James Wood vs. Dan Green.

“You rely too much on the brain. The brain is the most overrated organ, I think.” — Isaac David, Manhattan

I should say from the onset that I am not chronicling Rebecca Solnit the writer, at least as she presents herself in her text. Rather, I am dwelling specifically upon Solnit the public intellectual, the figure you are likely to encounter at a book reading. Or perhaps this is about Solnit the writer. You see, that’s the way things work in the Solnit universe. Terms are set up, but they merely serve as a needlessly convoluted bypass to Solnit’s vast depository of heavy reading and inventive associations. Basic premises are not followed up or questioned, because the intellectual peanut gallery (in Berkeley, no less) is too busy fawning over just how damn smart Solnit is and how damn articulate she is. Which must count for something if you live a life cloistered from actual feeling and when regular people aren’t nearly as interesting as arcane books intended to be endlessly deconstructed by gray pates.

I should point out that it is not anti-intellectualism that fuels this post. Rather, it is context and dimension. Because anyone who publicly declares herself “the love child of Gary Snyder and Susan Sontag” must be taken to task. Anyone who constantly kveteches about the evils of the right-wing in a completely unrelated tangent while expatiating about a French philosopher must be reconsidered.

There were seven of us, including Tito, Scott and several other nice people, at Cody’s Books. We were there to see Solnit, who lives here in San Francisco and has written eight books, including a microhistory called Wanderlust. The latest book is A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which was germinated by a fair enough premise: How to go about finding something unknown to you? Solnit, a self-described cultural historian and activist, was dressed in a close-fitting grey leather jacket, a black top, black jeans, and a faded pink scarf embedded with thin white stripes that suggested an explorer motif. She had a very large head on a very petite body. She stared at the crowd with enormous owl-like eyes that blinked in mechanical measure just above a slight aquiline nose. She had blonde hair with a slight shock of grey, suggesting Sontag’s famous white streak, just above her right temple.

I liked her best when she was mispronouncing French terms. I liked her best when she drifted away from lecture mode. She was better slinging unexpected malapropisms. Because this insinuated a well-read and potentially down-to-earth person with a self-deprecating sense of humor. A human who might just communicate with the layman or, if not that, anyone with a bit of a brain. A human who might be viscerally as well as intellectually lost.

Unfortunately, when Solnit read, the hauteur was laid thick. There was a pompous and elitist New England intonation when she read from her pages that suggested the worst aspects of NPR. It did not help matters that she would follow her sentences with a deep sniff, as if expecting to engage in an obnoxious breathing contest with Parisian intellectuals.

Never mind that what she read was quite interesting. First, she noted the history of maps, pointing out how Las Vegas was developing so fast that it required a new map every month so that parcels could be delivered and residences could be found. She referened terra incognita and referred to San Francisco as the mysterious island attached to North America. But when she read and when she lectured, it sounded like some soporific narration from the Discovery Channel. This may have had something to do with the microphone volume, which meant hunching close to the mike so that the folks in the back could hear.

But it also may very well be that Solnit is too institutionalized to see the real world. After all, she did refer to Novato, the city where a good deal of my extended family lives, as the “redneck part of Marin.” Never mind that an average home there goes for $366,921.

Solnit confessed that she “had a lot of fun with tangled tangential narratives” when writing the book. I’ve had a lot of fun with terms that are too intricate to vocalize myself, but you wouldn’t catch me announcing such an unfortunate phrase in public. And she described the sensation of being lost, only to describe how she perceived the color blue and her take on country music. During eight rounds of questions, I kept my hand patiently raised, wanting to ask her how settling on pure constructs and ideas actually led to one genuinely being lost. After all, wasn’t the idea of being lost visceral? Didn’t it involve letting the mind go and, if returning to a terrain, recapturing the initial lost feeling you felt when first discovering it? If one knew the intellectual terrain, then the sensation of being lost was, to my mind, emotionally challenged.

