As Maud has noted, the 1970s archive of the Paris Review DNA of Literature Archive is up. While Maud’s dancing over Didion, I’m sinking my teeth into the conversations with Anthony Burgess, who talks about Joyce at length, and Stanley Elkin, who notes that he had “a year of study in bed,” reading continuously for a year and staying in bed, only getting up to teach his classes.

And speaking of interviews, Birnbaum is back, this time talking with Jonathan Safran Foer.

While it’s very nice to see coverage of the book world online, the Village Voice does raise an interesting point about Kevin Smokler‘s Virtual Book Tour.

Smokler charges $1,500 for a one-day tour, allowing an author to make the rounds on several other blogs. (A three-day intensive will set you back about $3,000.) Smokler pockets the money from the publisher, and doesn’t distribute any of it among the blogs who essentially turn themselves into uncritical advertisers of an author. Instead, he offers a free copy of the book for each participating site, something that any legitimate litblog can obtain for free from a publisher (and from the publisher’s end, a comp book actually costs much less as a publicity item than the supplemental income that lands in Smokler’s lap).

“Paying them would open up an ethical hornet’s nest,” says Smokler, “since there’s no way we can expect bloggers to be impartial if we’re paying them.” (Emphasis added.)

I have to question the ethics of this. If you sublet an apartment to someone, you expect the tenant to pay. If you sell magazine space to an advertiser, you expect the advertiser to pay for the column inches. So if Smokler wants to turn blogs into a PR machine, why then should the bloggers who let their spaces not be entitled to collect?

Beyond the troubling notion that those who participate in the Virtual Book Tour are no different from the people who walk around the beach in a Nike T-shirt, because they are apparently precluded from commenting on the weaknesses of a particular book (partiality or impartiality, I’ve yet to see anything critical on the various VBTs), there’s the seedy notion that Smokler is running a small-time sweatshop. Surely, the bloggers who put in the time to read the book and who style content to a particular author are entitled to earn money for their labor. An advertisement is an advertisement is an advertisement, even if it’s for a book that happens to enjoyable.

That’s why I’m proud to be part of the Litblog Co-Op. You see, if certain members don’t enjoy a book, they won’t be nearly as hindered from voicing their thoughts and opinions. The LBC exists for the love, not the money.

And, no, you couldn’t pay this site any amount of money to shift our content to an advertiser. The coverage here remains independent and unsullied. And that includes not littering our posts with Amazon links and actually attributing the original bloggers who cover a story. Anything less than this strikes me as downright parasitical.

[UPDATE: Scott and Bud have more thoughts on how “parasitical” the litblogosphere can be. And I should point out that not a single contributor to Bookslut (including me) has received a cash payment for their work. Not that I mind, but if that isn’t being parasitical, I don’t know what is.]

[UPDATE 2: Jessa has emailed me to tell me that Bookslut does pay for features.]

As Beatrice has pointed out, there’s more to the Michael Chabon hoax (profiled in the current issue of Bookforum) then meets the eye. It seems that He Who Shall Not Be Named fired Paul Maliszewski from McSweeeney’s for sending out a fabricated email containing lies about various writers. E—– claims that it wasn’t funny. I’ve tried Googling around for the particular email, but I’ve had no luck. Later today, I’m going to pick up the latest issue of Bookforum to see if I can get more answers from the complete Maliszewski article. But if any of the “hundreds of people around New York” (perhaps regular Reluctant readers?) have the email in question, I’d certainly be curious if the newsletter was a funny Kaufmanesque exercise that went over E—–‘ oversensitive head or a genuine atrocity.

[UPDATE: I’ve emailed Maliszewski and if he has any thoughts on this article, I’ll post them with his consent. I should point out that NYT reporter Alex Mindlin tried getting in touch with Maliszewski by email and phone, but couldn’t get through. So presumably Maliszewski is either deliberately remaining silent or has sequestered himself from humanity. Whatever the case, these pages remain open to him.]

[UPDATE 2: Maliszewski says he has no specific comment on the Eggers comments and directs all curious individuals to his Bookforum article. He writes that it’s “a serious investigation and a fair piece of journalism and is based on my extensive interviews with Chabon, two people at Nextbook, and several members of the audience. It would have been nice to let all that work do the talking, but that doesn’t seem to be possible.” Maliszewski has talked with Dennis Loy Johnson about the Chabon scam and, as soon Dennis has his column finished, I’ll link to it.]

Activist Marla Ruzicka has died. She was only 28. Had it not been for Ruzicka’s efforts, Iraqi families who lost relatives courtesy of U.S. bombs might not have been compensated.

As a DV/Photoshop/Flash/Director geek, I have to say that the Adobe/Macromedia merger may be the best way to go after Apple. Provided of course the world has need for a vector-based NLE.