• Martin Amis: “I did have [a midlife crisis]. Sorry to inform you that you’re going to get one every decade after you’re forty, and it’s a different kind of crisis every time. You can read every novel ever written and they won’t prepare you for it. My midlife crisis was bang on schedule: mid-forties, divorce, terrible realizations about death.”
• Should authors respond to wrong-headed reviews? (via Maud)
• Podcasts, Haggis?
• The 2006 Nebula ballot. (via Gwenda)
• Jodi Picoult visits the school were her book was banned.
• Has Jonathan Littell scandalized France? My own statistics show that France is scandalized in some way every 32 minutes.
• Levi Asher talks with Danny Simmons.
• “Literary classics” now available on DVD.
• Rudy Wiebe has won the 2007 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.
• Matthew Sharpe interviewed in Poets & Writers (via TEV)
• A new short story from Richard Russo at the Atlantic. Shockingly, it’s not behind a paywall. Has the Atlantic finally come to its senses? (via Dan Wickett)
• Teddy (via Other)
• Legos have changed.
• An honorary doc for Ozick. (via Orthofer)
• G.K. Chesterton gets the Golden Rule Jones Theater treatment.
• Mark Thwaite on Dawkins: “The God Delusion didn’t convince me at all, it just made me think Dawkins was a bit of a scary megalomaniac.”
• Scott Esposito: “Guess this is turning into ‘mean week’ here. Who will get dissed tomorrow?”

It was somewhere in the middle of the broadcast: a muted melange of cultural snippets that I apparently didn’t pay attention to, but that partisan puppets and closet conformists salivated over. I didn’t know. I was probably pouring scotch.

Now it’s spread across the YouTube. And I won’t mention it. Because I have a twitchy baseline phone that takes shitty pictures and does more or less what it sets out to do. Even when it cuts out. Even when it fails. What kind of spoilsports are we to declare more when only fifteen years ago we had a curly cord that attached into a wall or, if lucky and prosperous, a cordless? If you think I’m dropping half a gee for a whiz kid’s toy, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me. If you think I’m going to buy into this because some kid in an editing room mashed up clips from popular films of people saying hello while the suits were burning bills left and right laughing their asses off because they had told you the same thing before, telling you to think different, you’ve really got ME laughing, pal. Boy, my boister’s dripping down the halls because the hell of it is that if I were about seven years younger, I’d probably fall for this shit.

I’m disappointed in geeks sometimes. Are there no cynics among the bunch? Do they casually accept everything without contemplating that baubles are often confused for advancement? Besides, this is a corporation we’re talking about here, not a gaggle of philanthropists. Ol’ Steve-O’s doing quite well because you swipe your credit cards without understanding what you’re doing. Hell, how many of these contraptions have been pre-ordered because these guys played into your uncanny love of the first person singular?

It’s not that I’m anti-fruit. (By now, you know who I’m talking about. So there’s no need for sobriquets.) The costermongers, on occasion, put out good wares. But I’m against this smelly buy now think less fervor, which has not only polluted the airwaves but taken up precious real estate on this alternative media thing we’ve got going here. Think different? A con man’s first point of order is to get you to believe the opposite.

Look, all I’m asking here is a healthy dose of skepticism. They’ve got some geeks drooling at the bell. Woof woof. It’s a shame, because many of these geeks are a lot smarter.

• Inside the NYTBR: “Before McGrath, there was Rebecca Sinclair—she didn’t even last seven years, and told Gewen at the end of her term: ‘I took this job because of my love of books, but all I’m doing everyday is dealing with crap.’ Tanenhaus, apparently, is now going through the same thing. ‘He has a pretty thick skin,’ Gewen said, ‘but I would anticipate that after five or six years, he too will have been worn down by it all.'” Well, this explains a lot of things. I don’t see how you can produce an engaging weekly book review section if cannot maintain even a remote passion for books. I certainly wouldn’t be maintaining Return of the Reluctant if I felt, in any way, that my passion had waned in any way. And I would ask my readers to Sure, I’ve read a lot of crap too. But I’ve also read a lot of books that have greatly moved me. And it is these gems that keep me going. (Cases in point: I strenuously direct your attention to Ellen Klages’ excellent short story collection, Portable Childhoods, due from Tachyon Press in April. Sure, there’s some obvious filler in there, but “Basement Magic” and “Time Gypsy” in book form is long overdue. And I’m very glad that my LBC duties have permitted me to read the excellent title story for Alan DeNiro’s Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead.)
• Annalee Newitz points to a new vampire soap opera (on Lifetime TV!) that subverts gender roles. The tough detective is a woman. The sensitive romance novelist, who also happens to be a 450 year old vampire, is a man. We need more of this.
• Philip Roth has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman.
• So all the complaints about “scrotum” have brought Susan Patron’s book into the top 40 at Amazon. If I ever write a children’s book, I’ll be sure to include the word “buttock” on the first page.
• Daniel Green examines the circuitous publishing route of John Sheppard’s Small Town Punk.
• Gwenda unearths a fascinating WaPo article which observes that psychiatrists and literary scholars are at a loss to locate literary works involving repressed memory before the 19th century.
• Jessica Stockton on New York ComicCon.
• In defense of Bill Bryson. (via Rarely Likable)
• I hope I never have to go to Phoenix. (via Henry Kisor)
• RI PJürg Federspiel.
• If it’s any consolation, Mr. Goldberg, they stole my Un-Ethicist idea too.

Time: “In a new documentary, Producer Cameron and his director, Simcha Jacobovici, make the starting claim that Jesus wasn’t resurrected –the cornerstone of Christian faith– and that his burial cave was discovered near Jerusalem. And, get this, Jesus sired a son with Mary Magdelene…film-makers Cameron and Jacobovici claim to have amassed evidence through DNA tests, archeological [sic] evidence and Biblical studies, that the 10 coffins belong to Jesus and his family.”

Guardian: “Despite the fact that Politkovskaya was articulate, attractive and accomplished, she was barred from appearing on television, which is the only way the vast majority of Russians get news. To the degree that a living woman could be airbrushed out of post-Soviet history, she had been. ‘People call the newspaper,’ she wrote, ‘and send letters with one and the same question: “Why are you writing about this? Why are you scaring us? Why do we need to know this?”‘ She provided an answer as much for herself as for any reader: ‘I’m sure this has to be done, for one simple reason: as contemporaries of this war, we will be held responsible for it. The classic Soviet excuse of not being there and not taking part in anything personally won’t work. So I want you to know the truth. Then you’ll be free of cynicism.'”