New Yorker: “[Rich Little] promised to use mostly political material, though, along these lines: ‘They said we’re going to send jets to Israel this year, but what the hell would they do with a bunch of football players?’ Iraq jokes, however, are out. ‘I do have a funny line on that,’ he said, and he began to imitate the current President: ‘George W. Bush here. I tell you, I’m between I-raq and a hard place.'”

Matthew Tiffany may very well believe in the semiotic advantages of chickens, but I assure Mr. Tiffany that when this site undergoes its long neglected redesign, he may very well be outweirded. You have been warned, dear readers.

Scientific American: “Researchers at Dartmouth College may have the answer. They found that a default network of regions in the brain’s cortex—a grouping known to be active when the mind is completely unoccupied—is firing away as a person is engaged in routine activities. Malia Mason, now a postdoctoral researcher of neurocognition at Harvard Medical School, trained subjects in verbal and spatial memory tasks that after four days of continual repetition became quite banal—perfect conditions for thinking about something unassociated with the work at hand. In fact, subjects reported more daydreaming when performing the rehearsed sequences rather then when the tasks were tweaked slightly to introduce a novel stimulus requiring a bit more focus.”

New York Times: “Now pornographic movie studios are staying ahead of the curve by releasing high-definition DVDs. They have discovered that the technology is sometimes not so sexy. The high-definition format is accentuating imperfections in the actors — from a little extra cellulite on a leg to wrinkles around the eyes….Producers are taking steps to hide the imperfections. Some shots are lit differently, while some actors simply are not shot at certain angles, or are getting cosmetic surgery, or seeking expert grooming.”

A few people have criticized yesterday’s post, pointing out that the NBCC fiction nominees are about celebrating “the best” or “the most noteworthy books of the year,” with the idea that it doesn’t matter if an author has received accolades or not.

This is a fair point, but what is “the best” about exactly? Since we know that the NBCC created a committee and spent an entire day settling upon these mostly lackluster candidates, one must ask whether “the best” are genuinely being sought through the NBCC’s current consensus approach. Did the NBCC Board Members even talk about a book like Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y or was it simply not in its collective radar because one of the judges doesn’t read books set in a dimensional universe? Was this really a matter of delving deep for “the best” or settling upon a group of ten pretty good books that everyone had already read?

Is not celebrating literature the act of submerging one’s self across a broad spectrum, particularly areas that run counter to one’s interests?

Finding “the best,” in my view, means plunging into books in direct conflict with one’s sensibilities, while simultaneously embracing those established (and deserved) voices that speak to the collective timbre. It can be done. It was done with the National Book Awards, and one need look no further than this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist to find another eclectic array. The list includes a genre staple like M. John Harrison, while recognizing a left-field candidate like Lydia Millet’s Oh Pure and Radiant Heart.

The National Book Critics Circle Awards nominations are up. And it’s clear to me that the NBCC’s fundamental goal here is to play things safer than a dinner for four at the Olive Garden. The NBCC awards were once the place to find books representing literary innovation (witness the 2005 list of finalists, which included Gaitskill, Ishiguro and Vollmann). But what we have this year is Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy and Kiran Desai: authors who have already received considerable plaudits. It’s good to see Adichie on the list. She’s the only fictive sparkle here, the underrated book that the NBCC should remind readers about. But in a year that included Ngugi wa Thiong’O’s Wizard of the Crow and Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y, rewarding Dave Eggers for his “philanthropy”-as-opportunism strikes me as a disingenuous commendation, about as honorable as nominating Michael Moore agitprop for a distinguished film award. And when you compare these finalists against the National Book Award finalists, one begins to wonder if it’s the National Book Foundation that’s the real champion of tomes that rock the boat.

Of course, there are a few sparkles amidst the predictable. In the memoir category, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a quirky and commendable choice. Frederick Crews’ Follies of the Wise has a modicum of punk rock chic attached to it, as does Julie Phillips’ biography of James Tiptree, Jr.

But otherwise, it’s a pretty tepid list. Even stranger, the Critical Mass thread is now being heavily moderated, as those who take understandable umbrage over these choices (particularly over the lack of women awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing) are denied their say. Literary elite indeed.

This is a reminder that I’ll be appearing tonight at Writers with Drinks, at The Rickshaw Stop, located at 155 Fell Street (at Van Ness), where I’ll be reading the first chapter of my novel (currently titled Untitled). I promise at least one testicle joke. But beyond this, the hot talents of Andrew Sean Greer, Michelle Tea, Kim Stanley Robinson, Michael Blumlein and Justin Chin will also be there.

Travis Nichols may not be able to tell the difference between a novel and a memoir (re: Heartbreaking), but I think he nails a major flaw in Dave Eggers: “[B]y telling Deng’s story in the identifiable manner of Team America, Eggers strips him of some of his Otherness in a way that leaves us asking: Can we feel charitable only toward people whose stories seem like our own? And if so, are we more interested in helping other people, or in flattering ourselves?”

I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong in telling a story in an accessible manner. I think there’s room for both baroque literary endeavors and books that function as “page-turners.”* But I do object to the idea that when one reads a book and one likes it, one immediately joins a team of unquestioning acolytes (the “Us” team that Nichols suggests in his first paragraph). This is quite possibly my only major objection to the Litblog Co-Op. The current atmosphere of championing books is a good one, but it sometimes leaves little room for points of contention or spirited (yet amicable) debate about a book’s flaws. I feel that my own enthusiasm has contributed somewhat to this atmosphere, and I have tried to offset this partisanship somewhat with my interviews, where I often ask challenging questions of the authors (even when I greatly admire the work in question).

