While you await the inevitable long-form posts:

CURRENT AFFAIRS:

• Portuguese poet Eugenio de Andrade has died. He was 82.
• The San Francisco Chronicle declares Michael Houellebecq one of the “most compelling novelists today.” He’s also been claimed the “most hated man in Europe.” No word yet on whether Houllebecq will be accused of molesting an infant or whether he will be appearing as a mafioso in an upcoming reenactment of the Kefauver trials for Court TV.
• Is there a detente in literary London?
• Apparently, there’s a concerted effort to break the long-term reading record. 100 hours of continuous reading, according to Guinness. That doesn’t seem so tough, but then I’m an inveterate reader and an insomniac..
• Who is Trevanian?
• Lionel Shriver: “I acted like a man.” That still doesn’t explain the way she kissed her Orange Award.
• Apparently, there’s another version of No Exit written by “John-Paul Sartre.” Was this Jean-Paul’s brother? Or some fly-by-night impostor? Hopefully, the Centre Daily Times fact checkers here will be more diligent in their pursuits than their copyeditors.
• Current theatrical plays are “excellent television scripts” but very few “really show a sense of how to write for the theatre.” That’s the verdict of some anonymous literary manager at a theatre. But if theatre is transforming into what is essentially live television (and the many “theatrical” reenactments of films and television, with their one-man performances of the Star Wars trilogy and the like suggest that this is the case), the interesting question here is how theatre can draw in the short attention spans while remaining true theatre.
• And we’ll be a lot less lazier than this when we offer our final BEA upcoming titles post.

STEPHEN DIXON: For those who caught my post at the LBC site this morning, here’s some more Dixon info:

• Small Mouth Press interview: Dixon has published 425 stories and has “another fifty stories” lying around.
• Stephen Dixon on Thomas Bernhard: Was Dixon influenced by Bernhard’s long paragraphs? (Rain Taxi)
• “Shoe” — early excerpt from I (from 1999).
• From McSweeney’s: J. Robert Lennon, Jonathan Lethem, a Dixon interview, and another excerpt from I.
• Stephen Dixon at work.
• Excerpt from Phone Rings.

Several unexpected obligations and occurrences over the weekend (resulting in lack of sleep) pretty much derailed my update plans and I’m still catching up. But I hope to get the final BEA post, the latest Tanenhaus watch, and my thoughts on the book-length version of James Kuntsler’s The Long Emergency up in the next few days. In the meantime, I’ve posted a writeup of the book I nominated for the LBC.

• Which famous modern American poet are you? (Me: Sylvia Plath, apparently.) (via Gwenda)
• There’s an interesting niche blog, Living with Legends, which caters to books for residents of the Hotel Chelsea. This is a nice supplement to the literary map of Manhattan.
• The new Bookslut issue is up and there’s a good interview with Jon Scieszka.
• Still behind on email backlog. Bear with me.
• And my final BEA post should go up sometime this weekend (I hope).

In 2003, Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police chronicled the often ridiculous lengths that school textbook publishers resort to not to offend anyone. For example, according to some of the mandates, a dinosaur can’t be mentioned because this implies the theory of evolution. Further, no stories or pictures of a mother cooking dinner are allowed because this reinforces a stereotype. (Unsurprisingly, many of these ideas, which involve preposterous gender-neutral rephrasings of questions and promoting abstinence over contraception, were whipped up by McGraw-Hill. One professor, Sean G. Massey, was so furious that he initiated a boycott.)

As if publishing approaches to school textbooks wasn’t absurd enough, McGraw-Hill is now hoping to target children in Canada with ads placed within their textbooks. The Toronto Star reports that McGraw-Hill has been “quietly trying to coax companies into buying advertising space in their texts.”

McGraw-Hill has a history of doing this. In 1999, a McGraw-Hill mathematics textbook featured an equation asking students to figure out how much money they needed to save to buy a pair of Nikes. The outcry resulted in AB 116, banning commercial images in public school textbooks in California.

