• One week, she’s giving marital advice to the Beckhams; the next week, she’s polluting the television medium with her drivel. I remain convinced that there is no way to get the media to stop paying attention to Jackie Collins (including me, apparently).
• Someone must also ask this: when was the last time David Denby was enthusiastic about film? Presumably, “the spectacle of dying” also explains Denby’s recumbent work of late. Denby has offered very thoughtful reviews in the past, but someone needs to whip the man into shape. David Remnick, it is your duty to unleash a horde of ball-busting editors on Denby before March!
• Don’t entirely discount hasty reading. I can agree with Ms. Waters that some books, such as David Markson’s Going Down (which I am now reading), simply cannot be read fast. But if Ms. Waters honestly believes that the average reader should diagram every single sentence and deconstruct the fuck out of every volume, then I have to wonder just how she has fun on a Saturday night. Is not the joy of reading predicated upon leaving some spontaneity or ambiguity to the reader? I’m not suggesting that books should be construed as mere entertainments, but if the process of understanding literature is not engaging on some level (hopefully with a modicum of fun), then what hope for tomorrow’s grad students? Besides, who is Ms. Waters to dictate just how any individual reader reads? One of the joys of reading is returning to a book a second or third time, realizing that a particular passage from a book you haven’t touched in six years is calling you in the dead of night, lending some aid or reference to another unsolved and entirely unrelated mystery.
• I don’t know if I mentioned this already, but Scott McLemee is now blogging, although I must reprimand him for using “thorough” and “Wikipedia” in the same sentence.
• Oh, grow some balls, Gerry Adams. (via Elegant Variation)
• Dan Wickett’s Dzanc Books is starting to pump out a few titles. Set for 2008: a Yannick Murphy short story collection and a volume from Peter Markus.
• Matthew Tiffany has scored a future interview with Dave Eggers and Valentino Deng. Failure to engage Mr. Eggers on his inexplicable flip-flopping will be duly observed, Mr. Tiffany. Go get ’em, tiger. Nobody else has the balls. (Well, I would, but Eggers has refused multiple interview requests.)
• I’d like to agree with Levi (somewhat) concerning bloggers “loathing” the NYTBR. I don’t “loathe” Sam Tanenhaus (just as I don’t “loathe” Dave Eggers, much as he and his minions seem to think I do). “Loathing” implies that I feel complete disgust for the NYTBR. But if I “loathe” this weekly broadsheet, why then have I praised David Orr, Liesel Schillinger and Dwight Garner on these pages? This “with us or against us” mentality might sit well with paranoids and conspiracy freaks, but it doesn’t sit with me. I apply a great degree of scrutiny to anyone, including authors I admire (see my recent Miéville review). It’s the only way I can stay honest. Perhaps the issue here is one of assumed respect, a collective state where one assumes that because something is printed in a prominent newspaper, it must therefore be “beyond criticism” (like Saul Bellow, apparently*). But how can any solid thinker maintain such an attitude? Why is vehement disagreement confused with a jihad? That my clear skepticism and playfulness is confused with “loathing” reveals quite a lot about the disingenuous nature of today’s book review climate. (And, no, I don’t “loathe” Mark either for quibbling over his verb choice here; far from it.)

* — See also this post from Dan Green.

• J.M. Coetzee on Norman Mailer: “If one takes seriously Mailer’s reading of world history as a war between good and evil in which human beings act as proxies for supernatural agents—that is to say, if one takes this reading at face value rather than as an extended and not very original metaphor for unresolved and irresoluble conflict within individual human psyches—then the principle that human beings are responsible for their actions is subverted, and with that the ambition of the novel to search out and speak the truth of our moral life.” (via Scott)
• I don’t really watch television, so perhaps one of you might tell me why I should care about Damien Leith and what makes this ponce such a fantastic novelist?
• Elif Shafak: genuine protection needed or Salman Rushdie schtick?
• RIP fanboy.
• Given the man’s inflexibility to any viewpoint outside of his own and his animosity towards anyone who even remotely disagrees with him*, I don’t think I’d ever want to interview Cory Doctorow. But Rick Kleffel has been brave enough to take the plunge, talking with Doctorow for his excellent podcast series.
• Ecclesiastical Proust Archive (via Mark Thwaite)
• Justine Larbaleister goes medieval on Maureen Dowd.
• Anna Nicole Smith: The Annotated Biography
• “Would you like to establish a new freelancing career?”

* — Conclusion based on personal emails between Champion and Doctorow, 2001-2006, although third parties assure me that Doctorow is “nice.”