But Solnit, perhaps seeing my wry smile, passed. Even when Tito tried to get Solnit to remark on how her sensation of San Francisco compared to Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Solnit evaded the issue, preferring to expatiate on another subject, rather than convene with another thinking mind who wanted to understand where she was coming from.

Here were some of the pronouncements uttered midway through Solnit’s responses:

• “The self is a trauma” without any real elaboration on this idea.
• “Socrates always wins, even though he’s so annoying.”
• A brief allusion to a “punk rock youth,” presumably to establish streetcred.

Solnit also made reference to being “cross-examined” on a hour-long radio show (“a weird interview”) shortly before her hegira to safety and unquestioning mass acceptance across the Bay. The radio show hosts in question had dared to ask Solnit about what she intended by the title.

The Berkeley liberal crowd ate Solnit up like a rock star. One almost expected them to touch Solnit’s hem when she was done. A father asked Solnit how he could instill the spirit of “being lost” within offspring. Call me crazy, but parenting advice from a deconstructionist is never a sound proposition. One woman declared that in light of Solnit’s ability to get lost in her native environment, she couldn’t “possibly imagine how you’d get lost on an exotic cantina!” Another commented upon how “musical” Solnit’s voice was, presumably confusing hollow etherealness for an actual key.

Solnit’s strategy seemed to be to evade any question asked of her, throwing in a Walter Benjamin reference or two, and speaking without so much as an “uh” or “ah.” Although again, there were plenty of prerigged sniffs.

Rather interestingly, Solnit had been told by some unknown representative that she needed to repeat all questions and flattering remarks to her bookstore audience.

The book, incidentally, had been padded out because Solnit’s editor told her that a handful of chapters was not long enough to sell her book. So four chapters, chronicling “The Blue of Distance” were inserted among Solnit’s ruminations upon the issue of being lost.

But my general conclusion was that the real person who was lost was Solnit herself, no matter what her strengths on paper. Perhaps more than she knew.

[RELATED: Scott Esposito’s account of the event. Also, Tito offers a Consumer Reports-style comparison of the Ames and Solnit readings.]

[UPDATE: Mere Observation wonders if I’m being “too assholian” with this post. Again, I was very clear to explain from the onset that my opinion reflected Solnit’s public persona — a valid perspective, given that Solnit went out of her way to compare herself with one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. To refrain from anything less than an honest assessment here would be to serve injustice upon what I experienced. Nor was I completely negative in my depiction, as I’m sure the above will attest. However, in hindsight, I should point out that I find myself willing to subscribe more towards Scott’s view, which laid the onus at the crowd.]

Ask Yahoo looks into the origin of “peanut gallery” — a term that I’ve been enamored by over the years, perhaps because the idea of happy elephants enjoying a show (itself a fixation that goes back to my love of the film Fantasia) has always appealed to me. Not that I associate cheaper seats with elephants or anything, but this term that has always played tricks on my associative mind.

In any event, Ask Yahoo claims that the term predates Howdy Doody, dating back to 1888 in American theatres. The theory making the rounds is that people who sat in cheap seats often ate peanuts. But if I have a hunch this isn’t entirely correct. If these cheaper seats were the cost of “peanuts,” then it’s also possible that the “peanut gallery” may have come into popularity from this slang defintion. In the case of a theatre, a gallery is a roofed promenade or a long passage. So we’re talking about “peanuts” that were either fixed in place (as in seats for “peanuts”) or the sitting nature of theatregoers who were eating peanuts.

The question here is whether or not the affluent theatregoers actually went out of their way to crane their heads at people eating peanuts, or whether the “peanuts,” so to speak, drew attention to themselves:

The Word Detective weighs in with this:

The topmost tier (what we would call “the nosebleed seats” today) was the gallery, where the less affluent patrons ended up. Many of these folks were not shy about expressing their opinions when they found the performance lacking, and often employed the peanuts they bought to munch as handy missiles to get the actors’ attention. Thus, “peanut gallery” gradually took on its figurative meaning of “rowdy rabble.”

