Australian News: “Those on low-carb plans lost weight more quickly over the first six months but failed to shed much more over the next six. Those on low-fat, low-cholesterol diets continued to lose weight throughout the year. There was no difference over the full 12 months.”
Boo yah, low carbers! I win!
Wired: “Americans are willing to ‘get naked’ for their government if they feel it will make them more secure. That’s the conclusion Jeffrey Rosen reached in his new book The Naked Crowd, which explores the willingness of Americans to abandon privacy for perceived security.
BBC: “But the movie’s conclusions – true or otherwise – and highly emotional interviews with bereaved parents and injured soldiers will have a big impact on audiences around the world.”
Roger Ebert: “The film shows American soldiers not in a prison but in the field, hooding an Iraqi, calling him Ali Baba, touching his genitals and posing for photos with him. There are other scenes of U.S. casualties without arms or legs, questioning the purpose of the Iraqi invasion at a time when Bush proposed to cut military salaries and benefits. It shows Lila Lipscomb, a mother from Flint, Mich., reading a letter from her son, who urged his family to help defeat Bush, days before he was killed. And in a return to the old Moore confrontational style, it shows him joined by a Marine recruiter as he encourages congressmen to have their sons enlist in the services.”
1490 WBEX: “Coldplay singer Chris Martin says he and wife Gwyneth Paltrow have no idea why they decided to call their baby Apple.”
E.L. Doctorow: “Writing isn’t just a matter of putting words on a page. If you do this long enough, there’s a kind of loss of self. It can drive a writer to drink, depression, whatever. The hazards are quite visible in the physical wreckage.”
Jerry Jenkins: “Jesus is our model. His parables were clearly fictitious, while communicating truth with a capital T.”
It’s been reported everywhere, but grab the goldfish cracker cover of Tom Perrotta’s Little Children while you can. Pepperidge Farms, in collusion with Perrotta to obliterate all remainders, has provoked a recall.
Since I don’t have the time right now that my sexy colleagues do to read an author’s collected works and interview some writer about the pressing issues of the literary world, and since pith is the order of the day, the other night, I had a conversation with Good Ed and Bad Ed. Neither of them are authors, nor are the collective two half as interesting as Andrew Sean Greer. Good Ed is a nice, considerate entity living within my body who sometimes treats people to lunch, walks old ladies across the street, and the kind of guy you might take home to meet your parents. Bad Ed, by contrast, is the Loki to Good Ed’s inveterate angel. Bad Ed is known to scowl, drink too much, and offer scathing remarks without apology. What follows is my transcription, which took six days and several bottles of lager to get through before the tape inadvertently cut off.
ED: I notice that you’ve been reading Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent and that you were getting through the book only with complete reluctance.
GOOD ED: I’m sure Ms. Diamant is a nice woman. Perhaps the problems started with me. I must confess that, as an atheist, I don’t really have much of a religious background. So I may not be as familiar with Genesis as other folks are.
BAD ED: Shut up, bitch. A bad tale is a bad tale. The lady can’t write. “Ruddy” and “red” in the same sentence to describe that insufferable tent? “Impassive” and “without expression” in another sentence later in the book? What kind of shit is that? Two things that mean the same damn thing. I’ve got your red, ruddy, and rosy bluster right here.
GOOD ED: I don’t think you’re being fair. This was a neglected tale that needed to be expanded and elaborated upon. Feminist subtext and all.
BAD ED: Oh please. Expansion of an oft told tale? Don’t even pretend that you weren’t snoozing to Gregory Maguire’s Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. I remember that you were one disappointed mofo when you were reading that puppy. You want feminist subtext? Go read Doris Lessing or Margaret Atwood.
GOOD ED: Can I give you a hug?
BAD ED: Hell no, bitch.
ED: Okay. Hold it. Time out, you two. I can see this conversation is getting heated and I haven’t even asked my second question. What prompted you to read this book?
BAD ED: That cute girl who recommended it.
