From an interview with Austin Grossman: “Practically speaking my brother Lev helped see the thing to publication – he saw it in its early stages and told me it was worth finishing in the first place, which helped enormously; and he introduced me to his agent, who encouraged me and helped me find my agent. So I was enormously lucky in having someone to show the book.”

After spending hours carefully going through my laptop hard drive through an enclosure and hacking files through a command prompt (since Windows did not want to recognize the files), I was able to retrieve 95% of my data. Which includes about five podcasts and several lengthy pieces of writing I had feared lost. I’m now on the laptop with an image of the factory default, stealing wireless from a kind neighbor.

The moral of the story, folks, is this: No matter how healthy your drive appears to be, be sure to make images of your hard drive every month. And if you have a laptop, invest in an enclosure. They’re only about $20 and they will save your ass.

I should hopefully be back in earnest tomorrow.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, but it seems that Cablevision, perhaps because they didn’t take too kindly to me reporting their incompetence, have cut off my broadband service without notice. I am currently working on restoring my laptop, including all of the data that I lost, so that I can steal wireless from the many networks in my neighborhood and therefore carry on blogging. But for the moment, my online access is extremely limited. So bear with me while I work out the kinks. Thank you for your patience.

An author who I will not name sent me his book, along with a cash amount intended as a donation to this site. I’m happy to accept donations for anyone who considers this site to be of value to them. And I’m sure that this author meant well. But because this donation came with a book, I do not feel that it would be ethical for me to accept the cash. It implies that I must take a look at his book without a honest and scrupulous eye. Therefore, I will be returning the cash by mail to this author.

At an event, I was asked by a publicist to take a photo. “I’ll pay you for it,” said this publicist. Sure this would have been helpful to me, particularly since I am currently scraping by here in Brooklyn from one gig to another. But I demurred. Because to accept cash from a publicist would imply that my perspective can be irreversibly colored by the Almighty Dollar. At BookExpo, another publicist told me that he could send me audio clips of authors to me and that, together, “we might be able to construct an interview.” I am not in the business of “constructing” interviews or designing questions for preprogrammed answers. That is not journalism. That is corruption. And it is not fair to all parties.

I do not care if I am forced to live on a diet of Top Ramen or if I must pay my rent by sifting through the coins in my piggy bank. I would sooner pump gas or work retail somewhere than allow myself to be corrupted like this. Let it stand for the record that my opinion cannot be purchased. If a media outlet deems me fit enough to write an opinion piece, then this is fine. I am happy to be hired. I also see no problem with advertising, provided that the advertising is clearly separated from the content. I also do not see any problems with donations, likewise separated from any implied quid pro quo. But I would not be able to live with myself if I knew that what I was writing was tainted by money. Indeed, there would be absolutely no point to what I do.

As can be expected of such predictable speeches, NEA Chairman Dana Gioia outlines the kind of death knell against cultural conversation that one would expect of an embittered elder priding himself on walking uphill to school and back (both ways, meh!) in the snow.

Without citing any specific studies and relying only on his suspicions, Gioia claims that today’s Americans “live in a culture that barely acknowledges and rarely celebrates the arts or artists.” He condemns the mass media for not placing as great an emphasis on “presenting a broad range of human achievement” and, like an old fogey in the truest French sense of the term, fails to observe the Internet as a medium that might very well rectify the wrongs currently committed by the old guard. With an egregious prejudice evincing his clear displacement from his roots, Gioia declares that “no working-class or immigrant kid would encounter the range of arts and ideas in the popular culture,” failing to consider that any kid hungry or motivated enough to go to the library or get his hands on culture will, in fact, do this, regardless of what his teachers tell him what to do. He presumes that the mass media dictates precisely how such a hypothetical kid will respond to the world around him. To exist in the Gioia universe is to live without hope, without the possibility of infectious enthusiasm for the arts passed down from old to young, or from the popular to the more cultivated. It is to live without the possibility of cultural redemption, and without any expansion or evolution of the current terms that, presumably Gioia and the NEA, now believe contemporary culture up to be. Which is to say, inexorably fixed.

I think the key to understanding Gioia’s disreputable cynicism resides in his declaration of entertainment as a corrupt force. What then is the alternative? Culture that is crammed down your throat like prescriptive castor oil? Artistic achievements that are dictated, rather than presented in an invitational manner?

