It began with a charming correspondence I maintained with Aggro Littleton at DearBlogger.com, who believes that identifying the size of my penis as “pequeño” is a protected form of free speech. It continued with several emails to Holly Lisle, who slandered me further by suggesting that I might be a slattern (there is only one definition of the word!), but who would not allow me to send her a full-scale JPEG of the penis in question (along with three notarized statements from former lovers attesting to the size).

I know there are differing reports about my anatomical dimensions, but this is getting ridiculous! The lies, damned lies, and assorted hysteria directly caused me to ply into a bottle of Stoli last night. It is Littleton and Lisle’s respective charges that are not only slanderous, but have caused me considerable emotional and physical distress. (Physical distress indeed! I was, for example, unable to jerk off last night, because I was still stewing over every sentence, every word, and even the comma placement contained within Littleton’s wholly lost and unfounded charges.)

Now I’m wondering whether or not I even have a penis. And I won’t know for sure until I take a shower. And even then, can I truly count upon my own perception? But I must! For I am right, and nobody else can correct me! I have nothing to learn from disagreement. Thus, the appropriate measures have been taken.

Rest assured, I have contacted lawyers. I will be filing at least five lawsuits this morning. And if this isn’t enough, I will file five more tomorrow. My legal team will be taking a shower with me this morning, to determine if, in fact, the penis allegations are true. We will have very precise diagrams, blown-up as exhibits, that we will bring with us to court.

My lawyers will shut down every blog that deals even remotely with books. And they will do this on Christmas Day. Justice must be exacted for charges, real or imagined. And if it inconveniences bloggers as they attempt to celebrate the holidays, then these bloggers SHOULD HAVE KNOWN WHAT THEY WERE GETTING INTO IN THE FIRST PLACE!

I will fight, fight, fight, and then fight again. I’ll take this to the Supreme Court if I have to! I’m a blogger, dammit. And if this means point-by-point rebuttals of pedantic arguments, posted publicly and then further commented upon by readers, who will then take sides and waste additional time, then I accept the absurdities of a cruel universe.

Contact Music: “Balding makes Bruce Willis no less a man, and even enhances his acting abilities, the Hollywood star insists. The hardman is defensive about his thinning palette, but claims it means he can change his appearance more easily. He explains, ‘I’m a man and I will kick anybody’s ass who tries to tell me that I’m not one because my hair’s thinning.'”

“So what’s it going to be, fellas? Costello, I’m going to New York with you. We need ourselves a Person of the Year.”

“You!”

“Yeah, I’m the guy steering this committee. And if we’re not careful about nipping this in the bud, we’ll be here close to Christmas. You got any bright ideas, squirt?”

“Don’t you get it? You!”

“I got a name, shortstop.”

“You! That’s our Person of the Year!”

“What the hell did I do?”

“You!”

“You!”

“Yes, that’s it!”

“I was only doing what you did.”

“But that’s just it!”

“We can’t have two Persons of the Year. We had three Good Samaritans last year.”

“Which is why we settle upon you!'”

“That’s a conflict of interest.”

“No, it isn’t. Let me explain. The reader picks up the cover and sees the word ‘You.'”

“Which means the manager?”

“Yes.”

“The coach too?”

“Yes.”

“Anybody playing baseball?”

“Yes.”

“And who are these fellows? Do we need to know their name?”

“Well, we shouldn’t. Because the Person of the Year is ‘You.'”

“Then you’re the Person of the Year?”

“Yes.”

“And who are you?”

“Me. But that’s part of You.'”

“Me? The guy on first?”

“Yes. You’re You too!”

“The first baseman?”

“Yes. He’s Person of the Year too.”

“This is too goddamn conceptual. Priscilla wouldn’t approve.”

“What?”

“I Don’t Give a Darn!”

“That’s next year’s Person of the Year.”

Sara Nelson: “As for HarperCollins: it is well known that many Regan books—from Wicked to Howard Stern to three bestsellers about Scott Peterson—made a great deal of money for the company. Without her—and really, without her, will the imprint be able to make and market the books that reflected her uncanny and unseemly taste or lack thereof?—won’t Harper feel the pinch? The marketplace certainly wanted many of these books, which may say more about the marketplace than it does about the morals of editors, but we all live and die by that marketplace.And I can’t help wondering what the brass will say if their numbers are down in the first post-Regan year.”

