Daily Mail: “For when a budding author sent typed chapters of Jane Austen’s novels to 18 of them, changing just the titles and characters’ names, only one recognised her words. Another managed to recognise they were ‘a really original read’. But the rest simply rejected them or never responded, according to the man who posted the manuscripts, David Lassman.”

This may be the first reading campaign that has expressed the urgency of reading, while simultaneously berating its audience. And that’s not all. The spot also demands, “Your body needs water. So drink that shit,” among other angry catechisms evocative of better living.

I’d like to see more people reading and if this gets at least one kid to read a book, then it can’t be bad. It also takes a truly deranged mind to put BO on one buttock and OK on the other, suggesting in a rather hysterical sense that reading is sexy or as empowering as a booty call. I hope that the crazy motherfucker who came up with that idea is hired for something else.

But there’s an anachronistic groupthink approach to this ad — a sense of severely underestimating the audience’s intelligence — that greatly troubles me. I simply do not believe that people are this dumb or that they will be coaxed into reading because an animated guy named D-Mike says so. (And what’s wrong with the sports page anyway?)

I don’t think Tony Soprano has whacked the novel or that books are going away anytime soon. But surely there’s a better way to promote literacy than this unintentionally hilarious video.

Publishers Weekly: “The HM Riverdeep Group has agreed to acquire the U.S. business operations of Harcourt Education for $4 billion. The deal, which is expected to close later in early 2008, includes the Harcourt’s elementary school publishing businesses as well as Harcourt Trade. The price includes $3.7 billion in cash plus $300 million in an equity stake for Harcourt in HM Riverdeep. Total revenue of the properties involved in the sale was $1.11 billion in 2006 with the vast majority generated by the school and library operations.”

Tom Wolfe and others on the blog’s tenth anniversary.

Once again, the Beatniks wish to tarnish the good name of realist literature — truly the only form of literature that’s good for you. The latest nonsense comes to us from a thirty-year-old whipper-snapper from San Francisco fond of reciting obscenities. It is rather childishly called “Howl.”

Let us examine this “poem”‘s first few lines:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,

And so on. Ginsberg cannot get to the point. He prefers nonsensical religious imagery like “angelheaded hipsters” and “Mohammedan angels.” He cannot put the adjective before “tenement roofs” like a proper writer.

If I were forced to play Pin the Tail on the Donkey after several shots of Stoli, I could easily identify this, without effort, as the kind of prose fashionable among the beret-wearing riff-raff who declare themselves “artists” or “poets” or “writers.” What does Ginsberg mean by ‘dragging themelves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix?’ Streets are not racial! How is a fix angry? One does not bare one’s brain to Heaven. There is no El in San Francisco last time I checked. Ginsberg can’t even decide on what one must hallucinate. Is it Arkansas or Blake-light tragedy?

I certainly cannot see any literary scholar taking such a preposterous poem seriously fifty years from now.

My profile of Marianne Wiggins can be found in this week’s issue of Time Out New York.

Yahoo: “Metallica singer James Hetfield was investigated by UK airport officials who believed he was a terrorist this week, it has been claimed. The star was barred entry to Luton airport on Thursday and questioned by staff who were concerned about his appearance. Fears that Hetfield might be involved in terrorism were apparently founded on his ‘Taliban-like beard’, according to The Times.”

I am unsure why a correspondent (who I shall not name in the interests of retaining her privacy) has deemed me responsible for what Tao Lin’s Intern Army (recently trademarked) does in promoting Tao’s books. I am neither employed by Melville House, nor do I represent Tao Lin in any capacity. But at the risk of participating in a potentially fabricated and guileful publicity masterstroke from Tao’s Intern Army, a correspondent (does she work for the New York City Transit Authority?) has written to me to complain about a sticker currently affixed to the top surface of a turnstile at the 14th Street — Union Square station. She has even helpfully sent me a copy of Section 1050.5 of the Rules governing public safety, demonstrating quite clearly that the mysterious individual who had the temerity to place the sticker on the turnstile (nay, THE HUBRIS AND THE EFFRONTERY to sully the Great City of New York in such an insolent manner!) has clearly broken the law.

Well, this may indeed be the case. But surely such a sticker-specific blasphemy is not exactly going to, as this correspondent puts it, “alienate book customers and readers in the city.”

Then again, I’m new here. So for all I know, all New York book customers and readers are highly sensitive to incongruous stickers, particularly those illegally placed on a subway seat or a newspaper kiosk. Perhaps, such a sight causes the book customer to see sudden flashes of light, hear the voice of Elijah Wood instructing them to exact justice, and thereby enter the clean and noble McNally Robinson with a semiautomatic to retaliate for a CLEAR WRONG against the City of New York.

You tell me.