He declares art “an expendable luxury.” Ah, but this assumes that those who lack the funding or the emolument to create will stop creating. This also assumes that art is based upon a marketplace, an environment which Gioia champions, rather than the burning desire of the individual to put paint upon a canvas or write words upon a paper, no matter how cruel or dismissive the artist’s naysayers are.

There is no better place to observe the old guard’s resolute hysteria than a speech from an establishment goon like Gioia. Gioia champions words like “consensus” over “community.” He is a man who would prefer to not see more artists, but “complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society.” But who determines what is complete? Who determines “successful and productive lives?” The marketplace? The NEA?

Gioia cannot accept the possibility that arts and culture might exist in a fantastic anarchy completely outside the marketplace, capable of having its terms overwritten by an underclass or a figure who falls outside of the establishment. He cannot accept an amateur like Heinrich Schliemann discovering the true location of Troy. Or James Joyce, that feckless upstart, self-publishing Ulysses. (Likewise, Walt Whitman.)

This is the man who purports to lead our august body for the arts. But what Gioia outlines in this preposterous speech is not an artistic world that I’m acquainted with. And if Gioia believes that the ridiculous “Praise to the Rituals That Celebrate Change” is the kind of thing that will awaken the young from their apparent Wii-immersed haze, then we’re in an altogether different sort of trouble.

I cannot count the number of sleazeballs, both small-time and corporate, that I’ve talked with today. But I’m pleased to report that I’ve found a broadband provider who will offer a dry loop DSL line with VOIP that will also give me a static IP. All this with minimal setup fees and without a yearly contract. The guy I spoke with was professional, friendly, and crystal-clear about technical details, answering every question I asked of him. It was a clear case of one geek talking with another — a conversation I was close to giving up one of my testicles for.

Now that things are in action, it’s enough to make me buy a top hat and dance in the streets. I don’t care how hot it is. Of course, the proof will be in the pudding.

I can tell you this much: Verizon is a bunch of liars.

I was very close to signing a yearly contract with them for a phone and high speed internet combo package. The sales rep I spoke with insisted three times that I would be getting a static IP. Skeptical of this after my experience with Optimum, in which I was told the same thing, after muddling through a series of vague Verizon pages, I found a Verizon site that claimed: “Static IP addresses are only available thru Verizon Business DSL.”

I managed to reach someone in Verizon DSL Technical Support, who waffled around the subject, until I said, “Answer the question. Is there any way that a residential DSL customer can get a static IP? Yes or no?”

“Basically no,” he said.

So essentially Verizon and Optimum are lying to you — and, in the case of Verizon, conning you into signing a yearly service contract. They are telling you they have a static IP when, in fact, they don’t, if you’re a residential customer.

I didn’t have much of a voice. So I was unable to pursue this further. But all I can say is that if you’re in Brooklyn trying to find a broadband provider with a static IP, be extremely careful to get something written down before signing on with these turkeys.

I’m only surprised that there hasn’t been a class action suit filed for those who were suckered into this nonsense. I can’t be the only one they’re lying to about static IP addresses.

When I get my voice back, I plan to conduct some experiments and upload my results to YouTube. But for those who have their larnyxes, call Verizon and Optimum. Tell them that you’re interested in residential DSL with a static IP address. See what they say.

To: Doug ________
From: Edward Champion
Re: Lies, Incompetence & Rudeness

Doug:

Never in my history of dealing with telecommunications companies have I lost more man hours, borne such a burden for your company’s failure to communicate and organize action among its remarkably Kafkaesque branches, and experienced more outright incompetence.

Let us review the history: I ordered your Triple Play package last month. I was told that I would be given a static IP. It was under this specific condition that I ordered your service. When the technician arrived on May 30, he was hostile and threatened to leave when he saw that I did not have a television. The cable service was more or less a fringe benefit that I could do without. But that didn’t seem to matter to this technician. I had apparently committed an installation solecism. I then had to persuade him to install the phone and broadband service — in part, by calling Cablevision while he was here. Your technician bitched and moaned the entire time, particularly since the super wasn’t available in seconds to open up the basement.

He installed the service, but there was no static IP. There were at least four conversations with Optimum I had on the phone. Until I finally got in touch with you. You represented to me that through a work transfer order and through switching my service from residential to business, I would be able to obtain my static IP and keep my phone number. But that this would take two and a half weeks. I reluctantly set the appointment for the morning of June 25, 2007, where the cosmos would be aligned and all would be well.

