It looks like the levels of post-terrorist incident guilt that we’ve had here in the States are being reproduced in London and affecting the literary world. Chris Cleave is asking whether or not it’s appropriate for him to promote a novel that includes a fictional terrorist attack at a soccer game.

As someone who forced himself to continue writing a screenplay involving terrorism the very week after 9/11 while in another country, I’d say that the answer for Cleave is very simple: grow some balls and don’t let the bastards get you down. These folks aren’t afraid. Why should writers be? To remain in a suspended state about whether art is appropriate or not is to let the terrorists win (or some similar crazed sentiment that isn’t so half-baked and hackneyed). It’s also damn spineless to boot.

God damn you all to hell, Dalkey! Quit this whole 100 books for $500 bidness! Why, for that price I could probably summon an outcall and maybe get the escort to read me some Flann O’Brien just before performing fellatio on me! Hell, maybe she could do both! (Yesterday, I felt my futon showing signs of collapse after two years of solid sleep and other activities. I turned on my side and, when I felt that nobody was there beside me, I weeped into a pile of hardcovers and rearranged these sturdy squares into the form of a woman under the blanket. Sadly, my penis collided into one of the spines, causing a large and painful bruise, and I have been applying ice to my crotch ever since. I understand if other people choose to stave off loneliness in other ways.) All this is a roundabout way of saying that you should give your money to Dalkey because what they do is fantastic and that nachos are nothing to be ashamed of.

With all the recent talk about movie box office slumps, could it be that the declining grosses have something to do with the rising ticket price? In the past year, we’ve seen movie ticket prices rise from $8 to $10. Those two dollars may be small potatoes for most of us, but let’s say that you’re a family of four operating on an extremely tight budget. Suddenly, you’re now paying eight extra dollars per week (or what was once the price of one movie ticket).

Factor in the loud movie ads that thunder during those hideous “20 Minute Countdown” presentations before the movie, working against parents who are trying to get the kids settled down, and the fact that movies have seriously declined in quality, and the problem from a family perspective becomes apparent. Moreover, considering the rise in talkers, I wonder if this has less to do with home theatre environments and more to do with walking into a theatre and hearing not some soft music playing over the speakers so that people can settle down, but getting a projected movie with advertisements and hollow trivia.

And lest any sleazy Michael Medved types come around here preaching about “indecent” films that families don’t really want to see, I don’t think it’s the content or type of movie that matters. But families do go to movies. All types of movies. Everything from the latest Dreamworks animated epic to a serious drama.

If the movie business truly wanted to halt the gradual taper, then they might consider (1) reducing the ticket price from $10 to $8 by promising movie theatres a greater percentage of the gross, (2) reduce second-week dropoff by reducing supply (i.e., number of screens) and increasing deamnd, (3) demand a theatrical environment that is less intrusive and ad-centric and that actually relaxes people as they sit down, and (4) stop treating audiences as morons and make smart, entertaining, and story-centric movies.

Gawker has been mining this MySpace blog about a 26 year old working in the publishing industry who was fired for blogging. The only thing we have to say is that we’re extremely distrubed that anyone in their mid-twenties would use “totally” on a regular basis in their writing (and to be clear on this, using this modifier before the verb rather than after), let alone hired in the publishing industry or (since things have LIKE TOTALLY turned up for bluegirl24ny), a copy editor.

We wouldn’t mind being copy editors ourselves, but we haven’t been hired because we TOTALLY read the Chicago Manual of Style for pleasure (preferring to revere language instead of butchering it), we live in San Francisco (about as far removed from the center of publishing as one could get), and we don’t really have the sexy curves of a nubile twentysomething young lady who plops nothing but Nutrabars on a supermarket checkout scanner. So we’re SOL. TOTALLY!

Michiko Kakutani: “Jack’s ‘melancholic logorrhea’ might yield some useful therapeutic results, but in terms of storytelling, it makes for a tedious, self-indulgent and cruelly eye-glazing read.”

