We’ve just heard from an anonymous reader concerning “The Pearl Report,” the email newsletter that was apparently written by Paul Maliszewski. Again, if anyone has any additional leads on what content was featured within “The Pearl Report,” then we will certainly post them.

The reader writes:

Forgive the nom de plume but I’m avoiding the Wrath of Dave. In late 2001 I (and apparently a number of people whose names were culled from the McSweeney’s e list) began receiving, about two or three times a month, emails with the subject heading “The Pearl Report,” signed Allan Pearl. (This is the name of Eugene Levy’s character in “Waiting For Guffman” but I don’t know if that was the reference intended by “Pearl.”) The epistles purported to relate various gossipy tidbits, mostly about Tom Beller and the three Jonathans – Ames, Franzen, Lethem. (Though I think Chabon and maybe even Eggers figured in a few items.)

To give you an example – one item, as memory serves, alleged that J Lethem, tiring of the effort involved in signing a ltd edition in the late ’90s, rounded up a young, unknown friend of his named Colson Whitehead to forge his signature on the books, and that these forgeries could be identified by Whitehead’s having written a microscopic “CW” in the corner of each leaf in which he wrote Lethem’s name. (The joke may not be obvious to Dave but I can see it – such a book, thanks to its Whitehead connection, would be worth more than the usual ltd Lethem. But I suppose Lethem would have been unhappy about the allegation – since he’s the former rare-books specialist at Moe’s in Berkeley, this would indeed be rather a slur.) But more often the items were of the Tom-was-seen-with-Parker-the-other-night kind, rather harmless.

After several months of such hijinks, circa the spring of 2002, a young lady came up to Ames at a reading in darkest Brooklyn, informed him that she was “Pearl’s” ex-girlfriend, and spilled the beans. Ames told Dave. At which point Dave did the stuff that makes him so eminently qualified to replace the ‘zinger-man at the Holy Office, now that the dude’s moved on up.

After this all went down, I did some Googling for a while to see what turned up online, but there never was a thing. Such was life in the dim, dark days before litblogs. As to where the Pearl Reports could be found now – maybe the deepest, darkest recesses of the cast-aside laptops of the Jonathans could yield some answers.

Jonathan Safran Foer, in a post that is likely fake unless Mr. Foer would like to corroborate it, has responded to Steve Almond’s takedown:

Me and you should hang out, really. With my ironic-ironic-ironic-ironic pretentiousness and profound postmodern invulnerability and your high-school / freshman-year-in-college ironic, I’m-not-pretentiousness-because-I-am-aware-that-I-might-be-pretentious-and-also-because-when-I-feel-that-I’m-being-pretentious-I-go-ahead-and-say-that-I’m-being-pretentious (and I use a lot of cliches in my language, just like on TV and in Hollywood movies) we can be really profound and postmodern and probably we can achieve true art really quickly, in like two minutes, and then after we can eat hot dogs. We can eat nuts from those profoundly sorrowful Nuts 4 Nuts people.

(Thanks, Chelsea!)

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.]