That dependable beacon of contemporary literature, MOTEV, has weighed in on more titles. In fact, as much as I love Ian McEwan (I consider him to be one of our greatest living writers and there is, in fact, something of a McEwan shrine on one of my bookshelves), I have to agree with her slightly about Enduring Love. I genuinely believe it to be the weakest of McEwan’s novels because, as MOTEV suggests, the artifice calls attention to itself.

But I suspect the faults have more to do with McEwan’s inability to follow through on Enduring Love‘s fantastic opening set piece, which is among one of the greatest things he’s ever written. One of McEwan’s literary specialties is in showing how one act affects other lives. In Atonement, we see how a childhood act of cruelty leads to guilt and deceit, even in chronicling the details of the act. The Cement Garden shows with devastating clarity how the loss of parents alters the lives of children. But Enduring Love‘s great fallacy is in intellectualizing the trauma rather than filtering emotion through McEwan’s cut-to-the-bone clinical prose.

The other night, I found myself defending Something Wild‘s spotty third act with someone. I still consider Something Wild to be my favorite of Jonathan Demme’s films, largely because the first hour is such a breathless array of madness, with the tone alternating between demented screwball comedy, melodrama, sexual charge, and the poignant revisitation of family. Is it a flawed film? Absolutely. But as far as I’m concerned, I don’t believe Demme will ever top that first hour in his career.

So what of it, readers? Are there any books like Enduring Love or films like Something Wild that you find yourself falling over, yet looking the other way when the last act gets derailed by clunky narrative or, worse yet, a deus ex machina?

THE GOOD:

• It’s better than the awful Paul McGann 1996 TV movie. It’s better than “Time and the Rani.”
• Christopher Eccleston is a very good choice as the Doctor. We’ve never quite seen a version of the Doctor this spastic, let alone one with such an unusual gait. I’ll be interested to see where this incarnation, who is far more interesting than McGann, develops.
• Thank goodness they acknowledged the awkward romance angle that was introduced in the TV movie. There’s a funny scene where Rose’s mom is trying to seduce the Doctor and he isn’t interested at all. This is the kind of juxtaposition I see working in the series’ favor.
• It completely makes sense that there would be people on the Web keeping track of this strange guy, the Doctor, popping up at various moments in human history. Also, Doctor Who premiered the day after Kennedy was assassinated. The Doctor’s tie-in with JFK is a nice inside joke.
• Rose, the new companion, isn’t bad. She’s not a screamer. She fits in as the constant questioner. She’ll certainly appeal to kids. I’m not crazy about her character, but it’s still early.
• Finally, people who suffer total disorientation on the whole “bigger on the inside than it is on the outside” question.
• The Doctor’s concern for humanity’s potential is as strong as ever.
• The old sound effects are preserved!

THE BAD:

• The Doctor wearing a leather jacket, jersey pullover, and black pants? That’s the kind of thing I’d expect out of a CSI investigator, not Doctor Who. Where’s the eccentric attire? The question mark collars?
• The intellectual aspects of the Doctor have almost completely vanished. Part of the charm of the previous incarnations was that the Doctor would toss a reference to meeting Sir Francis Bacon or Picasso out of the blue. Writer-producer Russell T. Davies has gone for a more goofy direction, but his goofiness isn’t offset by a passion for knowledge and personal development.
• In fact, the Doctor’s solutions are more physical than creative. We first see him running away from an Auton. Would the Doctor really put an Auton into a headlock? Come on.
• It’s good to see the sonic screwdriver back, but what happened to “reversing the polarity of the neutron flow?”
• The new Doctor Who logo sucks.
• There seems an almost complete lack of mystery to this first episode. Where’s the sense of wonder? The weird details that come together to reveal an alien conspiracy?
• The new TARDIS console room is going to take some getting used to. The blue rotor looks nice, but the pillars surrounding it look like cheap foam core. The design is busier than it needs to be.
• The TARDIS is no longer temperamental with its navigation? That’s no fun.
• I miss the cliffhangers.