Hopefully, the Canadians might take a cue from this.

A House subcommittee has voted to cut all federal funds for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting within two years. That’s $400 million a year, comparative chump change in the federal budget, to destroy a broadcasting conduit that offers educational and alternative programming to the public.

These creeps truly want the public to remain uneducated. Super Bowl, yes. Sesame Street and Frontline, no.

I’ve been on an Anthony Burgess kick lately. But what I didn’t realize was that back in 1984, Burgess offered a list of the Best 99 Modern Novels between 1939 and 1984, novelists who “have added something to our knowledge of the human condition.”

As can be expected, James Joyce and Flann O’Brien are there. But there are some quirky choices too, such as David Lodge’s How Far Can You Go?, J.G. Ballard’s The Unlimited Dream Company, John O’Hara’s wildly ambitious The Lockwood Concern and Erica Jong’s How to Save Your Own Life.

Beyond this list, there are some interesting revelations about Burgess in the article. For one, Burgess once had “the notion of writing a fiction of a dying man who sees the unfolded Times on his bed and deliriously traces all his past life as though it were the content of that newspaper – news items, editorials, crossword puzzle, everything.” The other thing, and it’s perhaps an invaluable piece of info for those impoverished souls who left BEA with copious swag, is that when Burgess wrote book reviews for the Yorkshire Post, the local post office had to hire additional staff to take in the book parcels. Further, since Burgess was paid a pittance, every two weeks, Burgess would pack two book-filled suitcases and sell all of his review copies at half price.

• Like the Rake, Professor Fury sings the praises of Jack Butler and reminds me that I’ve yet to pick a Butler book up. The situation will be corrected this week.
• And speaking of the Rake, he finds the real reason to flip through Bookmark Now. And unsurprisingly, it involves Michelle Richmond.
• Collected Miscellany talks wiith Michelle Herman.
• Randa Jarrar depicts BEA from a cabbie’s perspective. (via Maud)
• Megan has her BEA report up.

I’m still trying to sift through all this BEA data while simultaneously engineering audio for Segundo. I hope to post more things tonight (particularly on details from various publishing houses). The goal is to get done with all this by the end of the week. In the meantime, check out Bud Parr’s extremely comprehensive coverage, which crosses over with mine and covers a few booths I didn’t get a chance to check out.

Here’s the morning roundup:

• Terry Teachout (who sadly was out of town during BEA week) tackles “Culture in the Age of Blogging.”
• Based on some recommendations from trusted people, I’m more interested in Nicole Krauss the writer then Nicole Krauss the person, but, despite my JSF mandate, even I couldn’t resist this profile, which tells how the two met. Apparently, the two met on a blind date. I leave experts to conclude whether it had something to do with Mr. Foer’s email skillz.
• According to a new scientific survey, successful marriages involve comparable education backgrounds, not socioeconomic strata. Interestingly, education affects the speed at which couples marry and have children. Maybe this explains all those crushes I had on teachers growing up.
• I didn’t check out the Google Print booth at BEA, but IT World did.
• Clay Evans’ review of Sam Weller’s Bradbury bio reveals some interesting details: Bradbury traveled primarily by roller skates well into his twenties and he was a flamboyant irritant to science fiction authors.
• Apparently, some of the tales from the Brothers Grimm can be traced to women. Scholars believe that women provided these tales to Jacob and Wilhelm, and the Brothers Grimm capitalized upon these stories. Perhaps Terry Gilliam and Ehren Kruger aren’t as far off with their film premise as we figured.
• Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian has received a $2 million advance. It’s an elaborate multi-plotted tale about Vlad the Impaler. The film rights have been picked up by Sony and it has the Susanna Clarke/Michael Faber-style “ten years to write” label written all over it. But is it any good? Laura Miller says it’s good, not great. Publishers Weekly notes that “a lot here lives up to the hype.” The Los Angeles Times thinks its okay, but quibbles with the overwrought prose.
• The Telegraph speaks with Christopher Hitchens. There’s the usual contrarian grenades, including Hitch confessing that he doesn’t find Marilyn Monroe beautiful.
• Yet another example of BEA covered with an amateurish glitterati angle: Wynonna Judd and Kim Catrall described as “leading thinkers.”
• This week’s upcoming film horrors: The Banger Sisters’ Bob Dolman making How to Eat Fried Worms and Akiva Goldman writing a remake of The Poseiden Adventure for Wolfgang Petersen.
• A collection of celebrities playing table tennis (via the Morning News)
• While I was out of town, a man broke the six-and-a-half-hour endurance test at the Masturbate-a-thon.
• Notepad Invaders (via Quiddity)
• Editing Hunter S. Thompson (via Kitabkhana)

