At last night’s book launch party for Kate Christensen’s The Great Man, I observed a bald man — much shorter than I had expected — resembling a certain journalist working for Time Magazine. It was none other than Lev Grossman, my proud nemesis. Lev had been wiser than me in maintaining his bald form. I had allowed my hair to grow back, complete with its ridiculously receding hairline, after a brief experimental phase in which I had forgotten to acquire a drug habit or transform into some consciously ironic Williamsburg hipster, but that mostly involved seeing if I could effect some bald badass corporeal form with ridiculously cherubic cheeks. The experiment, alas, had mixed results, particularly since I had laryngitis during most of my hairless stint and because Daniel Mendelsohn had confused my lack of voice with a diffident stance. And I remain convinced that I could beat Mr. Mendelsohn in an aggressive game of ping-pong or Connect Four. But no matter. This is unnecessary bravado, but it must be set down for the record. I know I can win. I do plan to revisit this hairless approach later, perhaps when I am feeling more masculine or I have just eaten twenty pounds of raw ground chunk and jogged six times around Prospect Park and I have shouted Hemingway passages at the top of my lungs.

Anyway, Lev was there. And I introduced myself as his nemesis. It took three attempts before he figured out who I was.

“Ed?” he said, unaware that I had moved to New York.

It turns out that he lives not far from me, that he genuinely likes William Gibson (I quizzed him on Count Zero), and that he is a more or less friendly person. Kate Christensen, who was somehow cognizant of last year’s skirmish, remarked, “But you’re both such nice guys!” I assured Ms. Christensen that she was wrong. Lev and I enjoyed a Moriarty-Holmes relationship. We were both gentlemen and we didn’t wish to unleash our fury upon an unsuspecting crowd.

Is this the end of the Lev-Ed loggerjam? Well, who is to say? Mr. Grossman appears on the surface to be quietly charming and perhaps just a tad misunderstood. But I still believe him to be made of sturdier stuff and indeed pressed him on this pedantic character quality over twenty minutes of conversation. He took it well.

I slipped away so that Lev would think himself safe. But, of course, I concoct silly and meticulously contrived plans that will be unleashed at a time of my choosing.

In a sleazy and remarkably embarrassing post, Publishers Weekly‘s Karen Holt reveals that she not only composes author profiles with preconceived boilerplate language, but that she has no problems with influence peddling:

There was the time at BEA when I wanted to ask Margaret Atwood a few questions so she took my arm and steered me toward some chairs in the corner (“Margaret Atwood is touching me!”). There was my trip to Maine last summer to interview Richard Ford when he and his wife put me up for the night in their guest cottage (“I’m staying in Richard Ford’s guest house!”). There was the night I capped off an interview with Gay Talese by joining him for dinner at Elaine’s (A double shot of literary New York icons). (Emphasis added.)

To respond to such a stunning statement without raising my blood pressure too much, let me consider Holt’s perspective first. I understand Holt’s need to gush. Enthusiasm is often a commodity among jaded hack journalists. There have been many times when I’ve interviewed an author and I’ve silently pinched myself in disbelief that I’m having a conversation with someone whose work I admire. And I’ve also become acquaintances and friends with a few of the authors I’ve talked with.

Nevertheless, when a journalist conducts an author interview or writes a profile, a journalist has the duty to maintain some sense of independent authority, which will permit her to ask hard-hitting, challenging and thought-provoking questions. One must ask questions that nobody else asks. One must practice journalism. One must not be afraid to ask contrarian questions. To cling to predictable, pre-packaged terms like “bard of the working class,” as Holt does, is not journalism. Such a practice is not altogether different from recycling items from the press release. A journalist must enter a situation without any sense that one has been purchased and report back what was uncovered during that experience. And that means having your outlet pay for your car rental and your motel room during an overnight visit (or doing this on your own dime, if necessary; it’s tax deductible).

Each journalist, of course, has a different form of practice. For example, I never conduct any author interviews at a publisher’s office. I feel that any journalist who does this is ethically suspect, because this involves some kind of quid pro quo that goes well beyond the reasonable request of a review copy. There is also the sense with this set-up that the ground is not third party enough for journalist or publisher alike. (And besides, who needs soulless conference rooms when you talk in New York’s many cafes, bars, and restaurants?)

But there is an ethical ceiling that all good journalists are aware of. And I think it goes without saying that staying at the guest cottage of your subject’s house is highly suspect and deeply unethical.

Karen Holt has, with one simple sentence, revealed that Publishers Weekly has little concern for journalistic ethics. Her stay at Ford’s home is not unlike some of the egregious influence peddling that studios use to buy the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s votes for the Golden Globes. (In fact, the situation was so bad that the HFPA had to institute a tchotchke cap.)

This is certainly not something you’d do if you were expected to write an honest and ethically foolproof profile of your subject. Maybe it’s something you’d do if you wanted to write an uncritical puff piece describing Richard Russo’s jeans and warm smile. But it’s not something you do if you are a journalist.