In the case of Dave Eggers, however, I suspect this collective herd mentality is even more egregious. Where the LBC’s boosterism is in some ways accidental, Eggers has styled a more deliberately programmed “Us vs. Them” mentality. Eggers has consistently boasted about how all the What is the What sales will go to Valentino Achak Deng’s charitable foundation, and it’s a bit like observing a little boy constantly tugging on his mother’s sleeve every time he does a good deed. But I think Eggers, much like Eddie Vedder before him with Tibet, is attempting to set an example and act like a leader in which his followers act upon the same impulses. This is all fantastic if you are naive enough to believe that humans will understand goodness entirely by mimicry, but the problem with this approach is that I don’t think this allows the McSweeney’s acolytes to think actively and intricately about the Sudan situation on their own. It assumes, like a liberal attending a protest against Iraq greeted by pro-Palestine supporters who immediately assume that the liberal is on their side, that the person is on board completely for the cause. But skepticism, particularly when applied to one’s belief system, is a very important part of being a good thinker and, as such, a very important part of being a good reader.

If What is the What was written with all this in mind, then I’m wondering if this decreases the book’s literary worth. The collective mentality didn’t work well for Bolshevism and it certainly doesn’t work well for literature. (Witness for example how well the One Book, One City campaigns have done.) And it seems possible to me that some of the people cradling What is the What on the subway are doing so with the same eager zeal in which others have clutched Mao’s Little Red Book.

* A brief aside: I should note that I disagree with Jeff VanderMeer when he suggests that paragraphs used “merely to advance the story” are poorly constructed. Sometimes, a paragraph must bristle with nothing but emotional life. Consider, for example, Charlie Huston’s Caught Stealing: a novel in which nearly every paragraph is used to advance the story. If Huston had paused to embed what VanderMeer identifies as “intellectual life” within his paragraphs, then the book’s hard visceral thrust would have been lost. The protagonist’s spiral into the underworld must occur in a kind of half-formed, miasmal universe where both the protagonist and the reader don’t have a clue as to how the protagonist got there. Sometimes, fiction operating on pure emotion is the best mode with which to affect a mood. Small wonder then that “page-turners” are often dismissed by literary types because a term like “intellectual life” is more valued than an author’s ability to advance the story and thereby evoke mood in a way that books which concern themselves exclusively with “intellectual life” (Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle comes to mind) are sometimes incapable of.

Gawker unfurls memos sent to various people at Time Inc.. The New York Times reports the layoff figure at 300. Bureaus in Washington, Miami, Chicago and Austin have been shut down. People has laid off 44 editorial employees, Time has laid off 50 people, and there are additional layoffs at Sports Illustrated and Fortune.

[UPDATE: I have confirmation from a few inside sources that an even bigger round of layoffs is scheduled in two weeks and that volunteers have been asked to step forward.]

New York Magazine: “Gawker Media, Nick Denton’s swaggering blog network, yesterday fired Chris Mohney, the managing editor of its flagship site, Gawker, and will replace him with Choire Sicha, the New York Observer writer and editor who was the solo editor of Gawker in 2003 and 2004.”

What the hell happened over at the Observer? Or perhaps the real question that should be asked: what offer did Denton make that made Choire abandon his newspaper career?

Starcade: Nine Full Episodes

USC: “Adults over 70 with higher levels of education forgot words at a greater rate than those with less education, according to a new study from the University of Southern California. The findings, published in the current issue of Research on Aging, suggest that after age 70, educated adults may begin to lose the ability to use their schooling to compensate for normal, age-related memory loss.”

It seems to me, observing columnists with lifeless and soporific timbres, that someone is generalizing about the way “young” people obtain their news and that someone (I wonder who?) will learn a harsh lesson when the winds of change knock him on his pompous ass — particularly as he continues to serve up such stubborn “Back in my day!”-style folderol. (And does this man realize he is not writing for a newspaper, but an online publication?)

As someone who swings both ways between broadsheets and LCDs because of a bizarre personal relationship with paper and who is therefore relatively nonpartisan on this issue, I don’t see how any of what Garrison Keillor observes is sad. (Of course, the development of the coffeehouse from social nexus to surrogate office is very sad. But Keillor has been very specific about his target here.) I don’t see how reading a newspaper is any more intellectual or stylish an exercise than playing chess in the park. One simply does it, without giving a damn about how one looks or how one is perceived. (Indeed, it takes a very self-absorbed person to compare a common act like reading a newspaper to that of a swordsman, while reprimanding others through an misfired attempt at wit that reveals passive-aggressive diffidence.) The hope, of course, of any media consumer is to find something substantial (at least as it pertains to the consumer), but then one can find things of substance from multiple conduits (yes, even YouTube!). And who is Keillor to judge what causes another person joy or what gives them substance? Just because he can’t grasp the way that others get their news online doesn’t mean that he should dismiss those who can.

Keillor does have a certain point about paper in general. But reports of paper’s death have been greatly exaggerated. The paperless office isn’t coming anytime soon. To rely upon empiricism (like Keillor), I observe “young” people on the subway reading articles that they have printed out at work.

The free flow of information is doing just fine. (The fiscal health and job security of newspapers, nicht so macht.) It’s the crusty barnacles who cling to their partisan scows, paper or digital, who are tarnishing the finish.

It turns out that the Blake’s 7 revival, which had promised Paul Darrow’s return to the role of Avon (before Darrow dropped out and the television project was aborted), is taking the audio route: perhaps taking a cue from Big Finish’s work with Doctor Who. Alas, there will be new actors playing Blake and Avon (played respectively by Colin Salmon and Derek Riddell). But several writers involved with Doctor Who (including Marc Platt and Ben Aaronovitch) have penned scripts.