The onus, of course, falls upon the Tao Lin Intern Army. I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen Fritz Lang’s M more times than I should. And if such unwarranted blasphemies continue, I will gather together a vigilante mob, hunt Tao Lin down, and interrogate Tao Lin in German, uploading the resultant black-and-white video onto YouTube, whereby the Great Democracy of New York can make their final judgment.

[UPDATE: It appears that this correspondent also left a comment on Tao’s blog.]

Alex Good: “But overall I have a hard time believing that the internet constitutes any kind of an alternative to mainstream book reviewing. Indeed they may be even more corrupt, compromised, and commercialized, more of a personality-driven ‘performance art,’ more of a hysterical scream for attention, than what we see in print.”

Actually, if you want to discuss what constitutes “a hysterical scream for attention,” Good’s inept essay is about as hysterical — for both author and reader alike — as foolish screams come. I particularly like Good’s faux footnotes, which suggest some explicit examples to prove his flaccid argument, only to offer more hysteria — and sometimes fabricated hysteria taken out of context — from other sources!

Behold, Lapham’s Quarterly.

Net neutrality is on its way to being gutted. Time Warner has rammed a bulk mail rate increase that severely undercuts small periodicals. Small presses are dying and quirky imprints like Thunder’s Mouth are being gutted.

And remember the Fairness Doctrine shot down by Reagan? Well, it seems that the Republicans want to bring back the debate through the dubiously named Broadcaster Freedom Act (PDF).

It seems that letting the issue die twenty years ago wasn’t enough. One of Senator Sam Rayburn’s great legislative accomplishments — The Communications Act of 1934 — is being completely destroyed — even with the enthusiastic help of many Democrats. Here is the clause in question:

Notwithstanding section 303 or any other provision of this Act or any other Act authorizing the Commission to prescribe rules, regulations, policies, doctrines, standards, or other requirements, the Commission shall not have the authority to prescribe any rule, regulation, policy, doctrine, standard, or other requirement that has the purpose or effect of reinstating or repromulgating (in whole or in part) the requirement that broadcasters present opposing viewpoints on controversial issues of public importance, commonly referred to as the ‘Fairness Doctrine’, as repealed in General Fairness Doctrine Obligations of Broadcast Licensees, 50 Fed.Reg. 35418 (1985).

Congress wants to ensure that the FCC never considers the concept of the Fairness Doctrine ever again.

The Oreganian has a solid overview of the Fairness Doctrine, which revisits the failed 2005 efforts to re-adopt the Fairness Doctrine through the Media Ownership Reform Act and offers this telling quote from Representative Greg Walden:

Among the five stations Walden owns is KACI, which airs conservative talk shows such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Michael Reagan. While the stations offer some local, objective news reporting, they don’t balance the conservative talkers with liberal shows.

Walden acknowledges the rightward slant of talk radio but attributes it to consumer demand.

“Is it more conservative than liberal? Yeah,” Walden said. “Are there a lot more country-western stations than polka stations? Yeah. Listeners make these determinations. The marketplace decides.”

Reuters: “The U.S. Federal Trade Commission warned Wednesday against regulations to ensure providers of high-speed Internet service treat all content the same way, saying such rules could stifle innovation. Network neutrality proposals, backed by Internet content companies like Google Inc. and eBay Inc., would bar Internet providers from charging extra fees to guarantee access to the Internet or give priority to some content. In a report, the FTC sided with high-speed Internet providers such as AT&T and Verizon, saying the government should be cautious about imposing such regulations.”

Folks, this is extremely horrible news. Ending net neutrality means that the Internet is a place where only those who can pay for it are capable of expressing themselves — in effect, turning the democratic foundations of the Internet into something no different from other media. Kill off net neutrality and Internet freedom of speech becomes dedicated to those who can pay for it.

The FCC has launched a public inquiry into the matter. You now have seven days before the consideration period is over. Act now to save net neutrality and maintain the Internet!

New York Times: “On a Sunday night last month at Daddy’s, a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, more than a dozen people in their 20s and 30s gathered at a professional soiree, drinking frozen margaritas and nibbling store-bought cookies. With their thrift-store inspired clothes and abundant tattoos, they looked as if they could be filmmakers, Web designers, coffee shop purveyors or artists.”

I don’t know what to be more alarmed by in this article: the Times only just discovering that librarians don’t always live up to the bespectacled stereotype (something that has been common knowledge for quite some time now) or the librarian hipster angle. The last thing you need when asking for a roll of microfilm is some languorous asshole giving you an ironic answer.

“Hi there! How’s it going? Can I get the November 1978 New York Times?”

“1978. Man, that was the year of Lou Reed’s live album. The one where he talks about the origin of ‘Walk on the Wild Side.'”

“Yes. Actually, can I just get the microfilm please?”