Then again, consider Holt’s bio:

Karen Holt was a newspaper reporter for years before discovering the lunches were better in book publishing. In between lunches and cocktail parties, she works as a Deputy Editor for Publishers Weekly and Editorial Director of Publishersweekly.com

If Karen Holt is really more concerned with the “lunches and cocktail parties” function of her job, then perhaps she’d be the first to tell us that she’s neither a reporter nor a journalist, but rather an easily malleable mouthpiece concerned with lapping up any and all gifts or overnight stays that come with the job. That might give her a great fangirl rush, but it’s a great disgrace to the rest of us out here who do our damnedest to stay as honest as possible

(via Sarah)

In 1960, seven years into Eisenhower and seven years after the Korean War, the United States populace was still contending over whether they “liked Ike.” There was a question in the air of whether Americans liked Eisenhower at all. They put their faith in a bald ex-general leading them down the rabbit hole of mutually assured destruction. But it was a man named Theodore Geisel, an uncredentialed ad hoc doctor of juvenile letters who had drawn up a series of illustrations during the previous war and who remained paralyzed by the considerable deaths at The Battle of Pork Chop Hill. Ham was the natural choice for a project.

The political atmosphere had gone green. Adlai Stevenson, the egghead offered by the Democrats, had failed twice. He had merely been a governor. What remained for the left was the distant memory of such compassionate folly as the Ham and Eggs program in Southern California — a cry for economic redistribution that was a much a cri de coeur for a mostly tenebrous form of social action.

Enter Dr. Seuss with Sam and his unnamed friend. Green eggs and ham was on the table, and Sam would not sup.

I was in the children’s section of a Barnes & Noble in Stanford, Calif., shaking down the dregs from my flask and firing up a cigarette for fortitude when I was kicked out by the employees. They told me that I could not smoke or drink and that I was an evil man for practicing my habits in an apparently sacrosanct section of the store. They didn’t know I was a writer of some note, that I was the Hitch and I could write them all under the table. Literally and figuratively. I then proceeded to berate the idiot behind the counter because it amused me. He could not identify Khruschev, even when I tapped the sad sod repeatedly on the head with my heavy shoe to help him get the hint. He called the police. An arrest and a court appearance later, and I was on the phone with Sam Tanenhaus, seeing if I could write a piece that would pay my bail. He told me that I should write about Green Eggs and Ham. I could write it completely drunk if I liked. I wouldn’t be edited.

So here we are. I’ve downed the rest of my flask and the words on my screen are starting to blur. An assignment that even I can’t even begin to understand. I’m wondering if George Orwell had to operate under such circumstances so that he could publish such seminal essays as “My Country Right or Left.”

I would give a lot to understand the Dr. Seuss phenomenon. Part of it must have to do with the fact that the Cat in the Hat was clearly a yin-yang of Caucasian and African-American. A mulatto if you like, representing the approaching racial tension. This on its own would not explain the cat’s hideous barbershop hat and his continued hold on American culture. Even my youngest daughter, whose eyes seem to light up whenever I place the bright green Tanqueray bottle in my study (best imbibed on bright cold days in April), didn’t know any better. I had spent months of my life trying to get her to read Orwell and offering tips on how to avoid the ongoing religious indoctrination that remains all the rage. But she would not listen to dear old dad.

Seuss then — as malevolent a figure as Mother Theresa — deserves to be forgotten. He is concerned too much with phrases like “I would not like them” or “I do not like them” — perhaps because he is a narcissist in the grand American tradition. “Sam-I-am” is a rather overwrought form of address to the reader. One wonders whether Sam, representative of a complacent postwar nation, would have eaten the entree had it been the only option through war rations. Much like many a spoiled American now, he demands it now, leaving one to ponder Alexis de Tocqueville’s sharp foresight. Green eggs and ham — the only apparent option on the menu — is denied again and again by Sam, who becomes something of a tedious little tot you want to slap. This is the great icon of children’s literature?

Finally, Sam learns to love his dish and learns to love his mediocrity, setting a great precedent for the banal decades to come. Is this the end of Sam? One hopes so, but perhaps there will be other authors hoping to find additional silt in the muddy Mississippi that inspired Twain but appalled Dickens. The distinctly slushy close of the story may seem to hold out the faint promise of a sequel, but I honestly think and sincerely hope that this will not occur. Green Eggs and Ham reveals its narrative hand pages before the great revelation. It’s achievement enough that Sam-I-am proceeds to thank his unnamed conversationalist, and thus the reader. As for me, I’m happy enough to collect my bail money and I’m pleased that Sam (the editor, not the eggs and ham meditative figure) is now truly off his fucking rocker for giving me the strangest review assignment of my long career.

My desktop is out of commission right now. I hope to check in later.

