The British have announced that they no longer feel inferior to U.S. novelists. The sudden burst in UK hubris, however, had much to do with noted American novelist John Updike singling out UK minority writers — an option, according to the Guardian, apparently outside the purview of the typical Brit reader or the average Fleet Street hack.

Rasputin: “Moveon.org, I love you, but seriously, what is this shit? You’re handing out fliers, trying to get people to go see The Day After Tomorrow? Maybe you should reconsider?”

Sarah, the grand gal single-handedly responsible for getting me to read four Ian Rankin novels in the past month, has moved to a new domain. Go check it out. And to answer Ms. Roy’s concerns about blogs about underground streetcred, we mentioned “colostomy bag” before 8AM. Surely, this counts for something.

1. Above all, don’t panic. Going back to work isn’t as dreadful as it seems. Keep in mind that you essentially have a four-day workweek ahead of you. Your co-workers will be sympathetic to your readjustment. And if they aren’t, invent an imaginary newspaper article pointing out how holidays lead to temporary malaise extending into across the midweek swath into Wednesday. You can get away with this, because, quite frankly, nobody read the papers over the weekend.

2. Yes, there’s a ridiculous email backlog and there weren’t as many books finished as you had hoped. Yes, you may have even succombed to paying for that silly Roland Emmerich eco-disaster movie or perhaps engaged in the horrors of television. But the good news is that you can go back to your routine, such as it was. People in general will be slower, thanks in part to the overall lack of holidays in the United States of America, and the strange turn of fortune that momentarily granted the public a three-day weekend (that is, if they were lucky not to be working in the service sector).

3. When in doubt, resort to coffee. Its efficacy can never be underestimated. This woozy Tuesday isn’t unlike a hangover, what with your body drooping out of bed and your shirt being slightly more difficult to put on. But the good news is that if you didn’t drink last night and slept horribly, the coffee will have an even greater effect than before.

4. You can always relax again. Either tonight or next weekend. However, keep in mind that this time, it might be prudent to accomplish something, if only to make up for the debauchery.

5. Please know that it was perfectly fine for you to lounge about the living room while other people paid homage to the deaths of soldiers.

6. If you saw that eco-disaster movie, know that Dennis Quaid will eventually slip from your mind.

7. When in doubt, sexual release, whether solo or with another partner, is a pretty solid cure-all, particularly during lunch hour.

8. If you’re terrified by the idea of cooking tonight, keep in mind that there is probably a good deal of food in the fridge that you can reheat. Your overcompensatory zeal in the food department, together with such ubiquitous technology as the microwave oven, should get you through dinner tonight.

9. Set at least two goals that you must accomplish before bedtime. Make these modest goals. Things like balancing your checkbook or reading a Dr. Seuss book. You can save the loftier accomplishments (climbing Kilmanjaro on Wednesday, performing philanthropic CPR on a colostomy bag on Thursday) for later.

Brendan Gullifer offers some literary pitch ideas: “When you’re a struggling artist, like me, the F-word always grabs attention. Writing a novel has used up more money and energy and time than an affair. Two years ago, we sold our house to pay the bills. For the sake of my marriage and sanity, I need closure. I need a publisher.”

Reuters: “The United Nations has estimated that one million people have been displaced by fighting in Darfur and calls it the largest humanitarian emergency worldwide. Another 125,000 Sudanese refugees have fled to Chad to escape violence….UNICEF said it was providing 300,000 displaced people with access to clean water, double the number of a few weeks ago, but 700,000 people remained out of reach. It has installed nearly 190 new water pumps and repaired 320 existing ones in the area.”

There’s a moment in Superman II where E.G. Marshall, playing the President of the United States, appears on television, announcing to the nation that he has surrendered his authority over to General Zod. But Marshall breaks down midway through the speech and shouts into the microphone, “Superman: can you hear me? Superman!” Zod then picks up the microphone and asks, “Where is this Superman?” and demands that Superman come to challenge his authority if he dare, so that the son of Jor-El can eventually kneel before Zod.

But Superman has lost his powers. He has just been beaten to a pulp by some hick in a diner and he suggests to Lois Lane, as he is bleeding, that maybe they might need a bodyguard. But Superman, knowing that he must rid the world of the forces of evil, insists that he has to go back. He eventually gets his powers back and stops the three baddies. Though not without sacrificing his love for Lois Lane.

The moment is one of supreme comic book movie melodrama, but for some damned reason, it’s one of the grandest cinematic moments I remember as a kid. It might be the general state of helplessness, an unexpected breakdown following the calm actions of a leader willing to kneel before Zod to save human lives. But I like to think it’s more about decency in the face of horrible capitulations — something that buys the human race a little more time.