I anticipated a technician to arrive this morning to make the change. The man, George, showed up at 5PM with a work order directing him to move my line from the fifth floor to the ground floor. After wasting twenty minutes with his dispatcher on his cell phone, he then left — without installing the static IP. When I objected, he told me, “Don’t look at me.” Well, who else should I look at? The Virgin Mary? The nearest Mister Softee truck? This man was a representative of your company. This technician then told me that I would have to call your sales department to arrange for another appointment.

I am currently suffering from laryngitis, but I called your sales department, only to strain my voice considerably in describing your screwup to three different people. The last one claimed that he could help me, only to tell me that it was “impossible” to move my number, to the new business account. This was not, of course, what you told me. Before I could describe everything that had been set down for the record, he then put me on hold and, since I was unable to talk on the phone any further, I hung up.

Let us review the email that you sent on June 8, 2007 — two and a half weeks ago:

Hello Mr Champion,

Just a correction for your reference. The new account number will actually be XX-XXXXXX-X not XX-XXXXXX-X

Sorry for the confusion.

Thanks,

Doug __________ previously wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
This is just to confirm your move transfer request for XX XXXXX St #XX 11225 to attempt to move the phone # XXX XXX XXXX from residential acct # XXXX-XXXXXX-X to dual Commerical acct # XX-XXXXXX-X. We are sending out this request as an accomodation to you as our customer to correct the type of cablevsion acct your serivces are on , which should allow you to order Static Ip in the future. Install will be reduced to $46.95

Thank you for your patience

* * *

Because your company has completely failed to solve this problem, and because your company has lied to me repeatedly, beginning with the false promise that I would have Internet service with a static IP (which again I have been without for almost a month and which has greatly inconvenienced me), and because your company has talked to me on the phone as if I was the one who screwed up, not YOUR company, I have no choice but to pursue other broadband options. At this point, I would not trust your company to perform basic arithmetic, let alone possess the decency to help an old lady cross the street. (Basic spelling and grammar likewise seems to have failed you.)

Since I am entitled to a 30 days money back guarantee, I wish to disconnect my service, effective June 29, 2007. I will return my equipment to your New Jersey address and be sure to postmark it for that date. I demand the immediate refund of the $100 that I initially paid you.

I assume, based on this history, that your company will likewise fail on this front. So here’s the deal, Doug. If I do not receive my refund within 30 days of June 29, 2007, I will have no choice but to pursue a small claims action. I trust that we can resolve this dispute amicably.

— Edward Champion

[6/28 UPDATE: Word apparently has made the rounds of my Cablevision horror story. This morning, I discovered that my service had been cut off without warning. This evening, a gentleman by the name of Bob Weisman, who claimed to be the head of the Brooklyn branch of Cablevision, called me, wanting to see if there was anything he could do to keep me as a customer and noting that he had “seen my writing.” I talked with Mr. Weisman for about fifteen minutes, pointing out that I had already taken steps with a new provider who had communicated with me at all stages of the installation process. But I did go through the history of events with him. I don’t know if this will have any effect upon the way that Cablevision treats its customers. But Weisman’s gesture is a start. I’m only sorry that it took a public callout to get Cablevision to listen to its customers.]

• Rumors, put forth by San Diego literary agent Sandra Dijkstra, are now making the rounds that the San Diego Union-Tribune books section is dead. I have no wish to perpetuate a false rumor and I plan to make several calls tomorrow to confirm if this is indeed the case. (In the meantime, an email has been sent to Books Editor Arthur Salm to determine information.) But if this is true, this is very sad news, as Salm ran one of the more underrated book sections in the country. (Don’t believe me? Check out Salm’s footnote-laced review of Consider the Lobster.)
• Marilyn Robinson on Annie Dillard.
• Joseph Campana offers one of the best takes on the J.T. Leroy fraud ruling, pointing out that “[t]he problem was the exploitation of addiction and abuse narratives to feed a national hunger we assiduously excuse or deny.” I too am perturbed that such a base capitalization upon the public’s appetite to commiserate with the scarred horrors of someone ostensibly using fiction as a coping mechanism would outweigh the possibilities of infinitely more interesting author hoaxes and identity shenanigans. If anything, Laura Albert should pay for cheapening the potential of more talented authors to tinker with what is real and what is not.
• Michael Winter is turning to Facebook to unveil his novel. There, he will find many friends who will claim passing acquaintance with him as an excuse to harangue him with hastily composed messages. Or he will find a way to get laid.
• Pierre Jourde is in trouble. Five farmers have accused the French novelist of revealing family secrets in a “tell-all novel.” But one wonders why these farmers didn’t just keep their traps shut. After all, with the “novel” label attached, Jourde’s work is “fiction.” Was the book miscategorized in the nonfiction section? Personally, I’m hoping for more “tell-all novels,” if only because resulting conflicts along these lines may encourage more baroque French novels deconstructed by literary scholars instead of barristers.
• Lev Grossman offers this bold lede: “Writing about rich white people is no way to make it as a novelist anymore.” On the contrary, Mr. Grossman. Never underestimate the parochial reading tendencies of those determined to read solely within their own niches. Particularly the rich white people who inhabit certain areas of New York. After all, if they view my own safe neighborhood as dangerous, then what’s to suggest that they won’t apply the same ridiculous lack of logic to their reading choices?

