• Maud has a report from a JSF reading. There are lots of mumbles and ashen expressions described.
• Dan Green is refreshingly unapologetic about his long posts, while remaining concerned that his content is being tagged “read later.”
• Ms. Tangerine Muumuu has some alternative titles for reluctant memoirs.
• Steve Almond offers eight reasons why he writes short stories. Apparently, he can’t accept the flawed framework of a novel and doesn’t care much for plot, two sensibilities which might account for why we’ve been unable to muster up more than cursory enthusiasm for his work.
• Robert Birnbaum, a man who has apparently frightened so many authors that not even Zoe Heller can utter his name, talks with Nick Flynn.
• Terry Teachout is a machine, I tell ya!
• Apparently, romance novels are all about the nookie. All this time I thought they functioned as an excuse to get models who resemble Fabio off the dole. Who knew? (via Sarah)

As the New York Times reported yesterday, Dan Brown is only one blockbuster novel away from designing an aircraft and using assorted taxpayer money to bankroll his obsessions. Should the aircraft prove successful, Brown reportedly has his eye on Vegas.

Since the success of The Da Vinci Code (which Brown refers to as the Book 4 Hercules), Brown hasn’t left the house. He speaks of rampant bacteria that might infect him and has a number of aides leaving milk bottles just outside his door. When Brown does leave his compound, he’s been known to babble about being able to buy any individual on the planet. He’s also taken to hitchhiking with the vain hope that he’ll be picked up by some guy named Melvin.

Brown has been toying around with the plot structure for Ice Station Zebra, having watched the film 75 times in the past month alone. While his publishers are encouraging Mr. Brown to abscond with its plot the same way that he did with Umberto Eco for his breakthrough success, Brown is too busy trying to determine if Jeb Bush needs a loan.

However, should Brown face writer’s block and remain incapable of writing further novels, Martin Scorsese is said to be interested in making a Dan Brown biopic.

Carrie recently weighed in on the good man as protagonist. And by “good man,” we may wish to clarify this wholesome term more wholesomely: maybe Ward Cleaver or Father Knows Best fits the bill. The irresistable person who can do no wrong. The person who has few problems other than how they’re going to refinance the house or, worse yet, the type who spends most of a novel lounging about a silk dressing gown.

While I generally tend to favor protagonists who have significant problems (not necessarily outright bastards), whether obvious ones or, even more interestingly, flaws hidden beneath tightly sewn seams of life experience leading inexorably to a dilemma we are about to experience, there’s something to be said for Carrie’s plea. Certainly the human perspective isn’t limited to madmen or druggies or pedearasts. Nearly every community has a do-gooder. Not a nagger who gets in the way of other people’s affairs or a sanctimonious Dimmesdale type copping a feel in a garret. We’re talking a genuinely outstanding member of society with nary a blemish on his record.

And I don’t want to cop to the easy defense that these types of characters don’t make for conflict. However, I think good men must be thrown into conflict in order for us to recognize their virtues. We must understand how they arrived at their goodness over the years, what efforts at self-purging and ascetism that allowed them to become the people who they are. Transposed against a narrative template that involves people from the past coming into this good man’s life, I can see this working as a way to compare and contrast the good man of today versus the developing good man of the past.

I haven’t yet read Gilead. In fact, it’s a stone’s throw away on my own bookpile. But I’ll be quite curious to see if this hypothetical development is one of the linchpins of the book. To understand and ruminate upon virtue is perhaps a trickier thing to know than vice.

The Rake continues his mighty depictions of bookstore readings with a run-in with Lily Tuck.

This video is wrong on multiple levels. (via B)