In contemplating the current situation, I feel almost exactly like E.G. Marshall reflecting the will of the people. If Kerry is really presidential material, just where the hell is he? Deaths continue in Iraq. The economy remains in the toilet. Bush’s approval figures are now the lowest ever in his presidency. And now Bush wants more troops while remaining in firm denial about the consequences of our actions: “The actions of our enemies over the last few weeks have been brutal, calculating and instructive. It reveals a fanaticism that was not caused by any action of ours and would not be appeased by any concession.”

This should be a slam dunk, a moment that the Democrats should be seizing with momentum and mobilization. This should be a time in which John Kerry is galvanizing the nation with the same fire he showed protesting Vietnam.

Pollster John Zogby himself is on record stating that John Kerry will win, but only if he, and he alone, will screw it up. And from where I’m standing, I see a tepid man and an ineffectual leader. I see a man playing it far too safe for the present time. I see a man who doesn’t have the guts to fight the good underdog fight and act like a goddam President, a man who believes that Bush’s extra spending before the Republican National Convention will somehow buy the faith of the American people — this even as Tom Clancy almost came to blows with Richard Perle..

Kerry’s hands may be admittedly tied by current campaign finance and a colossal Republican-to-Democrat spending gap. But the real question here is whether postponing the nomination until the Republican National Convention so that Kerry can spend his own money is worth sacrificing the general morale of the country.

It would be one thing if Kerry managed to express public consternation over our current unwillingness to accept responsibility for the horrors that we sow. But whether he’s officially the Democratic candidate or not, the time has come for Kerry to start acting like our next President, which means sacrificing something in the process.

John Kerry needs to show us that he’s Superman.

The London Times business section examines, of all things, the economics of writing with crime writer Julian Rathbone.

The Guardian: “[Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt] insisted there were ‘no decorations, no musical instruments found, no large quantities of food or leftover servings one would expect from a wedding celebration’. However, the video obtained by APTN – which lasts for several hours – shows a large wedding party, and separate footage shot by AP cameramen the following day shows fragments of musical instruments, pots and pans, and brightly coloured beddings used for celebrations scattered around a bombed-out tent. There were also fragments of ordnance that appeared to have US markings.”

We have no time these days, but our colleagues do. Maud interviews Jonathan Ames, Lizzie takes on Alice Randall, and you can find Sarah in The Denver Post.

The Chronicle talks with Diana Abu-Jaber about Arab-American identity. She notes that since there are so few literary depictions of Arab life in America that she receives highly scrutinizing letters from readers niggling over the details. Abu-Jaber also points out that people consider her work highly politicized when it is not. According to Laila, she’s also a grand reader. Abu-Jaber has also recently launched a website, which will contain information on future appearances. There’s also an interview with Terry Gross up from March 2003.

The Sacramento Bee gets into the auctorial interview game and talks with Jane Smiley about how selling the film rights to A Thousand Acres has allowed her to write about horses. Smiley will be working on The Roan Tetrology through 2006. An early galley of the first book, My Kingdom for a Horse, features a 24-page monologue on why every American should own one.

Novelist E.L. Doctorow was booed at Columbia University while delivering a commencement speech attacking Bush. Financier George Soros offered a similar anti-Bush speech at Hofstra, but was not booed.

The New Yorker: “After directing the driver to East Seventy-second Street, she said she wanted to make it clear that, while she loves her bloggers, and has faith in them, it can be difficult to get them to be productive. ‘They all have day jobs,’ she pointed out. Writing anything longer than a blog post is a commitment they don’t always seem up for.”

Graham has a spiffy new layout, with a decided Kottke influence. But thanks to the colors, his integration of remaindered link content is something a lot easier to follow after a few beers. Which reminds me: the plan is to tinker with WordPress for the soon-to-emerge Wrestling an Alligator production blog. If all goes well, then I may switch over to WordPress for Reluctant. This comes at a time when I was planning a major overhaul of this place anyway. For anyone else looking for a smooth MT to WP transition, here’s the skinny.

Andrew Anthony: “‘Do you think [Nick Broomfield] wants to be on camera?’ [Michael Moore] puts the question back to me. ‘Do you think he looks like he’s enjoying it?'”