UPDATE: I am now CHKDSKing, which should take some time. If you emailed me on the main edrants account in the past two days and it’s urgent, try me on the Yahoo account.

UPDATE 2: Thank you, Microsoft! It’s time for a goddam clean install. By the way, if your registry hive ever gets corrupted, this is a great resource.

Updating will be mostly nonexistent while I spend my time reinstalling Windows and all my damn programs.

UPDATE 3: I’m now writing this from the desktop, now denuded of its former glory. Thankfully, I didn’t have to slipstream to get Windows to recognize the new 500 GB SATA drive. (For those who encounter the 137 GB limitation problem on either XP or 2000, this will solve your problem.) I now have a fresh install and, after I finish formatting the logical partition, I hope to transfer the data from the old drive over. I have three podcasts almost ready to go, but alas, the hard work of reinstalling all the programs will begin once this current nonsense is done. I’m hoping to get everything tweaked over the weekend. Bear with me.

Minesweeper: The Movie.

A behind-the-scenes doc of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls. (via Jeff VanderMeer)

As Megan notes, New York isn’t the only East Coast venue for Rupert Thomson . He’ll also be appearing at the Harvard Book Store in Boston the night before — on Thursday, August 16, 2007 at 7:00 PM. At my old stomping grounds in the Bay Area, Thomson will also be appearing at Black Oak Books on August 13, 2007. There are also two appearances planned in the Seattle area.

Deborah Solomon to Mary Gordon: “Do you care that you’ve never won a Pulitzer Prize or, for that matter, the Nobel Prize in Literature?”

There’s lots of good stuff in this week’s Los Angeles Times Book Review, including Good Man Park on Spook Country, which he compares to William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, a full-fledged geek-centric mystery column from Sarah, and Emily Barton on Mata Hari.

Oh, and there’s some other Ed you might know reviewing Matt Ruff’s Bad Monkeys.

To make up for the lack of content in the past twenty-four hours, what with birthday celebrations and concomitant activities, I have compiled a number of strange things that I wrote circa 2002 — on Shauny’s grand blog.

* * *

From what I understand from a solid source, the Melbourne Mad Hatters Recruiting Agency (the logo of which features a giant glove grabbing a billfold out of a backwards top hat) may just cater to your needs. For one thing, every recruiting agent that the Mad Hatters employ demands that the applicant not only pet a white rabbit (an animal who, because of a past experience, is fond of biting the hands of applicants who are wearing a watch that is wound five minutes slow or more) but also participate in an interview process that involves the sipping of tea and behavior that is considerably out-of-line in a staid corporate environment.

The Mad Hatters specialize in particularly vibrant or crazed souls. If a humorless applicant signs up with them, the applicant is generally subjected to cruel ridicule, asked to impersonate a Kimono dragon, or assigned tasks of an increasingly outre nature. Those that walk the fine line between normal and crazed have less of a risk (but still a considerable one) than the peripatetic accountant. But, ideally, the boisterous vociferator or the closet anarchist is welcome with the Mad Hatters. For corporations requiring the last nut in the Planters jar to run loose in a jungle of cubicles go to the Mad Hatters first. If a corporate position of unusual duties and obligations cannot be found, then there’s always the street performer route. The Mad Hatters also perform complimentary surgical procedures on anyone who aspires to spend the rest of their days touring with a circus freakshow.

In fact, if it hadn’t been for the Mad Hatters (who have been in business since around 1886 over roughly four continents, but are based in Melbourne), the midgets, Siamese Twins, bearded ladies and other souls tittered at by those who pay to enter a tent and be astounded would be considerably less populous than those which continue to work today.

In fact, in an early draft of the Alfred Hitchcock film “Saboteur,” Dorothy Parker attempted to include a reference to the Melbourne Mad Hatters. Unfortunately, since a war was on in Europe, Parker’s meticulous research into the connection between the Mad Hatters and the circus freaks had to be excised. We still get some sense of the connection in the film when the performers look at Robert Cummings with considerable suspicion. The line that was deleted (and, alas, no footage exists of what was cut) was “Are you from the Mad Hatters?” This dialogue would have cleared up what is already a confusing though fascinating scene. But the mystery of the Mad Hatters remains.

* * *

“Does anyone read the entries?”

The answer to this question, a notion constantly within a blogger’s mind, involves considering several facets. First off, it’s worth tallying that instant feedback to a personal piece of writing, discounting any feverish dissemination of a journal during the Victorian age and a quick rejoining epistle shot with dementia by a writer’s potentially psychotic peers, is only a recently technological development. Also, as Marybeth has noted, more often than not, a reader is either intimidated or altogether perplexed by whether or not s/he should reply.

In some cases, a reader replies when s/he often shouldn’t or, more often than not, to alleviate boredom. This is not necessarily an exclusive condition of a reader’s mind.

In still other cases, a comment is fired off in an effort to contribute to an impromptu discussion or to cheer up the blogger or the idea expressed.