No doubt peanuts themselves were as noisy to eat back then as they are now, with considerable shell-cracking to boot. But there doesn’t seem to be anything I can find that corroborates what was served back then. If anyone is an expert on snacks that were served in theatres before the turn of the century, I’d definitely be curious to hear from them.

It is worth noting that peanuts were quite popular in the 1890s. George Washington Carver promoted the peanut as a replacement for the cotton crop, which had been decimated by the weevil. Only a decade or so later, all sorts of devices had been created to harvest peanuts in droves. So the transplant of the Brazilian nut must have taken a major hold upon both American life and, accordingly, American language.

Jumping off from this Book Standard article by Jessa Crispin, here is a list of cliches to be found in any article written about comic books. I urge all reviewers to please clip this list next to their typewriters before sending out a query.

1. Comic books: They’re not just for kids anymore!
2. Comic books: They tackle adult themes!
3. Comic books: They’re not lower-class art!
4. Comic books: They tell personal stories!
5. The Egyptians had hieroglyphics. Today, we have comic books!
6. Comic books as the great equalizer among audiences.
7. The obligatory comparison to Art Spiegelman.
8. The obligatory comparison to Frank Miller.
9. Comic books: It’s about the sense of wonder!
10. Well, wouldn’t you know it, graphic novels really are literature!

Bobbie-B chats with Ian McEwan. Among the most shocking revelation: Birnbaum doesn’t celebrate April Fool’s Day! There’s no mention of Saturday‘s parallels to Mrs. Dalloway, but this probably has to do with time constraints more than anything else.

I’m about as depressed as one can be over that a slick motherfucker like John Roberts, a man infinitely worse than Scalia, is now being seriously considered for the Supreme Court. His record shows wild-eyed ideology rather than a bilateral concern for upholding the law. We’re talking about a man who wants to decimate the separation between church and state and a man who is seriously against a woman’s right to choose — despite the fact that the majority of Americans want Roe vs. Wade to be upheld.

This is a man who wrote in 1990: “We continue to believe that Roe [vs. Wade] was wrongly decided and should be overruled…. The Court’s conclusion in Roe that there is a fundamental right to an abortion … finds no support in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution.”

I guess Roberts didn’t read the first paragraph: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Last I checked, “domestic Tranquility” and “general Welfare” involved a woman having the right to choose in the 21st century. It involved a family having children when the parents were ready, so that they would be in a better position to provide the appropriate care and emotional and financial support to ensure that a child can grow up in a safe and nurturing environment rather than a broken home.

If the Democrats do not filibuster this man, if they do not do their damnedest to ensure that we don’t live in a Handmaid’s Tale-like universe of backalley abortions, then they are nothing less than culpable.

I urge everyone who cares to write your Senator and urge him or her to fight this nomination.

From NARAL: Tell your Senator!

[UPDATE: Slate has an article on Roberts’ stand on civil liberties, specifically in the Hamdan v. Rushdie case. Needless to say, the opinion that Roberts penned is troubling for anyone concerned about due process and the Geneva Convention.]

Scott Esposito offers an article about litblogs for Rain Taxi. Not a man to explore an issue without looking at it from multiple angles, Scott notes that the current litblog structure “presents a threat of insularity” and notes that “even the best litblogs sometimes feature typos or half-formed thoughts.”

I’ve had a few unfortunate run-ins with cat ladies — more, quite frankly, than a thirtysomething man deserves. The incidents in question have been so harrowing and traumatic that I have actually pined for an unfortunate run-in with a cat burglar, if only to draw a distinction between literal robbing and the very particular robbing of the soul that only cat ladies are capable of.

My first long-term experience with a cat lady occurred shortly after my apartment burned down — the very night that Republicans took both houses on a cold November night in 2002. I needed a room to rent. My charred out bedroom would not do. At least that’s what the Department of Health said.

