• Last night’s overwhelming support for the Herring Wonder exceeded even my expectations. I felt bad for Craig “The Crippler” Davidson, who maintained gravitas near the end amidst a decidedly pro-Ames audience. I was very impressed with Miss Saturn — and, no, not the way you’re thinking. Swinging forty hula hoops in varying degrees of elliptical rotation is no small feat. David Leslie orchestrated the elements. Gleason’s Gym owner Bruce Silverglade destroyed the Burgess Meredith stereotype. Patrick “The Mangina” Bucklew and Valmonte Sprout were fantastic, but need to work on their timing. They entered the ring on the second round and caused considerable confusion. I was sitting next to Silverglade and he looked as if he was prepared to draw blood when this happened. Others dwelt unduly upon who Ames was dating. Referee Dominic Manatho and I quietly performed our duties. And the call for blood was something to see.
• Gary Kamiya comes to praise the editor, not to bury him, leaving the Rake to meet Kamiya halfway.
• Warren Ellis interviews William Gibson. (via TEV)
• Antoine Wilson locates the vicious circle that many of us out here on the Internets are caught in.
• Oh yes, Brockman, the entendres are fully intentional.
• New York examines the Mediabistro sale and concludes: “In fact, Touby’s success underscores the difference between the current (seeming) bubble and that of the late nineties: The way to cash out now is to get bought out, not to go public. And until the right buyer shows up, all that most of us can do is stand back and guesstimate what’s worth what.” If I didn’t know any better, this seems a disingenuous way of evoking Chris Anderson’s hypothesis without actually typing in the dreadful words “long tail.”
• RIP George Tabori.
• Kassia on why literary embargoes don’t matter.

• A quick reminder that Jonathan Ames and Craig Davidson will be fighting tonight at Gleason’s Gym at 8:00 PM.
• Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s excellent comic, Y: The Last Man, is being adapted into a film by the folks behind Disturbia. I am unsure how many Hollywood dollars will be committed to training monkeys, with the animal trainers spending hours attempting to reproduce Guerra’s juxtapositions of Ampersand on Yorick’s shoulders. But I’m convinced that monkey accuracy will be the key indicator as to whether this is a successful adaptation or not. Hell, this particular film could very well set a precedent for persuasive monkey behavior. If Clint Eastwood, who I understand has some experience in these matters, is somehow involved, then this film adaptation will go forth without a hitch.
• Guitarist Brian May is completing his Ph.D more than twenty-five years after he abandoned it for a music career. Presumably, having to endure Ben Elton’s dumbing down of Queen’s legacy was enough to push May over the edge.
• Tod Goldberg offers tips on how to write an essay for Parade.
• A.L. Kennedy has a new story in this week’s New Yorker. (via Maud)
• Dan Green responds to the opponents of the Harry Potter opponents.
• I stopped getting excited about new Noam Chomsky volumes when I turned 22. A glowing orb on my hand went off, signaling that there were better ways to be political than celebrating the art of writing lifeless sentences.
• Tim Rutten insists that the embargo hoopla is all about the green.
• The Weekly World News, one of the most important newspapers of our time, is shutting down. The News‘s fabrications were the best of all the tabloids. And I can’t think of another publication that will be able to offer the same kind of amusement as I wait to purchase broccoli. (via Pete Anderson)
• Speaking of which, here’s Magazine Death Pool — sort of a Fucked Company for periodicals.
• The American Scholar‘s Charles Trueheart revisits Lawrence Durrell fifty years later.
• This is bizarre: Carcassonne has been transformed into an Xbox game. But truthfully, can those delightful tiles actually be replaced by a television screen?
• Harriet Baskas examines the connection between used bookstores and airports.
• An interesting comparison beween Enid Blyton and J.K. Rowling. Blyton, incidentally, wrote 10,000 words a day. (via Book World)
• The Washington Post examines DC Fringe offerings, which are considerably literary.

