Laura Zigman: “Then, as Laura’s Animal Husbandry disappeared, replaced by lots and lots of other more chick-litty books, Laura was only occasionally included in the chick-lit round ups. Laura never knew how to feel about this — that is, part of her was hurt that she wasn’t included when other lists of chick lit writers were named since she felt she was kind of at the forefront of the genre and felt left out. But another part of her was relieved that she wasn’t included because most of the articles about chick lit were very negative, so maybe the fact that she wasn’t mentioned was a good thing.”

Ed never refers to himself in the third person and certainly doesn’t whine when he’s forgotten. You see, this is not the reason why Ed writes.

BBC: “Pop star Madonna has said she ‘wants to be like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and John Lennon.’ The 48-year-old made the statement on US radio station Sirius – but added she wanted to ‘stay alive.'”

San Francisco Chronicle: “The United States and Britain ranked as the worst places to be a child among 21 wealthy nations, according to a report by UNICEF released Wednesday. The Netherlands was the best, it said, followed by Sweden and Denmark….Some of the wealthier countries’ lower rankings were a result of less spending on social programs and ‘dog eat dog’ competition in jobs that led to adults spending less time with their children and heightened alienation among peers, one of the report’s authors, Jonathan Bradshaw, said at a televised news conference in London.”

A Netflix employee: “After working at Netflix for a while, it starts to get boring and it really brings your emotion down since there’s not many interactions with your fellow coworkers, like for me, sometimes I feel really shitty after shipping for about three and a half hours and that’s why I try to do many talking, walking during our breaks. We can talk during shipping cause our manager don’t mind and we can talk very, very little during rental return cause we need to concentrate on inspecting the DVDs at a fast pace.”

In my continuing obsession with furniture store commercials, where I am now convinced the best TV commercial cheese can be found, I have discovered that Norton Furniture has a MySpace page and that the creepy proprietor offers free bread to his customers when they walk into his store. The man’s name is Marc Brown and, according to Cleveland Scene, Brown has “an uncanny ability to remember customers’ names and what they bought.” With Brown’s voice, it’s doubtful he’ll ever have to hire a collection agency.

And Overstated does some digging on Flea Market Montgomery. Apparently, the man’s name is Sammy Stephens and there’s even an “It’s Just Like a Minimall” remix contest in the works. Sammy Stephens also appeared on Ellen.

And here’s some blue-screen footage for Adobe Premiere enthusiasts. This guy interviewed Sammy Stephens on the phone, where Stephens claims “they’re dancing to it in the clubs.”

[UPDATE: Here’s a pretty good Flea Market remix.]

If you are a professional musician and/or composer (ideally, you cut your teeth with keyboards), I need to talk with you. This is in relation to a fiction project I’m working on. I’m hoping to talk with you for about 20-30 minutes on the phone (don’t worry: I don’t bite!) or, if you live in the Bay Area, I’d be happy to buy you a coffee. You can leave a comment here or shoot me an email at ed AT edrants.com

Thanks so much!

MISS PAGLIA had that kind of loquacity which seems to have been thrown into relief by poor dress. Her mind and mouth were so smugly formed that she could only bear fruit comparable to a costermonger. Had she run out of topics to write about? The servants and the plebs thought not, but their collective emolument steered their ratiocinative rudders. Once a peacock, always a peacock, feathers flitting in the hot air. It became necessary for her to return, huffing out phrases like “aimless hejira” — note the alternate spelling — in relationship to banalities about Anna Nicole Smith. Because this was what Miss Paglia did. She fooled her readers into thinking they were masticating upon something significant, when the meal was mere venison — a common table d’hôte for an unsuspecting commonweal.

Miss Paglia had once been an essayist of some note, sending engaging epistles and pleasant postcards to her fellow baronesses. Then something quite catastrophic had occurred. Pears and oranges flew in parabolic trajectories after every meal involving MIss Paglia. Then Miss Paglia disappeared and returned. But her loyal pups with previously perked up ears had grown up, their perspectives broadened by the lineaments of time.

But Miss Paglia had not changed. If anything, her overbite had grown worse.

8:45 PM. I’m inside a convenience store. I’m standing in line about to buy four rolls of toilet paper. A young man in his early twenties purchases two 40 ounce bottles of Mickey’s and a box of toothpaste (the latter purchased so he can meet the $10.00 credit card minimum). He buys the liquor for a homeless man, who is already quite inebriated, and smiles at the clerk behind the counter and the homeless man. He tells the homeless man, “Alright, man! Time to enjoy yourself!” I’m unsure if he means anything diabolical by this. The remark seems straightforward enough.

1. Is the buyer of Mickey’s culpable of contributing to the homeless man’s inebriation? Is he helping to blot the homeless man’s mind out from the real world? Or is he committing an act of genuine philanthropy beyond my comparative ken? Will the liquor help the homeless man survive another day in the streets?