The Cleveland Plain Dealer: “Perhaps in an attempt to depict that innocence, Irving has created a personality-free main character who spends much of the story in a curiously passive state. Do such people exist? Everywhere. They are as frustrating in real life as they are in books.”

Boston Globe: “Irving takes no more notice of an amputated limb than a stray pimple. A shattered life impels no more wobble in his plot’s dense tread than a crumbled cookie strewn across a graying plate, so the reader is deprived of a useful collision with a sensibility truly at odds with one’s own.”

New York Daily News: “[T]he book is emotionally barren, antsy in its execution, and too precious by half.”

[ALSO RELATED: Jimmy Beck’s “Hip Hoputani”]

Magazines have long pulled the ignoble trick of getting their subscribers to sign on for multiple years, suggesting with repeated correspondence and feverish pitches that subscriptions are in jeopardy when there’s still plenty of time to renew. And if you’re a person (like me), who subscribes to about six billion periodicals, then you send in your check on impulse, only to find that you’ve unexpectedly signed on for another two and a half years.

(I won’t name names, but I’ll just say that certain magazine empires are even more egregious than this. When the magazine folds after a handful of issues, they don’t even bother to refund a partial amount to their subscribers unless the subscriber calls them. But most of them forget and, of course, take their sweet time in sending out the checks.)

But Wired‘s treatment of its subscribers takes the cake. Apparently, Wired assumes that if a subscriber doesn’t renew his subscription, then the magazine automatically assumes that the subcriber wants to renew. If there is no written notice provided by the subscriber, they sic the North Shore Agency, a major debt-collection firm, upon the reluctant renewer.

One San Francisco resident, Bob McMillan, received a variety of letters reading “Request for Payment” and “Account Status: Delinquent.” (A sample letter can be found here.)

There is no doubt in my mind that Boing Boing will not mention any of this. After all, all of its authors contribute regularly to Wired. This seems hypocritical to me, considering how EFF-friendly and pro-individual they present themselves to be.

Further, Wired isn’t the only one doing this. One subscriber reports that PC Magazine has been nebulous about the number of times the magazine is published and automatically renewed his subscription without his permission. Another blogger experienced a Kafkaesque moment when he was hassled on the phone by Time. (See the May 28, 2005 entry.) (And interestingly enough, the Time Inc. Magazine Group was the subject of a multi-state investigation into their subscription practices two years ago.)

Apparently, Wired is able to do this through direct-mail solicitations that contain a clause in fine print — what is sometimes referred to as advanced consent marketing. But are these clauses clear and conspicuous enough to the magazine subscriber. Even the MPA notes that magazine subsciptions have guidelines, subject to Federal Trade Commission regulations:

The customer must take an action to demonstrate affirmative consent, such as checking a box, affixing a stamp, pushing a number on a telephone keypad, pushing a key on a computer keyboard, clicking a mouse, giving an oral response, or returning an order form. The customer should have all the material terms of the sale, disclosed in a clear and conspicuous manner, prior to taking the action demonstrating affirmative consent.

The FTC suggests that anyone who has been misled into automatic renewal to contact their state Attorney General or local consumer protection office.

But if automatic renewal has become such a major problem, then perhaps government legislation that upholds the clear and conspicuous consent of a consumer and that enacts substantial fines and punitive damages upon the magazines who mislead their readers is a better answer.

There are two types of people: people who get geeky and groove to Rush and people who don’t. If, like me, you’re one of the former, then you’ll enjoy this eyepopping CGI animation of Peart playing the drums for “YYZ.” (via MeFi)

Solid coverage from The Mumpsimus regarding Readercon:

Jonathan Lethem Samuel R. Delaney said that he read a western story by Theodore Sturgeon that, in the first half, was a beautiful Sturgeon story, and then in the second half was also a beautiful Sturgeon story, but a different one, and the experience of reading this story then made him want to write a western that was more unified but still beautiful, and this impulse was enough to get him thinking about something new to write [I forget what he said it was came out of this — maybe one of the stories in his first collection]. Writing, he said, comes from an urge to write something like someone else who inspired you, or to fix something that you read by someone else.

