loathe” Sam Tanenhaus (just as I don’t “loathe” Dave Eggers, much as he and his minions seem to think I do). “Loathing” implies that I feel complete disgust for the NYTBR. But if I “loathe” this weekly broadsheet, why then have I praised David Orr, Liesel Schillinger and Dwight Garner on these pages? This “with us or against us” mentality might sit well with paranoids and conspiracy freaks, but it doesn’t sit with me. I apply a great degree of scrutiny to anyone, including authors I admire (see my recent Miéville review). It’s the only way I can stay honest. Perhaps the issue here is one of assumed respect, a collective state where one assumes that because something is printed in a prominent newspaper, it must therefore be “beyond criticism” (like Saul Bellow, apparently*). But how can any solid thinker maintain such an attitude? Why is vehement disagreement confused with a jihad? That my clear skepticism and playfulness is confused with “loathing” reveals quite a lot about the disingenuous nature of today’s book review climate. (And, no, I don’t “loathe” Mark either for quibbling over his verb choice here; far from it.)

* — See also this post from Dan Green.

• J.M. Coetzee on Norman Mailer: “If one takes seriously Mailer’s reading of world history as a war between good and evil in which human beings act as proxies for supernatural agents—that is to say, if one takes this reading at face value rather than as an extended and not very original metaphor for unresolved and irresoluble conflict within individual human psyches—then the principle that human beings are responsible for their actions is subverted, and with that the ambition of the novel to search out and speak the truth of our moral life.” (via Scott)
• I don’t really watch television, so perhaps one of you might tell me why I should care about Damien Leith and what makes this ponce such a fantastic novelist?
• Elif Shafak: genuine protection needed or Salman Rushdie schtick?
• RIP fanboy.
• Given the man’s inflexibility to any viewpoint outside of his own and his animosity towards anyone who even remotely disagrees with him*, I don’t think I’d ever want to interview Cory Doctorow. But Rick Kleffel has been brave enough to take the plunge, talking with Doctorow for his excellent podcast series.
• Ecclesiastical Proust Archive (via Mark Thwaite)
• Justine Larbaleister goes medieval on Maureen Dowd.
• Anna Nicole Smith: The Annotated Biography
• “Would you like to establish a new freelancing career?”

* — Conclusion based on personal emails between Champion and Doctorow, 2001-2006, although third parties assure me that Doctorow is “nice.”

• I’m with Jeff on this one. I liked Neal Pollack’s Alternadad, but comparing it to Howl is like calling The O.C. the finest drama since I, Claudius. I can only chalk this bizarre comparison to the precarious employment scenario now going down at Time.
• Responding to the Reason fanfic imbroglio, Tod Goldberg observes that “all uses of the term ‘raging fucktard’ be noted as originating from me.” One would think that this point would be self-evident, but it seems that the Cathy Youngs of the universe require clarification.
• Charlie Anders uncovers a remarkable stereotype in the Star Trek animated series. I hope The women of Charlie Chaplin. (via Quiddity)
• Michelle Richmond is posing for Playboy.
• Banville on Amis. (via Maudier)
• I think the question of whether an author has set foot in the place he’s writing in is moot. Shouldn’t it be about the work? One can look on further than Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Crane never set foot into battle and yet composed chilling imagery.
• Levi Asher hits PBS!
• I wonder if these animators stole the idea from Nick Mamatas’ Move Under Ground.
• Meghan O’Rourke on John Leonard: “It would be fine to leave it at that, if it weren’t that the word ‘enthusiast’ sounds dilettantish, somehow not quite serious. So let us try this: John Leonard is our primary progressive, catholic literary critic; he is also, with the exception of Susan Sontag, the best American literary critic to come of age in the 1960s, when the destabilizing forces of rock ’n’ roll and popular culture ransacked Axel’s Castle, that modernist symbol of aesthetic detachment, and began throwing parties in the inner keep. Like Sontag and Camille Paglia, Leonard has been one of the few literary essayists who can make sense of the erosion of highbrow culture, ruing elements of its loss while embracing the forces of popular culture. He is a man who loves The Beatles and Arthur Koestler, Joan Baez and William Wordsworth; and whom we can trust, now, when he worries that our intellectual culture is being, if not ‘dumbed down,’ then coarsened. He may be an ‘old fart,’ as he describes himself. But in outlook he is still a young progressive — the word-drunk man who has done for literary criticism what Lester Bangs did for rock journalism.” Sam Tanenhaus, take note. (via Complete Review)
• It looks like auctorial doppelgangers are afoot at the Philly Inquirer.
• James Tata on the Echo Maker epigraph.
• Today’s students are unfamiliar with the Beatles, Norman Mailer and Orson Welles. (via Bookblog)
• Nextbook chats with Aline Kominsky Crumb.
• Bookish Love, an excellent site for reading reports by the by, meets Madison Smartt Bell.
• Can today’s newspapers be trusted? (via Bookninja)
• 2007 seems to be the year of vampire novels. Or at least I seem to be reading more of them lately (three so far and we’re barely into February). But Bookburger informs us that John Marks’ Fangland is the one to read.
• Atwood on arts funding. (via Magnificent Octopus)
• Matt Bell reports on a Michael Martone reading.
• A detailed Stephen Dixon interview. (via Matthew Tiffany)
• Is there now a confluence between Internet advertising and newspapers?
• 24 co-creator Joel Surnow’s politics.
• Mystery Morgue interviews Sarah Weinman.

