It suddenly occurs to the proprietor that he is allowing silly things to plague his mind and thus the blog here in question. Recent emotional currents rolling down my grand river of life have left me in states that involve (a) absent-mindedness, (b) placing priorities on things that I might otherwise never have considered, (c) operating on a tightly regimented plan in defiance of states (a) and (b), (d) divesting myself of a lot of needless muck, and (e) being far too nice and considerate to people, more so than the cheery days of March. The end result of this is something strange, productive, and otherwise unworldly. Nevertheless, it’s all true — indeed, truer than before. I’d go into more details, but the simple fact is that I’m not entirely cognizant myself and I need to memorialize much of these strange sensations privately before I can begin to be forthright about them publicly. Plus, some of the grand plans keeping the momentous rivulet gushing are still being carried out and the nautical expert’s results remain inconclusive. Plus plus, the details are bound to mesh with more details pertaining to completely unrelated things and developments rolling along (including this play). So there you are.

I’ll just momentarily state that I acknowledge your confusion, but out of this mesmerizing chaos will come, I suspect, a clarity deeper than before. For those who have waded through these waters, I admire your determination. I’ll do my best to provide life preservers and remind you to roll up your jeans before you get your feet wet. But at the present time, I cannot guarantee consistency in content, disciplined or otherwise. But I’ll do my best.

DVD File reports that After Hours, a beautifully twisted Scorsese film, is coming to DVD, along with several other rocking titles. After Hours will have audio commentary from Scorsese, deleted scenes and a featurette.

Charles needs a job. Hire him.

Kevin has again bravely served up what he calls his “lack of education” regarding the National Review’s Top 100 Non-Fiction Books of the Century. My own bolded paucity (23 — admittedly, the number would have been greater if the list had slanted left or if I had counted excerpts) follows.
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Associated Press: “The 9-to-5 shift overwhelmingly favors larks. When has anyone complained that employees show up too early? Owls, on the other hand, are frequently stigmatized as recalcitrant slugabeds who fritter time and resources on the company’s dime. That stigma is just another sign that shallow emblems of productivity impress American managers more than results. After all, the 9-to-5 shift has become an anachronism in the 24-hour global economy. It fails to take into account the impact of e-mail and other technologies in making traditional work hours less relevant.”

The Age: “According to literary critic John Guillory, the relationships that form between literature teachers and their students may carry an erotic charge. Anyone who has studied or taught the subject at university can readily confirm this from experience, observation, or hearsay. In his ponderously titled but surprisingly readable book Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, Guillory argues that desire plays an important role in the transfer of knowledge from academics to their students in a university environment.”

I’ve been telling folks this for years. You don’t need whips and chains and whipped cream in the bedroom. Or maybe you do. Even so, a little bit of poetry and a professor’s cap never hurt anyone lying naked beneath an eiderdown. So work that bump and grind, baby! Get some of that hot deconstruction action! If music be the food of lust, oh yeah!

Alice Randall, who parodied Gone with the Wind, received an injunction from the Margaret Mitchell estate, and won her case on appeal, is suggesting that Pushkin was part of the Harlem Renaissance with her next novel. Alas, Carlin Romano isn’t impressed: “Unfortunately, Randall’s effort drags for many of the same reasons “The Wind Done Gone” did: overwriting and repetition, tiresome thumping of racial resentment, and a pathetic Afrocentric need to claim scalps for the cause. Windsor’s logorrhea suggests that Randall’s own self-absorption trumped any ambition to master her invented subject. The entire Russian aspect of the book reads like pretentious window dressing for a shapeless vanity tale.”

He was raked over the coals by Blogger, but you can find the trusted Rake at his new Pad.

Sad news from Bakersfield. Bandit, the world’s heaviest raccoon, has passed through the great raccoon gates in the sky. Bandit weighed nearly 75 pounds, more than enough to secure an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records. He was fond of Froot Loops and french fries. He is survived by his owner, Deborah Klitsch.

If keeping up with her publishing schedule isn’t bad enough, the Washington Post reports that Joyce Carol Oates’ theatrical adaptation of The Tattooed Girl will make its premiere at Washington’s Theater J. Oates will also be writing Van Helsing 2: They Needed Real Writers for Universal. Efforts were made to pry the pen away from Ms. Oates’ hand, but she remained stubbornly resistant and even penned a short story during the unsuccessful attempts to stop her from writing.

At the Seward Park Library, serving the Lower East Side of Manhattan for 95 years, annual reports have unearthed details about readers. The Times notes that in a 1920 report, sweatshop workers and tenement dwellers greadly desired Dickens and Hawthorne. During the Depression, “undesirables” scoured the stacks for books on syrup flavoring. And They Were Expendable and A Bell for Adano were popular just after World War II.