San Francisco Chronicle: “San Francisco city government will no longer be allowed to use city money to buy bottled water for its employees under an executive order Mayor Gavin Newsom is expected to sign today.”

Washington Post: “‘You get into shades of gray,’ Hernandez said. ‘The kids say, “If he can high-five, then I can do this.”‘

Scott McLemee offers an excellent column in response to the Encyclopedia Brittanica brouhaha, pointing out:

But no such ambiguity colors the scenario we find in Gorman’s commentary.For the digital boosters, the problems will all repair themselves over time. For the neo-Luddite quasi-Mandarins, by contrast, the new-media matrix is a catastrophic force so devastating that its effects may well contaminate human consciousness for centuries to come.

Ron Rosenbaum: “But does anybody ever read this stuff? Does anybody take it seriously? Does the writer? It’s the Emperor’s New Clothes of prose. There’s a certain sadness to it, as well. To paraphrase that line in “Howl”: I saw some of the best writers of my generation destroyed by celebrity profiling.”

And Rosenbaum is just getting started.

(via Tingle Alley)

The Independent: “There is a rule in America that states employers must make up the difference in pay if any member of their staff earns below the minimum wage when their pay is added to their tips. This might mean customers in the US fear people will lose jobs if they don’t tip heavily.”

Mr. Welch, we tip because we know how little those working in the service sector actually make. We tip because they often don’t have health care and we know that they might be working a second job to make ends meet. We tip because the government’s answer to providing for the unemployed is welfare-to-work.

Instead of silly speculation, why not simply ask us why? Is this not, after all, what a journalist does?

I’ve had a mean spot of bronchitis. I could describe to you the Quincy Verdun-like phlegm patterns I’ve been coughing up. Or the mighty rattling coughs that jerk me out of bed at 2 AM. Or the troubling fact that I cannot laugh without coughing, making me wonder if I have a temporary future as a humorless accountant. Or the pleasant dizziness actuated by my shots of Robitussin. But instead I’ll simply bid a momentary adieu to this blog until I feel better.

James Marcus on Andrew Keen: “In any case, amateur is hardly the dirty word Keen makes it out to be, and his reflexive obeisance to people in charge cripples his polemic. After all, a James Madison (whom Keen cites approvingly for having a similarly jaundiced view of human nature) wrote: ‘The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.’ I believe it was the professionals he had in mind.”

There is a curious phenomenon underway in contemporary literature. Two recent novels, Marianne Wiggins’ The Shadow Catcher and Katherine Taylor’s Rules for Saying Goodbye, both feature characters named “Marianne Wiggins” and “Katherine Taylor.” (And both are set, oddly enough, in large part on the West Coast.) In approaching both of these books as a reader, I was both delighted by the miasma of invented subjective truths contained within these novels and somewhat curious as to why these respective subjective accounts were not executed in memoir form. Is it possible that in our post-James Frey memoir world that today’s writers are not allowed even a kernel of invention when setting down their stories?

Earlier this year, I read Anthony Burgess’s two-volume autobiography (which he preferred to style, St. Augustine-style, as “Confessions”), Little Wilson and Big God and You’ve Had Your Time. One of the joys of reading these picaresque narratives was to observe precisely how Burgess invented himself. By his own admission, Burgess relied almost exclusively on his memory, occasionally verifying his wild ontological tales through whatever notes he had at his disposal. This approach raises some interesting questions. Can we believe that a preteen John Wilson (Burgess’s real name) truly coaxed numerous maids into sexual intercourse? Can we believe that, as a struggling writer, he was able to provide money for some of his sexual conquests? I don’t think these questions of verisimilitude matter so much, because one reads these memoirs largely to observe how Burgess created himself and what his particular perspective revealed about his view of the human condition. Let us not forget that human nature is as much defined by what one choose to remember and how one remembers, as by what actually happened.