Back in 1996, when Michael Moore came through San Francisco on a book tour for Downsize This, I walked up to the man at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books, mentioning that I had started a comprehensive FAQ that began with obsessive riffling through microfilm when I was an undergraduate. “Hey, Kath, it’s the FAQ guy,” he said to his wife, not directly addressing me but presumably hoping that I would be impressed by this aside to his wife. At one point, in the middle of his lecture, Bay TV cameras came in and Moore lit up, becoming the consummate showman and acting as if the crowd who assembled there to buy his book was simply a fill-in audience for a television show. Outside the bookstore, I asked for an interview, figuring that Moore would, by way of his purported “working class” roots, be interested in talking with the little guy. He grilled me at length over what media outlet I was with. It was the kind of treatment I expected from Bruce Willis or John Travolta — not a man running around from coast to coast to get in touch with the great American heartland, going out of his way to expose corporate wrongdoings. I named off a few sites I had been writing for that would probably take it.

“How many hits?” he asked.

When it became clear to Moore that I wasn’t the New York Times, he handed me his business card, suggesting that I could contact the general number at his office for any questions I might have, and then pretty much ignored my existence. As I recall, he didn’t even shake my hand or thank me. I figured that since my FAQ wasn’t a completely slavish portryal of the man, having pointed out the Harlan Jacobson Film Comment controversy, Moore didn’t really care to talk with me. When I saw Moore’s 1997 documentary The Big One (a film, along with Canadian Bacon, curiously omitted from most discussions of Moore’s ouevre), I was struck by how much the film served to boost Moore’s ego. The Big One prioritized Moore’s standup routines over the struggling working class people who saw Moore as a Will Rogers type for our time.

This is, by no means, a complete condemnation of the man’s work. I thought Bowling for Columbine functioned as an effective polemic (its quibbling with the facts aside), and I certainly look forward to seeing Fahrenheit 9/11, now that it’s won the Palme d’Or.

But Andrew Anthony’s revelation is nothing new. Moore has a long history of being a self-serving whiner. There was, for example, the infamous San Diego “arrest,” in which Moore’s unwllingness to leave a building prevented janitors from going home, hardly reflecting the sympathies of a “working-class” hero, and Moore claimed that it was a freedom of speech issue. Another fact that goes unmentioned is that, when Moore made the switch from TV Nation to The Awful Truth, Moore stopped using FAIR to fact-check his information.

One should never confuse the man with his work, but the question brought up in the Anthony profile is whether Moore, now with his grand win in France undisputedly the most prominent figure for the left, has a certain responsibility to maintain a more dignified profile for the Left. Will rewarding Moore with the Palme d’Or serve to amp up his ego to heights beyond Limbaugh? Then again, if Moore’s legions of followers are so blindly unquestioning, drawing the exact same arguments when rattling off their bluster to potential converts, what makes Moore any different from Limbaugh?

If Fahrenheit 9/11‘s chief goal is to get Bush out of office, then progressives have a definite interest in seeing this film get distributed. It’s impossible to comment upon the film until one has seen it, but the real question that needs to be asked is whether this film’s audience is a built-in demographic or something that extends beyond it. Like Ray Kroc pilfering the McDonald brothers’ ideas about how to serve food in the interests of cash, Moore may be the consummate businessman, marketing to a select niche, taking other people’s ideas and adding them to the company repertoire without credit. This might explain why Moore would be so wililng to trash his peers (in this case, Nick Broomfield) by suggesting that Broomfield doesn’t enjoy being in front of camera (a ridiculous assumption for anyone who has experienced Broomfield’s self-deprecatory approach and watched his willingness to wander down seedy avenues).

New York Times: “Considered in this light, the photographs are us. That is, they are representative of the fundamental corruptions of any foreign occupation together with the Bush adminstration’s distinctive policies. The Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria, practiced torture and sexual humiliation on despised recalcitrant natives. Add to this generic corruption the mystifying, near-total unpreparedness of the American rulers of Iraq to deal with the complex realities of the country after its ‘liberation.’ And add to that the overarching, distinctive doctrines of the Bush administration, namely that the United States has embarked on an endless war and that those detained in this war are, if the president so decides, ‘unlawful combatants’ — a policy enunciated by Donald Rumsfeld for Taliban and Qaeda prisoners as early as January 2002 — and thus, as Rumsfeld said, ‘technically’ they ‘do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention,’ and you have a perfect recipe for the cruelties and crimes committed against the thousands incarcerated without charges or access to lawyers in American-run prisons that have been set up since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”

Since there’s been a rise in people expresing the desire to send their review copies, love letters, hate letters, and other assorted literary paraphernalia to me, I proudly announce that a P.O. Box has been set up. Rest assured, we like free stuff too and will happily review or assess what we can.