“Dude, don’t you dig Reed? Reed is why I moved to New York! Or are you one of those guys who believes a Welshman did most of the work for the VU?”

“I just need the microfilm, thanks.”

“Answer my question: Reed or Cale?”

“Is this Satellite Records or the New York Public Library?”

“I’m not going to give you the microfilm until you lay your cred down, son.”

“Alright, pops. Can you please give me the fucking microfilm before I physically demonstrate the meaning of ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song?'”

(Thanks, Jeff Severs!)

From the years 1942-1966, Orville Prescott served as the main daily book critic for the New York Times. It would seem to me, based on some of Prescott’s remarkable assessments, that Michiko Kakutani’s hostility against nearly almost anything fictional fits in with a long Gray Lady tradition of daily critics who remain mostly hostile to fiction.

On Lolita: “‘Lolita,’ then, is undeniably news in the world of books. Unfortunately, it is bad news. There are two equally serious reasons why it isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive.”

On Catch-22: “‘Catch-22,’ by Joseph Heller, is not an entirely successful novel. It is not even a good novel. It is not even a good novel by conventional standards.”

On The Floating Opera: “Most of this odd novel is dull. Most of its humor is labored and flat. Some of its heavy-handed attempts to shock seem cheap in a juvenile and nasty way rather than sophisticated or realistic, as they probably were intended.” (Never mind that Barth’s first novel is a beautifully twisted satire of Camus.)

My broadband situation will, as of this Tuesday, be rectified. If you have sent email to the edrants account, I am sorry that I have not answered. I will begin responding to this two month (!) backlog next week. Bear with me.

I have decided to grow facial hair for the first time in seven years. In two and a half weeks, I have managed to surprise a few people in New York. I get odd stares from people who have espied me clean-shaven and I sometimes respond, “Humidity, baby!” They do not understand that there are certain sacrifices to perfecting follicle growth. By growing practice facial hair now, I am actually preparing for the winter, where the extra insulation will come in handy should I grow it again. I like to keep my options open. I like to perform trial runs, get measurements, and see if I can come up with some amazing chart after feeding the data into OpenOffice Calc. I like to have some dubious facial hair experience that I can put on a resume and then perhaps get an interlocutor at a job interview to talk to me about it — just to break up the flow for the benefit of others, because interviewers often ask the same questions and they always seem to look austere and professional. And I like to have fun with these things.

Anyway, the facial hair has been a success so far. It’s well past the itching phase and settling in quite nicely. I am not sure if it makes me look any wiser. But I like to think of my facial hair as Robin Williams facial hair: the way that Williams grew beards when he wanted to win an Oscar. I have no real desire to win an Oscar or any award for that matter, but it is fun to be taken seriously sometimes, only to flap out my tongue or blow a raspberry or do something decidedly not serious. Call me an iconoclast of small moments. I suspect that men with facial hair, discounting the buskers of course, aren’t allowed to be silly in certain parts of Manhattan. But then I don’t know. I only have their stern faces to go by. Hopefully, I will start a movement for more silliness from men with goatees, moustaches, and beards. Unless, of course, someone has already initiated such a study. I don’t wish to step on anybody’s toes, or fail to acknowledge the appropriate antecedents.

Can I recommend growing facial hair in New York during July? Well, why not? Live dangerously. Grow something! It’s like having your own personal garden! The only real difference between facial hair and a garden is that you don’t get any ripe fruit with the former. But you do get plenty of whiskers! Who knows? Maybe there’s a barter market somewhere that trades in whiskers for fruit?

Here’s a helpful list for New York freelancers who need to write a needlessly alarmist newspaper piece about what may be killing the novel. So if you’ve run out of ideas and don’t quite know an angle, here are some casuistic ideas for your future pitches! Remember, if you collect a check from any of these ideas, I’m only asking 5%. Be sure to send a check to me within 45 days after the piece runs. Good luck and Allah’s speed!

• Global warming
• David Hasselhoff
• Sudoku puzzles
• People who are really into Settlers of Catan
• Tao Lin
• The bottled water industry
• Right-wing French joggers
• Waffles and pancakes
• Men who leave the toilet seat up
• Women who leave the toilet seat up
• Pet dogs who have been trained by their masters to keep the toilet seat up with their paws
• Marxists
• Eucharists
• Tom Cruise (or any famous Scientologist, really)
• Eco-friendly organic pizzeria owners
• Pot smokers
• Golfers
• Matt and Daniel Mendelsohn
• Lev and Austin Grossman
• Edward Champion
• Killroy

I have been receiving letters sent to my address from people hoping to reach Norman Mailer and a few other authors. I am not Norman Mailer. Nor do I have any way of contacting Mr. Mailer. I am Edward Champion. I’m just some bastard with a blog who happens to interview authors. If you hope to reach an author, please direct your correspondence to the publishers. Not me. Thank you.