• From 1934 to 1949, the Philly Inquirer published “complete illustrated novels” in its Sunday book review section. You’d be hard-pressed to find even the most secure and well-funded Sunday supplements doing anything like this today. (via Books, Inq.)
• Primo Levi’s “A Tranquil Star.”
• Keith Gessen asks, “Where is Martin Amis heading next?”
• Behold: New Critics.
• Obviously, Kim Bofo has never read Faulkner. The “clever literary thing” is something known as eye dialect, designed to convey cadences in phonetic terms. It is not intended to be “clever,” nor is it intended to spawn anti-intellectual hostility from across the big pond. More information can be found here and here.
• Joyce and Beckett play golf. (via Fimoculous)
• The 11 Least Intimidating Movie Villains. (via Quiddity)
• Poor Mike Judge. Fox doesn’t deserve him.

• If you’re anything like me, you consider Jackie Collins’ words to be about as insightful and comprehensible to your life as those incomprehensible furniture instructions printed who knows where. Yet Ms. Collins seems to believe that she can help Victoria Beckham. Perhaps Ms. Collins is attempting to atone for past conversational setbacks. Or perhaps she’s alarmed that Tony Danza didn’t follow her advice to get his nipples pierced in order to ward off evil eidolons. Either way, I’m awaiting the inevitable novel fictionalizing Ms. Collins’ admonishments, Fool Me Spice, Shame on Me.
• It wouldn’t be a Tuesday without a Lethem story. (Hell, it would be Tuesday without a Collins story. But I’ve already blown that promise and you can send your disused prophylactics to me by mail in protest.) It appears that Boston musicians are creating an original song from the lyrics in Lethem’s upcoming novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet. The winning song will be unfurled at Lethem Central and it will be performed at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on March 27. Whether this will translate into a Clap Your Hands-style indie hit through the Internet or an unsettling choice at your karaoke bar of choice remains anyone’s guess.
• Cathy Young offers this disingenuous claim: “Respectable modern-day literature has no shortage of derivative works: What are Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead or John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius but Hamlet fanfics?” I think not. There’s a fundamental difference between “writers” who labor over bad prose describing Kirk schtupping Spock and writers like Stoppard offering a witty and separately realized tale of two overlooked bumblers. In Hamlet, R&G were little more than minor characters with scant attributes. Plus, I don’t believe international copyright law applies to works published in 1599. Besides, it’s not as if Updike and Stoppard are going to other characters for the majority of their work. Updike and Stoppard have indelible characters like Rabbit Angstrom and Moon to fuel their respective imaginations. Fanfic writers, by contrast, often have no narrative ideas other than derivative stories involving characters they don’t own or have not created. Further, they are often inept with subject-verb agreement. I advise novice writers to toil at such infecundities at their own peril. What’s more, Ms. Young has also taken Lee Goldberg’s comments out of context. But then one would expect no less of a self-acknowledged fan fiction writer accustomed to absconding with characters she has neither the right nor the talent to tinker with. (And lest I be accused of attacking Ms. Young’s character, let’s let her fiction speak for itself. This story reveals such blunders as “Xena’s voice spilled into his reverie.” You mean, Xena’s voice is liquid as opposed to aural? Who knew? Or how about: “Back in his leather pants, Ares came out into the main room of the house.” The prepositional phrase is unnecessary. We’re already in the goddam house. The words “out into” are oxymoronic. And what in the hell does that dreadful clause about the leather pants have to do with the sentence’s purpose? I could examine this dreadful prose at length, but I’d rather spend a weekend hiring someone to saw my limbs off.)