In the course of flophousing, I became used to cats. At one point during my subsequent week of couch-crashing, one friend’s cat, one of the most enormous felines that I have ever encountered, had supplanted its torso upon my legs over night. When I awoke the next morning, it took ten minutes for the blood to rush to my legs. And it was impossible for me to stand. It took ten minutes of strenuous punching upon various leg patches above my knee to walk like all the other humans. Of course, I didn’t complain. Even when I spent much of that week hobbling, explaining my temporary physical affliction to prospective roommates.

I suppose this fantastic cat-clumping experience inured me momentarily to the threat of cat ladies. I was blinded by the prospect of having my own space again. So I moved in with a cat lady — or rather a cat lady in situ. I didn’t know it at the time. It was still in its early formation. She had two cats and spent most of her time inside. She would kiss the cats between the ears and tell them lengthy personal tales that went on for no less than three hours. Never mind that I always said hello when I came home. Apparently, two cats were worth more than one human.

Things reached an impasse when the cat lady claimed that she could “hear me typing through the walls” and when she started keeping track of when I would come home from a night out. What disturbed me was that she kept such precise figures. “You came home at 2:32 AM,” she’d say. And there was the time that I did this cat lady’s dishes to be nice. I heard a tiny rap upon my bedroom door and instead of a thank you, she asked in a barely audible voice if I could “just wring out the sponge a little more when I was done with it.”

I asked friends and family if this was normal behavior. And within months I departed, only to encounter another cat lady at a job I worked for a short time. This lady would avoid work whenever possible and she would spend most of her time calling random people on the phone, trying to find homes for her cats. She did this all in an adenoidal singsong voice. I wish her well, but needless to say, in six months, I only saw her smile once. And that was when I stubbed my toe.

The upshot of this is that I’m nervous around cat ladies. There is something about the accumulation of cats that causes the mind to turn into muesli.

But now it’s been reported that there are also cat gentlemen! This affliction is no longer gender-specific.

Chicago Tribune: “Hare, 71, is one of the world’s foremost experts on psychopaths. He developed the ‘Psychopathy Checklist,’ which has been used to diagnose psychopaths for 25 years, and the ‘P-Scan,’ which is widely used by police departments to screen out psychopaths among recruits. Hare sees similarities between the psychopaths he has studied — Mafia hit men and sex offenders — and the corporate crooks behind the Enron and WorldCom scandals.”

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “More clever, but equally embarrassing, was the device of explaining the solo acoustic section of the show as a way to give the band a dinner break. ‘It’s time for nourishment'” he said as the band sat on the floor and noshed while he played a sloppy and indifferent cover of Korgis’ 1980 hit, ‘Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime,’ recorded for the ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ soundtrack.”

Wired: “Using random event generators — computers that spew random output — they have participants focus their intent on controlling the machines’ output. Out of several million trials, they’ve detected small but “statistically significant” signs that minds may be able to interact with machines.”

So if you plan on stalking me, you have a great opportunity to do so this week.

If you’re in the San Francisco area, I will be at the Jonathan Ames reading tonight at the Booksmith.

On Wednesday night, I’ll be hopping across the Bay to catch Rebecca Solnit. Word on the street has it that Mr. Esposito and Mr. Perez will also be there.

And although it’s been receiving almost no coverage from my peers (not even panelist Kevin Smokler! for shame!), this City’s annual Books by the Bay is going down this Saturday. It will feature several authors and other book-related happenings, all at the Yerba Buena Gardens. I will be there as well, with a ridiculous collection of electronics attached to my body. I will return here sometime later to offer a sizable report.

And for all you podcasting freaks, there are several (multiple!) episodes of Segundo in the works, many of which will be posted this week and next.

Keep watching the skies.

Ever since finishing Jonathan Coe’s Like a Fiery Elephant quite a while ago, an excellent biography that I will go into length at in another venue (I’m dancing as fast as I can!), I have been extremely curious about reading the works of the biography’s subject, B.S. Johnson. Johnson died tragically young of a suicide, but during his brief life, he dared to publish novels with holes that allowed the reader to “see into the future” (Albert Angelo) and he also infamously published The Unfortunates, which involved pages contained within a box, to be shuffled in whatever order the reader decided.

