Without even bothering to read the book in question (David McCullough’s 1776), professor David Greenberg has declared war on popular history in a two part argument on Slate. Specifically, Greenberg suggests that McCullough’s “surfeit of scene-setting and personality, the meager analysis and argument, the lack of a compelling rationale for writing about a topic already amply covered” will drive Greenberg and his academic colleagues up the wall.

Greenberg’s assault is largely composed of ad hominen tactics and arguments without support. Without citing any specific examples (the stuff that one would expect from a professor), he has declared popular history “vapid mythmaking that uninformed critics ratify as ‘magisterial’ or ‘definitive.'” But if the alternative to popular historians along the lines of Stephen Ambrose or Will Durant is a populist reading public that is not concerned or curious about history, I have to wonder why popular history is such a bad thing.

In a paragraph on academic vs. popular history, Greenberg bemoans doctorates who “command little scholarly respect” — again, without citing examples or clarifying why. He then points to an anti-Zinn Michael Kazin essay that is similarly sparse with its supportive examples (the Greenberg argumentative approach in a nutshell). (Kazin, for example, complains, “The doleful narrative makes one wonder why anyone but the wealthy came to the United States at all and, after working for a spell, why anyone wished to stay,” apparently not aware that it remains a triusm that, irrespective of class, families, sometimes lacking resources to migrate, will subject themselves to misery to (a) survive and pine for a better tomorrow and (b) insure that their families are taken care of.)

Even more curious, Greenberg takes offense to journalists who write about the past ending up in scholarly footnotes. But if a journalist has confirmed a fact or talked with a primary source to confirm a detail, how is this any different from what a scholarly historian does? It would be difficult, for example, to accuse bestselling biographer Robert A. Caro of being anything less than thorough in his lifelong work on Lyndon B. Johnson. His footnotes alone could probably squash out an ant colony.

Then with a hasty conclusion, Greenberg concludes, “institutional status hardly correlates with quality.” I absolutely agree. In fact, I’d argue it from a radically different perspective. After all, it was a self-taught amateur (Heinrich Schliemann) who discovered the ruins of Troy. A history book, whether popular or scholarly, is subject to whatever level of scrutiny the public (or academics) will give to it. But to suggest that a wall between academic and popular history exists is to remain inflexible to the transitory nature of books and scholarship. For those who insist upon maximum scholarship, that market will always exist — if not in books, then through communications among scholars.

One sizable problem with Greenberg’s argument is that it is laced with a strange contempt. At one point, Greenberg openly confesses his jealousy to losing a job because of another man’s dissertation, but he also proudly confesses his deliberate ignorance of its contents. Is the inability to read what you’re criticizing the stuff of scholarship? I would certainly hope not.

Greenberg also complains about radical histories being “tinged with a sentimental celebration of ‘average Americans’ that no more prods us to critical reflection than does a Richard Brookhiser biography of Alexander Hamilton.” So if I understand Greenberg correctly, it’s apparently a mistake to comb over the everyday people who populate this planet in favor of the leaders, artists and sundry mighty figures who were essentially history’s administrators (rather than the people who voted for a leader or, as Goldhagen has chronicled, those who followed genocidal orders without question). Furthermore, Greenberg fails to elucidate us on what he considers “sentimental.” For example, if the reader stares into the famous Dorothea Lange photo, “Migrant Mother,” one will indisputedly have a “sentimental” reaction. But to cover, say, the Great Depression without referencing this would overlook a seminal photograph that captured a moment at a particular time. Is it the historian’s fault that the reader actually feels sad by the photo?

While Greenberg seems completely adverse to the notion of popular history (he is more a booster of the academic beating out the easy explainer), he does have a few solid points about how histories, whether academic or popular, can be improved. In particular, Greenfield’s second part, while directed towards academics, is far more constructive on this topic.

Greenberg does have a good point when he bemoans the cult of personality now coveted by historians. If I had my way, I’d suggst that certain academics be wiped from the face of television after five appearances on Charlie Rose. If you’re a historian pining for an east wing to add to your palatial home, then become a ruthless capitalist, not a talking head.