But now only two decades later after Burgess’s truth, in an age that demands a video taken from a cell phone and uploaded to YouTube for veracity and a letter published to the New Yorker demands Kafkaesque fact checking to clear up a quibble, I’m wondering if some of the fun has been taken out of these narrative liberties and this flexibility for heightened perspective has been notably impaired. Some recent posts on this site have featured subjective reports of events and a few people have written in to express how “mediocre” they are because they do not match up with their own respective memories. Daniel Mendelsohn chooses to believe that I “fawningly asked to shake [his] hand,” when this was not the case at all. However, I was doped up on Benadryl to fight a cold. So Mendelsohn may have misperceived this condition as obsequious. I choose to believe, perhaps wrongly, that Mendelsohn was not referring to himself when he referred to “98% of these emails were from those ‘sitting in his underwear with a laptop'” — in large part because he did indeed express frustration, only minutes later, with the confessional nature of emails that came in response to his excellent memoir, The Lost. I’m wondering why we cannot live in a world in which both subjective truths and both unique contexts are possible.

If we are, as Mendelsohn stated on Thursday night, in “a crisis about reality,” and I agree with Mendelsohn that we are, why then is there such inflexibility to varying subjective accounts? Can we not accept another person’s right to a subjective report? Can we not accept the disparity between authorial intention and reader interpretation? Or have we become so hyper-sensitive as a culture that any account which does not portray people in anything less than a celebratory light causes, those like Donna Masini, to be “rather shocked” that anyone would perceive something different. I will no doubt be taken to the task by the peanut gallery for “waffling,” but, for what it’s worth, I intended to portray Mendelsohn in a picaresque light, which he took objection to. He assumes that I intended to belittle him for his “hyper-articulitis,” when in fact I recognize the affliction in myself and intended to celebrate it. It makes Mendelsohn who he is, and I think the world is an interesting place because of it. Likewise Matt Mendelsohn assumes that I have seen his brother multiple times when I have only seen him once, along with numerous other untrue speculations by others about me in the thread.

It’s no surprise then that Wiggins and Taylor have turned to the novel format for the kind of thing once commonly found in memoirs or gonzo journalism. In the novel, respective liberties can be accepted because everyone accepts the work as “fiction.” Until, of course, the current fervor for absolute truth extends beyond the limits of nonfiction and starts to apply to the novel. Then where will we all go?

It appears that my camera lens was damaged during the course of the move. So I’m afraid I don’t have decent photos to accompany what went down on Thursday night at Housing Works — a most excellent bookstore, I might add — where A.M. Homes and Daniel Mendelsohn were in discussion on the memoir’s current state.

It might seem to some readers that I’m stalking a certain person, who I will refer here only as Colonel Klink in order to avoid yet another tedious mention. Honestly, I attended this panel because it was impossible to resist such an interesting pair-up of authors. I did not know that Colonel Klink, again out of his league though more tolerable this time, would be moderating the panel. Maybe I was a bit naive to expect otherwise. This was a pity, because juxtaposing Mendelsohn’s hyper-articulate vernacular, involving sentences with clauses within clauses within clauses, with Homes’ clear enthusiasm was a smart way to keep the panel going.

Approximately sixty people showed up to the event, with the front rows reserved for Homes and Mendelsohn’s respective families, leading me to wonder if Col. Klink was prepared to shout, “Let’s play the Feud!” I was disappointed not to run into Matt Mendelsohn, who long-time readers might recall leaped to his brother’s defense when Mendelsohn declared litbloggers as the devil incarnate. (Give Mendelsohn some points for being ahead of the pugilistic curve.) But I did run into Homes’ brother while standing in line to purchase a book.

I hope the reader here will forgive me if I elide Colonel Klink’s needless digressions from the record and dwell upon the considerably more thoughtful remarks from the subjects.

There was initial discussion about what the memoir is. Mendelsohn identified it as “a genre with a very long history.” He suggested that the current explosion in memoirs was comparable to the similar explosion that followed the French Revolution. He offered his “nutty mad scientist” theory linking the rise of the memoir to the end of the Cold War, comparing the memoir to new trees rising after a forest fire. “When old narratives collapse, the new ones pop up.” Mendelsohn was adamant about distinguishing biography from memoir, calling the former merely the writing of one’s life “from soup to nuts, presumably” and the latter involving how one’s life is a kind of prism to thinking of life’s issues.