Well, one Golden Rule Jones has begun the legwork, searching for a copy of Albert Angelo with the holes. And I’ll let his post speak for itself. He also points to this B.S. Johnson Flickr tag. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Complete Review’s coverage of Johnson titles.

Don’t know how I missed it, but if you’re looking for another outlet-centric blog, Emily Gordon’s blog, Emdashes, is New Yorker-centric and also offers a monthly column about writers named Jonathan entitled “Jonathans Are Illuminated.”

There’s now a rumor being floated around that Apple has a Video iPod in the works for September.

I have two words on why such a device will completely and utterly fail: Video Walkman.

Actor Jude Law has expressed “sincere regret” for allowing his penis to take over his body and consummate its desires for nanny Daisy Wright while he was engaged to actress Sienna Miller.

Law issued a statement shortly after his publicists were in the dark about how to spin this, before coming up with an eleventh-hour forthright apology.

“I just want to say that I am deeply ashamed of my manhood. I should have controlled my penis. It should not have controlled me. As I try and weather the storm with Sienna, it is quite likely that I will be having an exclusive hands-on relationship with my penis. For this, I am truly sorry,” said Law.

“There is no defence for any actions that my penis has taken.”

Shortly after this sentence, in a rare appearance, Jude Law’s Penis emerged from Mr. Law’s trousers and begin to speak to reporters.

“She was only caring for one children,” rebutted Jude Law’s Penis. “Surely there was enough time on her hands for two. And frankly, I was getting sick of Jude and Sienna’s hands. The time had come to mix things up.”

Mad Max Perkins has departed the blogosphere, wizard hat and all.

It isn’t easy for me to make this next confession. After all, we’re talking about a medium that has kept me excited, enthused and alive for damn near my entire life. But if the point of this blog is to chronicle the truth, then I have very little choice in the matter.

Anyhow, the confession is this: I have very little desire to go to the movies anymore.

It’s not the obnoxious people. I can handle their cell phones and their terrible cellophane wrappers and their talking through a movie. Years of constant moviegoing has inured me to the rudeness of the American public.

It’s not the prices. Ten bucks isn’t really all that much more than eight bucks. And besides, even at that price, you can at least get a theatrical experience that deafens your eardrums.

What it is, I think, is the fact that the people who produce these movies probably don’t know who John Cassavetes or Federico Fellini were. I get the strong sense that they do not read, let alone live. I get the sense that they no longer have the ability to reduce me to some silent and lifeless hunk of flesh, completely in awe of what has just transpired. Because what it is all about these days is pure profit. It’s about taking something that might have been special to me once (e.g., The Fantastic Four) and reducing the magic to utter idiocy.

I have no desire to patronize their crapola. The last film I paid for was Land of the Dead, and that was only because I inherently trust George Romero.

I am probably the only human being in the world who has not seen The War of the Worlds. Probably because I liked the H.G. Wells novel just fine and I don’t want my fun memories of George Pal’s version to be sullied.

Every time I go to the movies, I see trailers that mean absolutely nothing to me. They fail to delight, to suggest, or to play with my imagination. I presume that this is because I don’t fall within their demographic anymore. And I am forced to conclude that I am either too old or too demanding of my fantasies. Either that or I’d like to think that something is terribly wrong with Hollywood.

But whatever the case, aside from the new Terry Gilliam film, there is not a single film coming out in the next few months that silently demands, “See me.” There is not an upcoming release that I believe will sufficiently take the wind out of my lungs and transport me so completely into its world. Instead, I have had to rely upon DVDs of older films made by people who know and intuitively feel that this is what the cinematic medium is about.

And for this, I am very sad. Because I know the power of the medium. I know that it is a place that can produce something that matters. I know that it is a realm that can demand an intense vicariousness. And it is my hope against all possible hopes that one day, it will do so again.

If there’s any moral to this story (and this subsequent response), it’s this: if you can’t handle people under your employ being more interesting than you are, then perhaps the unlived life is not worth examining, let alone selling it to the Gray Lady for opportunistic payola.