I concur with Greenberg when he suggests that analysis should co-exist hand-in-hand with narrative, although I would suggest that something be left for the reader’s perspective. And I also agree that banishing jargon isn’t the answer. I would suggest that publishing books which explain things in clear and understandable terms are part of the answer. For example, last year, I read a book by David Bodanis called E=MC² that went to the trouble of explaining nearly every part of Einstein’s famous equation. I was finally able to understand not only what the damn thing meant, but how it influenced thermodynamics in the process.

Greenberg is also right to point to historian Christine Stansell’s review of Edmund Morris’ Theodore Rex, pointing out that history without varying context or new perspectives fails to ensure a fresh perspective. Then again, this is only one example, not several. One could also also argue that there’s plenty of fresh perspectives in popular history. What of Joseph Ellis’ American Sphinx, which focused exclusively on Thomas Jefferson’s character? I’m curious to know if Greenfield considers this a novelty or a contextual triumph. And are we to discount Ellis’ Founding Brothers, which used Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians as the inspriation for its comparative portrait of figures from the Revolutionary War?

Greenfield provides an interesting perspective, but I’m troubled by his generalizations and his inflexibility to certain fields of history. He says that “we need critics who will expose the perils of the historical blockbuster trend and show us more substantial ways to think about the past,” but I would argue that there is plenty of criticism out there already.

Since Greenfield didn’t bother to check out review coverage, I’ll do it for him. Here are some review excerpts for David McCullough’s books:

On John Adams:

Sean Wilentz writing in The New Republic: “In conveying so much about Adams’s goodness, in vivid and smooth prose, McCullough slights Adams’s intellectual ambitions, his brilliance and his ponderousness, his pettiness and his sometimes disabling pessimism. McCullough scants, in other words, everything that went into rendering Adams the paradox that he was: a great American who would prove virtually irrelevant to his nation’s subsequent political development. And in its very smoothness and vividness, McCullough’s life of Adams is useful also in another way. It gives a measure of the current condition of popular history in America, in its strengths but also–rather grievously–in its weaknesses.”

Michael Waldman in The Washington Monthly: “This is not a tome for scholars, or for those who want a detailed rendering of political differences between Federalists and Republicans. At times the reader wonders if the prickly Boston lawyer is being subtly reworked into Give-‘Em-Hell John.”

And in the most recent New Yorker, Joshua Micah Marshall writes: “McCullough, whose books include superb biographies of John Adams and Harry S. Truman, rarely finds his way into clashes of ideas or vast impersonal forces. (The word “equality” gets its only mention halfway through the book.) This is history at the ground level, sometimes even a few inches below.”

All of these reviews criticize McCullough’s smooth-as-silk approach to history. However, none of them suggest alternative paths about how we should look and chart history. At the very least, we should probably thank Greenfield for reminding us to ask that very question.

[UPDATE: Kevin at Collected Miscellany also weighs in.]

The folks at the University of Texas at Austin have decided to do away with books for undergraduates. 90,000 volumes in the undergraduate libraries will be replaced by something called an “electronic information commons.” Instead of doing research by sifting through magazines, tracking through footnotes to determine primary sources, and otherwise performing the bare minimum of research that a properly investigated and fact-checked essay requires, books are to be done away with because students aren’t using them. What’s even more distressing is that the students are being encouraged by librarians and professors.

The book medium itself is a trusty format. It can be read and reread. It can be started or stopped at any point. It can persused at any speed: as slow as Ulysses or as swift as a throwaway potboiler. For the truly devoted reader residing in an urban environment, with careful dexterity and enough practice, even a bulky hardcover can be balanced in one hand while standing in a moving subway during rush hour.

