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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Move over, David Mitchell. The Literary Saloon has gone gaga over Lars Saabye Christensen’s The Half Brother. And they’re not the only ones. Paul Binding says it’s “a deeply felt, intricately worked and intellectually searching work of absolutely international importance.” Anna Peterson calls it “a great river of a book.” And Boyd Tonkin calls it “a total knock-out of a novel ” Norman Mailer, however, remains convinced that he wrote it first, writing longhand in 1972 in Norwegian.

Ian Samson offers an unapologetically scathing assault on John Fowles:

The chronology of John Fowles’s friendless and hallowed experience is as follows: he gets born, goes to prep school, boarding-school, Oxford, then goes to teach at the international school on the Greek island of Spetsai, returns to London with the wife of a colleague, teaches at various unsuitable colleges, enjoys enormous success with his first book, The Collector (1963), and buys a big house in Lyme Regis where he writes very long books, such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Daniel Martin (1977) and A Maggot (1985), which sometimes get made into films and make him a lot of money (large parts of the Journal are filled with his totting-up of income and expenditure). It may have taken him a while to achieve the success he feels he deserves, but he hit his stride straight off in his journal, setting the tone in the first entry, on 24 September 1949: ‘A curious thing. About to throw a piece of screwed-up paper into the yellow jug which serves as waste-paper basket, I said to myself, “As much chance as you have of being a genius.” It fell into the jug without a murmur, a 20 to 1 chance, at the least.’

Of course, given how Fowles goes after Scrabble players (“‘The poverty of minds that can spend such evenings playing such rubbish”), the apparently joyless and smug scribe has it coming. Personally, I keep a daily journal (in addition to this weblog and everything else), but I would never deign to show anyone my prattle, let alone profit off of it when I couldn’t write a new novel.

(via Rake)

Toni Morrison’s next project is very intriguing. USA Today reports that her next book, Remember: The Journey to Story Integration, is framed around early black-and-white photos of school integration, with Morrison writing the hypothetical dialogue and emotions of the children. The book has 52 photographs, and marks the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

The Independent reports that Michael Moore knew that Disney wasn’t going to distribute Fahrenheit 9/11 a year ago. Here’s the CNN interview in question. The full quote is this:

Almost a year ago after we’d started making the film, the chairman of Disney, Michael Eisner, told my agent that he was upset that Miramax had made the film — Disney owns Miramax — and he will not distribute this film.

Miramax said don’t worry about that, keep making the film, we’ll keep funding it. The Disney money kept flowing to us for the last year. We finished the film last week, and we take it to the Cannes film festival next week.

On Monday of this week we got final word from Disney that they will not distribute the film. They told my agent they did not want to upset the Bush family, particularly Gov. Bush of Florida because Disney was up for a number of tax incentives, abatements … whatever. The risk of losing this — we’re talking about tens of millions of dollars — they didn’t want to risk it over a little documentary.

So the big question here is whether this is a trumped up publicity stunt or a legitimate case of Moore defiantly raging against the machine. Granted, the semantics don’t help Moore’s case. But in light of the deflating Disney image, part of me wonders if this was a ploy by Miramax to stir up a Pixar-like shakeup.

As if Nerve weren’t cool enough already, Neal Pollack now has a column there called “Bad Sex.” Huge bonus points for getting “priapically” in there as a deplorable Tom Swifty.

James Patterson, author of Kiss the Girls and other novels that have sold quicker than airplane parts during the Blitz, intends to write a children’s book. Patterson, known for fulminating at book critics, hopes to demonstrate with “SantaKid” that there’s a kinder, gentler James Patterson behind all the fury. Return of the Reluctant has obtained an early excerpt of his story. We leave readers to decide if there are, in fact, two James Pattersons co-existing in this universe.

Beautiful pearly teeth filled her mouth. She was ready. Really ready. Everything was good, really damn good, about this smile.

Kimberly the Elf was a North Pole trainee. It was her first day.

“It’s a good smile,” Rufus the Elf whispered. “I wouldn’t change a single thing about it.”

They had come to the toy factory to work and to smile. They had three hundred gifts to wrap and send out. Three hundred gifts, and if they were feeling really good, maybe they’d have three hundred and one.

Rufus the Elf had to smile. He had already smiled twice that morning, and he knew he would smile again.

“Tough business,” Kimberly admitted. “But we’ll make it through.”

“Just keep smiling,” he said to her. “It’s the right thing to do.”

Kimberly had imagined this moment, this tremendous new life, so many times. It became easier to smile as the toys poured out the chute like coins flying from a Vegas jackpot. God, she loved smiling and wrapping toys.

Rufus looked at Kimberly. Kimberly looked at Rufus.

There was work to do, and it was good work. As good as the smiles they rode in on.