In the case of this particular comment herein, the purpose is to inform one Shauny that yes, indeed, her blog is being read and yes, indeed, in one sense or another, the reader is weighing words in his/her mind. So please do not fret. Participation within a comment thread often involves the flimsiest and ridiculous of pretexts.

* * *

There’s a new kind of social contract with the blog. It’s considerably more dangerous than the already troublesome relationship between author and reader, in which reader demands new book pronto you son of a bitch, little realizing that author needs time to not only deliberate and hone up the tome but find a tenable way to publish the damned thing (i.e., can author logistically make next month’s rent? is this the same old hash?).

Now thanks to the Internet, the petty bleats of readers demanding instant gratification have sealed this Hobson’s choice. Update a lot and you’re damned. Update too little and you’re condemned. Diverge from the ha ha funny or the inline graphic and actually (aghast!) contemplate and you’re suddenly some Minnesota housewife’s number one fan, with the duct tape thoroughly constricted around your throat via fractious e-mails.

It’s a neverending circle, this little contract. And it’s probably one of many reasons my own hits are so sporadic. But if I was concerned about popularity, I’d lay off the political diatribes, attend every blogging social gathering with a hidden agenda and somehow find my way into an A-lister’s pants, presumably the online way of marrying into money.

Who gives a damn about the readers? Write when you goddam want to and about what you goddam want to. If your readers can’t understand that the hyperelectronic bypass is a hell of an advantage compared to the ritualistic wait for a letter or a magazine in the post, particularly when one considers the immediate contact with the author, then it is their loss.

* * *

No, the blogs of the future will involve lengthy clips of people standing in front of a camera, talking about “how cool Ron was on Saturday night” while simultaneously performing a striptease, with frequent clips of nudity involved and occasional obscene gestures.

* * *

Four day Easter weekend? You’ve got to be shitting me. We Americans get ignobly poked in the posterior with a heartles middle manager’s cudgel when it comes to time off. For my own part, I had to deduct tomorrow off from my own vacation time for a three-day mass exodus to Nevada with friends, where the imbibing of beverages, spins of the roulette wheel and the wafts of first and second-hand smoke would somehow equate to a defiance of Judeo-Christian celebrations over some bearded guy pulling a Houdini from the grave. A specious plan, at best, but that never prevented anyone from trying.

Of course, it still doesn’t address the problem. In nearly every other industrialized nation, a worker is prone to getting something like 20 days (if not a third of the year) off annually. Meanwhile, we jaded Americans must settle for 10 days because someone who laid down the rules decided that our entire lives were work-based. Is it any wonder why some of us Americans became so cynical?

The only guaranteed vacation that an American has is when he willingly gets himself fired or is somehow extricated after the words, “Please call security” are spoken into a speakerphone. In these cases, there is usually some kind of severance pay, which means two weeks of boozing it up and wild spending sprees. Of course, this method doesn’t exactly ensure any kind of return to employment. But if one is to become ensnared within this ritualistic act three times a year, it’s easily equal to about six weeks of work, a fair bargain compared to the lack of vacation time we normally encounter.

* * *

The inclusion of the song in Shrek didn’t help matters. “I’m a Believer,” much like another Diamond song thrown away to UB40 known in modern vernacular as “Red Red Wine,” now resides just outside the edge of the corpus callosum of nearly every person born since 1947. The song has not only aged well, but it has been utilized for commercials and has hit more Muzak circuits (perhaps unfairly) than Ohio Express’s “Yummy Yummy Yummy,” a song that came one year later and was used in a Monty Python sketch.

“I’m a Believer,” amongst many other songs is a testament to one tenable reality: Neil Diamond is a magnificent songwriter, but inevitably people forget his original versions. “I’m a Believer” is remembered as a song written by the Monkees. Urge Overkill gets hitched to “Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon.” And of course, there is the UB40 problem.

It doesn’t help matters for Diamond much when he sings. He has a silly angst-ridden voice which, while laudable in some kitschy capacity, is rendered positively ridiculous through such covers as his version of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Thus, the quandary. Diamond is somehow pinned down as a regular on the Vegas-Reno casinos when the songs he writes are considerably more than that. Someone save the man from his predicament before it’s too late.

* * *

One advantage of naming a vehicle “Manuel,” particularly if the car is a stickshift, is that, if you apply an embossed or machine printed appellation somewhere around the dashboard, then people may think that the car manufacturer deliberately misspelled the word “manual” when they were simply trying to inform a new driver that the car in question has a manual transmission.

Of course, the big question that any astute passenger will ask is: Why is the car advertising the stick? Shauna’s clutch regularly goes out. There are only four gears and only two or three of those work, giving the car a top speed close to 34mph. What possible reason did the car company have for putting this notice, which glaringly illuminates the effort of a driver, on the dashboard? And why on earth did they bother to mess up the spelling?