• I can truthfully think of no duller candidate for a lead review than this guy.
• Other Ed, currently counting Rowling units, on Walter Kurtz.
• Mr. Mitchelmore raises an interesting point about prejudices before reading. I think that a book, no matter how overexposed the subject matter, is still capable of surprising a reader if an author is good enough and that it’s a bit foolish to discount an author’s creative possibilities within a given formula. If anything, seeing precisely what Coetzee will come up with after so many books about writers writing books is the more interesting question. Hell, is not David Markson’s “Novel” tetralogy — if we must group them together — essentially about a writer writing a book? You’d be hard-pressed to call his approach similar to Stephen King novel featuring a writer writing a book.
• Regrettably, I had to miss the Harlem Book Fair. But Richard Grayson was there dutifully reporting.
• Spoon is not treading water. The new album is a fabulous head game with what the long-time listening base is expecting. (Case in point: the abbreviated “Your” in the title “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb.” And where’s the Y in “Rhthm and Soul?” And why a song about a Japanese cigarette case? That’s the kind of thing you’d expect from a band desperately seeking objects in a hotel room to write a song.) I’m liking this album very much because of these elisions, which also manifest themselves in such “ghost” flourishes as that sequenced horn section which opens up “The Underdog,” only to not quite match up with the bass notes in that chorus’s expected pomposity. (And then the “horns” shift to a clear synth voice around the three minute mark.) No, it’s not as overtly experimental as something like Kid A and these production decisions aren’t immediately clear on the first few listens. But it’s still pretty fun. And even if you don’t sign on for this sort of thing, there are still slacking rockers (“slockers?”) like “Finer Feelings” and “Don’t You Evah.”
• And speaking of Mr. VanderMeer, here he is again in this week’s Book World.
• More after sleep.

• Ron Howard will be destroying directing Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children for the big screen.
• Douglas Coupland’s JPod is being turned into a 13-part television series. (via Bookninja)
• Okay, this is sort of a Harry Potter link, but not really. Frank Wilson’s words about hubristic security measures are well worth reading.
• Maud on out-of-town bookstores.
• Matthew Tiffany has the scoop on Tom McCarthy’s next novel — excerpt here. And then of course there’s this.
• Dan Wickett offers a third panel of literary translators.
• David Ulin outs himself as a Leonard Maltin Movie Guide junkie. I have to confess. I pick one of these puppies up every year too and have spent too many hours, often with beer and friends, pondering its odd subjective slant (four stars for The Cider House Rules?). It’s always good to have a backup for when the IMDB goes down.
• I don’t entirely agree with Charles Taylor’s argument, but he does have many good points about mass readership.
• Someone has purchased Mediabistro: “A woman with a boa and a dream and a bad laugh has emerged from the hubbub of the internet triumphant.”
• William Gibson “briefly noted” in The New Yorker? The times they are a-changing?