2. Is the clerk complicit by finalizing the transaction and not remarking upon its consequences? * (Corollary: Are all clerks complicit when they sell cigarettes and alcohol to troubled souls? Or does the free market dictate that a person is entitled to whatever he wants? Why is it so easy to let others, who have homes to sleep in, make bad decisions over more trivial matters and yet so troubling to me to watch this man purchase liquor for another? Further, why can I accept some young person buying another person alcohol and not this man’s actions? Why does class shape my views? What right do I have to possess these assumptions when there’s a double standard?)

3. Am I complicit in my silence? I could have voiced my dismay. I could have stepped in and bought the man a slice of pizza. If I had chosen the latter, the homeless man, his eyes widening at the malt liquor, may have refused my offer. He’d clearly prefer eighty ounces to block out the sights of his horrid world rather than nourishment which would at least settle his belly.

General Feelings: Unsettled by the philanthropist, saddened by the homeless man’s addiction, infuriated that I did not do anything. The defendant pleads guilty.

* — The great irony here is that, when the young man and the homeless man shuffled out of the store, the clerk remarked, “I don’t know why he did that,” to which I could have easily responded, “I don’t know why you did that.” It’s easy for all of us to walk this earth, unaware of our own ironies.

The only thing more pathetic than The 1/2 Hour News Hour, a conservative attempt at Daily Show-style humor with a laugh track more canned than a crate of Spam, is that the producers commit a Dubya-worthy malapropism within the show’s title.

• Critical Mass has a lovely list of links to John Leonard, a critic whose acumen can never be underestimated. Take, for example, this essay from 2005, in which Leonard declares of Jonathan Lethem, “Even so, from a young writer as clever as they come and as crafty as they get, who skinwalked and shape-changed from Kurt Vonnegut into Saul Bellow before our starry eyes, whose Huckleberry Brooklyn novel brought municipal fiction back from the dead, the whimsies in Men and Cartoons look like arrested development. And The Disappointment Artist, a collection of Lethem’s journalism and reminiscences, seems at first to be more of the same. Whole chapters are devoted to John Ford’s westerns, Philip K. Dick’s science fiction, Star Wars, John Cassavetes, and Stanley Kubrick. Page after page celebrates recording artists such as Chuck Berry, David Bowie, the Beatles, Elvis Costello, Brian Eno, Pink Floyd, and Cheap Trick, and such science fiction writers as Frank Herbert and Jules Verne. And when the loftier likes of Kafka, Borges, and Lem, or Faulkner, Beckett, and Joyce, or Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, and William Gass are mentioned at all, they will be fingered in brusque passing as ‘professional Bartlebys.’ It’s not as if he’s never met them; they show up in his novels, wearing turtlenecks and trench coats; they hang in his closet. Yet not one is worthy here even of a paragraph.” Today’s book critics are certainly content to venerate authors who deserve it, but a critic like Leonard reminds us that taking a long look at a wunderkind might get us thinking twice and healthily.
• The Maltese Falcon has disappeared!
• Ann VanderMeer has been named the new fiction editor for Weird Tales.
• Poetry readings while doing laundry? Now a possibility in New York!
• If you’re still looking for a Valentine’s Day pointers, Ron Jeremy offers advice.
• I’m disappointed with this list of great sex poems. Come on, Pinsky. If you can’t find us a villanelle about cunnilingus, then how can we be expected to adopt the French form? (via that Brockman guy)
• The New York Times investigates red velvet cake. I’m surprised I mentioned this before Tayari. (via Gwenda)
• Faster Than Light: a science fiction-based podcast I didn’t know about and will investigate later. They also had the good sense to talk with Mike Harrison.
• R.U. Sirius talks with Steven Levy (interview available in MP3 and text form) about how the iPod has changed culture.
• BSG gets renewed for a fourth season, but it appears to be on probation. It’s been guaranteed a minimum of thirteen hours. But given this season’s lackluster results, I really hope that Moore & Co. have been given a short leash so that they’ll turn out better storylines. (via Quiddity)
• To hell with Valentine’s Day. Happy Horny Werewolf Day.
• Jason Boog talks with Vikram Chandra about how to write a long novel.
• Forget shelling out ten bucks. Now there’s a brazen site called Oscartorrents. Argh, matey!

Simon Owens has done the legwork and he’s revealed that the Litblog Co-Op site has been blacklisted from Google. In fact, I’ve performed a few Google searches for “Valerie Trueblood” and “Stephen Graham Jones” and these names don’t come up at all in the first five pages.

This issue has been broached to the group and we’re now discussing options, including switching over to WordPress if need be. It’s a great pity that the hard work of the nominated authors kind enough to volunteer their time to guest blog and answer questions, the many contributors and readers who have discussed the books, the podcast interviews, and the like simply aren’t accessible to the search engines.