Even so, this isn’t that bad of a start.

Publisher’s Lunch reports that Margaret Cho has sold world rights to her YA novel I Hate Boys to Harper Children’s. Despite the seemingly endless spate of celebrities donning their pens to children’s books (there are now, in fact, more actors-turned-authors than actors-turned-directors), this one might be worthwhile.

• Disney has paid Clive Woodall $1 million to film One for Sorrow. Unfortunately, Disney has revealed a company policy whereby that are only allowed to pay seven figures to a supermarket manager once every thirty years. (This is for tax purposes.) So aspiring writers working at supermarkets will have to consider other studios.
• You have to admire the ethical devotion of the Limestone County School Board. After all, those Alabamans, who are clearly morally superior to the rest of us, have gone out of their way to keep a novel depicting “realistic life” off of school library shelves. The book is Chris Crutcher‘s Whale Talk. An excerpt reads: “The facts. I’m black. And Japanese. And white. Politically correct would be African-American, Japanese-American and what? Northern European-American? God, by the time I wrote all that down on a job application the position would be filled. Besides, I’ve never been to Africa, never been to Japan and don’t even know which countries make up Northern Europe. Plus, I know next to nothing about the individuals who contributed all that exotic DNA, so it’s hard to carve out a cultural identity in my mind. So: Mixed. Blended. Pureed. Potpourri.” Could it be that the Key Lime Pie Imperial Wizards have a problem with “realistic” diversity?
• I might be alone in my excitement here, but He-Man has come to DVD.
• “The most unnatural thing for a novelist is to talk about their [sic] work, really. And certainly about themselves.” What planet is Emma Richler living on?
• A cookbook catering to book clubs is out. The cookbook will include the proper dishes to serve when book club members are on the verge of strangling each other and an appetizer that will help settle the stomach when only one arty dude shows up among a coterie of thirtysomething women.
• Sam Weller has written a new Ray Bradbury biography entitled The Bradbury Chornicles. No word yet on whether Bradbury will go as apeshit over Weller’s title as he did over Fahrenheit 9/11. Odds: 10 to 1 that Weller will be physically assaulted by an 82 year old writer before the summer.
• And believe it or not, Rushdie was able to speak for one hour without threatening a journalist. Too bad that his idea of deep thought is “In order to defeat the enemy that needs to be defeated, we must not stop being what we are.”

OGIC has undertaken a massive summary of the movie quote game. The most cited film was Casablanca. Tied for second were Dr. Strangelove and The Big Lebowski (further proof that Lebowski is now indelibly quilted into the cultural fabric).

However, I’m really curious about the films that were only quoted once: the fun little gems and cult movies that remained in everyone’s subconscious.

(For what it’s worth, Quote #6 would have probably been “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kickass, and I’m all out of bubblegum” from They Live, “Let’s order sushi and not pay” from Repo Man, “Oh Mr. Travis! Try not to die like a dog!” from O Lucky Man!, “You say to yourself ‘How hot can it get?’ And then in Acupulco, you find out.” from Out of the Past, or “They’re coming to get you, Barbara!” from Night of the Living Dead.)

Hell yes! He’s back with the Hag. Which means that Top Jimmy as a feature here is, presumably, no more. My diabolical plans actually worked this time.

Mark has weighed in on the spate of Foer bashing. Of course, anyone who bashes Foer at this point, whether with blunt objects or swizzle sticks, is beating a dead horse. I succombed to it only because the idea of someone as incompetent as Deborah Solomon talking with Foer reminded me of a weekend I once spent at a Days Inn with a venemous journalist who insisted on calling me “Johnny from SF.” She insisted on abbreviating my hometown and didn’t offer an explanation. Needless to say, the weekend fling didn’t pan out, Solomon’s article hit close to home, and, after penning the post, I was reduced to chronic weeping for the next three days. These are some of the unfortunate things that happen behind the scenes here at Return of the Reluctant. I wish I could tell you more about the blood, sweat and tears. But that might be as unfortunately earnest as Foer’s emails were to Solomon.