• The Millions’ Garth Risk Hallberg offers “an attempt of a review” for Against the Day.
• Orhan Pamuk is not pleased with “being secure.” Accordingly, Pamuk has spent much of his spare time combing through the DSM-IV for ways to be insecure. In addition to isolating a large chunk of his friends by revealing TMI at cafe sitdowns, Pamuk has adopted an awkward gait, hunched shoulders, and has started to pen confessional essays similar to Jonathan Franzen’s.
• Clive Cussler inflating book sales? The next thing you know, he’ll inflate his literary worth!
• Be sure to drop by the Litblog Co-Op this week for discussion on Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The Wizard of the Crow, which also made my top ten books of 2006.
• Poet John Hewitt is set to become a “Statue of Liberty man.” But the more important question, still unanswered, is whether Hewitt was a breast man or an ass man.
• Norman Mailer: “I’m not as interested in fights as I once was. I used to enjoy a fight. Now I look at (a fight) as something that’s going to use up a lot of the little working time I probably have left. I don’t want to get to the point where I’m frantic about the working time.” Well, then how will the old man get out all that aggression so that he can feed his ego? Cross-stitching? Bocce?
• Ed Park on PKD’s Voices from the Street.
• Michael Chabon on McCarthy’s The Road. (via Bookdaddy)
• Embarrassing books, including Bill O’Reilly’s Those Who Trespass: A Novel of Television and Murder. (via Bookshelves of Doom)
• Revolutionary Road: the movie? I don’t know about this. With Sam “I’m About As Subtle as CG Petals” Mendes at the helm, I can’t see Richard Yates’ classic novel being given the hard realism treatment it deserves. (via Matthew Tiffany)
• To those who have asked me to respond to the Gavin Newsom scandal, I truly could not care less. I’m more concerned with, say, affordable housing, the homeless, the social impact of Proposition F, MUNI’s failures, and at least four thousand other issues pertaining to San Francisco. And I’m appalled at how I have been asked nearly every day during the past week to engage or joke on the matter, when what happened is between the involved parties and is frankly none of my business. And for those who might impute that I’m a Gavin apologist, I should also note that I voted for Matt Gonzalez, not Gavin, in the last election.

