Until we guest-bloggers pool our collective blogginess and figure out how to keep together Ed’s excellent Roundups, I offer you some reading from elsewhere. Consider it a bite-sized roundup. Particularly as I don’t know how to make WordPress do bullets, or pretty much anything useful. Ed: WordPress?

Bullet!: Books are not sweaters. This post made me sweat until I bled.
Bullet!: Harry Matthews goodstuff.
Bullet!: A good review for Chuck P’s Rant.
Bullet!: Your online writing hideaway.
Bullet!: Books we want and books we need.
Bullet!: A good place to go, every day. Well, go with your browser. You know what I mean.

• Black Garterbelt: the dawning of a new rake.
• 2 Blowhards discuss Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy.” Let me add G.K. Chesterton (along with Maugham) as one of the most needlessly dismissed writers of the 20th century I’d like to write about sometime. (And, incidentally, he had quite a lot to say about Dickens, which was one of the first critical books I ever read.) (First link via Books, Inq.)
• Bookninja observes that three out of the top four richest authors in the UK are women.
• Also cadged from Mr. Murray: An interview with Dennis Loy Johnson.
• Mr. Esposito interviews Matthew Sharpe.
• A field guide to reading DeLillo. (via Sarah)
• In an uncharacteristic abandonment of diaphanous snark, Gawker’s Emily Gould defends Meghan O’Rourke, causing Gawker commenters to pick up the catty slack. Personally, I think Meghan O’Rourke’s a fine critic. I could care less about whether or not she worked at the New Yorker or who she’s marrying. That such needless questions increasingly matter to people who comment on blogs is appalling. If you’re going to criticize O’Rourke, do so for her work. Not because she spells her first name with an H or because she was more successful than you.
• It looks like Charlie Winton has acquired Counterpoint Press from Perseus.
• Richard reassesses his reading of Richard Powers’ novels.
• I believe I mentioned this a few weeks ago, but a hearty litblogosphere welcome to LATBR editor David L. Ulin, who now has a blog. And, yes, there’s an RSS feed. (Thanks to Carolyn for the reminder.)

• The Believer reveals the results of its 2006 Believer Book Awards, leaving two spots blank, authored by writers associated with the magazine, “because it would look creepy to include them. (via Scott)
• I like David Kipen. He’s one of the most enthusiastic and passionate literary people I’ve had the pleasure to meet. But his Salon essay smacks of sour grapes. It’s an absolute mistake to attribute the failure of his Big Read campaign to reader ennui, particularly when you consider the Oprah effect. Or perhaps Kipen was too concerned with his own apocalyptic thinking to consider McCarthy’s apocalyptic novel. [UPDATE: Mr. Kipen has asked me why I feel the Big Read campaign, which I think is a fine idea, has failed. It’s a fair question, and my problem with much of the “print reviews are good for you” and the Big Read campaigns is that it prescribes, rather than invites. The public is quite capable of thinking on their own. So why not invite them with more passion and less doom and gloom?]
• Due to the demands of my current schedule, I couldn’t fit the delightful Arthur Phillips into the Segundo lineup (at least not immediately). But thankfully, Mr. Sarvas has taken up the slack.
• Michael Calderone offers a heartbreaking revelation for Sontag fans: Susan was a plagiarist. (via Galleycat)
• The Frank O’Connor longlist. (via Sr. Cheney)
• Apparently, Tao Lin ran away from Levi Asher. This is a bit silly. I will happily broker a détente against such diffidence at a future Tao Lin reading!
• Terry Teachout echoes what I’ve been hoping to see happen. The time has come for stagebloggers to make themselves known. I’m game too.
• “My name is Jerry and I’m a poet.” (via Ron Silliman)
• Marco Roth is not a fictional character, but he sure seems like one sometimes.
• Quiet Bubble examines Stan Brakhage’s excellent film The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes.
• The Poetry Audio Archive. (via James Marcus)
• Is this a solution to gamer widowhood? (via The Underwire)

