This is a quick test to see if the RSS feed is working.

[UPDATE: Even though the XML feeds have been validated and appear through every other aggregator, they are still not showing up at Bloglines. I’ve emailed WordPress and, if I do not hear back from them, I will keep contacting them until I elicit a response and a fix.]

• Nora Sohnen asks whether anyone reads literary journals besides the contributors’ moms. Why yes! The audience also includes glue sniffers, inveterate magazine clippers, insomniacs, MFAs who went through the mandatory “How to read literary journals for life” seminar, and of course snarky literary bloggers.
• I’m truly hoping that this is a typo, but if it isn’t, it looks like men who are literary and unattractive. The daily five mile runs begin tomorrow.
• Actress Joan Allen took to iambic pentameter like a fish to water. Next up: haiku cadences!
• An artist’s invaluable piece, valued at £42,500, has been stolen by some cultural visigoth. Or perhaps the thief was just thirsty. The piece, after all, was a two-liter bottle filled with ice. No doubt that Wayne Hill will have to tap (no pun intended) into his creative energies quite hard to reproduce this masterpiece. Of course, if you give me half of Hill’s price, I’d be happy to serve up my artistic angst. And I’d even outdo Hill by putting a Post-It on the bottle that reads: “CAUTION: ICE INSIDE.”
• Do people know the real Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?
• Leaf Books, a Welsh publishing company, hopes to corner the cafe and train station market by offering short stories in book form. Each story will be 4,000 words long. Unfortunately, genre ghettoization will be in play. Each book will be “color-coded by genre.” No word yet on whether the books will be drinking from separate fountains.
• It looks like the new Harry Potter book isn’t available yet in Spanish, French or German — thereby deflating the hearts of children everywhere. You see? The Harry Potter books do bring people together. Thank you, Ms. Rowling, for all the tears!
• Biographer Bernice Galansky Kert (The Hemingway Women) has passed on. She was 81.
• And James Patterson has become so comfortable that he’s now mining his material from the windows of his $5.2 million Palm Peach home. His next book is Lifeguard and contains such zingers as “It doesn’t rain in Palm Beach, it Perriers.” Product placement and a noun-to-verb transition that didn’t need to happen. Way to go, James!

Okay, everything’s good with Bloglines. Not so good with Sage. If anyone has any problems, please report them here. Name your RSS feeder of choice, the specific message you’re getting and I’ll do my best to fix it.

Okay, I think I’ve killed the old template. It apparently cropped up last night. And the new feed (in the old feed) is working. Please report any and all problems here. This site should look the way it should now. (I hope!)

Even though all of the comment has been imported into WordPress, I am still contending with the old MT reference points. Movable Type would not permit me to utilize a script that would generate the rediects for the 3,000 or so posts that are here. So I have left the old permalinks there and they also exist here.

Please report any and all problems here. And I’ll try to accommodate.

Okay, bear with me as we get things squared away. It appears that I lost my entire blogroll. I have a backup somewhere. So I will restore this as soon as I can. In the meantime, please let me know if you encounter any problems.