However, I’m troubled by Mark’s suggestion that making fun of literary figures involves bitterness or his further insinuation that certain people are off limits. Particularly in an age when television that people pay for is being seriously considered as “indecent” and people are being placed on no-fly lists simply because they venture an opinion. I should remind Mark that taking the piss out of someone doesn’t necessarily mean that you despise them. Any good humorist knows this. Beyond this, appreciation or condemnation of another person’s contributions to letters is hardly a black-and-white issue. (To offer a personal example, while I’m not exactly a fan of Dave Eggers’ writing or the way he exploits his volunteers, I nevertheless commend what he’s done with 826 Valencia and have been nothing less than nuts about the comics issue of McSweeney’s, along with the two Chabon-edited anthologies.)

Like any redblooded American, I too read and enjoyed Everything is Illuminated. Even saw the guy when he came out to A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books years ago. Seemed nice enough. He was mobbed by youngsters who couldn’t scrape up the dough for the hardcover. And when Foer replied on these pages that he had given his PEN money to people who needed it, I was quick to commend him. As was Poets & Writers.

But there’s a fundamental difference between a writer’s life and the work he puts out. At issue here was Foer’s behavior, which seemed out of step with the privileged life he led that many of us writing in the skids dream about. Not his books.

If Philip Roth had decided to do something as manic and desperate, then, as much as I love Roth’s books and as crazy as I am about The Plot Against America, I would have mocked him to the high heavens. Not because I have anything personal against Roth, but because it helps to communicate to the world that writers are hardly the flawless beacons that the press and the literary community (including the litblogs) make them out to be. Truth be told, the publishing industry is nuts. That can’t be stated enough. In Foer’s case, they have given a young man ridiculous sums of money in the hope that he’ll become an instant literary superstar and, like J.T. Leroy, speak to the next generation of readers and hopefully sell boatloads of books.

I don’t envy Foer’s position or the pressure he has with this new book at all. If anything good came out of all this, it was a greater understanding that Foer’s just as fucked up as the rest of us. Raw talent often is.

But Foer’s also a smart guy. And anyone even remotely familiar with the Sunday New York Times, who has even leafed through the magazine at some point, is aware of Solomon’s tactics. He did something foolish and let himself get set up. And 150 e-mails to a reporter (many of them thousands of words) is, even from a twentysomething, a tad obsessive.

Further, there’s a fundamental difference between mocking and outright loathing. I don’t think that any of the people out there actually hate Foer or that he is being “punished,” as Mark puts it. Foer is not Raskolnikov. People are reacting the same way that they responded to Gerald Ford when he said that there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. For Christ’s sake, we did the same thing to Franzen.

But for what it’s worth, I’m rooting for him too.

Jonathan Ames writes that he will be performing at the Fez under Time Cafe, which will be closing down soon. The Fez is where many of Ames shows went down. On March 11, with the doors opening at 8PM and a cover charge somewhere between $14.99 and $15.01, Ames will rock the house with others at 380 Lafayette Street (@ Great Jones), New York, NY 10003. You can call 212.533.7000 for reservations.

No word yet on whether Ames will lather himself up for this performance.

Ames’ tale, “The Story of the Hairy Call,” has been turned into a movie.

And Ames has edited a new book called Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transexual Memoirs, to be published April 12 by Vintage.

Because we like Jonathan Ames, we will continue to report any and all Jonathan Ames-related news (true or false) that comes our way. So if you have any Jonathan Ames information, please feel free to send them the usual route and we will post all half-truths, deviant lies, and Ames anecdotes you heard from a friend of a friend of a friend on these pages. We feel it’s our civic duty to unfurl rampant misinformation, as this is the only proper way to call attention to one of those most candid writers of our time.

