[EDITOR’S NOTE: Is Otto Peltzer Otto Penzler? Note the surname.]

Not that I want to say anything negative about literary critics, for I am a literary critic. I am indeed the best literary critic. When it comes to blowhards, there can be no better specimen than myself. And I have the trophy wife and the bookstore to prove it. If you don’t believe me, I can show you my chaise longue and perhaps we can come to a financial agreement pertaining to what you can do with something nestled beneath my own zipper.

Yet it often seems that other literary critics remain lost and troublingly incompatible with my dignified and nonpareil tastes, which are better than Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, and Edmund Wilson combined. I, Otto Peltzer, have long understood that the Caucasian male is the only qualified author to write the major literary works of our time. And yet looking at the National Book Award nominees, one sees some mousy chick named Lydia Davis among the lot, who has apparently been awarded something called a MacArthur fellowship. This was a fellowship in which I had no say and thus must be disregarded. Who are the people responsible for Davis’s inclusion in the longlist? And why do they threaten the white male’s domination over today’s literature?

I am convinced that Denis Johnson is responsible for this. It has been impossible to avoid Tree of Smoke because it is big and fat, and written by a white male, and thus “important” in some way. I’ll spare you supportive examples. I am Otto Peltzer and you’re just going to have to take my word for it. Tree of Smoke is bad because there are two nouns in the title and because I couldn’t get past the first sentence. Although I should observe that Johnson was born in Munich, which is certainly a promising nation for the literary master race.

I can also tell you, without citing anything specific, that Denis Johnson is as baffled about Lydia Davis as I am. A distant cousin tells me that his friend read an interview with Denis Johnson written by another friend. In this interview, Johnson confessed this. Therefore, this must be true.

Who’s read Denis Johnson? And who’s read Lydia Davis? Otto Peltzer has. And that’s all you need to know.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be settling into my den with some claret and my Hardy Boys books — far more important than any of the National Book Awards finalists and celebrating the experience of white male power in a manner that this year’s crop of finalists certainly cannot.

And if you think that’s bad, you haven’t seen this (definitely NSFW and via Erin O’Brien, of course!).

Honest words from Millard Kaufman.

• So this winter thing — my first here in Brooklyn — seems to be setting in with the dipping temperatures. And I have to say that it’s pretty fantastic! Much preferable to the hot and humid summer in which I was stopped in my slumber by the logy sweat that started to appear in places where I hadn’t sweated before just in walking from one corner of the room to the other. Although I may change my tune when the balls-shriveling lack of mercury kicks in. For now, the crisp brisk cold leaves untold promising days for hot chocolate and ice skating: the former secure, the latter of which I will have to attempt! Why the weather reports? Incredibly deranged dreams — no doubt incurred from the crazy books I’ve been reading of late or perhaps the general burden of an imaginative mind — have jolted me out of bed. The good: lots of solid, hard-core sleep that has kept me rested and peppy through the day. The bad: dreams so intense that it can take me as long as an hour to recalibrate my bearings. So if I’m clinging to a conversational topic that is a bit safer than my usual repertoire, I hope you will understand.
• Terry Teachout has a thoughtful essay in Commentary reconsidering classical music Neville Cardus and asking the question of whether his disinclination to embrace modern offerings has caused him to be forgotten. (via Books, Inq.)
• Joe Bob Briggs — and his more sober self John Bloom — can be found (among others) at The Wittenburg Door.
• I’ve felt that because Richard Donner was only half-justifiably fellated with that Superman II — The Richard Donner Cut DVD (which revealed that the best version of Superman II is probably some bastard hybrid we’ll never see involving Donner’s technical chops and Richard Lester’s light comedy), the incredibly talented Lester has been left unduly in the lurch. But thankfully, Lester’s two great Beatles films have been put out and Keith Phipps has managed to track the director down.
• And in additional defense of the inventive Lester, who nearly every Superman fan seems to have declared an untalented hack, here’s “The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film.” (Part One and Part Two)
• So will the WGA strike effect the literary world? A few agents now fear that many option deals may be quelled.
• Margaret Atwood and husband Graeme Gibson brought their own dinner in a box to the Giller Prize reception to protest a Four Seasons development that threatens the endangered Grenada dove. They said they could not accept food and drink from the Four Seasons, although they seemed to have no problem occupying the premises. (Would it not have been more effective to simply not attend the ceremony, thereby protesting the Four Seasons and letting the Giller people know that there are consequences to scholarship? I can’t help but ponder whether this particular resistant approach is more of an upstaging of the nominees. Much like her LongPen solution, I simply don’t understand why Atwood would bother to participate in a process if it’s absolutely painful, unless there’s a self-serving satirical intent.)
• Incidentally, it was Eliabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air that took the award.
• It seems that Oprah isn’t a very careful reader. First James Frey, and now a book pulled from a reading list on her website: Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree. Carter, of course, was a speechwriter for George Wallace, giving us the mantra: “Segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” Okay, not the most ideal thing you want to hear from an author. But I’ve long wondered, like Sherman Alexie (quoted in the article), if Little Tree was — in some sense — an act of atonement and whether it is entirely fair to dismiss a good book simply because it’s written by a racist. It’s a tricky question, but I submit to you that we have no problem accepting D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation or Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will as significant parts of the film canon. I, for one, absolutely despise Griffith and Riefenstahl’s life choices, while also appreciating the technical components of these two films. It’s possible that Oprah and other detractors may be clinging to a set of politically correct assumptions just as vile as racism: the tendency to conflate an author’s work with an author’s life and the discounting of the former because there are extremely unpleasant aspects within the latter. If Oprah “couldn’t live with that,” as she claims, then how can she have any reasonably sophisticated take on our complicated world? The world is not always a place where artistic achievement is grounded on a rosy Runyonesque life. Art often emerges from an ugly and turbulent existence. Must we discount some works of art because we learn unpleasant things about the artist? Or can we be mature enough to judge art on its own merits?