Chip McGrath has an interesting essay on social class in American novels (and culture in general), suggeesting that the poor were quite invisible in fiction until the turn of the 19th century and that a substantial portion of 20th century novels have been devoted to a long tradition of upward mobility worship. McGrath accuses American culture of turning its back on blue-collar life and suggests, “If Gatsby were to come back today, he would come back as Donald Trump and would want a date not with Daisy but with Britney. And if Edith Wharton were still writing, how could she not include a heavily blinged hip-hop mogul?”

We here at Return of the Reluctant take considerable pride in exposing the pressing issues of our time. This includes, of course, the very seminal subject of female orgasms. Interestingly enough, nobody had thought to determine if there was a biological basis for orgasms. Until now.

The answer is yes, indeedy, there is a genetic basis. The results will be published in the August 2005 issue of The American Society of Human Genetics (not yet available online).

But it’s not encouraging. Somewhere between 34-45% of the variation between the ability to orgasm and the inability to orgasm can be explained by heredity. Tim Spector of St. Thomas’ Hospital in London effected these results by using 1,397 pairs of twins, both identical and non-identical.

Criminally, one in three women said they never or infrequently had an orgasm. 14% always had an orgasm during intercourse. 34% always had an orgasm during masturbation.

The hypothesis going around is that the women who can’t obtain an orgasm are more likely to be born and thus the unlikely orgasm trait will be carried over. Why? Well, Spector speculates that women who orgasm too easily aren’t as skillful in selecting potent partners.

If that’s the case, does this mean that female partners who continually use birth control of some kind (or who have no children or fewer children) are more likely to have an orgasm? Raising a kid is certainly no picnic and I would speculate that the higher stress that mothers suffer is going to affect their ability to orgasm. But if there is a genetic predisposition (as Spector concludes)that truly prevents women from achieving orgasm, then at the risk of drawing the wrath of the multitudes here, I’m curious whether there’s a chromosomal corollary between the ability to orgasm and (a) wanting to have a child, (b) willingly placing one’s self continuously in stressful situations (i.e., not being able to relax enough to have an orgasm), and (c) being less inclined to use birth control.

For the men who hope to use this information as an excuse to cop out after ten minutes, I should remind them that sexual intercourse is an act that involves two people in which both are equally culpable or, obversely, equally compatible.

…Lionel Shriver for We Need to Talk About Kevin. Looks like the bookies were wrong.

I’ll have more to say about this nonsense when I get to the Tanenhaus Brownie Watch, but Sarah and Carrie have some interesting thoughts on the chicklit problem.

If you’re interested in heckling a litblogger, you’ve now got the chance. Lizzie Skurnick will be on WYPR‘s Marc Steiner Show from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM (EST) tomorrow afternoon. The call-in number is 410-662-8780.

Last night, I opted to chill out and sleep, seeing as how I hadn’t slept for more than four hours in a week and having a percolating brain to process the copious info I collected was better than being half-asleep at the wheel. This should demonstrate to Mr. Parr that I am, in fact, not as tireless as he claims. But more BEA coverage is coming, along with catching up with the Tanenhaus Brownie Watch backlog and several other fantastic things.