Customer service. The very term implies a soft-spoken, clean-cut Babbitt man from the Eisenhower era, a teetotaler who votes Republican but never discusses politics, a necktie who calls you “sir” or “ma’am” and exudes an ineluctable folksy charisma, a guy who spends his Thursday evenings at the bingo parlor and who will pomade his hair well into his autumn years. A man prepared to listen to the customer’s needs, who might have attended a Dale Carnegie course, maybe donning a daring fashion accouterment like a purple polka-dot bowtie. Chances are his name is Harold or Orville.

“Dork” is probably the word here, but in a good way. I remember guys like this growing up. You could find them hunkered over a merchandise list in an appliance store or sometimes knocking on your door. They knew their products. They had a quiet and unobtrusive way of making a sale and finding out what you wanted. They were adamant, but never pushy. They offered to undersell the competition. They worked hard, but they always sauntered along with a relaxed gait.

But after spending a half hour dealing with outsourced customer service from a faraway nation the other day, I’m convinced that today’s definition of customer service involves nothing less than bad dialogue and circlejerks.

It was bad enough with the voice-activated customer service systems that denied you the use of the touchtone phone. Of course, with those, you could generally recite the first lines of “Jabberwocky.” Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem still stands the test of time, fooling the human ear as well as its crude computerized counterpart. The computer translates the polite sentence, “I want to speak to a fucking human being” into “I want to seek a fucking by your company, along with the loss of my time and the handover of half my savings.” And that’s when you get a live human being on the other end, because the company’s ultimate goal is to fleece the customer through an overlooked clause in an agreement.

But now that companies have outsourced their support to faraway nations, you get conversations like this:

OUTSOURCED CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE IN SOME FARAWAY NATION: I completely understand your concerns. But if you fax us the form, we will get you the information in two hours.

ED: This is the third time I’ve called you. The first time, we did what you asked. We faxed you the form and you promised the info in two hours. That was two weeks ago.

OUTSOURCED CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE IN SOME FARAWAY NATION: Yes. [pause, as if to imply somehow that, despite boiler-plate repetition, the result will be different] I completely understand your concerns. But if you fax us the form, we will get you the information in two hours.

ED: See, that’s the problem. We’ve already done that. The second time I called in, which was last week, you promised us the info in two hours. We have done everything you have asked and we still don’t have the info.

OUTSOURCED CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE IN SOME FARAWAY NATION: Yes, yes. [pause] I completely understand. But if you fax us the form, we will get you the information in two hours.

ED: No, you don’t understand. We’ve had these promises before and you’ve failed to live up to them. I need the info now. Can I speak to your supervisor?

OUTSOURCED CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE IN SOME FARAWAY NATION: Yes, but he will say the same thing.

[Time passes. ED repeats explanation of previous info dilemma to SUPERVISOR OF OUTSOURCED CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE IN SOME FARAWAY NATION.]

ED: [arch and serious] Do you realize the severity of this? If you don’t get us the info, then we may have to consider doing business elsewhere.

SUPERVISOR OF OUTSOURCED CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE IN SOME FARAWAY NATION: Yes. [pause] I completely understand. But if you fax us the form, we will get you the information in two hours.

ED: Stop reading from the script!

SUPERVISOR OF OUTSOURCED CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE IN SOME FARAWAY NATION: I’m not reading from the script.

ED: And I have a third nostril! Is there anyone there who can actually get me the info?

SUPERVISOR OF OUTSOURCED CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE IN SOME FARAWAY NATION: No. [pause] But if you fax us the form, we will get you the information in two hours.

ED: [contemplating another hour of “If you fax us the form, we will get you the information in two hours.”] Okay, what’s the fax number?

Some info from Fantastic Fiction on China Miéville’s third New Crobuzon novel, Iron Council (set to hit stores on July 27, 2004): “It is a time of revolts and revolutions, conflict and intrigue. New Crobuzon is being ripped apart from without and within. War with the shadowy city-state of Tesh and rioting on the streets at home are pushing the teeming metropolis to the brink. In the midst of this turmoil, a mysterious masked figure spurs strange rebellion, while treachery and violence incubate in unexpected places. In desperation, a small group of renegades escapes from the city and crosses strange and alien continents in the search for a lost hope, an undying legend. In the blood and violence of New Crobuzon’s most dangerous hour, there are whispers. It is the time of the Iron Council.”

John Derbyshire proclaims An African in Greenland, a first-person account of West African Tété-Michel Kpomassie meeting Eskimos, as the strangest travel book ever written. An audio interview with Kpomassie can be found here.

Also worth investigating: Troll: A Love Story, featuring what appears to be a Terry Pratchett-like skewering of fantasy conventions, gay consorts, and a baby troll being beaten up by street thugs.