The brilliant thing is that the passenger will in most cases be too polite to mention these angry and maddening internal thoughts to you.

So you have picked not only an admirable name with vestigial ties to the great John Cleese (and Andrew Sachs, the underrated actor who played Manuel), but one that will puzzle your passengers ad infinitum.

* * *

The problem with my own high school dreams is that I had more of them as an adolescent. For whatever reason, there were a few English teachers that turned me on as an impressionable youth. The dreams, which came from a fifteen year-old kid contending with both a developing imagination and a randiness rivaled only by a horny-as-hell squadron of virile soldiers returning from a war, involved teachers reading to me, seducing me and then allowing me to recreate the form of the book, using their legs and arms as metaphorical “pages” to turn over, in the bedroom. I would be disciplined by these older women, who were somehow more sinuous within my dirty mind, if I hadn’t read particular authors. For whatever reason, the book was the ultimate sexual high and the soiled sheets of many a wet dream contributed to furtive runs to the washer and dryer in the early morning, attempting to cover up dissemination (no pun intended) that I found I could control more effectively through quotidian mastrubation.

As a result, years later, when I saw the human body used as a book in Peter Greenaway’s Pillow Book, the film made a good deal of sense to me, more so than my friends, who looked at my admiration and immediate understanding as their own personal answer to a less rapacious but ultimately sick-minded de Sade.

Today, I am still turned on by brainy and playful women. But while my adolescent dreams were limited to the classroom and the bedroom, this newfound educator and I are gloriously free to roam the earth. And the tie-in between books and sex has possibly become considerably more intense now that I read and write more frequently than I did back in those days.

And why does this comment read like a really bad epistle sent into Penthouse Letters?

* * *

I’ve had a recurring dream lately that has essentially involved being smothered by breasts. Sure, you could interpret this as the typical quotidian fantasies of a heterosexual man who particularly admires that remarkable pair of soft and sinuous organs. But here’s the thing: the dream motif has been accompanied by a random lady asking me very politely if they can smother me with their breasts. And this always seems to happen first. Sometimes, there are options, as in, “Sir, would you care for one boob in your face or two?” and sometimes, money is somehow involved (“Mr. Champion, the meter is running.”).

The thing I don’t understand about these recurring dreams is how some remarkable lady with breasts is prepared to smother me no matter what the environment or nature of the dream. Just last week, as I found myself dreaming about storming the beaches of Normandy (the Nazis, strangely enough, were replaced by vicious accountants firing off fountain pens at my direction instead of bullets), as I was about to capture one of these Nazis/moneymen, one of them suddenly turned into a lady. Suddenly, this remarkably sized, newly appearing lady told me, “You’re going to need a Schedule 44D,” and then wouldn’t you know it — my head was once again joyously smothered between breasts with complete complaisance.

Of course, this had nothing to do with Normandy or Nazis (unless you count those Ilsa movies). But these recurring dreams have been happening for about two or three weeks. And I’m feverishly contemplating why the breasts feel the need to make these regular appearances, along with some prefatory sentence. Not that I mind, of course. I’m just wondering if I’m having a premature seven year itch or this is my mind’s way of saying, “Heya! Ed! Bedroom tango time!” If my brain is concentrated upon these two salient organs of desire, then I’m wondering whether I need to have more fun during my Friday and Saturday nights or I simply need to find the largest mammary gland (Woody Allen size?) possible. That essentially means smothering my face into one of the bovine’s six breasts. And that’s a hard way to find a solution to this for an urban dweller like me.

* * *

Okay, this is where you call in the Sanity Police, the gendarmes of childhood madness, the enforcers of juvenile escape. Basically, I had this tendency to create fictitious maps at an early age. What I used to do was lay out a whole town on an 8 1/2 x 11 paper. Bird’s eye Thomas Bros. view with clover leaves, winding roads and of course the rectilinear streets of downtown. Then I’d get a ream of paper and draw my car’s journey from the perspective of the windshield of this town. I’d label each sheet sequentially and then follow the car’s journey on the map. These pictures were pretty straightforward and crude. I was never much of a drawer, but all of this stuff was in my head and the minimalist stuff that I could reproduce was filled in by what I saw within my noggin.

But where it got pretty disturbing was in the signs I devised. Like any imaginative person, I too was fascinated by the SLIPPERY WHEN WET sign. But here in California, the sign had two absolutely identical curlicues that trailed from the car. This led me to believe that somehow the car, should it slip, would skid in precisely the pattern dictated the sign. After all, since some government official had put the sign up, my five year old head is thinking that they know the precise trajectory of the car’s skid, should the road ever become wet and, thus, slippery.

In mulling this dilemma over, I eventually came to the conclusion that the government simply wasn’t doing its job properly. Because it didn’t account for every potential disaster. But in the towns that I created on paper, I considered nearly every warning, while taking into account that the visual information on the signs that needed to be conveyed had to follow the certain house style set by the SLIPPERY WHEN WET sign.