Homes suggested that its rise had something to do with how postwar America had failed at the American dream and that the lost notion of imagination had led to more fact-based societal experiences. Mendelsohn interjected that the explosion of psychotherapy had much to do with it, leaving Homes to volley back about the “I’m not okay, you’re not okay” culture.

I enjoyed these conceptual volleys between Homes and Mendelsohn the best. Mendelsohn suffered from a kind of leonine hyper-articulitis, speaking in sentences like, “Some of the exhaustion of the novel — at least on the perception of the readers — may have something to do with this as well.” You’d expect Homes to translate for Mendelsohn, but she’d often offer a wild digression instead. It was a clear case of contrapuntal craziness, and Colonel Klink’s moderation was quite unnecessary. The two authors were just fine on their own.

Homes carried on about how her investigation into personal history became very much about world history. Mendelsohn, his right hand fixed in the air as if expecting Michelangelo to paint in the details, pointed out that reality is “a function of increasing representation and reproduction.” He pointed out that everybody marching through Europe between 1892 and 1912 appeared to have heavy boots, since they were always depicted in memoirs as on the go.

Homes observed that the voice of the novel is less stabler than that of the memoir. Quoting Popeye’s “I yam what I am,” Homes said that the novel was more fluid and constantly changing, but that the memoir was rooted in unshakable personal experience. Mendelsohn went further, pointing out that, “Whatever happened, it would make into the book.” There was, as readers of The Lost know, a point late in the book where he thought things had ended and had written a final chapter, only to learn of a dramatic discovery that caused him to write a new ending.

Homes noted that there was “nothing too unbelievable to be true.” Mendelsohn noted that what an author leaves out is a non-memoir. He then noted, with a smug air, about how he’s on the treadmill every day and sees the stuff on daytime television, a telltale sign that you can’t put everything into something.

Homes observed, “The average contemporary memoir isn’t written at all.” By this, she meant that there were many books written by people with an incident to tell, but that the larger thematic point identified by Mendelsohn was often overlooked or not considered.

Mendelsohn pointed out that the memoir has to engage the reader and leave out elements that are unnecessary. “It can be true without being the whole story.” He also pointed out that he received a great number of emails from people who had read his book and who would thereby confess their stories to him. Here, Mendelsohn segued into disappointing elitism, pointing out that 98% of these emails were from those “sitting in his underwear with a laptop.” He expressed contempt that these readers would think him his friend.

Later during the evening, Mendelsohn would point out how he was frustrated that readers couldn’t latch onto characters in The Iliad. “Think outside of the box!” exclaimed Mendelsohn. Considering his previously uttered generalization about people on the Internet and his insistence that he wasn’t interested in many of the stories from these readers, perhaps Mendelsohn should follow his own advice and be more tolerant and kinder towards the people who took the time out to write to him.

Mendelsohn characterized The Lost less as a memoir about the Holocaust and more as “a memoir about memory.” He was disappointed in many of the reviews of his book, which were more interested in the biographical details.

Homes expanded on this latter point, noting that we are “living in a culture that has Alzaheimer’s and has problems with memories. Even our government doesn’t remember what it did last week.”

Mendelsohn suggested quite interestingly that this was because of a “failure of the master narrative.” Unfortunately, due to his hyper-articulitis, he got too mired in his own thoughts and didn’t elaborate upon this interesting idea.

Homes made the bold claim, “Most memoirs are easier to read than a novel.” Novels, she said, are harder to navigate. But she did note that “we don’t live in a culture of readers.” People now relate by spilling their guts. She observed that she also received many emails from people spilling their guts after The Mistress’s Daughter.

Homes said that she wanted to be “as clean and direct in the telling of the story.” Mendelsohn had differing sensibilities, pointing out that he wanted to see the page dirtier. He pointed out, in light of the rise of narrative nonfiction, that every good story has the same elements.

During the discussion of reviews, Mendelsohn complained about The Lost being categorized by the L.A. Times Book Prize as “Biography.” “Maybe that’s why I didn’t win,” said Mendelsohn with a sour grapes gravitas.

Homes noted that there was a “general big mess about the memoir.” It’s the same setup as reality television, where everything is scripted.

