• Ron Howard will be destroying directing Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children for the big screen.
• Douglas Coupland’s JPod is being turned into a 13-part television series. (via Bookninja)
• Okay, this is sort of a Harry Potter link, but not really. Frank Wilson’s words about hubristic security measures are well worth reading.
• Maud on out-of-town bookstores.
• Matthew Tiffany has the scoop on Tom McCarthy’s next novel — excerpt here. And then of course there’s this.
• Dan Wickett offers a third panel of literary translators.
• David Ulin outs himself as a Leonard Maltin Movie Guide junkie. I have to confess. I pick one of these puppies up every year too and have spent too many hours, often with beer and friends, pondering its odd subjective slant (four stars for The Cider House Rules?). It’s always good to have a backup for when the IMDB goes down.
• I don’t entirely agree with Charles Taylor’s argument, but he does have many good points about mass readership.
• Someone has purchased Mediabistro: “A woman with a boa and a dream and a bad laugh has emerged from the hubbub of the internet triumphant.”
• William Gibson “briefly noted” in The New Yorker? The times they are a-changing?

• “Your money is now our money and we will spend it on drugs!”
• Simon Owens has written an extensive piece on Harriet Klausner, who is truly a menace to coherent sentences and taking a stand — two things that one would expect from a critic. If Harriet Klausner is a critic, I am a turtle chronically nibbling on Tetra Ropotmin who copulates four times a day with an even-toed ungulate.
• Warren Ellis: “Note: cigarette breaks are built into all signing times.”
• Christ, I can’t take this anymore. Fuck Raincoast. Get your Potter torrents here.* I do not endorse downloading the book, but someone has to offer a contrarian response to the insistent demands, protocols, and other wretched assumptions that the Harry Potter publishers have been dictating to the media, and which the media in turn has been willingly kowtowing too. Christ, folks, you’re literary journalists. Show some spine from time to time. Must you devote every column inch to this “phenomenon?” Any newspaper mention of the Deathly Hallows without the journalist actually reading the book is, as far as I’m concerned, nothing less than an ignoble junket. Nicholas Lezard has more reasons why you must take a stand. Look, if you want a damn good children’s series, seek out Lemony Snicket, which has more brains, imagination, and wit per book than J.K. Rowling has in her whole oeuvre.
• You and me both, Brockman. I underwent a six-hour interview today in an effort to obtain my “cultural credentials.” At the end of the interview, the interlocutor took one of those little hammers out of his suitcase — the kind that doctors have. I thought he had intended to test my reflexes, but he decided to repeatedly hammer upon my molars while two guys in expensive suits were holding me down. This was, they said, “the final stage of the interview.” After half of my teeth were pulled out with a rusty set of pliers and I was left on the floor, paralyzed with pain, my gums bleeding onto the concrete, these three guys laughed and me. “You want your cultural credentials? There’s your cultural credentials!” Then they kicked me in the stomach and the nads, dislocated both of my shoulders, and shaved off my eyebrows. If anybody knows of a better way to earn “cultural credentials” (and, incidentally, if you know of a good dentist who works cheap), please drop me a line.
• It appears that John Steinbeck’s granddaughter is going into the film industry as a scribe. Her first offering, I Travel With Charley in the Biblical Sense, should be uploaded to YouTube next week.
• The independent publisher Night Shade Books is having a sale to clear out their warehouses. 50% off all titles, four book minimum. That means M. John Harrison, Iain Banks, Tricia Sullivan, the remarkably underrated Paolo Bacigalupi, and Joe Haldemann. Do help support Jeremy Lassen, one of the craziest motherfuckers in the science fiction industry.

* — And it appears that the Harry Potter snapper made a serious mistake.