The Paris Review DNA Archive has been a bit slow in getting their 1970s interviews up (James M. Cain! Anthony Burgess! William Gass! Kurt Vonnegut! Eudora Welty! And more! Hurry up! It’s past March 1, dammit!). But this interview with Nabokov is a hoot. Some choice excerpts:

INTERVIEWER: And the function of the editor? Has one ever had literary advice to offer?

NABOKOV: By “editor” I suppose you mean proofreader. Among those I have known limpid creatures of limitless tact and tenderness who would discuss with me a semicolon as if it were a point of honor — which, indeed, a point of art often is. But I have come across a few pompous avuncular brutes who would attempt to “make suggestions” which I countered with a thunderous “stet!”

…

INTERVIEWER: Are there contemporary writers you follow with great pleasure?

NABOKOV: There are several such writers, but I shall not name them. Anonymous pleasure hurts nobody.

INTERVIEWER: Do you follow some with great pain?

NABOKOV: No. Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are for dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me, and I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as “great literature” by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterly’s copulations or the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake. I note he has replaced Dr. Schweitzer in some homes.

There are really only three reasons to see 1947’s The Long Night: Henry Fonda, Vincent Price and Barbara Bel Geddes. Bel Geddes is, strictly speaking, what made me stick around for what is undeniably one of the most ludicrous films noir ever made.

Lengthy aside: Fonda, holed up as a lodger, refuses to come out of his room. So what do the local police do? Call up the entire police force and shoot the hell out out of the place. Hundreds of bullets tear through the walls. And it is at this moment that the police decide that tear gas might be an option. To understate the obvious, it’s pretty clear that writer John Wexley — writer of Angels with Dirty Faces! — and director Anatole Litvak (the Nick Castle of his day; not exactly the brightest bulb helming in the 1940s; see also Sorry, Wrong Number, which turns the sumptuous Stanwyck into a one-dimensional puppet, as prima facie — riding on the coattails of Frank Capra as a directorial clone after co-directing Why We Fight) have no understanding of police procedure. Fonda, of course, stays alive, with enough vigor to spend the entire movie flashbacking to what got him into this ignoble spot.

But let’s go back to Bel Geddes. The woman is stunningly beautiful. Her acting is nuanced. On the basis of one movie alone, I am what you might call a fan, in the same way that I’m a fan of Liz Scott and Paulette Godard. Which is to say in a slightly unhealthy and decidedly masculine way.

One would hope that this (ahem) passion might be rewarded through the informational conduits of the Internet. If Google is a purported deity, we should be able to find all sorts of information about her, right? Nope. Because Bel Geddes is barely a blip on the cultural radar, here’s where the Internet’s powers are sorely lacking.

The Internet Movie Database, for example, suggests that Bel Geddes’ “career was damaged during the 1950s by McCarthyism” (as does Wikipedia). Okay, she’s had some sort of interesting political existence. But is there anything to corroborate this claim? Nope. Not even my dogeared copy of Victor Navasky’s Naming Names references her.

An interview with Larry Hagman reveals that Bel Geddes was one of the reasons he appeared on Dallas — largely because Bel Geddes was the first lady to say “pregnant” on the American stage. Is there anything to back this up? Not at all.

Hagman also reveals that Bel Geddes has become extremely reclusive and is hard to get a hold of. Further interest! But is there anything to back this up? No, not really.

So all any random person has to go on is unconfirmed rumors. There are no books. No newspaper citations. No abstracts. Almost nothing for someone who may have been a key figure in the political froth and who revolutionized theatre.

And the reason you can’t find anything on Barbara Bel Geddes is the same reason you can’t find much on John P. Marquand or even Sally Cruikshank’s wonderful animated shorts. If a person is not of the moment, then they are doomed to fall through the cracks of posterity.