In the meantime, here’s some headlines from the literary front:

• TMFTML unearths a deadly accurate depiction of today’s version of a David Sedaris essay.
• Jose Saramago’s new novel, The Intermittency of Death, will be launched in six nations in Europe and Latin America. There are no details as of yet, but the new book will have “a different style” from previous books. But my guess is that this doesn’t mean much. Given the moribund title, most likely, this means that the limited edition will have a tartan cover instead of a cloth one.
• The bookies believe that Jane Gardam‘s Old Filth will win the Orange Prize tonight. We will find out in one hour, as the prize will be announced at 1845 BST.
• Liars Club author Mary Karr says, “Oh my God! I wake up every day…and I feel like Walt Whitman. I really do. I’ve never been so happy.” We understand that “feeling like Walt Whitman” is a codeword for merging memories with fictional asides and transforming it into a well-received and best-selling “memoir.”
• Even the hallowed Library Journal was seduced by the BEA’s Dark Side (meaning stormtroopers and celebrity).
• Kate Atkinson complains about the “nastiness” of blogs. Well, if we’re so nasty, Kate, I guess we should stop praising you then, eh?
• The marketing for the next Harry Potter is very odd. Rowling will give no interviews to the UK press. And there’s a contest in which 70 youngsters between 8 and 16 will meet Rowling and “grill” her on questions about a book. While it’s doubtful that we’ll find any future Mike Wallaces among this group of urchins, I find it strange that the publisher would go out of their way to ignore journalistic and critical reception. Catering to the readers and fans is one thing, but I predict that, despite the definitive bonanza sales this book will pull in, this ostracized approach may result in a minor backlash.
• Marilyn Monroe’s black book has sold for $90,000 at an auction. Call me practical, but that seems a high price to pay for dead people’s phone numbers. Believe it or not, the book sold more than a painting that Marilyn created.
• Katie Holmes as Wonder Woman?
• “Books are not toys.” Well, you can build your toy house with Lincoln Logs. And I’ll build mine with the 150 books in my bookpile. My guess is that I’ll be having more fun than you, sir.
• Diane Johnson takes a look at several Jane Austen books in the NYRoB. Also, Jonathan Raban on Robert Lowell.

I’m riding on Americanos because of the time difference, but I hope to get some audio and additional reports up tonight. In the meantime, here’s a quick guide to coverage around the blogosphere:

• Ron Hogan weighs in through the conversational front.
• Bud Parr (who had a much swankier camera than I did and who offered a fine argument over why I should take digital photography more seriously) has pictures and impressions from the floor.
• Nathalie has captured the crazy crowd I had to storm through at the “Generation Next” panel and has her own perspective on what went down (part of an ongoing series).
• Publishers Marketplace has some good stuff from bookseller Robert Gray and Sarah Weinman.
• There are some great photos from Mary Reagan being unloaded right now.
• Mark Sarvas is still posting before his flight back to Santa Monica (and this workhorse tells me I get the Pulitzer) and has the goods on the book review embargo panel.
• MJ Rose offers a roundup.
• Cantara Christopher is also posting some quick stuff.

If there are any more floating around (or you’ve authored one), drop me an email.

One thing that the Apple geeks aren’t mentioning about the Intel chip use is something that I see as pretty important. If you were thinking of bolting from PC to Mac because of the DRM invasiveness, Apple is no longer a sanctuary. This is a bad move in more ways than one.

The headline for this USA Today BEA wrapup from Carol Memmott is “Glitterati outshine literati at BookExpo.” That’s funny. Because I saw plenty of small press booths crowded big-time on Friday and Saturday. I saw an NPR reporter talking with Dennis Loy Johnson. I saw oodles of folks converge upon the Independent Consortium party. The list goes on.

Granted, the main booths at Random House and Time Warner were crowded shitstorms. But then I didn’t come to BEA to touch John Irving’s hem. I came to find out about upcoming releases, meet people I had corresponded with, and get a better sense of how the publishing industry operated.