• Hitch on One Hundred Years: “For this reader, the most arresting episode in the Macondo saga was the epidemic of insomnia that afflicted the tribe.”
• The Esquire Napkin Project features contributions by A.M. Homes, Jonathan Ames, Aimee Bender, Andrew Sean Greer, and many more authors.
• James Gibbons on Paul Auster: “Novelists, of course, are not obliged to occupy themselves with a fine-grained depiction of external reality, so in remarking on the abstract terrain of Auster’s books I mean primarily to underscore how anomalous his success is. Simply put, neither American writers nor American readers tend to go in for the kind of fiction that Auster has made his specialty, and it’s unsurprising that Auster enjoys not just wide readership but also prestige internationally, particularly in France, that well exceeds his critical reputation in the United States.” (via The Publishing Spot)
• Jeff VanderMeer opines that BSG is beginning to suck. I agree. And yet when Annalee Newitz boldly put forth this proposition late last year, she was greeted by a torrent of denouncements from mad fanboys. The question is when this artistic declivity will be recognized by the more rabid BSG viewers. I don’t know whether to give up on the show or hope that it will get better. I keep watching, but only when I am suffering from insomnia or my brain power has depleted to near zero. Ron Moore has not written a single episode this season other than the two-hour premiere, and I suspect that he’s abdicated on his duties. Do we really need a BSG spinoff? I’d rather see attentions directed towards one good show instead of two substandard ones.
• Charlie Stross on the writer’s lifestyle. (via Speedysnail)
• Flickr has forced its users to get Yahoo IDs. Small wonder that Fotolog has overtaken Flickr. Treat your users as if they are prisoners forced to register for a stalag and they go elsewhere.
• What kind of reader are you? Me? I’m a “Dedicated Reader.” (via Bookblog)
• Sidney Sheldon has passed on, forcing readers to find another prolific hack writer to read on airplanes.
• Flatland: The Movie! (via Books, Inq.
• Over at Mark’s place, Daniel Olivas talks with Daniel Alarcón.
• The Existence Machine on Children of Men.
• Oh! My! Goodness! Radio! Radio! Radio! (via Condalmo)

• It’s Stephen Graham Jones Week at the LBC. Look for copious discussion, prolific guest posts from the author and a podcast interview conducted by the divine Ms. Kellogg.
• Speaking of which, Pinky’s Paperhaus uncovers this remarkable blog, which tells of an MFA student who suffered a stroke in her early thirties and had to drop out. The blog is a fascinating portrayal of someone trying to read and write (in short, operate in this grand realm of literature that many of us take for granted) with short-term memory problems, among other things. Also from Carolyn: this call for entries for Hot Metal Bridge.
• The San Francisco Chronicle gets to the AMS news almost a month after everybody else has mulled over it. There isn’t much in the way of new information, but there are quotes from McSweeney’s Eli Horowitz, among other people. (And, no, Ms. DeBare, while you were taking a nap, there were more than rumors circulating through the blogs. Wake up and smell the media convergence.)
• Leave it to Jack Shafer to serve up a contrarian eulogy for Ryszard Kapuściński. (via The Millions)
• Design Notes for the Richard Ford “Existence Period” Roller Coaster in Haddam, New Jersey. (via Tod Goldberg)
• Jeff VanderMeer has just announced another new project. By my count, that makes 43 books published in 2007 which will carry the “Jeff VanderMeer” sobriquet.
• M. John Harrison on worldbuilding: “Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.”
• Is Wonder Woman the most boring comic book character?
• Filmmakers take note: Jonathan Lethem has initiated The Promiscuous Materials Project. (via East Coast Ed)
• Elizabeth Crane reveals the truth about Eric Schaeffer.
• Maxine has some sad news for A Clockwork Orange fans.
• David Meghan talks with Charity Girl author Michael Lowenthal.
• Norma Khouri: victim? Next thing you know, someone will be making the case for James Frey.
• The Florida Times-Union is convinced that high-school authors are getting a taste of the literary life. But until these kids do their damnedest to shop for cheap groceries, attempt to persuade their supers that the rent is coming (really!) in a few days, and spend countless hours of their writing time trying to track down a promised royalty check from a deadbeat publisher, I don’t think it can be declared that they are “getting a taste.”
• Spring books from the Philly Inquirer.
• Tetris vandalism. (via Alan DeNiro)
• I don’t understand why the New York Times is astonished to learn that black people listen to indie rock. I don’t see a feature article devoted to all the Caucasians who’ve listened to Jedi Mind Tricks and Blade Icewood. Should one’s race dictate one’s cultural tastes? I guess we’ll all have to register with the appropriate government body before we do something dangerous, like consider a work of art without factoring in the artist’s race or ethnicity.
• I’m not sure if Daniel Green is familiar with Smoke, the fighter in Mortal Kombat who was fond of ripping hearts out of his opponents. But this post on Malcolm Jones suggests some familiarity with the phrase “Finish him!”
• I don’t know if this violates any conditions of confidentiality, but Mary Ann Gwinn spills the beans on the NBCC Awards process.
• When in doubt, Ms. Miller, throw caution to the wind and go. It’s nice to have one’s preconceived notions challenged and even changed.
• Auden’s literary executor Edward Mendelson is profiled at Bookforum. (via Jenny D, who shares my desire to visit Iceland one day)
• For the love of architecture, identify this man!
• RIP Wolfgang Iser. Now that Iser has passed on, please respond to his death in 2,000 words, adopting a uniformist cadence.
• The Battlestar Galactica gag reel. (via Fimoculous)
• Girl Scout cookies are now free of transfats. Alas, if only they could have spent all this time improving the cookie flavor and texture.
• In this week’s New Yorker: a new story from DFW.