[UPDATE: George has more thoughts on the Oprah snafu: “But, besides raising the question of how to view the merit of a work vs. the author’s bio, what this does illustrate is exactly how far removed this woman is from both her books and the everyday impact of her opinion on the army of mindless couch weights (like paper weights for furniture). Does she ever even get near this stuff anymore or does one of her handlers just draw up a list and sign her name at the bottom? Does she have any idea how her purported love of books is being used for corporate shilling, base taste-making, and political gain? Did she even notice this herself or was it another handler who noticed? When your whole life is outsourced like that, what can people trust you take seriously?”]

If you are fascinated by language, have a sense of humor, and live in the five boroughs, give me a jingle. I’m hoping to organize an etymology group with amicable and fun-loving word geeks who wish to explore this crazy little thing called the English language. Email me for details.

Steve Erickson: “The big publishers in New York no longer know how to publish literary fiction. I compare it to the big studios: They’re publishing blockbusters, and once in a while they bring out their prestige Oscar books, like Richard Powers.”

Ze Frank: “The Writers Guild of America strike begins today, leaving thousands of writers unshowered and in their boxers, which was pretty much how they were before. Except now they’re not typing.”

• In an effort to demonstrate just how lazy bloggers can be, I’m now typing these words from bed. This is because I had a frightening amount of coffee yesterday and I am trying to mostly abstain from caffeine today. Frankly, my imbibing on this front took me aback. But it was required yesterday, because I interviewed a super-smart author. Today, I will try to learn a few Esperanto words and shout these at the top of my lungs while conducting an impromptu one-person version of leapfrog — that is, if the neighbors end up screwing like dormice. There will be few jokes, unless something truly riles me up. For now, there’s linkage.
• Revolting returns in new form, although it’s considerably slicker — and, dare I say it, not as promisingly revolting — than its previous incarnation.
• A 1986 Mac Plus goes up against a 2007 AMD Dual Core. See who wins. It ain’t exactly John Henry, although one wonders why a test along those lines hasn’t been revisited. (There was, incidentally, a comparable showdown executed a few days ago between me, flipping through an unwieldy unabridged, and one Jackson West, consulting his laptop — both of us looking for a word definition. I lost. Within ten seconds. And it was Jackson who remarked upon the John Henry connection and made me laugh.) (via 2 Blowhards)
• I am beginning to wonder if reading challenges are the litblogosphere’s answer to the reality TV show.
• Here’s why you don’t want to devote your creative energies to something without crossing your tees. Some filmmakers spent four years planning a Warhammer 40,000 fan film. They sunk 10,000 euros, employed actors and extras, and put together a 110 minute extravaganza. Alas, they failed to get the appropriate sanction of Games Workshop — indeed GW refused it after lengthy negotiations — and the film can now never be shown in front of an audience. All that time. All that effort. Wasted. I find this story very sad. All this could have easily be avoided if the amateur production was permitted more exhibitionist leeway (after all, it seems quite clear that they didn’t intend to see a profit for this thing) or the filmmakers had bothered to perform the most basic of preparatory tasks: obtaining permission.
• We’re only just in November, but PW appears to have the first Best Books of 2007 list I can find.
• Steven Hall on the American book tour, which sounds like drug trafficking (at least the way he describes it): “It really is solitary. It depends how you do it. The one I did across America was really solitary. I met someone from my publishers in L.A., and they gave me an envelope full of money and a schedule and said, ‘We’ll see you in New York in three weeks.'”
• Now this is fucking appalling. (And I’m surprised this didn’t happen in America first.) It’s bad enough that some books bother to have advertising inserts at all, but using advertising agencies to slip bullshit cards into books and pollute libraries with this junk (Will the advertising agencies be responsible for removing the inserts? I don’t think so!) is an absolute betrayal of the public trust. The cretins who authorized this ought to be ashamed of themselves for whoring out one of the few public spaces where one can escape from the cacophony of advertising.
• “Take No Chances” Ciabattari is proudly featured over at “Take No Chances” Kottke. Two duller people couldn’t deserve each other any more.