[UPDATE: It was Delaney, not Lethem. Thanks, Kathryn!]

M. John Harrison: “My gut instinct is that we ought to talk less to each other. Some people think that religion is to blame here. I think it’s something prior to that. I think it’s language. You can’t do religion until you have language. You can’t promise someone ‘freedom’ (Bush) or ‘paradise’ (bin Laden) except with words; those items are labels without a referent. And if I have to read another article by Martin Amis or Ian McEwan — middle class wankers who have never been in harm’s way their whole lives, competing with one another to produce dully clever, middle-aged Britpap about real events; or if I have to hear another soundbite in which Slimy Tony, dressed up in a casual jacket to look ‘hard’, licks the arse of the biggest bully in the global playground by ‘pledging’ himself; or if I have to hear any more investment bankers presenting themselves as wounded martyrs in the ruins of the Church of Money; or if I have to hear another Islamic spokesman misappropriate the words ‘caution’ and ‘evidence’; I think I might fly an aeroplane into something myself. Only so I don’t have to hear words any more. Do you see? I’m fucking sick of words because I’ve spent nearly forty years manipulating people with them for a living, and they don’t come near being the thing itself. All rhetoric, including mine, is empty rhetoric. Every death is a real one.”

More Harrison interviews can be found at Strange Horizons, Cyberdark, and Zone SF. His work is highly recommended.

As if the 9/11 victimhood card being played by politicians to start wars based on fixed intelligence and now being used by priapic reactionaries to prop up London as a fait accompli for living in chronic fear* weren’t bad enough, it seems that the Portland Tribune has seen fit to offer yet another ridiculous article about how 9/11 has made it difficult to finish novels. Here’s what novelist Richard Rinaldi has to say:

“And because so much had changed, I was aware that I’d probably lost a novel, but so what? In the scheme of things it didn’t matter. My options were to just throw it away or put it another city. But my agents were leaning on me to include 9/11. Initially I was very reluctant, but I came around and said, ‘All right, I’ll give it a try.’ “

For those who haven’t been watching the calendar, 9/11 was three and a half fucking years ago. In other words, most of the time it takes to finish an undergraduate degree (assuming that you’re on the four year plan).

While certainly 9/11 has changed American life, I’m disheartened by the idea that a novel itself must completely change or drastically alter its content to reflect the jingoism of its time. Particularly when authors are, for the most part, paid a pittance to sweat over a novel that they’ve labored over for many years. The thing that matters is what the author has to say at the time he writes it. Wrapping a novel around the American flag or a sense of victimhood that will date poorly is hypocritical to the nature of art, and I would argue that it’s akin to a total sellout. Do we really need a marketplace saturated with potboilers that represent today’s answers to Peter Bryant’s Red Alert? Further, is a literary effort truly literature if it answers to the dicta of what’s hot with the public? Besides, from a marketing standpoint, this seems anathema to the nature of publishing, given that a book undergoes a two-year production process and attitudes are likely to change.

Technorati Tags: publishing, artistic integrity, Richard Rinaldi, jingoism, sellout

* — For more on this subject, Ian McEwan has penned an essay for the Guardian on how the London bombings were inevitable.

The battle between the two San Francisco alt-weeklies (one a New Times offshoot; the other indie and full of piss and vinegar) continues. But as the Guardian has reported, things have become a little sleazier. It seems that Clear Channel, known for promoting conservative radio and restricting free speech, has entered the fray. Bill Graham Presents, which owns the Warfield Theatre, is a Clear Channel subsidiary. In exchange for an exclusive advertising deal with SF Weekly, the Warfield over the next three years will be renamed (wait for it) the SF Weekly Warfield.

Pacific Bell Park was silly enough. But I think this corporate subsidizing takes the cake in the preposterous department. For one thing, “weekly” has transformed from a noun to an accidental advertising. One can only imagine future conversations among avid concertgoers:

Abbott: Hey man, you gonna check out the Killers?

Costello: Aw shit yeah! Gotta grab some tickets. Where they playing?

Abbott: The SF Weekly Warfield?