• Apparently, there’s a nutbar trying to off writers in Turkey. He killed Armenian journalist Hrant Dink and threatened Orhan Pamuk in a courtroom. Perhaps the only way to calm this guy is to get him a blog so he can type out his snarky aggressions like the rest of us.
• You know, I’ve been text-messaging “That’s totally book!” well ahead of the hipsters, which is to say as of fifteen minutes ago. I’m just too lazy to hit the number keys one additional time for C and L.
• The Brits, it seems, are prevaricators when it comes to literature. 40% of Brits lie about reading classics. 10% of men fibbed to their dates about reading a heavyweight novel. Even more criminally, The Da Vinci Code is the book that these folks are lying about reading. If you’re going to lie about literature, the least you could do is up the auctorial standard. I’m happy to tell you in all candor that I’ve never read Dan Brown, have no intention of reading Dan Brown, and would sooner be stabbed in the chest with a sharp icepick than read Dan Brown. (That last sentence alone should demonstrate that one can find a conversational starter within truth.) (RELATED: Maxine has uncovered the full list.)
• “Neck and shoulder massage!” Really, there’s no need for delicacy on this point. We’re all adults here. Should I now refer to other activities as “horizontal biological engineering tests?” Orwell would have had a field day with these euphemisms.
• Valerie Trueblood is in the houuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse!
• New letters from Anne Frank’s father have been discovered. The letters were written shortly before the Franks went into hiding. (via Michelle Richmond)
• HST for Sheriff. (via Jeff)
• Why, oh why books like this? What next? A sex manual penned by Ron Howard? A new Showtime television series called Joanie REALLY Loves Chachi, featuring a bukkake-flecked Erin Moran satisfying everyone at the Leopard Lodge? (via Rarely Likable)