Wired: “The idea was to explore what happens when digital games are placed in the larger analog world of city streets. And, according to player Mike Olson, a player in Saturday’s Pac-Manhattan game, one of the things that happens is that, soon after the game starts, ‘the more dissolute graduate students begin throwing up.’ “

Guardian: “A video posted today on an Islamist militant website appeared to show a group affiliated with al-Qaida beheading an American contractor in Iraq, saying the death was revenge for the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers.”

Following up on Ernest Vincent Wright’s Gasby: A Story of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the Letter “E”, Michel Thaler has written a novel without verbs. Which begs the question: can a novel resembling the Incredible Hulk’s vernacular remain captivating for 250 pages?

A list of epistolary fiction.

War letters.

Famous Love Letters: Includes Napoleon, Robert Browning, Lord Byron, Samuel Clemens, Honore de Balzac, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and more.

“Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter Writing” by Charles Dodgson

Emily Post on Longer Letters: “The art of general letter-writing in the present day is shrinking until the letter threatens to become a telegram, a telephone message, a post-card. Since the events of the day are transmitted in newspapers with far greater accuracy, detail, and dispatch than they could be by the single effort of even Voltaire himself, the circulation of general news, which formed the chief reason for letters of the stage-coach and sailing-vessel days, has no part in the correspondence of to-day.”

Einstein’s letters to FDR.

The letters of Henry James.

The letters of Jane Austen.

The history of Rasputin’s penis (and its forgeries), before it hit St. Petersburg.

One man’s quest to recreate the Karate Kid shower costume. (via Pop Culture Junk Mail)

[Related Link: The Ralph Macchio Homepage, “a wholehearted tribute to the greatest actor of the 20th century.”]

Due to lack of sleep, considerable diligence, and a surfeit of giddy emotions, posting will be light, if not nonexistent, over the next couple of days. Communications will continue, although indignation may be staged and/or plagiarized solely for the benefit of house residents.

Mark “Macho Man” Sarvas has a rocking new design up and promises to get an interview with Andrew Sean Greer up in the near future.

The Chronicle on Noah Hawley: “With this unexpected gift of New York barstool time, he grabbed a napkin and made notes about characters and scenes for a novel about love and marriage.”

Did I miss the memo that outlined the differences between East Coast and West Coast barstools? And can you dance in New York barstool time? Or do you need a jazz trio to make sense of the signature?

Just after the Fitzgeralds’ lives have been turned into a musical, Kit Harvey takes a look at the “first celebrity couple.”

MSNBC: “Levy is all but helpless, he says, when new e-mail arrives. He feels obliged to open it. He is similarly hooked on the news, images and nonsense that spill out of the Internet. He is also a receiver and sometimes a transmitter of ‘surfer’s voice,’ the blanched prattling of someone on the phone while diddling around on the Web.”

Hey, Levy, I’ve got two words for you: pro-active life.

I’ve become increasingly bothered by the idea that people feel “helpless” in our present day. Just about the only thing that mystifies me more are the people who proclaim that they’re “bored.” Bored? How can you be bored with all the crazy shit going on? Depressed? Delighted? Lustful? Geeky? Hell yeah. But bored?

For the “helpless” sort, I’m not talking about folks who have specialized interests and exchange knowledge about particular topics. That much involves a pro-active discussion in which various people are trying to wrestle with pertinent information, often in collusion with each other (sort of like these lit blogs). I’m talking about the folks who are incapable of moving the rudder even a smidgen, the people who feel compelled to use outside variables as an excuse.

I couldn’t balance my checkbook because I was catching the last episode of Friends.

I went shopping but I forgot my list and I was overwhelmed by the choices.

I couldn’t get up this morning because I was too mesmerized by my girlfriend’s accessory.

It never occurs to this type of person that filtering out the nonsense and focusing on the important information may very well lead him to a personal evolution. Or not. But, at the very least, it will get the person closer to who he really is, even if it involves taking steps and falling flat on his ass.

Levy follows up his whining with the idea that “it is part of our birthright as human beings to have space and silence for our thoughts.”

Well, it’s also part of our birthright to make decisions, sometimes without the benefit of considerable rumination, and to try things. That means seriously considering that 3AM call from Phil about an impromptu road trip to Vegas. To me, one of the most horrifying ideas of existence is to remain in a year-long passive stupor. Perhaps Levy’s idea angers me because I used to be like this, and I had pretty horrendous parental models involving passive self-entitlement that took years for me to personally reprogram.

Today, I cannot understand how anyone could ever live like this, let alone someone like Levy, who, at 53, is too old to be intimidated by everyday existence when, in fact, he can set up spam filters or unplug altogether.