• “Your money is now our money and we will spend it on drugs!”
• Simon Owens has written an extensive piece on Harriet Klausner, who is truly a menace to coherent sentences and taking a stand — two things that one would expect from a critic. If Harriet Klausner is a critic, I am a turtle chronically nibbling on Tetra Ropotmin who copulates four times a day with an even-toed ungulate.
• Warren Ellis: “Note: cigarette breaks are built into all signing times.”
• Christ, I can’t take this anymore. Fuck Raincoast. Get your Potter torrents here.* I do not endorse downloading the book, but someone has to offer a contrarian response to the insistent demands, protocols, and other wretched assumptions that the Harry Potter publishers have been dictating to the media, and which the media in turn has been willingly kowtowing too. Christ, folks, you’re literary journalists. Show some spine from time to time. Must you devote every column inch to this “phenomenon?” Any newspaper mention of the Deathly Hallows without the journalist actually reading the book is, as far as I’m concerned, nothing less than an ignoble junket. Nicholas Lezard has more reasons why you must take a stand. Look, if you want a damn good children’s series, seek out Lemony Snicket, which has more brains, imagination, and wit per book than J.K. Rowling has in her whole oeuvre.
• You and me both, Brockman. I underwent a six-hour interview today in an effort to obtain my “cultural credentials.” At the end of the interview, the interlocutor took one of those little hammers out of his suitcase — the kind that doctors have. I thought he had intended to test my reflexes, but he decided to repeatedly hammer upon my molars while two guys in expensive suits were holding me down. This was, they said, “the final stage of the interview.” After half of my teeth were pulled out with a rusty set of pliers and I was left on the floor, paralyzed with pain, my gums bleeding onto the concrete, these three guys laughed and me. “You want your cultural credentials? There’s your cultural credentials!” Then they kicked me in the stomach and the nads, dislocated both of my shoulders, and shaved off my eyebrows. If anybody knows of a better way to earn “cultural credentials” (and, incidentally, if you know of a good dentist who works cheap), please drop me a line.
• It appears that John Steinbeck’s granddaughter is going into the film industry as a scribe. Her first offering, I Travel With Charley in the Biblical Sense, should be uploaded to YouTube next week.
• The independent publisher Night Shade Books is having a sale to clear out their warehouses. 50% off all titles, four book minimum. That means M. John Harrison, Iain Banks, Tricia Sullivan, the remarkably underrated Paolo Bacigalupi, and Joe Haldemann. Do help support Jeremy Lassen, one of the craziest motherfuckers in the science fiction industry.

* — And it appears that the Harry Potter snapper made a serious mistake.

• The Millions offers a highly subjective ranking of the McSweeney’s issues, although I’d argue that Chabon’s editorial work on the second genre volume (Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, never issued a number) far exceeds Issue #10. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to see Garth lay down his subjective tastes like this over a literary journal. Here’s an unexpectedly thorough overview of all the issues — along with pictures. And, incidentally, in light of the AMS fallout, you might want to give the McSweeney’s Store and help them out with a purchase.
• Does David Letterman sell books?
• Andrew Wheeler ahs an advance look at Gene Wolfe’s latest book, Pirate Freedom.
• A review of the two-volume American Speeches offering from Library of America.
• 10 Surprisingly Good Tribute Albums.
• James Marsters on Torchwood? WTF?
• Will Gotham Mart live again? (via Bibliophile Bullpen)
• Can you really trust the Geek Squad?
• If you need a Harry Potter cheat sheet before Saturday, this will serve you well. (via Bill Peschel)
• Apparently, the racism racket has caused Tintin in the Congo‘s sales to leap.
• Footloose is being remade. To paraphrase Sammy Hager, the greed gets around. (via Bookshelves of Doom)
• So here’s some real Harry Potter news. Kassia Krozser exposes the book discount racket.
• There’s an interesting series at Editor & Publisher: 10 Newspapers That Do It Right.
• A blog to investigate: Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age.
• Online literary censorship from the Shanghai Information Bureau.
• There’s a legal battle over a Dorothy Parker compilation.
• Dan Green on Tom Perotta: “I understand that practically everyone in the world has a “screenplay” in the works, and that few of them will ever be produced, but if you’re going to write a novel that exists only as a proto-movie, why not just write it up as a script to begin with?”
• Believe it or not, Billy Wilder’s lost classic Ace in the Hole is now available on DVD.
• Apparently, Women’s Wear Daily refuses to electronically disseminate a critical profile of Nikki Finke. Do they fear retaliation from Finke? Before we have clear answers to these questions, in the meantime, David Poland reproduces the profile in question.
• Why is Blade Runner being reshot? More mysterious details from Film Ick.
• Dirk Gently is coming to radio. (via Savage Popcorn)
• DFW in Italy (YouTube)
• YouTube’s 5 Sorriest Questions for the 2008 Presidential Candidates.
• The return of Ayn Rand.
• Apparently, Farscape will be revived in a series of webisodes.
• Reuters: “A German bus driver threatened to throw a 20-year-old sales clerk off his bus in the southern town of Lindau because he said she was too sexy, a newspaper reported Monday.” Beyond the troubling discrimination, who knew that Right Said Fred were seers?