I would suggest that bloggers and online enthusiasts have a duty to reference the people they love and back up their findings with links and citations. Because if we don’t keep these people alive, then who will?

[UPDATE: A reader writes in to remind me that Bel Geddes played the unfortunate Midge in Vertigo. I suppose I overlooked this because I’ve always been troubled by this misogynistic aspect (one of many) of Hitchcock’s overrated classic and the Midge character in particular.]

It’s come to my attention that an impending “crackdown” on bloggers is in the works. Bloggers will be arrested without due process, left to rot in a small 3 X 5 room, forced to hum ELO tunes at gunpoint, and asked if they’d prefer a stale menthol before being executed.

Of course, all this sounds very exciting and ominous. Someone in the shadowy hallways of the Pentagon is no doubt laughing his ass about all this. Presumably, they won’t be contributing to the edrants micropatron fund. Their loss. The empty Stoli botle is A-1.

But, for the record, you won’t find this place catering to the alleged rules and regulations — mostly, because we’re too lazy to keep track of the type of linking that might construe terrorism. We’ll link any damn way we want to and we encourage you to do the same.

Ever since I decided to become a lazy bastard and ask my readers for money, I’ve had lots of laughs spending my days in bed naked, smearing myself with Vaseline, watching Jose Mojica Marins movies on DVD, heating and eating donated cans of Progresso Soup (might I recommend the Manhattan Clam Chowder?), growing a poorly trimmed beard and, when really bored out of my gourd, posting content here that you can get elsewhere for free.

Sifting through monster.com ads and slaving away at some dull office job like most foolish Americans was never a consideration. And I had no desire to film myself having a nervous breakdown. There are enough 900 MB Quicktime movies floating around. (Just type in “Edward Champion drunk phone breakdown BitTorrent” into Google and see the insalubrious results for yourself.)

But I genuinely had no idea that you’d want to give me so much money to post long screeds about ME! ME! ME! I have difficulty enough jogging three times a week. And the last woman who slept with me thought my penis was too small.

However, fair is fair. Since some of you actually care enough to send me your hard-earned dollars, I figure that you deserve more incentive than reading about some 30 year old Caucasian whining about books during office hours. With this in mind, I’ve prepared some contribution gifts for the true suckers…ahem…patrons:

MY NINE INCH NAILS T-SHIRT: I’ve had this thing for at least twelve years. Frankly, it’s too embarassing for me to wear and I can’t even use it as “doing laundry” attire. But if you’ve ever wondered what it might be like to come close to all of the sweat I accumulated in my twenties, now’s your chance. Donate away and relive my glory years!

THE EMPTY BOTTLE OF STOLI FROM LAST WEEK: Hero worship doesn’t stop with sartorial artifacts. If there are any genetic scientists in the house who desire to clone me, you can do no worse than extracting some of the dried saliva around the bottle cap. Why, together we’ll create a whole army of self-absorbed bloggers asking for money! What lucky payee will be the first to start this revolution? The first one who sends in $400 gets this puppy.

SLOPPY SECONDS: The aforementioned woman who thought my penis was too small? Well, guess what, kids! She’s offered to throw herself at anyone willing to pay me money, largely because she figures that my readers are far more interesting and sexier than I am.

Act now and one of these (or perhaps all!) of these gifts can be yours!

Remember, kids! Blogging is all about the money!

Hey, producers, hack screenwriters and directors, and other cretinous bastards walking through the slimy alleys of Hollywood: Stop fucking around with Alan Moore’s work! (Or rather, Alan Moore, stop allowing these guys to fuck with your work. Do you really need more Victorian erotica to add to your copious collection in the east wing of the estate? Shit, Alan. It ain’t worth it!)

From Hell was a tepid affair. The League of Extraordinary Gentleman was abominable. And if, as this guy reports, you’re going to tamper with the careful politics of V for Vendetta and dilute this fantastic masterpiece of all its punch — if you motherfuckers can’t even “adapt” a fucking comic book, then you have no business being in show business.