So far, in the reports that have been proffered, there seems to be two common reactions to BEA floating around:

1. Big popular names occluded the little guys.
2. This was a despicable showcase about the “business” of books, rather than books themselves.

In response to Point (1), I should point out that nobody is holding a gun to your head to see Billy Crystal. Nobody is forcing you to waste your time standing for about an hour in line to get two minutes with Spike Lee. BEA is really an experience that an individual makes of it. Reading Carol Memmott’s article, you would think that literary people were nowhere to be found. But the fact of the matter that it was Memmott, a reporter who purports to “cover books” for a major newspaper, who decided that Billy Crystal’s schtick, Candace Bushnell, and Tab Hunter were more important (and I’m giving Memmott a generous margin here) than getting a goofball report (as I did) about Anne Rice’s latest novel or (more nobly) finding out about the interesting novels in translation that Farrar Strauss & Giroux were profiling.

There was no shortage of interesting books at BEA to write about. And there were limitless people to talk to.

Memmott’s article then is not really about books at all, but about a journalist “reporting” who was at the autograph table — information readily available at the BEA main site — and an opportunity to hobnob with Tab Hunter about his sexuality. What then distinguishes this nonsense from a People Magazine profile?

As to Point (2), I don’t necessarily believe that thinking about the publishing of books detracts from the appreciation of books as works of art, provided that one keeps the lines of thought separate. In fact, I’d say that it’s pretty damn essential for us to be thinking about the business of publishing a little bit, if only so we can understand why certain books get published and others don’t. It is the business, as unsavory as it may be, that determines who are the midlisters, who are the A-listers, and who are left ignobly in the remainders piles.

Why then should we ignore it? If book lovers cut this area of thought from their ruminations, then in my view they are no different than the book publishers who often fail to recognize the book community. Maybe it’s the idealist in me, but I personally believe that if this chasm is bridged in some way, that if both sides make an effort to understand each other’s needs, the book climate can only be improved. Literary lovers get the books they want published and publishers discover the conduits in which to make their literary fiction sell.

Part of the problem is that publishers view the publishing business with a “winner take all’ approach. They dwell upon the Billy Crystals and the Candace Bushnells of our world who need to add rumpus rooms to their palatial Park Avenue estates. Memmott is culpable here, because her article is echoing this hard line. The duty here is for all sides to think and act more flexible about literature and to consider that sometimes a small press title or a book distributed through the streets might just turn a profit in its own right. And the duty for all journalists is to remain unseduced by celebrity bloat and realize that 30,000 people descend every year because it’s about the books, stupid.

The tireless Dan Wickett is blogging over at Scott’s and taking full advantage of his stint to offer his comprehensive coverage.

I’ve arrived back in San Francisco. But with all the information I have to process, I’m not done with BEA by a long shot. To get a head start, I started listening to one of the minidiscs on the flight and transcribed the following notes until my laptop battery ran out. (DFW fans, take note. Major details on Consider the Lobster to follow.)

Please note that because my crap is still packed, I’ll be referring to the publishing houses as “they” and “them.” I did in fact speak with specific people, but I want to ensure that I spell their names right. So without further ado:

Again, I can’t convey how cool the people at Soft Skull Press are. Poor Richard Nash was sounding hoarse when Bud and I talked with him at length during the Independent Consortium party. By the time he got to PGW, the poor man was sans voice. But I did want to point to two nonfiction titles on the catalog that were introduced to me: Michael Standaert’s Skipping Towards Armageddon, a takeoff on Joan Didion’s famous book, is an expose that dishes the dirt on the Left Behind series. Equally noteworthy is a collection entitled America’s Mayor, which is critical of Rudolph Guiliani and examines his legacy before 9/11 (a mayorship that seems all too overlooked these days).