A book can be the subject of a conversation. Hey, wazzat your reading? Any good? or That’s a great book! or Fertheloveofchrist, why are you reading Judith Krantz? In certain situations, the book operates as a sociological indicator. There are books that everyone is reading (e.g., Reading Lolita in Tehran), books that literary types are reading (e.g., My Name is Red) and specific books that are only read by an I-could-care-less-what-you-think-of-me sort of person (perhaps someone reading a thick Vollmann volume). There are even people who eschew books altogether, wondering why there’s “nothing” of value on their 57 channels. If only these people realized that a book represents one in a limitless array of channels, that the book is often smarter and that, on the whole, it is devoid of troubling, flashy and stress-inducing advertisements, save Don DeLillo’s “Celica.” Of course, for those who need an explicit visual medium, there are always pop-up books, which are known to amuse small children and John Birch Society members.

Books come in different sizes and shapes. There are mass-market paperbacks, which are short and thick and sometimes have questionable content and often fall to pieces if they have been packed tight in a box. There are trade paperbacks, which are almost as expensive as hardcovers but offer a very disingenuous price buffer that is often as little as five dollars, an emotional threshold that is perhaps most humiliating when the trade paperback edition is released months after a reader has purchased its hardcover edition, causing remorse for having neglected it, shame for having not read it, and a very peculiar kind of rage that is outside the understanding of most citizens. And of course, there are the robust hardcovers, which demand to be read without dust jackets, lest the jacket be torn or folded and thus divested of its “new” condition. In this sense, “preserving” the hardcover is the closest the bibliophile comes to anti-wrinkle cream, hair implants and liposuction. Like a mere mortal trying to squeeze a few years out of time, the obsessive hardcover enthusiast does not understand that time moves in only one direction and that books, like anything else, are suspect to age and will eventually fall apart. In fact, the book sometimes outlives its owner. And if imbued with a sturdily constructed spine, a book can last multiple lifetimes.

From a posterity standpoint, we can safely conclude that books pose a threat to humans. While dumb humans may beget dumb humans, books themselves are incapable of such inept procreation. And dumb books (and, sadly, dated books), unless having a fey appeal along the lines of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, are unlikely to endure. However, some smart books are likely to be forgotten because the rampant and variegated nature of the book population means that a reader cannot read them all. In this sense too, the book is superior to the human. While a book may come into contact with multiple humans throughout the course of its duration, often passed around through libraries, used bookstores and through social networks, it demands that the human adjust to its pleasurable format, forcing the human to recline, lie, sit or sometimes stand with hands perched out to hold both ends. What’s interesting is that the human demands no such physical contortions from the book on a regular basis, save through comfortably turning its pages and perhaps cracking the spine. Indeed, it should also be noted the book has remained in its rectangular form for several centuries.

While books have no specific sentience (although, ironically enough, books contain elements of human sentience), books also have no sexual needs whatsoever. And this too shows the unfair disparity between books and humans. If a book contains licentious elements, it is likely to be the victim of spontaneous jisms, which stain the page and cannot be properly cleaned up (unless paper is eventually replaced with Formica, a slippery affair that would alter the steady relationship between book and human). Even worse, while the book does not secrete any liquids whatsoever (save perhaps the ocassional wood shaving), the book often serves as a surrogate napkin or bandage, almost always without the human asking. Humans bleed, leave crumbs of sandwiches, write notes, and deface the book in numerous ways that they would never do to other humans. Through these various defacings, the book is very much a passive and innocent victim.

As preposterous as it may seem, some humans even burn books because they genuinely believe them to be a threat. In the many centuries that the book has been around, a book has never harmed or killed anyone, save perhaps in clusters overturned on large shelves collapsing and maiming other humans. But is it the book’s fault that the humans have failed to construct their bookshelves adequately? Or that humans have failed to exercise their sentience and work out how many books can stand on a shelf or how many shelves can rest in a building?

That humans would use such energies and waste such wanton aggression when books themselves remain harmless and somnolent suggests that either the human is more of a savage creature than he advertises or that books pose a belligerent menace that is utterly foreign to this thinker. Books have not declared war. They have not executed anyone. They have not locked themselves up in filthy prisons. And they certainly have not let anyone go cold and hungry. (Indeed, in a pinch, a book can be thrown into a fire for warmth or the paper eaten.) They have instead served as amicable beacons which convey information from one human to another. It is a pity that humans take this unique and seminal symbiotic relationship for granted.