A reader wrote in to say that she was mystified by the continued employment of Laura Miller at the Gray Lady. “I knew,” she continued, “like an unreliable vibrator, that every time I put a Laura Miller column into my hands, the sensation would start off pleasant and then sputter out because the electric current turned tepid and the vibrator itself was poorly designed. So now, in lieu of a pleasurable Times experience, I’ve been forced to call my man over every Sunday morning and have him ram me against the bedpost to iambic pentameter, while we both shout out Shakespearean sonnets. Fortunately, the downstairs neighbor, a professional drummer, appreciates our mutual syncopation.”

Yankee ingenuity is justly celebrated, independent and far away from Sam Tanenhaus’s hallowed millieu, but why subject yourself to an irksome book columnist when so many sublime ones are available? Every literature freak recognizes the threshold my correspondent has yet to cross: the moment you decide that a book columnist has jumped the shark.

For some, it’s like having your limbs tied up with hard hemp rope, your mouth gagged with a tight hankie, and a dominatrix referring to you as Phil Donahue. Even when you suggest that capital punishment should be aired on national television, there’s still the problem of being muffled by the handkerchief and manacled with the rope. And the dominatrix may, in a moment of kindness, get you your Sunday newspaper with that precious book section. But when the last page is Miller, as opposed to Margo Jefferson or that enjoyable comic strip, the dominatrix gains additional leverage, ruining what is, ostensibly, a perfectly deviant sex life.

But surely readers, who aren’t responsible for filtering through idiotic op-ed columns and deciding upon who gets a column and who does not, and who know what it’s like to suffer through silly book coverage offered by The Scotsman, are more generous? Not really. Even when columnists like Miller grab quotes from noted authors in an effort to justify their stature, it still cannot propel a 1,000 word column that can essentially be reduced to one sentence: “Don’t read the books you don’t want to, dude.”

The fact that these book columnists are so joyless and smug over book-related subjects that are essentially non-issues makes one wonder why these columns exist in the first place. Is the answer simply that Laura Miller is, as Chicha has suggested, sexually frustrated? If that’s the answer, then why the horrendous columns? Other great writers (HP Lovecraft, Emily Dickinson and Cornell Woolrich come to mind) have managed to produce greatness in stark contrast to their nonexistent sex lives. And they were writing fiction and poetry, not literary criticism, let alone a regular column.

There remains one ineluctable conclusion: Laura Miller has served her purpose. She must either produce something compelling in the next 60 days, something that recalls her early days at Salon, or jump over the Harold Bloom Memorial Bridge and throw herself into the Ponderous Hudson.

The Guardian: “Using sexual jibes and degradation, along with stripping naked, is one of the methods taught on both sides of the Atlantic under the slogan ‘prolong the shock of capture’, he said. Female guards were used to taunt male prisoners sexually and at British training sessions when female candidates were undergoing resistance training they would be subject to lesbian jibes.”

Scalia Erodes Free Speech for AP Reporter: “As Scalia spoke, a United States Marshal stepped in front of Denise and demanded that she turn over the digital recording she was making to back up her notes. She tried to say no, but the marshal ignored her and erased Justice Scalia’s words from memory on the spot.”

CNN: Judge orders couple not to have children.

I’m sorry if there hasn’t been a lot of book news lately, but when we live in a nation that restricts personal freedoms, obstructs the press, and teaches unnecessary sadism (later enforced) to soliders, it’s a bit difficult to dance a joyful jig.

Oh, and Van Helsing is easily the worst movie of the year. If you want vampires, see the old Universal horror films, any of the Hammer horror films, Near Dark, hell even Lust for a Vampire, anything other than this cinematic turd. I am convinced that Stephen Sommers will become a dreaded name in the annals of cinematic history. The film is so dumb and condescending that when we see a half-constructed Eiffel Tower framed prominently in an establishing shot, we also get a title card that reads “PARIS.” No shit? Paris? I mean, here I was thinking we were looking at that Paris hotel in Vegas or something.

So spineless is this film that there are no nipples on the flying vampire ladies. The film is an unrelenting headache of noise, futile shock moments and ADD editing. It’s something of an unintentional achievement to throw in Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster and a wolfman and not offer a single compelling moment. Kate Beckinsale is neither attractive nor capable of emoting beyond the level of a stale Saltine cracker. (Witness her bland delivery as she hears her brother howling in torture, which suggests an actress whose idea of human experience doesn’t extend beyond the hauteur of a Parisian catwalk.) Hugh Jackman does what he can, but not even Laurence Olivier could bring dignity to jejune dialogue like, “Guess it’s time to leave.” And Richard Roxburgh is the dullest Dracula I’ve ever seen. Lousy accent, even lousier delivery, the kind of inept thespian you expect to pop up at 3AM on the Sci-Fi channel, not some big-budget Hollywood movie. Think Wild, Wild West applied to Universal horror. Yes, it’s that kind of pain.

Thank goodness I saw this with an amazing moviegoing pal

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