Connie Willis is in the house over at Finding Wonderland, one of many blogs now walking in a wintry wonderland and thankfully avoiding that dreaded carol.

Matthew Rose has seen fit to write an article containing certain similarities to my own experiences with Facebook and, in fact, using the same Jonathan Franzen angle that I used here on September 26, 2007.

My lede: “Jonathan Franzen does not want to be my friend.”

Rose’s lede: “Is Jonathan Franzen my friend?”

Could such a similarity have been avoided? Well, enter the search terms “Jonathan Franzen Facebook” into Google and you shall see what comes up first.

Of course, Matthew Rose will deny it. But my post was the subject of some discussion — both in the blogosphere and on Facebook. I was the first to publicly out Franzen’s existence on Facebook. A friend of mine insisted that I write a feature article about the experience, but I told her that I honestly didn’t see any reason why any serious newspaper would be interested in my technological navel-gazing.

Oh, how wrong I was.

Open note to the Wall Street Journal: I happen to be a writer myself. And unlike Mr. Rose, I can actually generate original ideas.

All the lower was full of cans and mays, corpulent, the deep damp latter rising from warm and pleasant memory and scratched out, extirpated, replaced by former, because it was former, the word itself representing dregs of dame abandoned. Requited love, alleged and recalled, contained in one word caused fury and savage strokes with present partner participating leading the frayed abandoned strands. Replacement seemed inevitable given the bulging veins on her neck, domestic bliss man rayed, can I go lacking a certain verve in this post-may american expattycake bakers man ray again this time of sunshine, we cant repeat the past. Santa reminds us every december of this doomed repeat repeat doomed repeat. Doomed repeat.

So who was she this may and why cant we move on? Just a word, change two letters and an all together different autobio forms the cycle spinning near the open door, billowing gusts of precognition decades before others took it up. May I can I may I can I swapping adulterous pairs in a plangent recall of detestable love given up for plain jane to class declasse must not name, for it would be like may, now all fit for janet’s consumption speculation. Interesting yes but what tells us that isn’t here near? What does it tell us by way of outside of us as may was one month after elliott’s pronouncement assuming you see connection?

Living longer decades longer she remembered did not know why not use may as much as she did, because lacked, hinging upon either-or instead of can’s active will. May I can I stop settle this like grown adults. Nib ripping paper, fortunately no inkwell. Papers deposited in snug archives, leaving only rapt academics to baste spells and ramp up ample speculations.

Gertrude what did you think of all this? We’ll never know and do we have the right to pry?

Edgar Wright: “I can confirm too, that Simon was never contacted either. I don’t really want to get involved at all, but it infuriates me that they would a) never bother to get in touch but still b) splash me and Simon’s names all over the trade announcements and infer that we’re involved in the same way Ricky & Steve were with The Office.”

Even worse, McG is involved in this remake. Which is entirely unnecessary.

From Publishers Lunch:

Nelson Algren Literary Award winner and author of HAIRSTYLES OF THE DAMNED Joe Meno’s THE GREAT PERHAPS, the story of an eccentric family in the weeks leading up to the 2004 presidential election: two bumbling professors, two strange daughters, and a grandfather limiting himself to thirteen words a day, then twelve, then eleven — one less each day until he will speak no more, to Tom Mayer at Norton, by Maria Massie at Lippincott Massie McQuilkin (NA).