Costello: Where is it this week?

Abbott: No, the SF Weekly Warfield.

Costello: I know it’s weekly, but what kind of Warfield is it going to be?

Abbott: That’s the theatre’s name.

Costello: Gotcha, but where’s it going to be?

Abbott: In San Francisco. At the Weekly.

Costello: The Warfield?

Abbott: Yup.

Costello: And it changes every week.

Abbott: Yes. The music, not the place.

Costello: So where’s the Warfield going to be?

Technorati Tags: alt-weekly, warfield, San Francisco

I’ve let the Tanenhaus Brownie Watch updates slip for the past month. However, I’d like to ensure RotR readers that this Sunday, the weekly test will return, including the seminal male to female book reviewer test. In the meantime, the prolific Lauren Baratz-Logsted offers a guest essay over at Booksquare about bias against female reviewers. Ms. Baratz-Logsted offers her thoughts on this issue, takes up the troubling divide between male and female authors, and points to “[a] book review created by, for and about women; a book review that has room for Joyce Carol Oates, every single one of her books as they come out, but that also has room for all genres.” Until this utopian ideal happens, I direct readers to Domestic Goddess, a moderated e-journal devoted to womenwriters who pen domestic fiction, A Celebration of Women Writers, which has been attempting to collect online information on women writers for the past eleven years, Scribbling Women, and the Women Writers Project, which collects texts penned by women between 1400 and 1850.

Technorati Tags: women writers, NYTBR

I’m hoping it’s either serendipity or perhaps a subconsious riff on the deisgn similarities manifest within book covers, but it looks like the New York Times may have ripped off Nathalie Chicha. Not only did Andrew Adam Newman use the same examples that Nathalie used, but he quoted the blog Foreword, quite literally jonesing Foreword’s proprietor for examples rather than doing the legwork himself. (That would involve going to a bookstore and using a pair of eyes.)

It can be argued that a good journalist essentially collects information and assembles it. But the real question I have to ask is why Newman didn’t at least consult Nathalie in the course of writing his article, particularly when she was the one who ferreted out the issue in the first place and when a link to her visual examples was featured in the comments section at Foreword. Newman could have included a simple sentence along the lines of “Nathalie Chicha, editor of the blog Galleycat, has collected several interpretive examples of what these covers might mean.”

I would suggest that tracking the original source of an association is what a paid journalist should be expected to do. It’s decent and ethical and it also allows you to swap information with the enthused experts. Everybody wins.

(While I am not paid to blog here, I do go out of my way to attribute the original source, if I have found an item from somebody else — because it’s just possible that for anyone interested in the topic, there may be a debate or an additional debate or possibly a fantastic rabbit hole to head down.)

Most bloggers do this. It’s not entirely perfect, given that we’re posting entries on the fly, but it is possible to track linkage. However, if this is a case where bloggers are doing a better job of accrediting a source than Andrew Adam Newman, the real question is why the Times didn’t hire Nathalie Chicha to write the piece. She had the knowledge, she had the curiosity, and if a bit of cash and a shrewd and encouraging editor had been thrown her way, I’m convinced she would have dug up the reasoning behind the design similarities.

As widely reported throughout the blogosphere (and with a particularly heartfelt tribute from Sarah), the man who signed his checks Evan Hunter and who offered books under the names Hunter and Ed McBain has passed on. He was 78.

My first introduction to Hunter’s books were through a few hardcovers that somebody had given to me. This person was going to throw the tomes away and, being a selective packrat when it comes to books, I stopped him in the nick of time. Let’s just say that I was dubious about the “sultry” women on the covers, who sported pistols and wore their hair in dated feathery 1980s efforts to look what some publisher perceived as “trashy.” Presumably, it moved books. But the look of these ladies, to my eyes anyway, was about as morally compromised as It’s a Wonderful Life‘s George Bailey.

But I read them anyway. And found that the text itself was far from the pinup cliches on the cover. These were cops who had sizable problems, inhabiting a gritty world that was damn near hopeless, but bristling with life as if to defy the hard breaks. What made the McBain novels work were the telling details tossed so effortlessly throughout the text. A carefully wiped counterpane or a hastily tied garbage bag wouldn’t just give you a hint to the crime. It would tell you everything you needed to know about the people.