Exhibit A: Only one (one!) outlet resorted to “Newsweak” when writing about the Koran scandal.

• Bill Moyers, responding to attacks by “the right-wing media and their allies at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” says that the Internet represents the future to serve the public with a variety of perspectives. And that includes downloading hot MILF action with George Seldes’ voice ranting about the evils of controlled media over the soundtrack.
• Gawker features an interview with Jamie Clarke, author of an unpublished novel, Vernon Downs, that involves a young writer who stalks Bret Easton Ellis. If you join this Yahoo group, you can read the novel in question. However, judging from what I’ve seen, it doesn’t look like much and it’s laden with grammatical mistakes. The first sentence reads: “James stared out the airplane window, focusing on a cloudbank [sic] in the shape of the disappointment he expected to find on his parents face [sic] when they picked him up from the airport.” The dialogue doesn’t fare much better: “There’s a psychotic out there imitating the crimes in A Complete Gentleman and he’s threatened to come after me. My picture in the paper will only facilitate this threat.”
• Andrew Sean Greer’s The Confessions of Max Tivoli has won the California Book Award. The awards, now in its 74th year, will be held on June 14 at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Greer will apply considerable skin lotion before that evening, but he (and the skin lotion manufacturers) has personally guaranteed that he will not age backwards during the ceremony.
• As Maud reported this morning, Jonathan Lethem will pen a new comic book series based on little known 1970s character Omega the Unknown. The ten-issue series will launch in early 2006. Reportedly, Omega won’t suffer from Tourette’s syndrome.
• James T. Farrell, author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy, will have one block in Chicago named after him. Farrell’s block, which proved too controversial for two blocks, has been confined to the South Side, where the block will be forgotten for several years until an omnibus set of blocks is issued (with considerable controversy) by a distinguished zoning authority.

With the considerable help and participation of Black Market Kidneys, Conversational Reading, The Happy Booker, Rake’s Progress and this site, The Vollmann Club, an insane effort to read all of William T. Vollmann’s work, is now active.

The first Read This! offering has been announced. Joe Bob says check it out.

We’re in the process of restoring our juju, but we should be back in time for tomorrow’s Brownie Watch.

The Huffington Post, which has been a colossal misfire since its inception, has provided at least one colossal service: it proves just how humorless and bombastic David Mamet can be.

In related news, pugilistic critic John Simon has been fired from New York Magazine.

Tito quizzes his audience on one of the most seminal questions of our time: Happy Baby or Road House?

Maud points to this Daily Kos item. The rumor is that orders for Tim Schilke’s Growing Up Red: Outting Red America from the Inside are being canceled by the Ingram Book Group, a wholesaler that ships books for Barnes & Noble out of Tennessee.

Unfortunately, the Daily Kos didn’t consider actually calling Ingram, the Nashville based wholesaler in question. So what we have right now is an unconfirmed rumor. Being here on the West Coast, I caught wind of this news item after business hours, but I did track down the appropriate number. I spoke to a very nice Ingram employee who wished to remain anonymous. But he said that he was very aware of the title, but declined to provide information. He believed that he might have seen the title on a shipping circular, but couldn’t quite remember.

If orders for Growing Up Red are being cancelled, my hope is to determine the precise reasons why and see what the horse’s mouth has to say. But to get the true story on this, we’re going to have to do some work. If anybody reading this has actually tried to order this book from a Barnes & Noble in a red state, I would appreciate it if someone emailed me the precise store you tried to buy the book from, so that I can contact them and speak to the store’s manager.

Michael Medved apparently has no grasp on reality. The snide little man lost it on a radio show when confronted with these facts: (1) Bush supports the privatization of social security; and (2) Chris Chocola is a Congressman. When unable to present any kind of argument whatsoever, Medved reportedly called Hans Reimer “a liar,” even when Reimer had the facts at his disposal.