And on a related note, why does The Bourne Supremacy make Paul Greengrass the ideal man to direct The Watchmen? Wasn’t Terry Gilliam attached to this at once point? (via Bookslut)

The latest Book Sense picks have been announced. What follows is an attempt to provide additional information on the selected titles. After all, testimonials are one thing, but comprehensive coverage is another. I have deliberately skipped over the heavy hitters (McEwan, Foer and Levy), because, as good as their work may be, they have all the hype and press agents they need.

Gods in Alabama by Joshilyn Jackson [Author’s Website]
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro [Overview] [January interview]
The King’s English: Adventures of an Independent Bookseller by Betsy Burton [King’s English Bookstore] [Letter from Burton to Orrin Hatch]
Saturday by Ian McEwan
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman [Book Reporter profile] [Ploughshares profile]
Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America by Fergus M. Bordewich [Official Website]
Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald [Website] [Random House profile]
Dear Zoe by Philip Beard [Official site]
Me & Emma by Elizabeth Flock [Excerpt]
Too Late to Die Young by Harriet McBryde Johnson [“Unspeakable Conversations”]
Misfortune by Wesley Stace [Official site]
Small Island by Andrea Levy
Cut and Run by Ridley Pearson [Official site]
Lost in the Forest by Sue Miller [interview]
You Can’t Get There From Here: A Year on the Fringes of a Shrinking World by Gayle Forman [“Women in War”]
Bleedout by Joan Brady [Website]
A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian by Marina Lewycka [London Times review]
Towelhead by Alicia Erian [“When Animals Attack”]
A Changed Man by Francine Prose [“Living Legends”]

Nick Broomfield fans (namely, certain monkeys) may be interested to know that a collection of interviews revealing the documentarian’s working methods, Jason Wood’s Nick Broomfield: Documenting Icons has arrived. Daniel Graham has the scoop: “At the heart of Broomfield’s work is a genuine desire to understand the world we live in and to offer his findings to a wider public. He’s certainly right in asserting that evening news bulletins barely scratch the surface when it comes to the more complex issues that trouble the world today, and are often filtered through an inane and commercially-driven editorial process. Is this really preferable to Broomfield’s subjective yet greatly detailed and researched version? Even the documentarist of the day – Michael Moore – comes across like a blunt instrument when viewed next to Broomfield’s work.” (via Greencine Daily)

• Apparently, Stephen King isn’t the only one offing himself in his novels. Kinky Friedman has committed literary suicide in his new book Ten Little New Yorkers. And that’s just the prologue. Personally, I’m waiting to see if these authors start murdering other novelists within their novels. After all, suicide seems a cowardly way to go. Even in fiction.
• The Godfather is being turned into a video game by Electronic Arts. What’s even more frightening is that new dialogue was recorded by the actors because the sound quality of the original film was “too dated to meet today’s technology standards.” Even Brando spent four hours in a booth shortly before dying, perhaps the most regrettable final role for a great actor since Orson Welles’ appearance in The Transformers: The Movie. Of course, when the inevitable “Sonny Lives (with Cher)!” MOD comes out, perhaps it might be worth a few hours of gameplay.
• No love for Brion Gysin? One of Burroughs’ seminal influences is getting a theatrical revival in a musical homage entitled The Dream Machine. In a related story, the story of Scooby and Shaggy’s literary influences will be developed into a play called The Mystery Machine, whereby Captain Underpants will receive its long-owed dues. Sadly, Scrappy Doo proved too small and intricate to reproduce for the stage.
• USA Today offers a roundup of debut novels.
• Bad enough that Taylor “Sentimental Hack” Hackford absconded with the legend of Ray Charles. Now he’s meddling with Charles Bukowski, with the humorless Sean Penn in tow. Can we all agree that if you have An Officer and a Gentleman and Against All Odds on your resume that you’re forbidden from weighing in on literary icons? The thing that kills me about today’s literary documentaries is that they seem to avoid the real interesting people. Where, for example, is director Barbet Schroeder, who once threatened to cut off his fingers if he couldn’t make Barfly?
• And this month’s literary criminal is Ronald Jordan, who apparently stole some 50,000 books and resold them at street stalls.