Mendelsohn pointed out, “We’re in a crisis about reality.” The whole culture, he noted, is about irreality and thus more anxious about accuracy. Allusions were made in the Q&A part of the panel to Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That, which played looser with the truth but was more accepted by its audience. Mendelsohn observed that he doesn’t read Goodbye to All That for an Einsteinian truth about the universe, but because he wants to know what Graves thought about his story.

Homes noted that her memoir helped her determine that she had the right to exist, whereas she didn’t feel this before. She now feels legitimate, regardless of her parentage, and she feels connected to all of her families. Mendelsohn then commended Homes with an excited “You see, that’s what I’m talking about!” flourish, pointing out that Homes ability to describe a theme is what sets her apart. He declared his own theme as the acknowledgment of multiplicity of family identities. All memoirs, he said, should end well as an artistic object. And on that note, the panel ended, with nobody in particular objecting to this genre categorization.

• Scott Timberg takes a look at the crazed tour business that have cropped up around John Fante.
• A 1991 interview with Chinua Achebe. (via Maud)
• On YouTube: the first episode of Black Books. (It picks up, Keir. Trust me.) (via Likely Stories)
• Thomas Jones on Eggers. (via Laila)
• Edward Tufte profiled. (via James Tata)
• “The Hard Truth About Hardbacks”.
• “Secret Asian Man.” (via Colleen)

• Adam Bellow: “If I had learned one thing from my historical study of nepotism (yes, that was the subject of my book), it’s that a boy needs many fathers in his journey to manhood.” The problem with such a generalization is that when one considers daddy bears, fatherhood and nepotism take on more troubling definitions.
• Bob Hoover talks with Pete Hamill.
• The Bookseller reports that a new Stephen King novella will be in the July issue of Esquire. Even if it is just Stephen King, I must applaud Esquire‘s willingness to devote 23 pages of its magazine to fiction.
• Is Andrew Cockburn’s Rumsfeld hatchet job compelling enough to stand above its own clearly demarcated vitriol?
• Weiner on Paper Cuts: “I can’t wait. Seriously, I can’t. I bet my husband it’ll be less than five days before the blog mentions perennial Times boycrush Gary Shteyngart. If I win, I get a water ice.”
• Is BEA a waste of money for the aspiring author? (via Slushpile)
• Andrew O’Hagan on Don DeLillo.
• What next? Will they set up journalistic export processing zones? (via Ron Silliman)
• The San Diego Union-Tribune offers a summer reading roundup.
• A Stephen Dixon profile. (via Dale Keiger)
• Are lost pants worth $65 million? I mean, if it’s really another predictable series of dick wars (from a judge, no less), I’m wondering how many penis implants you could get for that price. (via Henry Kisnor)
• Dan Chiasson on Les Murray’s poetry.
• Litminds interviews Jessica Stockton.
• Jenny D points to another Jenny D’s take on Chabon.
• Slate’s Michelle Tsai looks (too briefly) into how a dirty word gets dirty. (via Literary Gas)
• RIP Ousmane Sembene. (via Laila)
• Is Jonathan Lethem “an overeager college student?”
• It appears that the New York Times has hired TvNewser blogger Brian Stelter as a media reporter.
• For those thinking of McSweeney’s financial woes, Matthew Tiffany offers an independent presses harangue.
• Oh no.
• There are some troubling comics “obscenity” battles going down at the border. (via Bookninja)

The latest Theremin development.

Between my laptop being afflicted with a virus and rendered unbootable (with the potential data loss of 10,000 words of my novel, several short stories, two radio plays, two acts of a play, audio data for five podcasts, and too many notes) and my inability to respond to any edrants emails for a while because of the draconian Port 25 requirements (“You can host your domain with us!”) and the almost total misrepresentation (“Actually, we won’t have static IPs in your neighborhood for another two weeks. Or maybe longer. [insert barely concealed laughter from tech guy]”) of my broadband provider, I’m limping along here as best as I can between deadlines. (At least one computer still works!)

The moral of the story is this: Back up your data, and back it up often. And get your broadband quote on paper, no matter what these bozos promise you.

If you’ve sent me an email to the main address, I can read them, but I won’t be able to answer them for a while. I’m sorry. Try arizona_jim at yahoo.com for the next two weeks if you need to get in touch with me in a hurry. I’m hoping to get back to everyone once these technical issues are worked out.

In any event, I hope to offer an update tonight or tomorrow.

Dwight Garner has joined the blogosphere, which means, of course, that Sam Tanenhaus can start ignoring its own pages and calling its own material “sub-literary.”

