BBC: “The author behind the film The Graduate faces eviction from his home in East Sussex because of rent arrears. Novelist Charles Webb, 66, and his partner have only days to pay two months’ overdue rent, totalling nearly £1,600, on their flat in Hove….The Californian author accepted a one-off payment of £14,000 for the novel, while the film made £60m….The theatrical adaptation of the classic movie took another £10m in its recent West End stage run.”

The origin of He-Man: “[Mattel president] Ray Wagner had passed on Star Wars because the license property apparently required $750,000 upfront. At the time, for an unproven property, that was a highly exorbitant sum. So Wagner had Mattel’s Prelimary Design Department – of which I was a member – Come up with viable male action figure concepts. I had been real impressed by Frank Frazetta paintings and I [submitted an idea] that I called monster fantasy. But it was actually a barbarian fantasy.”

Robert Birnbaum talks with Richard Reeves. Some interesting views on the Edmund Morris Reagan bio, Bob Woodward and this interesting quote:

But America, going back to something we said before, America is whatever we say it is. We have no sense of history, we live in the present, totally different and I am not against that. We are not fighting wars, like in Kosovo, for something that happened in the 11th century. And because of that, the way we developed, or at least I would argue American exceptionalism has to do with the fact that, forgetting that we killed the Indians, that there was this land here and we came from everywhere and we could keep moving on. That’s what I think of American exceptionalism and I believe it’s true, for better and for worse. He believed the same thing. But he believed God wanted it to be that way. The “shining city on the hill” stuff, and “last best hope of mankind,” and that was his American exceptionalism, that we were simply better than other people. And he said that over and over again. I am old enough now that I like us—America is a great place—we are different, we are not better. We are a different kind of people and I prefer being an American to being anything else. But I don’t think God had much to do with it. God doesn’t check passports.

Spark’s Slate diaries.

The Litblog Co-Op has revealed its Spring 2006 choice. Like the last round, there will also be five special podcasts provided courtesy of the Bat Segundo show devoted to all of the nominees (three are in the can), as well as brief interviews with the nominators. In fact, it was Mr. Sarvas himself who was the first to be recorded on one of our new audio toys and who put up with our rather geeky fixation on just how utterly sexy he sounded. Thankfully, none of our enthusiastic asides were preserved in audio form.