The SFist has the big-time local scoop on the current war between the Media Workers Guild and the San Francisco Chronicle. Needless to say, Chronicle management wants to limit the MWG’s ability to strike in solidarity. They are also calling for major wage cuts in the area of 2% to 24% and even a wage freeze through the end of the year. Needless to say, with these kinds of “negotiations,” a strike looks very likely in the cards.

Some months ago, we promised nonstop Jonathan Ames coverage. Now we lapsed badly on that score. In fact, we lapsed so badly that not even the Unitarian Universalist Church will take us in.

But hopefully we can provide penance by informing you that Jonathan Ames is on another book tour — this time, for the paperback release of Wake Up, Sir!, which is not only a very funny book but a loving homage to P.G. Wodehouse’s Worcester-Jeeves novels. (Yes, kids, before Ask Jeeves blasphemized the canon, there were many funny books written about a butler named Jeeves.) Fortunately, Ames has taken Jeeves back.

You can find Ames at the following places over the next few weeks:

Tuesday, July 19, 7PM: Booksmith, 1644 Haight Street, San Francisco, CA.

Friday, July 22, 7:30PM: Skylight Books, 1818 North Vermont Ave, Los Angeles, CA (the Los Feliz neighborhood).

Friday, July 29, 7PM: Barnes & Noble, Astor Place, New York City, NY.

If you’re in the San Francisco area, the incomparable Tito Perez and I will be at the Booksmith. Feel free to stop by and say hello.

You may not realize this, but I’ve spent the past five years writing a novel in code. The novel in question features a good deal of sex between an alcoholic Jesuit and a recovering politician, several fingers that are accidentally cut off in a shredder and sold for a stunning amount on eBay, and a lengthy section describing how to make the best chili con carne. The novel is entitled “:)” and while I don’t have $14,000 to offer, for anyone who can decode the text, I will buy them a beer.

The text follows:

”
!-?
(o)(o)
===|>
:(?
!!!!

Okay, so given that last post, it’s clear that we’re too hostile to blog. So to combine the best of both worlds (one being benign cuteness, the other being a decidedly perverted sensibility), we conclude this week with unicorn porn, where a young girl’s sunny bedroom decor walks hand-in-hand with an adolescent male’s worst fantasies. Enjoy!

See you on Sunday with the Brownie Watch.

On yesterday’s Radio Open Source show, Steve Wasserman (the former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review) said the following:

The best reading experience is to occupy your time with the worthy dead rather than the ambitious living.

So if I am to understand the Wasserman logic correctly:

If you’re Richard Powers, William T. Vollmann, or Nadeem Aslam — if you’re an author hoping to break outside of the so-called “fun and fast-paced” mould (a descriptive phrase that is perhaps better applied to a rollercoaster or a mercy fuck), sorry, kids! No consolation prize for you! You’re too ambitious, too “dense” and too challenging for today’s readers. You say you’ve got a novel that breaks outside the middle-aged, upper middle-class Caucasian male midlife crisis mode? Tough shit, honey. Because the publishing marketplace is all about the next Harry Potter or Dan Brown — or the next book you can wolf down in one evening. And even then, you’re no better than anyone else until the maggots are on you like a Las Vegas buffet, and some member of the hoary-haired literati offers the obligatory reconsideration article for Harper’s. And that’s assuming you can beat the odds and turn out a steady body of work.

It’s small wonder that with this kind of fey dichotomy, which must pass in Wasserman’s microcephalic headspace as sine qua non wit, the LATBR turned into a travesty and left Wasserman storming out of the gate. What right does Wasserman have to talk about ambition, when his very capitulation demosntrated how unwilling he was to compromise with top brass and maintain some semblance of a weekly book review section? His very actions proved to the world that he was anything but ambitious. This was a man who refused to fight, or grew tired of fighting, or just wanted a more comfortable role than the buffer between his audience and the men behind the curtain.

But never mind this.