• I’m with Jeff on this one. I liked Neal Pollack’s Alternadad, but comparing it to Howl is like calling The O.C. the finest drama since I, Claudius. I can only chalk this bizarre comparison to the precarious employment scenario now going down at Time.
• Responding to the Reason fanfic imbroglio, Tod Goldberg observes that “all uses of the term ‘raging fucktard’ be noted as originating from me.” One would think that this point would be self-evident, but it seems that the Cathy Youngs of the universe require clarification.
• Charlie Anders uncovers a remarkable stereotype in the Star Trek animated series. I hope The women of Charlie Chaplin. (via Quiddity)
• Michelle Richmond is posing for Playboy.
• Banville on Amis. (via Maudier)
• I think the question of whether an author has set foot in the place he’s writing in is moot. Shouldn’t it be about the work? One can look on further than Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Crane never set foot into battle and yet composed chilling imagery.
• Levi Asher hits PBS!
• I wonder if these animators stole the idea from Nick Mamatas’ Move Under Ground.
• Meghan O’Rourke on John Leonard: “It would be fine to leave it at that, if it weren’t that the word ‘enthusiast’ sounds dilettantish, somehow not quite serious. So let us try this: John Leonard is our primary progressive, catholic literary critic; he is also, with the exception of Susan Sontag, the best American literary critic to come of age in the 1960s, when the destabilizing forces of rock ’n’ roll and popular culture ransacked Axel’s Castle, that modernist symbol of aesthetic detachment, and began throwing parties in the inner keep. Like Sontag and Camille Paglia, Leonard has been one of the few literary essayists who can make sense of the erosion of highbrow culture, ruing elements of its loss while embracing the forces of popular culture. He is a man who loves The Beatles and Arthur Koestler, Joan Baez and William Wordsworth; and whom we can trust, now, when he worries that our intellectual culture is being, if not ‘dumbed down,’ then coarsened. He may be an ‘old fart,’ as he describes himself. But in outlook he is still a young progressive — the word-drunk man who has done for literary criticism what Lester Bangs did for rock journalism.” Sam Tanenhaus, take note. (via Complete Review)
• It looks like auctorial doppelgangers are afoot at the Philly Inquirer.
• James Tata on the Echo Maker epigraph.
• Today’s students are unfamiliar with the Beatles, Norman Mailer and Orson Welles. (via Bookblog)
• Nextbook chats with Aline Kominsky Crumb.
• Bookish Love, an excellent site for reading reports by the by, meets Madison Smartt Bell.
• Can today’s newspapers be trusted? (via Bookninja)
• 2007 seems to be the year of vampire novels. Or at least I seem to be reading more of them lately (three so far and we’re barely into February). But Bookburger informs us that John Marks’ Fangland is the one to read.
• Atwood on arts funding. (via Magnificent Octopus)
• Matt Bell reports on a Michael Martone reading.
• A detailed Stephen Dixon interview. (via Matthew Tiffany)
• Is there now a confluence between Internet advertising and newspapers?
• 24 co-creator Joel Surnow’s politics.
• Mystery Morgue interviews Sarah Weinman.

• From 1934 to 1949, the Philly Inquirer published “complete illustrated novels” in its Sunday book review section. You’d be hard-pressed to find even the most secure and well-funded Sunday supplements doing anything like this today. (via Books, Inq.)
• Primo Levi’s “A Tranquil Star.”
• Keith Gessen asks, “Where is Martin Amis heading next?”
• Behold: New Critics.
• Obviously, Kim Bofo has never read Faulkner. The “clever literary thing” is something known as eye dialect, designed to convey cadences in phonetic terms. It is not intended to be “clever,” nor is it intended to spawn anti-intellectual hostility from across the big pond. More information can be found here and here.
• Joyce and Beckett play golf. (via Fimoculous)
• The 11 Least Intimidating Movie Villains. (via Quiddity)
• Poor Mike Judge. Fox doesn’t deserve him.

• If you’re anything like me, you consider Jackie Collins’ words to be about as insightful and comprehensible to your life as those incomprehensible furniture instructions printed who knows where. Yet Ms. Collins seems to believe that she can help Victoria Beckham. Perhaps Ms. Collins is attempting to atone for past conversational setbacks. Or perhaps she’s alarmed that Tony Danza didn’t follow her advice to get his nipples pierced in order to ward off evil eidolons. Either way, I’m awaiting the inevitable novel fictionalizing Ms. Collins’ admonishments, Fool Me Spice, Shame on Me.
• It wouldn’t be a Tuesday without a Lethem story. (Hell, it would be Tuesday without a Collins story. But I’ve already blown that promise and you can send your disused prophylactics to me by mail in protest.) It appears that Boston musicians are creating an original song from the lyrics in Lethem’s upcoming novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet. The winning song will be unfurled at Lethem Central and it will be performed at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on March 27. Whether this will translate into a Clap Your Hands-style indie hit through the Internet or an unsettling choice at your karaoke bar of choice remains anyone’s guess.
• Cathy Young offers this disingenuous claim: “Respectable modern-day literature has no shortage of derivative works: What are Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead or John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius but Hamlet fanfics?” I think not. There’s a fundamental difference between “writers” who labor over bad prose describing Kirk schtupping Spock and writers like Stoppard offering a witty and separately realized tale of two overlooked bumblers. In Hamlet, R&G were little more than minor characters with scant attributes. Plus, I don’t believe international copyright law applies to works published in 1599. Besides, it’s not as if Updike and Stoppard are going to other characters for the majority of their work. Updike and Stoppard have indelible characters like Rabbit Angstrom and Moon to fuel their respective imaginations. Fanfic writers, by contrast, often have no narrative ideas other than derivative stories involving characters they don’t own or have not created. Further, they are often inept with subject-verb agreement. I advise novice writers to toil at such infecundities at their own peril. What’s more, Ms. Young has also taken Lee Goldberg’s comments out of context. But then one would expect no less of a self-acknowledged fan fiction writer accustomed to absconding with characters she has neither the right nor the talent to tinker with. (And lest I be accused of attacking Ms. Young’s character, let’s let her fiction speak for itself. This story reveals such blunders as “Xena’s voice spilled into his reverie.” You mean, Xena’s voice is liquid as opposed to aural? Who knew? Or how about: “Back in his leather pants, Ares came out into the main room of the house.” The prepositional phrase is unnecessary. We’re already in the goddam house. The words “out into” are oxymoronic. And what in the hell does that dreadful clause about the leather pants have to do with the sentence’s purpose? I could examine this dreadful prose at length, but I’d rather spend a weekend hiring someone to saw my limbs off.)