I hooked up with the folks at Tor to see if they had any emerging science fiction authors that they were promoting. What’s interesting is that, aside from the next Wheel of Time volume coming nout on October 11 and The Road to Dune (which will collect several previously unpublished Frank Herbert essays), Tor has shifted to an interesting YA emphasis with a new imprint called Starscape. The field is relatively new for them. And it’s a particularly interesting direction for Tor and for science fiction in general, given that Monkeybrain is also specializing in pure speculative adventure anthologies (inspired by the Chabon-edited anthologies for McSweeney’s). If I had to offer a prediction, I think we’re going to be seeing a good deal of books that pay homage to Heinlein-style juvenile fiction and a return to Golden Age-style speculative fiction in the next year or two. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not. On one hand, part of me sees this as a backlash to the prodigious work of China Mieville and John C. Wright. But if both subgenre markets are allowed to flourish, then this is still a good sign that speculative fiction is alive and well.

At St. Martin’s, there’s a hot allegorical title coming in October. And David Maine (who may very well be a smarter Gregory Maguire) has a new retelling of Cain and Abel called The Preservationist. St. Martin’s is also publishing a TPB original novel called Away from You, wirtten by Melanie Finn. The novel tells the tale of a South African woman living in the States who has to go back to her home country and unravel a family mystery.

Not sure how much I got into it with my APE report, but Drawn and Quarterly has a lot of Joe Sacco-style comics journalism titles coming up. War’s End is a followup by Sacco to The Fixer. It’s a collection of two short stories set in Bosnia. [UPDATE: Jessa writes in to let me know that the Sacco pieces have been previously collected and are not, in fact, followups.]

There’s also Baghdad Journal from Steve Mumford. Mumford took three trips to Iraq and drew what he saw there. It’s due out in October. Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang chronicles a French cartoonist who went to North Korea to work for an animation company. He spent three to four months there. The D&Q folks assured me that it had a dark comic tone.

For more traditional titles from D&Q, Seth’s new volume, Wimbledon Dream, is “a complete departure from anything he’s done.” But then that’s the case with nearly anything Seth does. Even so, this volume is in the form of a scrapbook, but, unlike other scrapbooks, it tells a linear narrative. Michael Rabagliati has a follow up to Paul Has a Summer Job called Paul Goes Out, an autobiographical story about getting a first apartment in 1983.

Little Brown has several interesting titles. Rick Moody’s The Diviners is a comic novel set in the movie business about vanity, ambition and the frantic pace of lives. While we’re not all that crazy about Moody, this novel has been declared “ambitious” and has Moody using a broader canvas for his characters. There’s alos a first novel centered around a mother/daughter growing up in Tahiti. (I’ll have the exact name after I unpack.)

Finally, we come to David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster — also set to be published by Little Brown. Here’s what I found out:

• The book comes out in January 2006.
• It includes “about twelve” essays. (The title essay is, of course, the one that appeared in Gourmet.
• The infamous “Host” essay will appear.
• There will be an essay that DFW published under a psuedonym where he attended the Adult Video News Awards, confronted his own shame, and contemplated the desexualizaition of sex.
• One essay’s on Updike, the other’s on Dostoevesky.
• “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” the essay about the 14 year old girl tennis player that DFW knew better than any adult, will be there.
• Apparently, there’s also an essay on language and culture in which DFW uses the publication of the American Usage Guide to talk about what gets put into dictionaries, who lets cerrtain words in, dictionary making, and deconstruction. DFW confronts the decay of language, and how it is enhanced by the publications of these dictionaries. The title page of this essay is in 4 point type and contains hundreds and hundreds of solaces he’s collected over the years.

Also from Little Brown, Walter Mosley has new Easy Rawllins novel coming out. Los Angeles 1967. Easy Rawlins meets hippies. The previous novels were Mosley’s father’s Los Angeles, but this one begins in Mosley’s own Los Angeles (meaning the one that he personally experienced). Apparently, when Mosley was a teenager in 1967, he used to drive to the Sunset Strip and want to be a hippie.