Pity Joe Queenan, who with his sad, bitter, and predictable essays has secured his position as the Bobby Slayton (or perhaps, more appositely, the Bobby Slayton knockoff) of the literary world. The amaroidal (or perhaps hemorrhoidal?) lout actually thinks he’s being funny with this smug piece that pillories Henry Petroski for having the effrontery to dwell at length upon the history of the toothpick. Who knew that those reckless microhistorians were the true brutes of our world? Forget sexism, racism, or even the Bush Administration. As far as Queenan is concerned, the true wrongs of the world are being perpetuated by the good professors at Duke University, the secret cabal no doubt headed with clandestine memos dispatched by Petroski and the handshake known only to a handpicked few. If you’ve ever wondered what it must be like to live such a myopic life, or to abdicate curiosity for the everyday objects that do indeed possess a hidden historical trajectory, then Queenan’s essay represents a fascinating specimen of oafish hubris and, above all, a restless determination to flaunt a presbyopic pestilence that slides across his saggy body as smoothly as a comfy counterpane clutched in desperation.

I suspect that Queenan doesn’t like ice cream very much. Much less anything at all.

This is the work of a man who is no more curious about the world than a agoraphobic reality TV show junkie. He neither addresses Petroski’s scholarship nor his shortcomings. Queenan simply declares, “So what?” Queenan is not one to ask why, nor can he tilt his pig’s head even one degree in the direction of what Petroski might be fired up about. He merely cites one passage — no more, no less — and declares the book dead, without even casual expatiation. That’ll teach those academic upstarts!

There once was a time when Queenan wrote funny and subversive pieces for Spy, but that was before he moved to Tarrytown, where 63% of households make $50,000 or more a year. Which makes you wonder about a man who is best known for the lackluster volume, Balsamic Dreams: A Short But Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation, which even Curtis White had to conclude a few years ago was “one of the nastiest books I’ve read in some time.” Here is a small sample:

I was, if nothing else, being true to the ethos of my generation. When faced with unsettling developments like death, Baby Boomers always react in the same way: We sign up for self-improvement classes. A Baby Boomer par excellence, a prototypical product of the Me Decade, I only knew how to respond to the world insofar as it responded to moi. Everything I had ever learned as a Baby Boomer had oriented me in a single direction: further into myself. Now I had to face the ugly truth, not only about me, but about us: We were appalling. We had appalling values. We had appalling taste. And one of the most appalling things about us was that we liked to use appalling words like “appalling.”

No hope then for looser and more lissome definitions, a la those found within the Chambers Dictionary, much less a receptive ear upturned to stirs outside Queenan’s immediate taxonomy. What do we make of such a man? Is this guy guided by inveterate self-loathing for the tool he has become? Or maybe it’s just Queenan’s begrudging acceptance that he’s no less a part of the Establishment than Pat Boone.

Joe Queenan is a life lesson for any young critic or satirist. Be very careful about the targets you place into your crosshairs. If you are not careful, you will see everything in bitter and reckless terms and you will grow up to be another Joe Queenan, a flaccid hack devoid of joy and enthusiasm. I suppose that, as far as Tanenhaus and company are concerned, Queenan is the kind of purposeless and prehistoric piss-and-vinegar that apparently represents the intellectual discourse of our time.

But there’s another reason he never finishes, if he’s honest with himself. He’s afraid of being disappointed by the endings, which is the reason he stopped reading fiction. He’d read Great Expectations at Rikers and had loved it — this story of a criminal secretly sponsoring some poor kid’s life — until the jail librarian pointed out that Dickens had written two endings. When he found the original ending Vince felt betrayed by the entire idea of narrative fiction. This story he’d carried around in his head had two endings? A book, like a life, should have only one ending. Either the adult Pip and Estella walk off holding hands, or they don’t. For him, the ending of that book rendered it entirely moot, five hundred pages of moot. Every novel moot.

So he only reads the beginnings now. And it’s not bad. He’s even begun to think of this as a more effective approach, to sample only the beginnings of things. After all, a book can only end of one of two ways: truthfully or artfully. If it ends artfully, then it never feels quite right. It feels forced, manipulated. If it ends truthfully, then the story ends badly, in death. It’s the reason most theories and religions and economic systems break down before you get too far into them — and the reason Buddhism and the Beach Boys make sense to teenagers, because they’re too young to know what life really is: a frantic struggle that always ends the same way. The only thing that varies is the beginning and the middle. Life itself always ends badly. If you’ve seen someone die, you don’t need to read to the end of some book to learn that.

— Jess Walter, Citizen Vince

My profile of Oliver Sacks can be found in this week’s Time Out New York. Dr. Sacks and I talked about quite a lot in the short time we had, and the entire conversation will be unveiled in a forthcoming podcast, which likewise includes Woody Geist’s remarkable version of “Shooby Dooin’.”