Please send all literary goodies, incriminating photographs, handwritten diatribes, and last wills and testaments inked in blood to the following address:

Edward Champion
Return of the Reluctant
P.O. Box 170130
San Francisco, CA 94117-0130

Those nimble proofreaders at Peachtree are taking all the fun out of the Bible. “Sour ancestors” is now “our ancestors.” There is no longer an end to “fractions,” but an end to “factions.” But that still doesn’t trump the ultimate typo from a 1631 King James edition: “Thou shalt commit adultery.”

NBC4Columbus: “Dan Brown said that when he wrote the best seller that dissects the origins of Jesus Christ and disputes long-held beliefs about Catholicism, he considered including material alleging that Jesus Christ survived the crucifixion.
While speaking at a benefit Tuesday for a New Hampshire writers’ group, Brown said the theory is backed by a number of ‘very credible sources,’ but that he ultimately decided it was too flimsy.”

W.W. Norton & Company will publish the September 11 commission’s report.

Jim Ritter examines Born to Rebel, the infamous Frank Sulloway book that suggested that firstborns are grat achievers and younger siblings that turn out to be the revolutionaries. Apparently, an attorney by the name of Frederic Townsend has taken Sulloway to task in his spare time. Poring through Sulloway’s contents, Townsend submitted a critique to the journal, Politics and the Life Sciences, which resulted in publication, a lawsuit, a retraction, misconduct charges, and volatile outbursts — in short, a shitstorm more stirring than L’Affaire Slater.

A new Hemingway movie is in the works — this time, with Patrick Hemingway, Papa’s sole surviving son. Hemingway is collaborating with DVD featurette director John Mulholland.

The United States government has insisted that on Wednesday, it did not fire airstrikes on a wedding party. More than 40 Iraqi citizens were killed and, yes, there was a bride and a groom there. But no, sir, the event was not a wedding party. There was a cake and several people dancing. There were guests, a maid of honor, a best man, and even a wedding singer. But no, the event was not, repeat not, a wedding party.

Under current Pentagon policy, a wedding party must closely resemble the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Since the Iraqi “wedding party” had only one culture involved with the “post-coupling event” rather than two, it was not, in fact, a wedding party at all. Since there were no Greeks or Caucasians present, it was not, in fact, a wedding party at all. Since there wasn’t a father with a bottle of Windex (Windex being an anticlimactic presence in the desert sands), the event was not, in fact, a wedding party. Most importantly, there was nobody there named Portokalos.

There were no dead children on the scene. There were, in the words of the Pentagon report, “miniature, tiny-limbed Iraqis who were not exactly alive.”

Because of these and many other mistaken impressions, Maj. Gen. James Matthis, who wears glossy pink fingernail polish and is fond of rolling around naked with refrigerated ground chuck, felt no need to apologize.

“It should be perfectly clear by now that Iraqis are second-rate citizens,” said Matthis. “If these people want to marry and reproduce, then, well, goddammit, they’ll do it where and when we say they will!”

Matthis refused to offer further statements, but he did say that he could be found at the meat locker if anyone else was into “the lifestyle.”

John Cleese is starting a blog. The site’s up and Cleese promises activity before mid-October. (via Cinetrix)

On the surface, it would seem that Maud is a nice gal, a talented writer, an able chronicler of the literary world, and, to my continued astonishment, a remarkably thorough correspondent. However, now that I’ve encountered Fraud Newton (defunct after mere days of wasted productivity by some cowardly anonymous employee at The Foundation Center), I have at last seen the light. Fraud Newton reports that beneath the seemingly benign sheen lies a heart of anthracite. This blog has revealed to me that Maud is a cold and calculated manipulator of the first order. I now realize that her friendly emails are part of a grand plot to overthrow the meat and potatoes of Western civilization. Would you believe that Maud has the temerity to lie about her birthday? Who needs the Iraq situation to get angry about when this minx is offering such jocose fibs? Thanks to Fraud Newton, I will avoid visiting New York altogether and I will stop sending her my boxer shorts by post.

No doubt the Old Hag will be the next grand hypocrite to be unmasked in the litblogging conspiracy. (She’s from Baltimore! Enough said.)

The Complete Review has its Cloud Atlas review up. We here at Return of the Reluctant have been nursing this fantastic novel like an exquisitely mixed margarita for several weeks and, given the extent of our notes, will weigh in eventually at a forum to be determined. The short answer is: Yes, this novel is better than the superlative Ghostwritten (we haven’t read number9dream, but we will) and, yes, it’s made us so happy and delirious that we’re actually using the first person plural against our better judgment.