Wasserman’s statement is preposterous because the very form of the novel has evolved precisely because of efforts from the ambitious living. Readers have long supped upon the fruits of ambition and writers themsleves have developed as a result of it. If we go back to the eighteenth century, a period in which the novel developed as a seminal art form, we find Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) as the first novel that attempted to merge a narrative with manners and a widely influential epistolary novel. It proved to be both controversial (because of its voyeurism and sentimentalism) and a bestseller — you might call it The Da Vinci Code of its day. But its very ambition not only spawned imitators hoping to cash in, but Henry Fielding’s parodies Shamela and The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews. Fielding’s approach in these novels went beyond mere satire. His very ambition turned Joseph Andrews in a vibrant character and, in turn, led him to write The Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great (1743), an ironic high point that was also a merciless attack on Walpole, and of course his masterpiece Tom Jones.

Or if that’s not enough, consider the influence of F. Scott Fitzgerald upon Ernest Hemingway. It would be difficult to argue that Fitzgerald, a man who could never within a then colossal $25,000 income, was anything less than ambitious. And it was Fitzgerald who gave pivotal input on The Sun Also Rises just before it was sent out to Maxwell Perkins. And given The Sun Also Rises‘ influence upon prose and modern behavior, introducing Paris and Pampolona in such a vivid way to millions of readers at the time. Would these audiences have experienced nearly the same locales had they frittered their time with the “worthy dead?” Or had not Fitzgerald’s ambition coaxed Hemingway to cut a chapter and a half (one of the more substantial changes in the book)?

If Wasserman genuinely believes that a night spent imbibing some dead Caucasian is the apex of reading achievement, then that’s his business. But no matter how far back you go, even these dead souls were inspired by the ambitions of their living peers. Competition was perhaps one motivation, but encouragement from people who gave a damn about literature (whether writers, editors, or audiences) was another. The point is that these authors cared enough to offer their very best, to sustain an environment where literature evolves, and to in turn inspire other authors and readers alike.

In Wasserman’s case, to discount ambition and influence with such a vapid statement, to appear contrarian through an unsuccessful bon mot that makes little sense and is not qualifiable, is not only contrary to the purpose of literature, but it’s ass-backwards when considering how people experience literature.

Because of this, I thank the heavens that this cuckoo is no longer editing a book review section for a major newspaper.

• Nicole Ritchie is becoming a novelist, drawing upon her own life experience for the book. That includes a particularly dark period as a drug addict. Says Ritchie: “I think sometimes when people think of the word drug addict they think the word dirty, under a bridge, like, really rock bottom. You don’t have to be that person to be an addict.” Of course! If you’re lucky enough, there’s always the sanctity and security of your family’s palatial estate during a withdrawal period. With butlers!
• Julian Barnes talks about his new book.
• Publishers are using fake websites to publicize books.
• Clive Barker forthcoming projects: two films and a 500-page book with naughty text and illustrations called The Scarlet Gospels about “a man with pins in his head.” Hmmm…shouldn’t Barker call this one Cockraiser instead?

The New York Times: “Now the popularity of yoga has left practitioners – 16.5 million in the United States alone, according to a 2005 Yoga Journal survey – with so many mats, and so much confusion. They come in cotton, synthetics and rubber. Some are thin, some are padded, and some are futon-thick.”

• L. Frank Baum
• J.G. Ballard
• Marion Zimmer Bradley
• William S. Burroughs
• L. Sprague de Camp
• Angela Carter
• Philip Jose Farmer
• M. John Harrison
• Ursula K. Le Guin
• Fritz Lieber
• Richard Matheson
• China Mieville
• Michael Moorcock
• Mervyn Peake
• Jack Vance
• Connie Willis
• Gene Wolfe
• Roger Zelazny

[UPDATE: And here are 18 more from Ms. Bond, who is more knowledgeable of this genre than I am. I too would add Kelly Link to the list, along with Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, George R.R. Martin, and Philip Pullman — to name but only a few.]

[UPDATE 2: A call from Matt Cheney for Harry Potter alternatives.]