I lived in San Francisco for thirteen years. All of my twenties. A fragment of my thirties.

I’ll miss the fog and the summers in the Mission and the drum circle on Hippie Hill. I’ll miss the burritos. I’ll miss the Haight-Ashbury, the neighborhood that I’ve been lucky enough to call home for the past two and a half years. It’s going to be extremely hard to find a replacement for Rockin’ Java, where many things were written, or the Booksmith or Ploy II or, hell, just everything really. I’ll miss the fag hags, the creative swindlers, the misunderstood people on the more interesting half of Polk Street, the guy who drums the same beat for hours on plastic buckets on Powell Street next to the meticulously groomed evangelist telling all who will listen that sex is evil. I’ll miss Frank Chiu, the tech geek crowd, the strange exhibitionist empathy, and the unapologetically corrupt politicians. I’ll miss Dan Leone’s Cheap Eats column. I’ll miss many friends and acquaintances, those noble soldiers of the Sunday Writing Circle, and I’ll even miss the sneers of some of my enemies. I’ll miss trips to Berkeley and the Great American Music Hall and the Red Vic and the Lucky Penny, easily the worst diner on the West Coast. I’ll miss Ross Mirkarimi. I’ll miss the incongruous automated voices inside MUNI buses, the capacious thatch of Dolores Park, the dogs flitting about Duboce Park, the almost perennial sixty degree temperature, the sex subcultures, the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, Bottom of the Hill, the Edwardian and Victorian houses, the many confused kids and misfits demanding spare change, the martinis at Blondie’s, the post-2AM crowd at Sparky’s, The Mint, the hills and the valleys, the earthquakes, the smell of oak trees in the Panhandle, the interesting developments around Divisadero Street, the snobs at Reverie, and the pretentious Marina crowd. I’ll miss the Exit Theatre, the Castro Halloween Parade, the lonely people I talked with during Christmas, the nice Russian ladies at the Yellow Submarine, the influx of Indian food in recent years, the notebooks at the Blue Danube, the sand hills near the Pacific, the drunks writing for the Guardian, and too much to list here really.

Goodbye San Francisco. It was a great run.

I uncovered this remarkable Craig’s List ad:

Small publishing company seeks qualified writer to interview director Michael Moore during press conference June 19 in New York. The ideal candidate will have the ability to write and communicate and produce the interview quickly and cleanly. Candidate will have access to Mr. Moore’s press conference. The candidate will have to deliver the article by June 22 with 1,300 words and incorporate the asked questions during the interview (specific questions will be sent to you in order to provide guidance and focus for the article/interview). Payment for the final written article is limited to $200.00. We understand this is amount is low, but the opportunity is unique for a strong writer to interview Michael Moore. Send resume and writing samples to editor Karl Hente by June 12.

I’m wondering precisely how any journalist can “write” or “investigate” a piece, if the journalist’s questions are “prepared” by another party in advance (were these questions, for example, pre-approved by Michael Moore?). A Google search reveals that Karl Hente appeared with Ivan Weiss at a May 2006 conversation, revealing that he copy-edited at the Washington Post (“Current projects: new business development, grantwriting, research.”). Hente’s involvement with the Washington Post is corroborated by his work here on an April 2007 “Community Guide” as copy editor. Although Hente claims to have left the Post, a “Karl F. Hente” is listed on the WaPo staff page.

So what happened? Was a Post staffer assigned the Michael Moore piece? And did he then walk away in disgust when Moore’s staff demanded all of his questions cleared in advance? Did desperate editors proclaim that a Michael Moore piece was too important not to feature, no matter how fabricated the journalism, and did copy editor Hente then continue on in panic? And did this then result in the Craig’s List ad with this “unique” “journalistic” opportunity?

I will be making calls on Monday to determine if this was indeed a Washington Post article or possibly a side project. I certainly hope that such dubious ethics aren’t being practiced by the Post or elsewhere.

Memo to Giuliani: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

RELATED: Gothamist: “According to Time’s Up!, Robert Carnevale was arrested while videotaping the bike raid after he asked one of the officers for his badge number. Carole Vale, a nurse observing the scene, was also arrested when she asked why Mr. Carnevale was being detained. Mr. Carnevale was held for 22 hours and Ms. Vale was held for 13 hours. Time’s Up!, along with the 6th Street cycling community are asking for a meeting with the commanding officer of the Ninth Precinct to explain the actions of the NYPD and to ask for their bikes back.”

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