Not only does Carolyn have a piece in today’s Los Angeles Times, but Dan Wickett has made Wired! It seems that some of these litbloggers don’t seem to be spending much of their time in Terre Haute these days.

Speaking of Mr. Wickett, I have unimpeachable evidence that he’s in New York right now. Roy Kesey, an author who has published two books with Dzanc, will be appearing tonight as part of the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series. The bar’s at 302 Broome Street. The show begins at 8:00 PM, and also features Benjamin Percy, Min Jin Lee, and music from Max Gabriel. Several bloggers (including me) should be there. So do swing by and say hello!

Science Daily: “With the latest advances in treatment, doctors have discovered that they can successfully neutralise the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The so-called ‘combination therapy’ prevents HIV from mutating and spreading, allowing patients to rebuild their immune system to the same levels as the rest of the population.”

Walter Kirn has an essay on multitasking in this month’s Atlantic. But perhaps the essay’s most startling revelation is that Jennifer Connelly likes to read a book and talk on the phone while having sex. Whether this is hyperbole or partially truthful is difficult to say. But if continuous partial attention is Ms. Connelly’s m.o., I certainly wouldn’t want to be her lover. No matter how stunningly beautiful she is.

So far, this weekend has involved a Friday night meeting with an 81-year-old television personality in his Upper East Side townhouse, a college kid calling me “Dad” (the first I’ve heard the term), frightening an eager photographer (honestly, this was unintentional; I was trying to be nice!), making a 911 call after seeing an extremely large and possibly dead man lying on a sidewalk near Columbus Circle (85% of the people passed him by; thankfully, he turned out to be alive), the giddy and retributive removal of a stranger’s baseball cap, and several other incidents too strange to report in full here. A future post fleshing out some of this nuttiness will follow soon. Let me just say that I’m really not trying to seek out strangeness. But it does have a tendency to seek me.

Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher is duly reviewed this Sunday by Carolyn Kellogg on the Left Coast and Liesl Schillniger on the other coast. For the latter review, Tanenhaus has warned readers of “frank sexual language” that comes from Perrotta reading an excerpt by telephone. Alas, the promised 1-900 banter isn’t nearly as salty as the admonishment, unless you’re one of those people who blushes whenever someone says “gonorrhea,” “pubic hair” or “peeing on a stick.” In which case, why listen in the first place?

Grabbing a cup of joe this morning at my local coffeehouse. Walking out the door.

“Hey, Ed!”

I race back in. She works at the cafe and she’s only a few years younger than me. But we have our share of conversations, in part because she seems to dig my T-shirts, and I always ask her how she’s doing and what she’s up to.

“You know that show, Ripley’s Believe It or Not? It’s this amazing new show where they have this crazy guy with long fingernails. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

I’m a bit baffled. Because I know that Ripley’s Believe It or Not? is not new. Also, the coffee hasn’t kicked in.

“You mean the show with Jack Palance?”

“Jack Palance?”

“Oh,” the coffee hitting my bloodstream, “this is a new show?”

I then describe to her the ABC television show that appeared on Sunday nights at 7:00 PM and tell her that Palance creeped me out when I was a kid. I then offer my best Palance impression. “Believe it or noooooooooooooooooooooot!”

“There was a show before this?”

I apologize to her for not knowing of this new show. I tell her that I don’t have a television anymore. It’s not that I’m against television. I do try and keep current with Heroes, The Office and Battlestar Galactica. But there’s only so much time. I ask her if she knows who Robert Ripley is. She doesn’t know. I point out that he was a high school dropout who started the whole Believe It or Not? business in cartoon form in the early 20th century. She seems stunned that there was a Believe It or Not? that came before. She tells me she’s going to go to the Atlantic City museum to check it out and thought I might dig it, given my T-shirts. And she’s right. And I thank her and tell her that I’ll try to check it out.

As I said, she’s only a few years younger than me. And I’m wondering who has the real cultural amnesia here. Am I the amnesiac because I’m not familiar with all of the latest television developments? Or is she the amnesiac because she isn’t familiar with the incarnations of Believe It or Not? that came before? Perhaps we are both amnesiacs and this simple exchange — one of many I tend to have in the morning — is a way for both of us to bridge the gap.

Nicholson Baker resurfaces to offer his thoughts on David Michaelis’s Schulz biography. (via Jenny D)

This week, the blog Romancing the Tome celebrates its third anniversary. The dynamic duo behind this blog asking me to expostulate on literary adaptations and an exemplar of my “seemingly fearless” character can be found here. Likewise, I was asked by Reese Kwon to put in my two bits on James Wood for a lengthy article called “What Would Wood Think?”