• Now that the Little House books have hit their 75th anniversary, the publisher has seen fit to replace Garth Williams’ illustrations with photos. And who will be in these photos? It appears that waif-like anorexic teens now represent the great American frontier, although I’m unclear of the association between binge eating and hunting and fishing. “We wanted to convey the fact that these are action-packed,” says Tara Weikum, who is shepherding this preposterous overhaul. Should not the action be self-evident in the text? (via Haggis
• The Rake hosts an interview with Carl Shuker.
• Hugh Grant, novelist? Hugh Grant, father? I suspect someone’s having a midlife crisis. Well, at least he can draw from personal experience on the first point.
• Seattle Times: “That was appropriate, because her songwriting made the show feel as much like a literary event as a musical one.” You say this like it’s a bad thing!
• Jay McInerney: “Well, there was a time when I would have said, “my work.” But now the kids are first; my work is second.” Actually, let’s be honest here: wasn’t there a time in which cocaine came first?
• Michael Chabon will be serializing “Gentlemen of the Road” in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. Let’s hope this doesn’t turn out to be as disastrous as other serials.
• Zoe Heller is having none of the “misogynistic” accusations directed towards Notes on a Scandal: book and movie.
• RIP Mary Stolz.
• Scott has some good advice for writers who also blog: slow down. I agree. If you’re blogging and writing more big league things, then it’s of great help to have a regular routine in which you take a great deal of time to craft your sentences. There’s often a misconception, promulgated by some of the dinosaurs who work on West 43rd Street, that bloggers can only write fast. Speaking for myself (and not accounting for revisions I do), it takes me anywhere from two to six hours to turn out 1,000 words of fiction or a review, whereas a blog post of the same length often takes me as little as 20 minutes. There are advantages and disadvantages with the two speeds. There are times when it’s necessary to labor over a sentence (and this process is often akin to watching ketchup pour slowly onto a patty). But there are other times when I’m probably fussing too much over it. I agree with Scott that if you want to be a serious writer, you need to stay in shape. Blogging alone doesn’t necessarily cut the mustard.
• Thom Yorke’s iTunes playlist. (via Quiddity)
• Also passed on: Ryszard Kapuscinski, who I haven’t read but who Megan vouches for.
• 3AM talks with Richard Nash.
• From the Sexy Scott: “However, I do wonder what my reading experience would have been like had I not consumed so much extra information before, during, and after my reading of the book. What would it have been like had I just plucked the paperback off the shelf and began on my own, unencumbered either by the massive hype that still surrounds the book or the copious exegetical efforts that exist online in their more lovable and amateur forms or in the more codified, professionally respectable versions available through either your seriously stocked research library or a good handy access to Jstor or Academic Search Elite or whathaveyou.” I don’t know if this is as much as a problem as Scott suggests it is, because a reader can willingly ostracize himself from all hype and reviews if she really wants to, but it is an issue worth thinking about.
• A week ago, I started to write an elaborate parody of Zadie Smith’s essay that, due to tenuous Wi-Fi conditions, was lost to the ether, but thankfully Dan Green expresses some of my feelings about Smith’s opinions on style. There’s a great difference between style that reflects a writer’s consciousness and style that reflects a character’s (or a world’s) consciousness (or, as Dan puts it, a “writer’s particular way of living with language”). Are we so immersed within the cult of personality that even smart writers like Smith can no longer discern the difference?
• John Mellencamp insists that he didn’t sell out. Right. Next thing you know, he’ll be telling us that Phil Collins-era Genesis and Huey Lewis and the News were the edgiest bands to came out of the 80s. (via Silliman)
• Man, another death. Burmese poet Tin Moe has passed on.

• Happy five years Largehearted Boy!
• Forget the Oscars. The big deal awards ceremony to watch is The Razzies. Basic Instinct 2 is the front-runner, with seven Razzie nominations.
• RIP, Ron Carey. I guess you made detective after all.
• Robert Fulford on literary rejection.
• Frank Wilson isn’t kidding about all the books he gets.
• Here’s one way to support McSweeney’s while the AMS thing gets sorted out. (via Scott)
• Congrats TJ.
• David Kipen on the Big Read. (via Mark)
• George Bush’s approval rating has hit 28%, making him (along with Nixon during Watergate) the most unpopular president since World War II.
• Ice chess in London and Moscow. (via Alan DeNiro)
• If you “feel like a traitor,” chances are you are one.
• 30 Books in 30 Days? Nice ambition, Freeman. This calls for an even crazier literary stunt. Something this year. I have some ideas.
• Wait a sec, VanderMeer. I thought you were done with The New Weird!