So what you had for a pothole in the road was a sign very much like the “SLIPPERY WHEN WET” sign, complete with the car jumping into the air, labeled “BUMPY WHEN HOLED.” I even created signs that predicted the car mowing down a random pedestrian trying to cross the street. If I recall, it was something like “BLOODY WHEN CROSSED.”

I was a terrible little boy.

* * *

Let me tell you a thing or two about e-mail, concentrating at length upon its rsults upon the human psyche, and singling out strange illnesses that involves spontaneously combusting heads (a veritable Cronenberg compost of nothing above the neck and brainmatter, natch!), three villainous itises (itii?) that insufferably reside beneath the deepest recesses of the three nails (isn’t 15% always the hardest?) that you think about the least, and how the specific beeps of certain e-mail clients have a way of triggering epileptic seizures if someone is confused enough to mistake the pleasant Eudora beep for the harsh simpering words of Mary Hart (or, considerably worse, Ann Coulter, a bona-fide maven who will make any sensible person’s brain hurt).

First off, with e-mail, there is lots of it. Thousands of e-mails are fired off into mail servers every minute. Several hundred of these will bounce, frenetically bumping into the gridlock of mistyped addresses or faux spam addresses that spam victims, angered and exhausted by the “PAY $2.99 A MINUTE FOR A HOT FAT FUCK WITH A MARSUPIAL! CLICK HERE!” epistles, perplexed that they of all people would be singled out in such a manner and rejoining appropriately. But most of these e-mails will meet their intended addresses.

This is where the finer struggle of getting your recepient to read the damned thing comes into play or, for that matter, to respond to it. If, like me, you have a tendency to write longass e-mails and leave longass comments on blogs based in Canberra, then it’s quite likely you will receive no response from your intended suitor. Indeed, this often forces those three daemons to come from beneath the fingernails, waltz with the bamboo shoots that affix themselves into the mail daemon, flipflop mental Post-It notes written in Unix and other strange commands that involve a prompt and then finally effectuate the brain into making a firm disease-ridden resolve.

In Shauny’s case, the unfortunate aftermath is mailache. But it could be considerably worse. You could be quitting smoking right now. You could be lying in a ditch, doomed to a lifetime of transcribing Pantera lyrics from the one tape you have managed to salvage from your former abode and that you now have playing on your Walkman.

But since Shauny is above rebuke in expressing her feelings here, since her postings give us all such joy, I would gauge her current status on the same level as the current Kashmir crisis.

There are only one of two solutions. Send in Jimmy Carter to negotiate between the two sides or send loving e-mails to our dearest Shauny. The choice is yours.

Today is Ed Park’s birthday. A very happy birthday to him. Good Man Park may seem to be an altogether different person from me, but, at long last, the truth must come out. Mr. Park killed off Ingmar Bergman by talking about him the night before his death. I killed off Tom Snyder by writing a post about him the night before his death. And what’s more, the two of us share the same birthday. I leave readers to opine just what this all means and why this all happened before we celebrated our birthdays. Is there really an Other Ed? Or are we the same person? And since Jennifer Jordan likewise shares the same birthday, is she one of our agents? Or possibly the designated Overseer of Eds? Is this a Brian Azzarello-style conspiracy?

Your speculations are, of course, entirely welcome. But be very careful. For the Eds may likewise rub you out with casual discourse!

Newsweek: “Wal-Mart is Mexico’s largest private-sector employer in the nation today, with nearly 150,000 local residents on its payroll. An additional 19,000 youngsters between the ages of 14 and 16 work after school in hundreds of Wal-Mart stores, mostly as grocery baggers, throughout Mexico—and none of them receives a red cent in wages or fringe benefits. The company doesn’t try to conceal this practice: its 62 Superama supermarkets display blue signs with white letters that tell shoppers: OUR VOLUNTEER PACKERS COLLECT NO SALARY, ONLY THE GRATUITY THAT YOU GIVE THEM. SUPERAMA THANKS YOU FOR YOUR UNDERSTANDING. The use of unsalaried youths is legal in Mexico because the kids are said to be “volunteering” their services to Wal-Mart and are therefore not subject to the requirements and regulations that would otherwise apply under the country’s labor laws.”

Well, if Wal-Mart is going to “employ” “volunteer packers,” I think it’s high time that those who frequent Mexican Wal-Mart outlets become “volunteer consumers.” After all, if a corporation as rapacious as Wal-Mart prefers not to pay their packers, perhaps consumers can prefer not to pay Wal-Mart for the goods they acquire from their stores. Who says that Wal-Mart holds all the cards in establishing a new economy?

So here’s the deal, Mexico Wal-Mart shoppers: the next time you enter a Wal-Mart, wear a sign that reads I AM A VOLUNTEER CONSUMER WHO WILL OFFER NO MONEY FOR THESE GOODS, BECAUSE YOU’D RATHER EXPLOIT KIDS THAN PRACTICE BASIC ETHICAL PRINCIPLES. THANK YOU FOR YOUR UNDERSTANDING.

