Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant

Morning Tidbits

• 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• Gawker features an interview with Jamie Clarke, author of an unpublished novel, Vernon Downs, that involves a young writer who stalks Bret Easton Ellis.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.