The amazing Quiddity turns five. YPTR turns one. Congratulations!

OGIC continues a new meme: name five movie quotes that pop immediately into your head.

1. “I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me.” (In a Lonely Place)

2. “Careful man! There’s a beverage here!” (The Big Lebowski)

3. “Mistakes? We don’t make mistakes.” (Brazil, said just before a circular wall section falls through the floor)

4. “You’ll catch your death of cold!” / “Yes, I probably will. But that’s all part of life’s rich paegant, you know.” (A Shot in the Dark)

5. “Sex with you is a Kafakesque experience.” (Annie Hall)

First Omar Hariri. Now Tung Cheehwa. The way things are stacking up, we won’t have many international political figures left to write angry letters about.

Fortunately, there’s one constant in international politics: upheaval is good for a little pocket money.

With shameless financial incentive in mind, I called my Vegas contact, Chuck Bamboono, to get some hot tips. Here’s what he had to say.

BASHAR AL-ASSAD:
Odds of Resigning: 4 to 1
Tell: “The withdrawal should be very soon, might be during few months and not after that. I cannot give you a technical answer.” Well, that’s putting it lightly. Uncertainty is a harsh mistress. It’s either resignation or untimely assassination, my friend. Get out while you still can.

ARIEL SHARON:
Odds of Resigning: 200 to 1
Tell: Even with Arafat, you can’t stop the animosity. And do you think Sharon wants to stop now that the alleged “dream” is just beyond reach?

GEORGE BUSH:
Odds of Resigning: 5,000 to 1
Tell: Stubborn is as stubborn does.

Well, since everyone seems to be following Terry’s lead, here are ten things I probably shouldn’t have done. This is by no means the list.

1. Talked my way out of being mugged while at gupoint on a bus in the Mission. Even managed to keep my wallet.

2. Wrote a feature length script in 24 hours, declared the script “experimental” to avoid heavy criticism, turned this piece of offal in for academic credit and was told by adviser that it was “one of the best scripts I’ve ever read from a student.”

3. Confused the dates of a major exam, went into the test cold without having read any of the material, relying upon hazy memories of reading the books in my teenage years, and was able to pass with flying colors, even recalling specific passages to back up arguments.

4. While in kindergarten, I was given a mathematical workbook. The book was intended to enrich me. It was suggested that I do the exercises, but I somehow construed this to involve the completion of entire workbook over weekend. Shocked parents, friends of parents, teachers.

5. Had sex in a museum while it was open.

6. On a dare, I once snorted about ten packets of Sweet & Low in a row at a 24 hour diner, to demonstrate that sugar substitute was a convicing cinematic substitute for cocaine.

7. As a teenager, to see how fast my mother’s shitty Ford Tempo could get, I slammed the gas down, cranking the speedometer hard to the right, and drove past a sitting fuzzmobile at 3 AM. Paranoid that I would be caught, that my license plate had been jottted down and that my underage drinking (one beer) would be discovered, I parked in an alley for an hour.

8. To see how long I could last without sleep, I once stayed awake for four days straight. Believe it or not, this was done without drugs.

9. Carried on an affair with a married woman. She was about twenty years older than me.

10. Was once escorted out of a building, according to “office procedure.” There was no explanation for my termination, nor any opportunity to explain my side of the story.