I’ve only read a few of his novels and that was many years ago. But now than Hunter’s gone, I hope I can work in some time to check out a good deal more.

• Emails being sent in to The Sun.
• Someone has already turned the attacks into a comic. Incredible turnaround time.
• Specific details on the blasts from The Guardian.
• Flickr: The London Explosion Pool.
• At the Huffington Post, Andrei Cherny suggests that the bombings will be a test to see if the U.S. can reciprocate Tony Blair’s pledge to America during 9/11 and Simon Jenkins pleas for normalcy.
• “The front of the building was covered with blood.”

Technorati Tags: London Underground, terrorism, London, headlines

• Cameraphone video showing trapped commuters.
• Raised alerts everywhere in U.S. but San Diego. Why?
• Sterling drops to 19-month low.
• American Communist Party issues statement condemning attacks.
• Queen in shock, Buckingham Palace sealed off.
• Eyewitness account from Marketwatch.
• Mayor Ken Livingstone calls attacks “mass murder.”
• David Plotz in Slate.
• Israel also holding economic conference near one of terror sites.

• Eyewitness reports from BBC.
• Wikipedia has an entry up on the attacks with some emergency numbers, if you need help. I understand that mobiles are down, but you can still text message.
• Numerology probably has nothing to do with this, but is there any significance to 7-7?
• The Guardian is now reporting 40 dead, 350 injured.
• London hotels are being overrun by commuters.
• Stocks take a dip on news of London bombings.
• Putin says attacks demonstrate that world is not united.
• G-8 talks postponed.
• Here in San Francisco, subways are delayed and many cops are patrolling the streets. I saw at least ten during my walk up Montgomery Street.
• CNN: “U.S. government sources told CNN that there was no specific or credible information indicating that there might be a threat to the United States.”
• Already, UPI is pinning this on al-Qaeda.

• IOC: London will still be home to 2012 Olympics.
• Blair says terrorists are behind attacks.
• Text of Scotland Yard statement.
• Flickr London
• US warns to be vigilant in subways.
• Australian narrowly escapes subway blast.
• There are apparently a total of four explosions: three on trains, one on a double-decker bus. First attack: 8:51, 7 people dead. Second attack: 8:56, 21 dead. Third explosion: 5 dead. Bus explosion: fatalities, unknown. This news report says 40.
• US to step up security on public transportation.
• Eyewitness account of paralyzed London.
• Is this a G8 protester or Al Qeada? Or someone else?
• By way of comparison, I should also point out that last year, there was a Moscow subway explosion that killed 39 people. But it didn’t receive nearly this amount of coverage.
• Warren Ellis updating. (via Bookslut)

Technorati Tags: London Underground, terrorism

Jesus Christ. Major explosions have rocked the London Underground. Numerous fatalities. More news as time permits and I can link to it today. My heart goes out to anyone who has lost loved ones.

St. Petersburg Time: “Richard Dinon saw the laptop’s muted glow through the rear window of the SUV parked outside his home. He walked closer and noticed a man inside.”

First off, if you can’t secure your own damn wireless network, you have no business bitching about people siphoning off your line. You ain’t a victim. You’re uninformed. Shut up and learn the basics, bitch.

Second, the menacing glow of a laptop makes for unintentionally hilarious “crime” reporting. Someone scare the bejesus out of St. Petersburg Times reporter Alex Leary so that he can write us a truly paranoid masterpiece.

Technorati Tags: dubious journalism, wireless, laptop, desperate lede

Holy Christ. Bob Balaban can be found over at the Old Hag’s.

Technorati Tags: Bob Balaban, funny lights, heckling, guest bloggers

Fans of poet Kenneth Koch (Koch’s Coffee House output was reported in the final installment of my BEA coverage) and David (Fraud) Rakoff might be interested to know that Rakoff can be heard reading Koch’s “To Jewishness” over at Nextbook.