• The Writers with Drinks event went very well. My hazy memory involves the mike stand, the words, wild gesticulations on my part, and an onyx expanse of faces and laughs. The far clearer memory: I will never think of erotica quite the same way thanks to the gloriously scatological Justin Chin. You can get the full scoop on what went down from Ms. Anders, the hostess with the mostest.
• When any other employee doesn’t do his job, he’s shitcanned on the spot. But if you work at Newsweek, if you don’t finish a book under review, you can write an explanation why. You don’t have to read the article. All you need to know is that the dog ate Malcolm Jones’ homework and that it’s clear that Jones forged a sick note from his parents, but somehow Jones isn’t serving detention for it. (via Orthofer)
• Salman Rushdie believes that “extremism will die a natural death.” Of course, given that it often takes artificial tactics such as war, terrorism, and assorted military interventions to stub out extremism, I find it difficult to believe that extremism will die of natural causes.
• The Columbus Dispatch chats with Alice Hoffman.
• Chris Abani refers to MLK as “Martin,” because he wants people to understand that King was a man. I was unaware that there were some scholars out there who understand King as a woman, but I would be curious to discern their findings. I feel uncomfortable referring to someone I haven’t met by their first name. Come on, Abani. It’s not as if you had dinner with the guy.
• Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai has been called “a damned Paki.” Perhaps the solution to the UK racism problem, which I understand also creeped up during a recent installment of Big Brother, is to simply call the entire population “damned Pakis.” Why not initiate a Ministry of Human Understanding? An institution that will hire government-hired men to go door to door and call each and every citizen a “damned Paki,” whether they like it or not. Then people will begin to see the absurdity of identifying someone by ethnicity or skin color (and damning it), and perhaps there will be less of this uncivilized nonsense.
• Apparently, 2007 has been declared “the year of Vonnegut.”
• Thanks to DNA sampling, scholars have detected a lost work from Coleridge.

• Last I heard, books didn’t have a ratings system. Last I heard, despite the movie ratings system, kids got their hands on R-rated movies anyway. Last I heard, Wendy Day hadn’t laughed once since the late ’80’s. (via The Millions)
• Vonnegut (and others) on Buchwald. (via Rake)
• Ian Rankin is interviewed by the Inverness Courier. Apparently, Inspector Rebus has a run-in with George W. Bush in the penultimate Rebus novel, The Naming of the Dead.
• At MetaxuCafe, Damon Garr wants to know how much you read. If I had to peg down a number, I spend perhaps at least three to four hours a day reading something, much of that during my commute time. I generally try to get in a lengthy reading session on the weekend. There’s often nothing more satisfying than five or six uninterrupted hours immersed in a book. I read constantly on planes, which is why I enjoy traveling. (I was able to finish two and a half books on my last flight.) I still manage to have some semblance of a life, despite all this. And of course, like any addict, I constantly crave more, which, now that I think about it, probably makes me more obsessive about books than I realized.
• Also at MetaxuCafe, Bud Parr takes a look at James Meek’s The People’s Act of Love. I haven’t read this yet, but I’ve received somewhere around seven copies of this book in the mail. Really, seven copies? Do you take me for a caffeinated hydra?
• Another reason to like Hardy: he wrote love poems to his wife at 72. It’s too bad he didn’t have any Viagra. He really could have shown Emma a good time, particularly if he thrusted in time with the meter. (via Kenyon Review)
• Mark Sarvas talks with NBCC president John Freeman.
• Robert Redford has demanded an apology for Iraq. Yeah, Redford, that’ll show ’em. I hereby demand an apology from Redford for all the meetings he’s shown up hours late for and all the people he’s expected to deify him over the years.
• When used bookstores go horribly wrong.
• Sarah has a list of the Edgar Award nominees.
• The 20 Richest Women in Entertainment.
• Stephen Colbert meets Bill O’Reilly.
• Matt Bell on Ander Monson’s latest.
• Victoria Beckham a must read? I don’t think so, Penguin.
• Andy Warhol’s films revisited. (via CultureSpace)
• Joan Acocella on House of Meetings.