• Scott smells a rat with Susannah Meadows’ review of Jamestown. I have to agree. Why bother to bring up the dog and penis imagery and not venture a stab as to what it might symbolize? Richard has more and has urged everyone to stop caring about the NYTBR.
• Another offering in last weekend’s NYTBR was (no surprise) Joe Queenan’s smug and feckless essay on bad books: “Indeed, one of the reasons I became a book reviewer is because it gives me the opportunity to read a steady stream of hopelessly awful books under the pretense of work.” Which is not unlike a food critic boasting about how a steady stream of Burger King meals permits him to remain a manic-depressive. One of the reasons I became a book reviewer is because it gives me the opportunity to read a steady stream of books from people who dare to think and write differently. I start off hoping to love a book and I am immensely disheartened when a book lets me down. As Nathan Whitlock observed this morning, Orwell had some interesting thoughts on “good bad books.”
• This week at the LBC, folks are offering thoughts on Alan DeNiro’s short story collection.
• Scott McKenzie examines the myth of stealing ideas. I’ve written before about the “screenwriter” I once met who seemed convinced that her “idea” about a fallen angel had been stolen for the John Travolta film Michael. When I interviewed Guy Ritchie many years ago, I pointed out that his subtitled streetspeak in Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels was similar to the jive speak in Airplane. He told me that it hadn’t occurred to him and that I was the first person to point this out. Outright theft, along the lines of Mencia, is one thing. But the best artists have no shortage of ideas. They are also intuitively aware that creative people sometimes think along similar lines. I do my best not to steal ideas and, if there is some inspiration, I try to attribute it to others. If I know that someone else has set a precedent, I generally try to avoid pursuing the idea until I can come up with my own unique execution.
• And while we’re on this subject, Good Man Park has found an astonishing emblematic similarity between the “Neon Bible” symbol and vanity publisher Author House. Did the Arcade Fire rip off Author House? I don’t think so. Happy accidents happen.
• A third digression on this topic and then I’ll stop: Many have remarked on how Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” is a grand Elvis homage. But I overheard Elvis playing in a coffeehouse last night and it occurred to me that the “Someone still loves you” part of “Radio Ga Ga”‘s chorus strikes the exact five notes as the fifth stanza line in Elvis’s “Love Me Tender” — A#, A, G, A, A#, if I’m not mistaken. I’m not sure if this was deliberate, but, in light of the song’s commentary on radio’s omnipresence, it does add an interesting nuance to the tune, no?
• Michiko likes fiction again!
• Tom McCarthy’s top ten European modernists. (via Messr. Thwaite)
• The Star-Tribune has cut 145 jobs, and the casualties include James Lileks’ column.
• Lynne Scanlon invokes an infamous line from Henry VI in her appraisal of book reviewing.

• There’s a new blog covering literary Chicago called Literago, which makes me wonder why San Literisco, Bookhattan, Los Angelinotypes, and the like haven’t lexically blended their way into fruition.
• I think between the dreadful I Am Charlotte Simmons and the preposterous answers in this profile that Tom Wolfe is far from the energetic gonzo that once made him so interesting. A real shame.
• Sarah gets the Litminds interview treatment.
• Dirty Books. (via Maud)
• Dominic Cavendish talks with Edmund White.
• Elizabeth Crane is spending her time falling down. Give her two months and she plans to get a buzz cut, glasses, and a short-sleeved shirt, abandon her car in the middle of the freeway, and terrorize the closest person resembling Tuesday Weld in Chicago. All this under the direction of Joel Schumacher. Be careful, folks. Ms. Crane is a powder keg.
• Ron Silliman laments the lack of serious novelists who start off as poets. As it so happens, there are many who do. Here is a haiku written by Chuck Palahniuk in the late 1980s:

  I hate you harder
  Scum sucking sheltered yuppies
  Cut me twice tonight

  So you see, the poets are out there. There just doing writing poetry on the q.t. for understandable reasons. Speaking of which, Palahniuk recently appeared on the Agony Column.

• William Gass has won the 2007 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, rendering Mick Jagger’s 1968 prediction correct. You see, many music critics have spent years struggling to figure out what the hell “Jumpin’ Jack Flash / It’s a gas, gas, gas” actually means. What these critics didn’t know was that Jagger was correctly predicting Gass engaging in a series of unexpected jumping jacks upon winning the award. In fact, the whole song is laden with literary soothsaying. What else could “I frowned at the crumbs of a crust of bread” represent but the woes of a struggling writer?
• John Sutherland wonders if first drafts should be ignored.
• It appears that Jack Herman is bamboozling Canadian playwrights.
• Isak reminds us that the time to sign the petition to save small and indie publishers from exorbitant postal rates is running out. Send letters and the like, if you care about an egalitarian postal system.
• Here’s one of the silliest reviewing ledes I’ve seen this year.
• Bill Clinton is now providing clues for the New York Times crossword.
• I hope George Murray knew what he was getting into with this troublesome blog post headline.
• There’s a new Zadie Smith story in The New Yorker. (via Bookblog)