Technorati Tags: Kenneth Koch, poetry, David Rakoff, poems

Due to other obligations, my daytime posting will have to be brief. But I wanted to briefly touch upon the strange legacy of Wallace Stegner. Stegner is a guy that I’ve never been all that crazy about as a novelist. This may be framing Stegner’s work too generally, but he seems to me someone who might be styled the Merchant-Ivory of literature (and I mean this in the insufferable sense of the comparison), meaning that with a Stegner novel, you’re going to get some tale of a crotchety old man, endless florid details about landscape and nature, and a storyline that is about as predictable as the perrennial constant of San Francisco weather. A Stegner novel is largely about the elegant prose and the way that humans are ensnared into a natural landscape. This is not to suggest that Stegner’s voice is without validity or his prose without grace. Right now, I’m reading The Specator Bird (it’s a book club selection) and am struck with how the novel takes something as banal as rustification and profiles it from multiple perspectives (it is honorable from the point of view of the main couple in their seventies; it is dishonorable from the perspective of a brash Italian novelist who comes to visit about a third of the way into the book). But simultaneously, the scenes with the countess (as profiled in the diary-within-the-novel) feature some of the stiffest dialogue one can endure. And unless Stegner is trying to make an internal point about the prosaic way that the retired protagonist Joe Allston is chronicling his life, I’m truly baffled why we are permitted such redundancies. (To contrast this with proper use of redundant dialogue, I refer to the cocktail party banter that proliferates William Gaddis’ The Recognitions. The banter itself is banal, but it almost serves almost as a time capsule portraying the intonations of a particular scene (affluent New York). One senses this, as one sifts through its preposterous questions and the conversational arcs that will not die. I wish I could say that I felt this same instinct in Stegner.)

To some degree, Stegner’s work strikes comparisons to that of Frederic Prokosch, another novelist who was criticized for prioritizing environment over the human spirit. But while I can accept this criticism to some degree, I nevertheless find Prokosch’s novels to be coruscating diamond mines that dare to portray a rather grim view of the human condition through metaphors and imagery. A Prokosch novel will frequently involve an American or Westerner (or a group of some sort, as in The Seven Who Fled) who is traveling around the world trying to find an identity, only to become acquainted with the seamy underbelly often left unmentioned and unexposed. Whereas a Stegner novel will essentially reveal what seems to me two obvious and less original truisms: (1) humans must come to terms with their past just before passing on; and (2) nature is strong and may consume humanity at a passing whim.

But it is Prokosch’s subtext that speaks to me more. And yet I wonder if this is a fair criticism because what I personally perceive as ambitious may be old hat to a literary traveler. So the rhetorical question I offer is this: Is a novelist worth less if he dares to deal with thematic dead horses? Further, if there are any Stegnerites in the peanut gallery (and there are certainly many in the Bay Area), do you have some hints and/or defenses for how and why to read Stegner?

Technorati Tags: Wallace Stegner, Frederic Prokosch, Gaddis, dead horse, books, literary, themes

Over at the LBC blog, the minority opinion for Case Histories has been unveiled. Unsurprisingly, there’s a good deal of controversy. You’d think that some of us were swing voters resigning from the Supreme Court at the last minute. But I’d like to address the main concern — chiefly, the “solo songs of appreciation and endorsement” that are allegedly sung by Mark Sarvas, Scott Esposito and myself.

Yes, it’s true that the three of us are now playing in an emopunk trio called the Banvilles (with Lizzie occasionally stepping in to provide sleazy lyrics while tying Scott up to the ride cymbal stand). You can catch us every other Tuesday at various nightclubs in Santa Monica. We even have a special performance set for August in Helsinki. But since the band itself has only been together for six months, I think it’s safe to say that nobody is polished enough to embark on a solo career. The problem, beyond the fact that individually and collectively we have very specific tastes that prevent us from performing with “appreciation and endorsement,” is that while we toss books at our audience, the performance highlights are hinged upon mock fistfights between Mark and I that are intended to evoke the animosity of the Gallgher brothers.