Hopefully, this will put an end to the mystifying notion of Medved being taken seriously as a critic and commentator. But I suspect not. Medved represents the uninformed and moralistic yokel given a bullhorn — in other words, a doofus for the doofuses to latch onto. Talk radio is not about intellectual discussions, but hollow pyrotechnics designed to foster the illusion of such.

Writer and activist Tristan Egolf has died at 33. The death is an apparent suicide, but police are investigating. Egolf was the writer of two novels, Lord of the Barnyard and Skirt and the Fiddle. Another one, Corn Wolf, a novel about a werwolf in Amish country, will be published next year. Egolf had his first novel published after 70 rejections and was initially discovered as a street musician in Paris. Further, Egolf was the head of the “Smoketown Six,” a group of men who were arrested when protesting against George Bush.

I haven’t read any of Egolf’s work, but if he was as promising as several folks have made him out to be, I plan on taking him up.

Life is busy. Posts are sparse. However, in the meantime, there are two things to look out for.

1. In three days (May 15, 2005), the LBC will reveal its first Read This! book choice. I’m not permitted to reveal the title, but since I was allowed to play fast and loose with the nominations, it seems only fair that I be allowed to offer clues for all eager guessers (after all, we’re only three days away):

• If you unscramble the word “hack,” you will have the author’s initials and the initial(s?) of the book’s title.
• I happened to love this book quite a lot, even if I didn’t nominate it. (But it was a close race. The book I happened to nominate was second place.)
• I liked the book so much that I expect to read other books that this author has penned.
• There is one murder (or possibly more) in the book.
• There is awkward sex in the book.
• One of the characters shares a first name with a notable painter.
• One of the characters shares a first name with a notable painter’s brother.
• One of the characters shares a first name with a notable pilot.
• An animal factors into the plot.

That is all until Sunday, folks. And if you manage to guess the book correctly before Sunday, I will personally send you a copy.

2. In addition to the LBC, there is a second exciting multi-blog venture that will be announced very soon on these pages. Perhaps we’ll be ready in time for Sunday’s LBC announcement. Perhaps not. I’ll only say that the people involved are dedicated, nice, and friendly, and that we will be performing a major service. Keep watching the skies. More to come.

• While certain litblogs looking for a picayune fight keep their heads in the sand about anything written outside the English language, Scott Esposito talks with Dalkey Archive Press’ Chad Post. Post reveals how he picked the books for the Reading the World program (an effort to promote global literature based on PEN’s celebration), but stops short of responding to Mr. Esposito’s questions in French. Chekhov’s Mistress has the full skinny on the titles. Taking things further, Robert Gray has pledged to review each book on his blog.
• Within a very interesting Cannes juries (headed by the underrated filmmaker Emir Kustarica, who I am nothing less than nuts about), Toni Morrison is a judge this year. Morrison is also adapting Beloved into a tragic opera.
• One of the first comprehensive world atlases is now on display in Australia. Amazingly, the geographic area that comprises Ohio today is marked as “Beezlebub’s Valley.”
• Kinky Friedman is dead serious about his Texas gubernatorial run. He’s so serious that, in an effort to appeal to Texas conservatives, he’s changed his first name to “Milton.”
• Matt Damon as Marco Polo? What next? Ben Affleck as Galileo?
• Apparently, in addition to being a fabricator, Mitch Albom is also a playwright.
• The California Literary Review tackles Paul Auster.
• Author Peter James is so upset by the film adaptations of his novels that he’s decided to make them himself.

Due to personal circumstances, I’m not going to be posting here for a while.

[UPDATE: I’ve decided to give it the old college try. But expect posts to be sporadic.]

