I’m still trying to sift through all this BEA data while simultaneously engineering audio for Segundo. I hope to post more things tonight (particularly on details from various publishing houses). The goal is to get done with all this by the end of the week. In the meantime, check out Bud Parr’s extremely comprehensive coverage, which crosses over with mine and covers a few booths I didn’t get a chance to check out.

Here’s the morning roundup:

• Terry Teachout (who sadly was out of town during BEA week) tackles “Culture in the Age of Blogging.”
• Based on some recommendations from trusted people, I’m more interested in Nicole Krauss the writer then Nicole Krauss the person, but, despite my JSF mandate, even I couldn’t resist this profile, which tells how the two met. Apparently, the two met on a blind date. I leave experts to conclude whether it had something to do with Mr. Foer’s email skillz.
• According to a new scientific survey, successful marriages involve comparable education backgrounds, not socioeconomic strata. Interestingly, education affects the speed at which couples marry and have children. Maybe this explains all those crushes I had on teachers growing up.
• I didn’t check out the Google Print booth at BEA, but IT World did.
• Clay Evans’ review of Sam Weller’s Bradbury bio reveals some interesting details: Bradbury traveled primarily by roller skates well into his twenties and he was a flamboyant irritant to science fiction authors.
• Apparently, some of the tales from the Brothers Grimm can be traced to women. Scholars believe that women provided these tales to Jacob and Wilhelm, and the Brothers Grimm capitalized upon these stories. Perhaps Terry Gilliam and Ehren Kruger aren’t as far off with their film premise as we figured.
• Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian has received a $2 million advance. It’s an elaborate multi-plotted tale about Vlad the Impaler. The film rights have been picked up by Sony and it has the Susanna Clarke/Michael Faber-style “ten years to write” label written all over it. But is it any good? Laura Miller says it’s good, not great. Publishers Weekly notes that “a lot here lives up to the hype.” The Los Angeles Times thinks its okay, but quibbles with the overwrought prose.
• The Telegraph speaks with Christopher Hitchens. There’s the usual contrarian grenades, including Hitch confessing that he doesn’t find Marilyn Monroe beautiful.
• Yet another example of BEA covered with an amateurish glitterati angle: Wynonna Judd and Kim Catrall described as “leading thinkers.”
• This week’s upcoming film horrors: The Banger Sisters’ Bob Dolman making How to Eat Fried Worms and Akiva Goldman writing a remake of The Poseiden Adventure for Wolfgang Petersen.
• A collection of celebrities playing table tennis (via the Morning News)
• While I was out of town, a man broke the six-and-a-half-hour endurance test at the Masturbate-a-thon.
• Notepad Invaders (via Quiddity)
• Editing Hunter S. Thompson (via Kitabkhana)

Chip McGrath has an interesting essay on social class in American novels (and culture in general), suggeesting that the poor were quite invisible in fiction until the turn of the 19th century and that a substantial portion of 20th century novels have been devoted to a long tradition of upward mobility worship. McGrath accuses American culture of turning its back on blue-collar life and suggests, “If Gatsby were to come back today, he would come back as Donald Trump and would want a date not with Daisy but with Britney. And if Edith Wharton were still writing, how could she not include a heavily blinged hip-hop mogul?”

We here at Return of the Reluctant take considerable pride in exposing the pressing issues of our time. This includes, of course, the very seminal subject of female orgasms. Interestingly enough, nobody had thought to determine if there was a biological basis for orgasms. Until now.

The answer is yes, indeedy, there is a genetic basis. The results will be published in the August 2005 issue of The American Society of Human Genetics (not yet available online).

But it’s not encouraging. Somewhere between 34-45% of the variation between the ability to orgasm and the inability to orgasm can be explained by heredity. Tim Spector of St. Thomas’ Hospital in London effected these results by using 1,397 pairs of twins, both identical and non-identical.

Criminally, one in three women said they never or infrequently had an orgasm. 14% always had an orgasm during intercourse. 34% always had an orgasm during masturbation.

The hypothesis going around is that the women who can’t obtain an orgasm are more likely to be born and thus the unlikely orgasm trait will be carried over. Why? Well, Spector speculates that women who orgasm too easily aren’t as skillful in selecting potent partners.

If that’s the case, does this mean that female partners who continually use birth control of some kind (or who have no children or fewer children) are more likely to have an orgasm? Raising a kid is certainly no picnic and I would speculate that the higher stress that mothers suffer is going to affect their ability to orgasm. But if there is a genetic predisposition (as Spector concludes)that truly prevents women from achieving orgasm, then at the risk of drawing the wrath of the multitudes here, I’m curious whether there’s a chromosomal corollary between the ability to orgasm and (a) wanting to have a child, (b) willingly placing one’s self continuously in stressful situations (i.e., not being able to relax enough to have an orgasm), and (c) being less inclined to use birth control.

For the men who hope to use this information as an excuse to cop out after ten minutes, I should remind them that sexual intercourse is an act that involves two people in which both are equally culpable or, obversely, equally compatible.