I am now about to collapse. More later.

Also, Mary Reagan (who I was glad to meet) has some great photos up. As does Nathalie.

The mistake I made was to forget about the galleys. I became so wrapped up in talking with many people that I had forgotten the “book” in Book Expo America. While I had a flight to catch in mere hours (I’m at JFK now), there was clearly no other option. Fill as many bags as I could, FedEx them back home, and get the hell out.

The funny thing about this is that if the books had been replaced with, say, a bank vault, this would have the element of despicable crime written all over it. But at BEA, it seems, this behavior is sanctioned, if not outright encouraged. One publicist who had “a big stack of galleys” waiting for me had the sense of humor to unload a colossal 1,400 page book (which I’ll end up reading of course, now that I can’t say no to a longass book).

This probably wouldn’t have happened had Sarah Weinman not been there. Sarah, besides maintaining a great blog, being a supernice person and being wise beyond her years, accompanied me as I talked with many more publicists and was good enough to put up with my fey enthusiasm and brio, which so overwhelmed me that, during some points, it took me more than a minute to introduce the publicist to Sarah (a sin for which I am now stewing in my own personal guilt).

It was Sarah who coined the term “drive-by galleying.” But it was also an effort to meet some of the remaining folks on the floor and get the lowdown on the titles. Curiously, some of them were hesitant about the audio thing. Which begs the question: why be a publicist if you’re afraid of a microphone that’s placed deliberately outside of eye contact so as to not frighten people off?

On Sunday, the floors were gradually dwindling. But people still milled about. There were last minute deals and, at the Farrar Strauss & Giroux table, all the marketing people were huddled around a table eating a bag of Doritos.

But Sarah went above and beyond the call of duty. She offered to FedEx the bags of books back to me. It was Sarah who reminded me that I had a plane to catch. It was Sarah who whittled the bibliophile in me down to brute pragmatism. And for this I remain not only grateful, but indebted. Rest assured the gesture shall be paid in kind. That’s the kind of person she is, and if you haven’t read her blog or met her in person, you’re missing out.

I’m still sitting on an incredible amount of information to process. I have a small time window before my flight. So in lieu of a summary, I’m going to use the time to talk with more people. The rest will have to wait upon my return to San Francisco. (However, if JFK has a wireless connection I can use, I’ll do some posting from there if I have the time.)

I have the complete scoop on David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster directly from DFW’s editor/head publisher himself. Watch these pages.

There was also an unexpected meeting between me and somebody else. It wasn’t Tanenhaus, but the results will be here in visual and audio form. Needless to say, you might be surprised.

Dale Peck, believe it or not, has a children’s book coming out through Bloomsbury.

Megan and I spoke with Chronicle Book Review Editor Oscar Villalon at the PGW party and he gave me a great idea to improve the state of book review coverage in the nation. The insane scheme will probably be unearthed here and at Bookdwarf.

Maud Newton is a standout lady. And all the bloggers I met here proved to be fantastic people. If you’re ever in New York, I highly recommend hooking up with these folks.

Cake?

Moleskine junkies: They’ve got a new product. It’s a reporter’s notebook, which means that the binding is at the top. Still has the pocket and it’s been proving quite handy. Moleskine was kind enough to get me a copy. Certain Moleskine addicts managed to walk away with considerably more. I’m not naming names.

Whoever created the ridiculous Subtalk ads on the subway is a genius. They are quite comically alarmist. One, for instance, has a man gripping the outside part of a closed subway door, and hanging on as the subway moves. The ad declares in bold letters: “This man might lose his life!” Either New York has people who regularly do this or some guy did this and there was a major wrongful death suit. Either way, to think that the MTA would spend money on such an ad, for such a minor problem, is a funny thought. Someone clue me in.

The crowd here is starting to thin out, but there are still people to meet and books to pick up. A full summary of upcoming titles will be coming in the next day or two. We never sleep around here.