My “nemesis” Lev Grossman now has a blog.

So Grumpy Old Bookman is calling it quits for a while. While this is a great shame, I completely understand. I’ve come close to retiring this blog many times. But what’s the point? I’ll always keep on coming back. There are simply too many things to learn and too much interesting information to keep track of. There are too many hats to try on. A grand sartorial wardrobe with limitless options rests permanently in my mind’s closet.

In a sense, this makes blogging no more selfish than any other kind of writing. I have put up around 5,400 posts here since December 2003, ranging from two-sentence items to 2,000 word entries that I probably should have revised and sold somewhere. But no matter. This blog doesn’t feel as if is distracting me that much from other things, such as living or writing fiction. But I’m not really the most reliable guide. Perhaps the process has become too habitual. Most astute readers (and especially fellow bloggers) can probably discern why I’m so prolific. When it comes right down to it, this blog exists under extremely absurd circumstances. I’m working to change this, but I entertain gladly.

What has caused Michael Allen or any of us to blog so much? I’m thinking we’re all motivated by the same forces. But waiting around for unknown convergence is a pretty ridiculous way to live. Bud Parr had it right by organizing Metaxucafe. And so did Mark with the LBC. But someone with enough crazy ambition needs to do something that advances us to a point that readers and bloggers both recognize. I wonder who this pioneer will be.

Carolyn Kellogg has revealed the three Spring 2007 nominees at the LBC.

Reuters: “Ten years after winning the Booker Prize for her first novel, and a decade as one of India’s leading social and environmental activists, Arundhati Roy is planning a return to fiction.”

Excerpt from Wallace Troglon’s “The God Who Taunted Her: Lee Goldberg, Cathy Young and the Tragic End of Young-Limsky,” pp. 34-35:

Of all the moments in the blogosphere, with the exception of the unexpected third-season frottage moment between Sam Tanenhaus and Bat Segundo[1], few have been as controversial as the relationship between Fanfic Warrior Princess Cathy Young and Lee Goldberg, the Television God of War. It is difficult for the amateur scholar to determine whether any of these relationships are true. It is further difficult for the amateur to limn the demarcation between reality and fiction.

Lee Goldberg, however, came across as a more menacing villain than Tanenhaus, causing much division and rancor within fandom.[2] That the show’s writers would disrupt the safe territory that the show had operated in for so long was an insult. That the show would dare to emulate real life to some extent, which most of the fans had previously avoided by spending their time writing 100,000 word dissertations and derivative stories based on the show’s characters, was an outright existential blow.

Goldberg was the first to challenge the much believed and still valid conclusions of the Young-Limsky School, making the bold claim that the litblog was not a form of fiction. This seemed, Goldberg averred, ostensible to anyone with a pulse.

I shall not address the “pre-Goldberg” and “post-Goldberg” periods of fandom. It has been discussed enough elsewhere.[3] But I am most concerned with the various dead gophers that Young sent Goldberg in the mail, along with the magazine subscriptions that Young had signed Goldberg up for. If we accept Goldberg’s contrarian thesis in part, were these moments initiated by Cathy Young? Or were they scripted into the series by the show’s brilliant head writer?

[1] See Season 3, Episode 55, “Books and Bats,” when the series switched over to Showtime to take advantage of the network’s “No Limits” policy. On March 3, 2005, a few weeks after the episode’s airdate, there was considerable debate in alt.fan.litblogs over whether the actor playing “Sam Tanenhaus”[a] whispered “You can’t write” or “You’re all right.” Whatever the three words were, it still doesn’t explain why the show’s writers followed this with a more explicit love scene that was completely out of character with the tone of the first two seasons. Fellow scholar and fanfic defender OMyGawdGoldberg!, leaving a comment on Tod Goldberg’s site, settled the matter by calling both Goldberg brothers “a bunch of heartless cretins.”

[a] The actor’s name remains unidentified, despite a coordinated stalking effort by fans of the show to get the answer from the producers.

[2] For more on this topic, see R.U. Phuckingsomeone’s invaluable “Litbloggers Copulate Too,” a 6,000 word treatise that posits many hypothetical couplings if we agree with the Young-Limsky school that considers litbloggers to be a fictive construct arranged within a five-season television series that aired between 2000-2005, released shortly thereafter on DVD.

[3] See Cathy Young’s trio of articles, “Fanfic is the Only Form of Fiction,” “Fanfic is Better Than Updike and Better Than Sex” and her confessional piece de resistance, “The Night Lee Goldberg Made Me Cry.”