Vanity Fair: “We are a long way from the glory days of Mission Accomplished, when the Iraq war was over before it was over—indeed before it really began—and the president could dress up like a fighter pilot and land on an aircraft carrier, and the nation, led by a pliable media, would applaud. Now, late in this sad, terribly diminished presidency, mired in an unwinnable war of their own making, and increasingly on the defensive about events which, to their surprise, they do not control, the president and his men have turned, with some degree of desperation, to history. In their view Iraq under Saddam was like Europe dominated by Hitler, and the Democrats and critics in the media are likened to the appeasers of the 1930s. The Iraqi people, shorn of their immensely complicated history, become either the people of Europe eager to be liberated from the Germans, or a little nation that great powerful nations ought to protect. Most recently in this history rummage sale—and perhaps most surprisingly—Bush has become Harry Truman.”

There’s considerably more. And this essay is yet another reason why Halberstam will be sorely missed.

(via MeFi)

From Ansible: “God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing?”

And Ursula’s just getting started.

(Thanks, Andrew!)

[10/15/07 UPDATE: While I did not post the entirety of Ms. Le Guin’s piece, I realize that I may have posted too liberally and have revised this post to limit my excerpt to one mere sentence, which I feel is applicable under fair use. Cory Doctorow, on the other hand, seems to be under the mistaken impression that quoting an author’s piece in its entirety is “fair use.” I feel that Doctorow was wrong to post the entirety of the piece and that, likewise, I was wrong in presenting more than three sentences. I should note that I have not been contacted by LeGuin or the SFWA, but her thoughts on the subject can be found here.]

BBC: “An artist has offered to donate his own head to an Oxford museum – if a collection of shrunken heads has to be returned to South America….Mr Dewan says that he hopes that any posthumous display of his head would have a ‘family friendly’ appeal.”

Finishing touches are being put on two more Segundo podcasts, with Larry N. Gittis momentarily replacing Mr. Segundo. One interview features a guest correspondent and involves superheroes; the other is the first part of a candid two-part interview with a cartoonist of some note. What could be more American than superheroes and cartoons? Stay tuned.

Kevin Burton Smith displays intellectual cowardice in proclaiming how horrible some of the “new noir” books are. What’s so wrong with this position? Well, Smith has failed to cite any specific examples for his argument. And what’s more, he appears more terrified than a mouse squirming in a glue trap. In the comments thread, Smith responded, “Like I don’t have enough people pissed off at me already? Why don’t YOU suggest some names that you think fit those shoes?”

Smith’s observations could have served as a launching point for a fascinating and provocative post, but Smith fails to cite examples of this “mean-spiritedness” and “self-righteous authorial stance” he identifies. I must therefore conclude from Smith’s post that Smith doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about, because he offers no explicit frames of reference for his argument.

Smith’s approach assumes that one cannot broach certain subjects without immediately inflaming an author, a critic, or a literary enthusiast. But this assumes that the author or critic is not mature enough to respond in a thoughtful manner to the argument, or recognize the value of discourse that gets the blood pumping. I suspect this fear of offending people in the literary world is one of the reasons Dale Peck’s form of book reviewing rankled so many a few years ago. But what’s more offensive? Hiding personal enthusiasms that offer helpful frames of reference and staying as safe as a Pat Boone record or being the momentary asshole who spots the leak in the lifeboat? Sure, you’ll hate the asshole. But if it were me, I’d trust him over the diffident one.

Forgive the radio silence. I’m attempting to beat deadlines, laryngitis that doesn’t seem to want to go away completely (despite expectorants, copious steam inhalation, and salt water gargling), and beat many other battles. I hope to offer a post or two later tonight.

PC World has listed “100 Blogs We Love.” Under the misleading nomen “Arts & Culture,” not a single arts blog, litblog, or theatre blog is listed. Instead, we get Nick Denton-style gossip, video games, and television. Last I heard, “Arts & Culture” covered a considerably broader range of topics than what is readily available through digital cable and the Wii. (Hat tip: Maxine)

How to tell when someone’s lying to you, or how to tell a convincing lie — depending upon your inclination. (via Bill Peschel)

Literary Rejections on Display. (via Bluestalking Reader)

Chronicle of Higher Education: “But after a dozen years in the industry, the whining and whingeing of authors had worn me down: The conspiracy theories about how a publisher set out to ruin an author’s career by not sending his 15-year-old book to a small regional conference; the notion that a publisher sullied an author’s reputation by giving her a red cover; the complaint that there were not enough ads promoting the book (there were never enough ads); the indignation that we didn’t get the author reviewed in The New York Times, or booked on Oprah.” (via Bookninja)