GOOD ED: What?
BAD ED: You’d suffer another insufferable Rushdie novel for the opposite gender, wouldn’t you?
GOOD ED: Hardly an issue now, given that we’re going out with a very fantastic lady these days. And how dare you make this personal!
BAD ED: What’s that? Do I detect the whiff of dishonesty?
ED: Let’s be fair here and suggest that you were looking for alternatives.
GOOD ED: Fair enough.
BAD ED: Not fair at all. Be honest. How many books have you read with the intent of digging up these hazy analyses for a highly literate foxy lady?
GOOD ED: Again, not an issue. And premeditated reading? You’re insane. I genuinely dig Atwood.
BAD ED: Preventive reading. Why subject yourself to trash, sweetheart?
GOOD ED: The standards are high.
BAD ED: Dear Lord, you’re sounding like Laura Miller.
ED: Okay. Stop! Stop! This is not what I had in mind.
BAD ED: Hey, it was your idea to put us in the same room.
GOOD ED: Highly unprofessional. Let’s talk books. Maybe about how great Cloud Atlas was.
BAD ED: Since when did you care about being professional?
[Sounds of scuffling, whimpering and various shouts.]
GOOD ED: [unintelligible]
ED: But I…
[Here, the tape cuts out.]
Shelley Jackson has published a short story entirely on human skin. The story, “Skin,” is 2,095 words long and was published on creative writing student Rob Poulos. Poulos is currently being sent to various literary magazines with a SASE.
Metherell Towers, Britain’s oldest nudist camp, has been put up for sale. The nine-bedroom chateau was opened up by Edward Hemingway, cousin of Ernest, back in the 1930s. The inside dirt is that Hemingway wrote nude standing up, with the typewriter roughly at waist level. And certainly granddaughters Marguax and Mariel have had difficulty keeping their clothes on in the films that they appeared in. Is there some nudist streak within the Hemingway genotype? I leave the fine investigative team at the Literary Dick to sort this out.
The Vancouver Courier is unimpressed with Don DeLillo’s 1999 play Valparaiso, pointing out “it doesn’t make for fully satisfying theatre. At the heart of DeLillo’s play, there’s a sad, sad story and the impact could have been overwhelming. But that’s not where DeLillo wants to go and so Valparaiso doesn’t go there.”
Newsweek takes a look at The Escapist Unbound, suggesting that literary involvement with comics is the key to mainstream acceptance.
James Sallis is crazy about Walter Tevis, a native San Franciscan, pointing out that by Tevis’s own admission, The Man Who Fell to Earth is “a very disguised autobiography.” The now famous book had been rejected multiple times by publishers, despite Tevis’s remarkable success with The Hustler. Here’s an audio interview with Tevis from 1983 just before his death. And last August, Bookslut’s Michael Schaub took a look at The Queen’s Gambit. And back in 1999, both The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth were named by Jonathan Lethem as two examples of great novels overshadowed by their film adaptations
Angry Asian Man, among many others, is interviewed about the sexual identity of the Asian male by the L.A. Times .
At a Canadian bookstore, a discussion of Howard Rotberg’s The Second Catastrophe was interrupted by an Iraqi Kurd and Palestinian taking umbrage with Rotberg’s words and ethnicity and spouting off antisemitic epithets. But the two hecklers wouldn’t be arrested because Rotberg shouted back at them.
Hari Kunzru, who nabbed a cool £1.2 million for The Impressionist, hopes to repeat his success with his second novel. “I’ve become so used to the good life that I can’t imagine going back to pauperhood,” said Kunzru. “Writing isn’t just a testament to my abilities. It’s also about stock options.”
Worst. Apartment. Ever. And here I was thinking that I was a bit messy. (via Six Different Ways)
Ron points to The Slush God, the blog of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction assistant editor John Joseph Adams. As Ron notes, it shows promise, not just for the insider’s dope, but for anyone interested in the kind of submissions likely to be returned back to the writer.