The moral of the story: if you have a Typepad account, you may want to check your search engine ranking. It’s very possible that you’re speaking into dead air.

[UPDATE: It appears that there’s a line in our source code deflecting search engines.]

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.”

Another crazy side project is being formed as we speak. You’ll know more in a week. You’ll see it in about two weeks. Keep watching the skies.

Hacking Hot or Not. (via MeFi)

I’m a native Californian. So this makes me something of a clueless wuss when it comes to East Coast winter. You see, here in California, unless we head up to the Sierra Nevada mountains, we rarely experience any weather below 45 degrees Fahrenheit. In fact, we Californians shiver and complain when the temperature hits tepid winter levels, and this makes us something of an understandable laughing stock. (This does not, however, explain California’s rampant libertarianism, nor its wacko New Age movements.)

There’s a corollary to this Left Coast predicament. California’s relative warmth also means that many of us (or at least me) are utterly clueless about winter wear. Hats? Scarves? Gloves? You don’t say! What the hell are those? I have a trusty full-length wool coat that gets me through the cold winter nights, thank you very much. And if you push me against the wall, I’ll drag out my thermal underwear under duress, which I honestly can’t remember where I put. But I’m pretty sure it’s somewhere in my apartment!

I hit New York this weekend, where the weather ranged from 15-30 degrees. With my Californian idiot thinking in play, I likewise figured that the wool coat would serve me well in these comparatively freezing conditions. This worked out okay for me, except when I ventured beyond three Manhattan blocks in the cold. After three blocks, I began to experience an astonishing freezing sensation in my cheeks! This was something new and strange (and, dare I say it, exotic) to me, and I did my best to hide my panic. When my silly masculinity dissipated and I began to realize that this was not a good winter wear situation, it was suggested by certain folks kind enough to comprehend my cluelessness that covering my ears and hands would probably be a good thing.

So I sallied forth to do this. But I could not find a trusty cap or gloves for sale in a ten block area. This was New York! Why was it possible to order smoked Cuban fish at 2:30 AM, and yet not find winter gear? I was prepared to abandon my quest altogether, silently shivering and risking possible frostbite, until I stumbled upon one of those 99 cent stores. I walked into this dubious outlet with some trepidation.

I was stunned to discover a hat and gloves, which I obtained for the amazing price of $2.58. The freezing feeling in my cheeks disappeared! There was better body heat distribution! I began to walk proudly in the cold, thinking that (at least for this weekend) I could probably pull a Travolta strut and ask for two, two slices of pizza somewhere.

There is a moral to this story: a discount store will save you from the cold more effectively than one of those silly Duane Reade outlets that purport to serve the general public.

RIP Ian Richardson

I’d lambaste Maureen Dowd for her uninformed column, but Ron Hogan has already done my job for me. I’ll only add that asking an assman like Wieseltier to comment on chick lit is a bit like asking a pornographic filmmaker about the artistic merits of a Skinemax flick. In both cases, the “expert” can’t be counted upon for a reasonable assessment because of his innate coprophilia.

San Francisco Chronicle:`”Elie Wiesel, the renowned Holocaust author and Nobel Peace Prize winner, was attacked and dragged out of a San Francisco hotel elevator last week, possibly by a Holocaust denier who claims to have stalked Wiesel for weeks, police said Friday.”

Sloganeering: “Much fan fiction is poorly written, and can cause actual brain damage in unsuspecting readers. The obvious response to this is to not read fanfic. But that’s not going far enough for some readers. The mere fact that this stuff even exists somehow poisons the world for them; much like knowing that someone, somewhere is, as we speak, putting the finishing touches on a Two and a Half Men spec-script or even — heaven help us — eating a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich made with nine-grain bread and wondering why he isn’t losing any weight.”

You can read my review of David Markson’s Epitaph for a Tramp & Epitaph for a Dead Beat in today’s Philly Inquirer.

Simon Pegg: “It’s not so much about having a different sense of humour as a different approach to life. More demonstrative than we are, Americans are not embarrassed by their emotions. They clap louder, cheer harder and empathise more unconditionally. It’s an openness that always leaves me feeling slightly guilty and apologetic when American personalities appear on British chat shows and find their jokes and stories met with titters, not guffaws, or their achievements met with silent appreciation, rather than claps and yelps. We don’t like them any less, we just aren’t inclined to give that much of ourselves away. Meanwhile, as a Brit on an American chat show, it’s difficult to endure prolonged whooping without intense, red-faced smirking.

You can read my review of China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun, appearing in this Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. In fact, it’s something of a West Coast Bloggin’ Boys Club feel this week, what with appearances in the same issue by Tod Goldberg and Jim Ruland.