1. This morning’s beauty
Sun shining on pallid flesh
Time for Coppertone

2. Four years for J-Franz
And still there’s no new novel
Remnick, why publish?

3. Sam, earn your brownie
You’re good enough to take risks
So why play it safe?

4. Bookpiles overflow
How will I read these authors?
Speedread? Not a choice

5. Ayelet needs journal
Or tranquil haikus. A therapist?
For personal woes

6. Haikus are nifty
They make me nice and toasty
No Foetry scam

7. Beatific books
Wall my hallways, line my bag
They like you too. Read.

8. Lazy Saturday
Don’t tempt me to do nothing
Weekends whoosh too fast

9. Drink too much coffee
Reliant on jitter gods
To not waste a day

10. People who send things
To my PO Box are sweet
Thanks. Will try to read.

11. To answer email
I’m trying, but there’s too much
Respond, if it’s months

12. Papers make me sad
No good news, just thugs and creeps
There are better folks?

13. Three overdue books
Librarians will ream me
Here, have my Visa

14. Will see my honey
Tonight, which is nice. Where to?
Must come up with plan

15. Three beer hangover?
I’m getting old, now cheap drunk
Drink lots of water

16. The hummer parks near
I have thoughts of smashing it
Teach it a lesson

17. Amazing how people
Waste time, money, energies
On picayune things.

18. Oh, that explains head
Forgot dinner. Despite friends
Telling me to eat.

19. Instead of violence
I’ll draft a law to fine fucks
Who park hummers here

20. Twenty haikus here?
Well, why not? Hope others will
Take up the pen now

So Indiewire, Hollywood Reporter and Variety say that the new Star Wars film is quite good. I remain a firm cynic. Of course, if there’s extra violence, this could mean a graphic and painful death for Jar Jar Binks. Which I applaud. (via GC Daily)

For the most part, we’re big fans of editors. We firmly believe that they are sexy people, among the most underappreciated people ironing out the English language. Beyond functioning as a seminal second set of eyes, a good editor can save a writer’s ass (often with the writer unaware), tear an inflexible hothead a new one, or encourage a dispirited voice. Hell, we wish this blog had a damn editor so we’d refrain from rampant grammatical mistakes. (And please, dear readers, if you ever want to fact check our asses — as opposed to Xeroxing them — then we invite you to weigh in.)

Unfortunately, even a pan from a dependable river has its dregs. We refer our readers to the Cinetrix, who has revealed the horrors of bright and talented people being dumbed down by the pivotal magazines of our time, let alone criticized by readers who don’t appreciate the phrase “semaphore of pulchritude” in a major magazine.

Bill Bradley, assistant managing editor at the Nashville Tennesseean, noted recently that a Tom Colleen, Vandy resume story was changed, but the changes weren’t sports-related. And then there’s the Washington Post‘s desperate stab to draw readers: keep the stories shorter and add photographs. Which solves two problems in one go: you can cut down on editorial workload and give the people who hate fancy phrases the paper they want all in one go!

For our own part, we still plan to throw around the ten-cent word every now and then. And, yes, Mr. Birnbaum, that includes “jejune.”

But we still can’t help but wonder if there’s a happier medium between a well-edited paper and an independent site that shoots from the hip.

Robert Sheckley, whose combination of comedy and science fiction is criminally underrated (and whose work inspired Douglas Adams), is in critical condition in Russia. Apparently, Sheckley went to Odessa to attend a science fiction writing forum and suffered from a respiratory insufficiency. What’s worse is that there seems to be a major struggle to get Sheckley into a state clinic.

I certainly hope Sheckley pulls through.

Spurned on in part by Maud, here are some statistically improbable phrases from certain books:

• Absalom! Absalom!: “monkey nigger,” “balloon face,” “dont hate,” “right all right all right”
• American Psycho: “little hardbody,” “wool tuxedo,” “her asshole,” “urinal cake,” “clock reservation,” “drink tickets,” “spread collar,” “dry beer,” “pocket square”
• Atlas Shrugged: “furnace foreman,” “young brakeman,” “tower director,” “transcontinental traffic,” “superlative value,” “best railroad”
• Beloved: “men without skin,” “white stairs,” “baby ghost”
• Blindness: “black eyepatch,” “white sickness,” “milky sea,” “emergency stairs”
• Brick Lane: “multicultural liaison office, “tattoo lady,” “ignorant types,” “girl from the village”
• Cloud Atlas: “steely gate,” “our dwellin” (Only four come up, despite the presence of the “Sloosha’s Crossin'” section!)
• Concrete Island: “overturned taxi,” “route indicators,” “metal crutch,” “feeder road,” “paraffin stove,” “bruised skin”
• The Corrections: “country ribs”
• A Death in the Family: “her trumpet”
• Empire of the Senseless: “red sponge”
• Gravity’s Rainbow: “pig suit,” “rocket field,” “firing site,” “runcible spoon”
• The Great Gatsby: “old sport”
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: “fucking wallet,” “green fluid”
• I Am Charlotte Simmons: “ilial crest,” “very hide,” “sobs sobs sobs sobs,” “compressed his lips,” “library tower,” “depressed girl,” “camper top”
• Mrs. Dalloway: “solitary traveller”
• One Hundred Years of Solitude: “porch with the begonias,” “insomnia plague,” “banana company,” “ermine cape,” “eating earth”
• Oryx and Crake: “fridge magnets”
• The Recognitions: “tall bellboy,” “small man with beer,” “plexiglass collar,” “distinguished novelist,” “weh weh,” “bull figure,” “hand mounting,” “youthful portrait,” “yetzer hara”
• Revolutionary Road: “rubber syringe” (Well, who else referred to it so obliquely?)
• Slaughterhouse-Five: “old war buddy”
• The Sot-Weed Factor: “bit oft,” “poet exclaimed,” “our barge,” “ocean isle,” “silver seal”
• This Is Not a Novel: “died mad”
• Tropic of Cancer: “rich cunt,” “guys upstairs”
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: “man with the guitar case,” “vinyl hat,” “macaroni gratin,” “telephone woman,” “cooking spaghetti,” “vacant house”

Patricia Storms serves up a pictorial response to the Great Oprah Debate.

At long last, Tito has unveiled his Coachella report, which includes a video of the much heralded Arcade Fire upwards crawl.

• Will Self once suggested that if Tony Blair should read John Gray’s Straw Dogs to put Blair’s thoughts into perspective. Tom Freke begs to differ, suggesting that it “could have been an interesting book, if only it was written by someone without such a large chip on his shoulder.”
• Europeans are up in arms about Google Print. They’re so upset about the potential for American cultural dominance that a “European digital library” is being talked about. Now if only Europeans could get angry enough to create an all-powerful search engine without ads and without tracking an obscene amount of personal information.
• Believe it or not, there’s hope for the future. Around 70 middle school students engaged in a “Battle of the Books” quiz that had the kids recalling details from books they read months ago. They’ve had to pry books out of these kids’ hands. And here’s the cool thing. This went down in Piedmont, Virginia. The organizers of the event have seen this thing spread to 22 states.
• John Updike takes on surrealism in the NYRoB.
• Mark lists what he’d do as LATBR editor.

As an informal poll, I’m curious how many readers here may share the following reaction:

Through unexpected circumstances, you end up somewhere else. You’ve failed to bring any sort of book whatsoever. In fact, you didn’t even bother to bring your backpack. Now you’re faced with the circumstances of traveling back to your original destination where the bag and the book sare. But through some strange alignment of the cosmos, there’s not only nothing to read nearby, but nowhere to buy anything decent. Not even so much as an issue of the New Yorker that you’ve already read.

Of course, you can tough it out. At least that’s what you believe you can do. But reading is such an ingrained part of your life that, with the exception of rampant copulation, you can’t think of a life without it. Whenever there’s a spare moment or the eyes can’t stay shut at 2 AM, the book is there to comfort you, to transport or inform you, and to provide a certain equilibrium that puts existence into a certain perspective.

Without that dependable security, you start to pace. You try desperately to find other things to do. You talk to the strangest people who might be in the same boat. Or something else.

You see, that’s where you folks come in.

What is it that you, dear readers, do when there’s nothing available to read? Do you read street signs? Do you get excited over the directions on a bottle of aspirin? To what degree does the reading experience become somewhat sociopathic, where the eyes must rest upon words and the imagination transported in order to remain of sound and jovial mind?