In the past few years, I’ve observed Melville House grow from a mom-and-pop imprint to an independent press keeping the work of Stephen Dixon, Tao Lin, the last interview of Jacques Derrida, and numerous other volumes in bookstores. Now Melville House is now having a summer sale. The MH website doesn’t specify whether or not this sale is being conducted because of the distribution nightmares now facing nearly every indie press working hard to offer alternative material. But if this is indeed the case, then you may want to throw a few bucks Melville House’s way for their backlist. And if you purchase two books, you get a copy of Lewis Lapham’s With the Beatles. Support your indie presses!

A very happy eighth birthday to Speedy Snail. Rory Ewins has been maintaining a grand arsenal of academic writing, cartoons, computer advice columns (Dr. Komputor) — in short, a variegated life preserved in web form reflecting the great possibilities of the personal web. I met Rory once — a good seven years ago at Fray Day 4. I was then posting a good deal of sophomoric personal material to the Web. But to my great shock, Rory recognized me and introduced himself. Not being among the cool kids, Rory and I both performed our material late in the night in front of a crowd. I recall capacious plumes of marijuana smoke drifting over the heads of disinterested twentysomethings sitting on the front couches at Cellspace. It was an audience that grew distressingly less interested with the fine folks who dared to share their stories. Thankfully, a German friend and I were there, sober, laughing hysterically at Rory’s grand delivery of a Madagascar tale. (You can find the audio here. Oddly enough, my own performance, which chronicled the history of a love seat, appears to have been dropped and unreferenced by those who have deemed me not part of history.)

Incidentally, Speedy Snail’s birthday reminds me that edrants celebrated seven years on the Web back in May.

And here’s Part Two and Part Three. They don’t make television like this anymore. Name a single interviewer today who would openly call a mass murderer as dangerous as Manson a “coward” or invite him to beat the shit out of him on national television. If anything, this incredible interview again demonstrates what we have lost in television journalism and why it is necessary for journalists of all stripes to up their game, remaining as fearless as possible in their pursuit of the truth.

Well, I thought I’d get the third and final Alternative Press Expo podcast up today, but other things — namely, lower back pain caused by accidentally throwing my back out of alignment last night — prevent me from industrious blogging. But I hope to return tomorrow.

Rupert Thomson is coming to New York and Maud will be interviewing him at McNally Robinson on Friday, August 17, at 7:00 PM. I’ve expressed my considerable enthusiasm for The Book of Revelation before. And Maud is a fantastic interviewer. So be sure to make it on August 17 to McNally Robinson, located, as all book enthusiasts know, on 52 Prince Street.

A saner man would simply throw his issue of Parade into the dustbin, pretending that the dreaded Sunday supplement simply wasn’t a part of the newspaper and taking a complacent munch from his lightly jellied English muffin. But not Tod Goldberg. His ongoing commitment to not only reading, but reporting upon the horrors of Parade has caused him to become desperately obsessed in an Ahabesque sense. And the results have, from my comfortable Brooklyn nook, been hilarious to watch. Goldberg’s become so desperate that he’s now penned an open letter to editor Lee Kravitz. Can a Parade Brownie Watch or a Kravitz-issued restraining order be next?

Walkscore. My neighborhood scores a 78. My old neighborhood in San Francisco scores a 98.

Craig Davidson offers this lengthy account of Tuesday night’s boxing match, observing, “Jonathan’s dating the singer Fiona Apple. So that’s pretty cool. I’m thinking, hell, even if he loses, he goes home with Fiona Apple. That’s got to go a long ways towards healing any hurts. Me, I got to go home to the hotel minibar.”

You know, if it’s any consolation to Craig, I was at the Rebar after-party and I happen to know that a few single women were there swooning for Mr. Davidson, with at least one of them asking me if “Craig was available.” I must aver that “available” meant a lot more than “Can I talk with him for five minutes?”

Remember: the fight is tonight at Gleason’s Gym, 77 Front Street, at 8:00 PM.

The fighters: Craig Davidson (boxing record 0-1) and Jonathan Ames (boxing record 1-4)!

The opening act: Miss Saturn and her hula hoops!

The card girls: Patrick “The Mangina” Bucklew and Valmonte Sprout!

There is also a rumor that a woman will paint her body and play accordion.

I am now prepared for my duties as ring announcer. And there is considerable excitement from all parties.

The after party is at Rebar on 147 Front Street, where I understand there are affordable beverages.

Don’t miss it!

What are economists good for anyway?

I look at Tyler Cowen and I ask for one main piece of information: Does this man have a sense of humor? Yes or no. This is a binary decision.

