I’ve intercepted some extremely vicious hate mails over the past week pertaining to the Save the Blogs campaign. I’m stunned that anyone would get so angry about this. We’ve only been saying that the blog, by way of being a natural parasitic medium based in Terre Haute, actually demands a lobbying group fronting as a venerable organization of literary enthusiasts. Anger! That’s the only way to save blogs!

And when we’re done saving the blogs, we’re going to be working very hard to get half of U.S. teenagers hooked on nicotine. And then we’re going to curb any and all bans on handguns and assault weapons. What the world really needs, and this has been the purpose of the Save the Blogs campaign all along, is needless violence and utter mayhem. Our successful campaign to throw laptops at the humorless has been working. There have been several trips to the hospital and we’ll be uploading these clips onto YouTube. But we WILL NOT STOP until every humorless cad has been hit with an iBook or a Toshiba laptop.

And just to be clear: The Save the Blogs campaign is being run by the National Parasitic Bloggers Circle Board of Directors, NOT the National Parasitic Bloggers Circle.

The posts put up by the guest bloggers, despite appearing at Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant, do NOT — repeat, NOT — reflect the opinions of parasites as a whole. The only exception are those posts having to do with David Orr’s pants and, in particular, his left bicep. All parasites accept David Orr’s hunky physique as the genuine article. And we’re hoping to regale you with some hot fan fiction in the forthcoming weeks.

Nobody writing on this website answers to anybody. That’s the philosophy we’ve appropriated (parasite-like, natch!) from the print critics, who have greatly inspired us with their persistent paralogia.

On Friday morning, I signed a lease for an apartment in Brooklyn.

This explains, in part, my two week absence.

I’ll have more to say about all this later, including a lengthy and perhaps needlessly maudlin post about San Francisco. (I apologize in advance for any visceral fulminations. One doesn’t leave a city that one has lived in and loved for thirteen years with anything approaching ease.) But before I do, I’d like to once again greatly thank the guest bloggers who have been kind enough to step in as I continue this remarkably insane cross-country migration, as well as the kind people who have offered recommendations, kudos, plaudits, and all manner of positive juju. These are exciting times. More later.

New York Times: “Along the way, he discovered a fact that many small-scale recording artists are coming to terms with these days: his fans do not want merely to buy his music. They want to be his friend. And that means they want to interact with him all day long online. They pore over his blog entries, commenting with sympathy and support every time he recounts the difficulty of writing a song. They send e-mail messages, dozens a day, ranging from simple mash notes of the “you rock!” variety to starkly emotional letters, including one by a man who described singing one of Coulton’s love songs to his 6-month-old infant during her heart surgery. Coulton responds to every letter, though as the e-mail volume has grown to as many as 100 messages a day, his replies have grown more and more terse, to the point where he’s now feeling guilty about being rude.” (via Jenny D)

From Cynthia Ozick’s excellent essay “Literary Entrails” (Harper’s, April 2007), which I hope Harper’s eventually makes freely available. Ozick’s essay should be read by anyone who has any interest in the current book reviewing climate, particularly as very few of the participants have the effrontery to look inward.

When, not long ago, the New York Times Book Review asked a pool of writers to name the best novel of the last twenty-five years, the results were partly predictable and considerably muddled. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a tale of slavery and its aftermath, won the most votes. Philip Roth, John Updike, Don DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy were substantially represented. In an essay musing on the outcome of an exercise seemingly more quixotic than significant, A.O. Scott noted that the choices gave “a rich, if partial and unscientific picture of American literature, a kind of composite self-portrait as interesting perhaps for its blind spots and distortions as for its details.” Or call it flotsam and jetsam. You could not tell, from the novels that floated to the top, and from those bubbling vigorously below, anything more than that they were all written in varieties of the American language. You could not tell what, taken all together, they intimated in the larger sense — the tone of their time. A quarter-century encompasses a generation, and a generation does have a composite feel to it. But here nothing was composite, nothing joined these disparate writers to one another — only the catchall of the question itself, dipping like a fishing net and picking up what was closest to the surface, or had already prominently surfaced. All these novels had been abundantly reviewed — piecemeal. No reviewer had thought to set Beloved beside Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (both are political novels historically disguised) to catch the cross-reverberations. No reviewer had thought to investigate the possibly intermarried lineage of any of these works: what, for instance, has Nick in DeLillo’s Underworld absorbed from the Nick of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby? The novels that rose up to meet the Book Review‘s inquiry had never been suspect of being linked, whether horizontally or vertically. It was as if each one was a wolf-child reared beyond the commonality of a civilization; as if there was no recognizable thread of literary inheritance that could bind, say, Mark Helprin to Raymond Carver. Or if there was, no one cared to look for it. Nothing was indebted to nothing.