• Columnist Art Buchwald is dead at 81.
• In Jules Verne’s 1882 novel Le Rayon Vert, Verne described the green flash of sunset as “a green which no artist could ever obtain on his palette, a green of which neither the varied tints of vegetation nor the shades of the most limpid sea could ever produce the like! If there is a green in Paradise, it cannot be but of this shade, which most surely is the true green of Hope.” Well, it appears that a photographer has captured the green flash on camera. It remains something of a mystery as to how Verne initially detected the flash, but some Verne scholars suspect that Verne began to see it during his famous (and often underreported) encounter with a gangrenous streaker.
• Radio Free PGW posts this message from the PGW ad hoc committee.
• An interesting interview with Joanna Newsom. (via This Space)
• Preposterous swag received by The Onion. My favorite: the “Just Do Me” breath mint.
• James Reasoner has authored 200 books. (via Lee Goldberg)
• Why did Neal Pollack write Alternadad? “I needed a new book contract in order to feed my family.” If only more writers could be this honest.
• Redheads won’t be having all the fun in a hundred years. In fact, there won’t be any left on this planet by 2100. I’m troubled by this. I had thought that, as a redhead (or perhaps “reddish” head, given that what remains of my hair is now more of an auburn timbre; when I was a lad, I sailed the berm with a red moptop and some unleashed sperm), I would one day produce legions of redheaded children who would then, in turn, spread their seed across the earth. I had counted upon my recessive genes to be resilient, working against insurmountable odds. But this won’t be the case at all. So have at it, lovers and casual fornicators! Get those redheads in the sack before they’re gone! (via Bookninja)
• Mr. Esposito observes that Vollmann is in the March Harper’s.
• Leah Adezio has passed on and Heidi MacDonald has links.
• Something to look for on YouTube.
• Bill Peschel revisits the Martin Amis teeth debacle.
• John Fox believes that Vollmann’s Swofford review was excessively harsh for a first novel.
• Tad Williams and Aquaman!
• Apparently, Silverblatt’s people can’t spell Bascombe.
• The American bathroom as status symbol. (via Magnificent “Ambersons” Octopus)

• On the AMS fallout front, five publishers have been selected for the AMS creditors committee: Random House, Penguin, Hachette, Grove/Atlantic and Wisdom Publications. The Delaware Bankruptcy Court declined to form a second committee consisting of the remaining PGW clients. Whether the creditors committee will take into account the precarious burdens of indie publishers remains to be seen, but with the second committee denied, this doesn’t look good. Galleycat has more.
• Over at the LBC, this quarter’s Read This! choice has been announced. Once again, The Bat Segundo Show will be teaming up with Pinky’s Paperhaus to bring you interviews with all the nominators and nominees. (And I’ll be back in business very soon on the Segundo front, as soon as I get things squared away on other fronts. There are some hot interviews coming up that you won’t want to miss.)
• Norman Mailer says that there’s very little interest in novels anymore. Perhaps he means to suggest that there’s very little interest in his novels anymore.
• Is knit lit a new genre? I hope not. It’s difficult to take any word that’s close to “nitwit” seriously.
• Normally, I’m all for awards that recognize both the novelist and the screenwriters behind a literary adaptation. But I must strenuously object to awarding P.D. James the Scripter. Children of Men went from potboiler to engaging cinema entirely because of Cuaron and his writers. And to award James any kind of merit for the way that these screenwriters turned a sow’s ear into a bleak purse is to reward mediocrity. What next? Giving a hack like John Grisham an award for the work done by Clyde Hayes and Francis Ford Coppola? If ever there was an honor awarded for a no talent assclown sitting on her ass, the Scripter may very well be it.
• UPI reports on the Decibel Penguin Prize controversy. The prize, established to award diversity, faced serious legal action because it discriminated against Caucasians. It probably wasn’t a wise idea to introduce an award in a country where affirmative action was about as common as food without mayonnaise. Perhaps this was a case of misunderstanding with our friends across the pond. But don’t worry, folks! The oppressed white male will get yet another shot at dominating yet another literary award. Remember, folks, there’s always room for Whitey!
• Paul Krassner is right. Where’s the mainstream media attention to Robert Anton Wilson’s death?
• Dana Spiotta appears as part of Largeheartedboy’s Book Notes series.
• Laila Lalami reports on the banning of Nichane.
• And I’m the walking dead today, folks: good for perhaps little more than a poorly translated (and poorly remembered) Swedish joke about a milkmaid in a brothel that I heard from a bleary-eyed pal in a beer hall. No putsches here, but certainly many putzes now parked on my medulla oblongata. But I’ll try and check in later.