Once I have the answer to this question, if I happen to be entering my apartment building from its southern angle, I abdicate my own sense of humor to the doorman. The truly successful man — and I learned this from reading Dale Carnegie, Tony Robbins, and Tyler Cowen — is one who simply says yes or no. Just as when you are presented with a pair of breasts in front of your face. You either nibble the nipple or you walk away and make money. One choice or the other.

There can be no room for vacillating over a decision. No room for irony. No room for emotion. Long tail. Long tail. Tipping point.

We live in a world in which gray areas are no longer possible. It is the critic’s job to write like Harriet Klausner. Forget those who dare to plunge further. Google has made them irrelevant. I bore easily. Like Tyler Cowen. I am more concerned with my dividends.

Imagine that. An asshole who believes in nothing but antipodean qualifiers. Is it any wonder why so many people think Tyler Cowen is a very silly man?

To me, the most valuable economists are those who write silly sentences contained within short paragraphs. Because there is the illusion of pithiness.

Sometimes I think it is enough to replace my brain with Ubuntu and have some hacker control my every critical thought. The unexamined life is well worth programming.

Lazlo Kovacs dead.

I’ve met Howard Junker — the man was silly enough to drink a barely drinkable pint of Pabst Blue Ribbon with me — and I also email him from time to time. He’s a quietly intelligent and friendly gentleman. I also know that he’s outspoken about what he likes and what he doesn’t like. He does this not to be spiteful, but because he cares tremendously about literature. Like any good literary enthusiast, he demands the best out of people. And if that means telling people point-blank that their work isn’t up to snuff, then that’s simply the way that Howard operates.

But for Stephen Elliott, a writer who purports to chronicle misfits and the misunderstood, a remark Junker made at a competitive reading contest was enough to send him over the edge.

Elliott misheard a remark that Junker made concerning Elliott’s “literary merit.” Elliott didn’t come up to Junker or ask for an apology or express his anger or initiate any attempt to clear things up. (As Howard wryly notes, Elliott didn’t even ask to settle things in the alley.) Instead, he threw beer onto Howard Junker, as well as the new owners of the Booksmith — who are also both very kind people. There was no explanation. No effort on Elliott’s part to talk things out.

Junker immediately left the room without causing any additional fuss. What was Elliott’s response? “I don’t understand why Junker left that night. I had a shirt in my bag he could have borrowed.”

I realize that Elliott has had a tough life. But this does not justify acting like a boor in the present. Particularly when the target is as understanding a man as Howard Junker. Things did not have to escalate to this level.

As Junker noted, “‘Literary merit’ is not a term I use on my own, and it is certainly not among the criteria I use to judge a man as a man. A man, I feel, should be able to hold his beer. Should be able to take his lumps. Should exhibit courage in the face of adversity. And so on.”

The very least that Elliott owes Junker is an apology. Real men own up to their mistakes.

What Elliott did is far from taking his lumps, far from exhibiting courage, and far from being a gentleman.

Horrible news.

[UPDATE: Pardon my laconic post. The news of these two deaths (Duncan and her boyfriend, Jeremy Blake) hit me as I was about to embark on a restful weekend. My immediate reaction was to beat myself up relentlessly on Friday night for not doing more or for not communicating enough to her that her zaniness was peachy keen. Theresa and I had exchanged quite a few emails after the two of us duked it out last December in an Elegant Variation thread, where I encouraged her to maintain her hearty enthusiasm for reporting breakfast. She responded that she was planning to extend her ebullience to lunch and dinner. Whatever her problems, what I do know is this: I observed in Theresa another giddy and idiosyncratic soul — someone who was good for the artistic community by way of her cockeyed perspective. And I’m very sorry that I never got the chance to meet her. If this horrible conclusion says anything, it is this: We must embrace those who are different.]

[For additional reading, see Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched with Fire. And on the film front, watch Janet Frame and Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table.]

I wrote a lengthy feature on confessional writing that appears in this Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. Many thanks to the writers who talked with me for the piece and who put up with my laryngitis. I did try to include everyone, but alas, I ended up talking to far more people than I probably should have. So I’m sorry if you didn’t make it in.

[UPDATE: Ms. Bussel and I talked for close to 90 minutes for this piece and she’s offered some additional perspective on her blog: “Me, I’m much more PG than I am NSFW, and yet by dint of what I do for a living, most of what you’ll stumble across on line is about matters sexual. But talk to me at a party and I’ll quiz you about your babies or your workout routine or your creative endeavors. I’ll ask you about your bad dates and favorite cupcakes. Sure, Martha and I probably horrified some of the Etsy folks with our sex talk, but I don’t think that’s a me thing, it’s a comfort with the topic, amongst friends.”]

BBC: “A Canadian team has created a computer program that can win or draw any game, no matter who the opponent is. It took an average of 50 computers nearly two decades to sift through the 500 billion billion possible draughts positions to come up with the solution.

Ladies and gentlemen, Phil Spector’s hair.