No one is injured in these staged battles, but it does get the crowd going. Because most of the audience understands that both the performance and the stage presence are intended to exude a certain informed passion for books and that everyone has different sensibilities. After the end of a performance, the trio gets together to watch a 16mm print of “Free to Be, You and Me” to get the adrenaline out of our system. Sometimes, we share small cartons of milk and give each other hugs that serve as surrogates to mantras of self-affirmation. Opinions are respected and informed dissent is reclaimed.

Really, at the end of the day, it’s the music that counts. And we sincerely hope that most people comprehend that our songs cut across a wide swath of feelings.

If this doesn’t clear anything up, I invite any and all readers to send clothespins (also known as C47s) to my P.O. Box, ideally with an explanatory note if you happen to remain perplexed. I will happily distribute these clothespins on to the appropriate parties so that they can affix these painful items to their nostrils. Hopefully, this will preclude any given LBC member’s nose from staying in the air too long.

Technorati Tags: LBC, clothespins, amateur emopunk, Santa Monica, controversy, explanation, nostrils, Case Histories, Helsinki, Marlo Thomas

• The gang Long Sunday talks with RotR fave China Miéville. Some of the topics discussed: genre, “voracious” narrative, the constraint of plot, and Jane Eyre. And what’s even crazier is that these two interviewers are just getting started. (via Mumpsimus)
• Indisputable proof that JSF is a younger J-Franz: “I remember, as a kid, I used to read the phone book and think that in 100 years, all these people would be dead.” Next thing you know, we’ll be reading a lengthy New Yorker essay about how Heathcliff saved JSF at a young age.
• And speaking of the New Yorker, there’s a lengthy profile of Roald Dahl this week. I’m not sure if I buy the idea that adults have always hated him, particularly when Margaret Talbot doesn’t cite a lot of examples to prove her thesis. If it’s controversy that Talbot is after, I would contend taht Dahl, like any original children’s author, has received no more and no less the amount complaints as Shel Silverstein.
• Blogging: good or bad for authors? The Times is so obsessed with these blogging articles that I’m awaiting the inevitable “Blogging: With Clothes or Without?” article, which should successfully merge their ridiculously genteel approach to the risque with its obsession with blogs as the new voice or the new something.
• And here’s yet another inconsequential Gray Lady correction: “An article on June 10 about criticism of Howard Dean, the Democratic Party chairman, over several derogatory remarks he made about Republicans paraphrased incorrectly from his comment during an appearance in San Francisco. He said that the Republican Party was ‘pretty much a white, Christian party’ – not that it was made up ‘only’ of white Christian conservatives.” You see? Big difference.
• In Korea, blogs are being taken seriously by publishers.
• Bruce Campbell is big on the Dayton, Ohio bestsellers list.
• Another reason to hate Microsoft: they’re spoonfeeding your kids. A new Office add-on, MS Student, offers book summaries of literature and a time management program for homework. It also features a Bill Gates-led instructional video on how to not pay attention and stare vapidly into space, associating the blackboard with the “evil of Apple.”
• There’s a new development in the “chick lit” debate: Christian women.
• H.L. Mencken in defense of the Enoch Pratt Library.
• Proving once again that the Book Babes are advancing culture better than any journalists of our time, we now find them rating the “top 10 fictional hunks.” You know, if you’re going to go down that silly route, why stop there? Why not rate the top 10 fictional penises? My vote goes for Portnoy.
• If litbloggers aren’t havens for kinky librarians, then clearly the wild orgy I had with five librarians over the weekend (which involved being tied up while three of them read excerpts of David Mitchell and the other two serviced me) means I’m doing something wrong.
• And I’d be seriously remiss if I didn’t mention the free download of Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen to tie in with the release of Magic for Beginners. To read more on Link, you can check out Gwenda Bond’s interview with her on these pages back in September.

Technorati Tags: Roald Dahl, Kelly Link, China Mieville, JSF, New York Times, Bruce Campbell, chicklit, Mencken, Book Babes, kinky librarians, litbloggers, Howard Dean.