• A.L. Kennedy weighs in on how we should adjust our attitudes to lost keys.
• Apparently, quelling indecency over the airwaves wasn’t enough. Now the bastards are going after pay TV. If there’s any positive spin on this, perhaps this will stop Anna Nicole Smith.
• A principal has banned a lesbian student from appearing in a yearbook. Her crime? Wearing a tux. No word yet on whether neckties are the next to go.
• Forget the fact that Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep is a coming-of-age tale. Eileen McNamara walked away from the novel convinced that that it contributes to the deviant sexualization of minors. Yup. We all know how Lolita led to an unprecedented spate of professors sleeping with twelve year old girls in 1958. America is still reeling from that dark chapter in the history books. Stop these novels from being published before it’s too late! Dammit!
• D.H. Lawrence’s legacy is being re-evaluated. Lawrence was not, in fact, a water skier, but a writer of several stories and novels.
• Zora Neale Hurston’s lost plays have been located and published.
• Pulp fiction isn’t enough for Stephen King. An anthology series based on Nightmares & Dreamscapes is in the works.
• Tim Dolin lists the top 10 books on George Eliot.

There’s some fascinating food-for-thought from the ever-dependable Gwenda. She quotes F&SF editor Gordon Van Gelder on the state of current story-centric magazines:

As I’ve been reading through this thread, the comments of one veteran editor keep ringing in my head—he said to me, “Of course Analog is selling better than any other magazine: it’s the least risky.”

I bring up that comment, I guess, to defend against the charge of a conservative attitude in F&SF. I don’t particularly like that word, “conservative,” but I’ll be the first to say that I’ve got to balance the artistic side of things with the commercial side. For every reader who appreciates the challenge that a story like John McDaid’s “Keyboard Variations” offers, there are two or three readers who favor less challenging work like Ron Goulart’s lighter fare.

Which is one reason why I’m happy to second Sean’s sentiment when he says “I’m all for it!” to the writers blazing their own trails. I think the zine explosion of the last couple of years is very good for the field and I do my best to keep up with all the various magazines and anthologies, but I feel like someone needs to inject a note of commerciality into the discussion. Considering there are two threads running on the board now about declining circulation in the digests, it might be worth remembering that experimental fiction (“experimental” is another word like “conservative” that I don’t particularly like, but I can’t think of a better term right now; “riskier”? “less traditional”?) isn’t necessarily commercial.

There’s much more, of course, at Gwenda’s stomping grounds. But, at the risk of sounding like that assclown Wenclas, it begs the question: When “experimental” is a four-letter word and magazines are inveterately associated with sturdy sales, is it any wonder why today’s fiction remains sadly safe and predictable?

It’s been too long. The time has come for another bold ’em if you experienced ’em experiment. This time, we’re taking on the Top 100 AFI films. I’m almost ashamed to reveal that I’ve seen 96 of ’em.
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Calling all squad cars! Calling all squad cars! New DFW, with weirdass color-specific footnotes no less! Frabjous joy! (via Scott)

Perturbed by the Google Autolink nonsense? Zeldman points to a solution.

And en passant, there really doesn’t seem to be any difference between the unquestioning Google freaks and the unquestioning Apple freaks, is there? If the technological mantra of the 90s was “You’ve got mail,” I propose that this decade’s answer is “You’ve been branded!”

A coefficient was dropped sometime during the calculation process, but the Million Writers Award has finally settled upon the Top Ten Stories of 2004. The winners are:

• Terry Bisson "Super 8" (Scifiction.com)
• Jai Clare "Bone on Bone" (Agni)
• Xujun Eberlein "Second Encounter" (Paumanok Review)
• Alicia Gifford "Toggling the Switch" (Narrative Magazine)
• Richard Grayson "Branch Libraries of Southeastern Brooklyn" (Fiction Warehouse)
• Trebor Healey "The Mercy Seat" (Blithe House Quarterly)
• Dave Housley "Ryan Seacrest Is Famous" (Barrelhouse)
• Joan Shaddox Isom "Remade Tobacco" (Eclectica Magazine)
• Corey Mesler "Madame Sabat’s Grave" (Pindeldyboz)
• Chika Unigwe "Dreams" (Eclectica Magazine)