Sara Gran: “For me, things work out fine (I can go to the suburbs or just shop in NYC for books, music, clothes etc.) but what about some poor mom who’s trying to get her kids clothes for school? She has exactly one option in the city: wal-mart, which offers terrible quality at average prices. The reason why I say this is, or might be, the future, is because I wish more people were aware that when it comes to this stuff there is nothing so special about New Orleans, except poverty.”

(via Pinky’s Paperhaus)

I had hoped to serve up a few more podcasts this weekend, but I’m a tad under the weather right now. So content will be lighter than usual. The Pynchon roundtable will also happen: through a more comprehensive format than I anticipated. More soon.

Lizzie Skurnick appears in today’s Style section with an article offering an overview of mommy lit, what Lizzie describes as “written in the wry voices of a generation of women who came of age after feminism, and they have a newly competitive, higher-end set of woes: $10,000 pacifier consultants, nanny-swiping and Harvard-like nursery school applications. Also present is chick-lit’s familiar cast of characters: the single best friend, the dutiful boyfriend (now husband) and a seductive other man who threatens to upset the apple cart.”

Barking Kitten takes umbrage with this, observing, “These writers are but a sliver of society, the hopelessly out-of-touch wealthy inhabiting the coasts. The article does give mention to blogs complaining about this rarified [sic] air, but the publishing world, personified by editor Stacy Creamer, who brought us masterwork The Devil Wears Prada, is all over the trend, anxious to capitalize on a strollerful of publications before the Mummies turn to divorce and menopause.”

Certainly, there have been books, including those cited in Lizzie’s article, that have attempted to capitalize on how to keep chick lit going. As those who read chick lit in the late ’90’s have started families, it makes complete sense to appeal to these new audiences, particularly if you’re an avaricious publisher. However, I must also take partial umbrage with mom lit — not because I have any objection to books which deal with mothers, but because a novel dealing with hyperaffluent maternity suggests more of a masturbatory fantasy than fiction rooted in realism. At least with chick lit, a genre which caters to valid, albeit wildly optimistic tales that often dwell upon women’s issues, there’s some sense of verisimilitude merged with fantasy. Mom lit, by contrast, involves milking the teat on a cash cow.

CNN: “Digesting that fact becomes harder when you consider that the Schuetts earn a comfortable living, with Amy, 39, pulling in $150,000 a year as a hospital psychiatrist. True, their income did take a big hit last summer when Brian got laid off from his job as a sales rep for a pharmaceutical firm (he’d been making a base salary of $82,000 a year, plus commissions as high as $24,000)….
Yet, says Amy, ‘We live from one paycheck to the next, we’re struggling to save and we never seem to have enough money to do anything fun.'”

Variety: “News Corp.-owned HarperCollins announced the news late Friday on the East Coast with a terse press release headlined ‘Judith Regan Terminated.’ Termination was effective immediately, the statement said. Move was clearly a reaction — albeit a delayed one — to the embarrassing scandal involving a Regan tome and T.V. special with O.J. Simpson titled ‘If I Did It,’ in which he described the way he would have committed the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. That event earned across-the-board condemnation and a statement from Murdoch, who called the event ‘ill-considered’ and yanked both the book and special.”

It’s a Wonderful Life in its entirety.

Peaches is 38 years old. Keep this in mind as you watch this interview with Henry Rollins. Questions that come to mind: Is this an act? Could Peaches be this inarticulate in real life? She was once a librarian. You wouldn’t know watching this clip.

I don’t know how I missed it a few months ago, but Bookninja chatted with Deborah Eisenberg.

Joan Didion on Evelyn Waugh (1962): “It is precisely this hardness of mind which creates a gulf between Evelyn Waugh and most American readers. There is a fine edge on, and a perfect balance to, his every perception, and although he is scarcely what you could call unread in the United States, neither is he what you could call understood.”

Rake’s Progress: “RP introduces a new feature today called Care For A Mulligan? Here, your pal will pull out a piece of criticism and kindly ask if the critic, on second glance, would care to have another crack at it. It’s Gentleman’s Snark.”

Popmatters: “The one thing that has always bothered me about the Charlie Brown Christmas special is that the other kids never admit to Charlie Brown that he was right about the little tree.”

Look at it this way, at least he didn’t publish in The New Yorker and a book. Then again, I suppose we can look forward to Klosterman V: Paragraphs I Wrote While on the Can.

I hereby adopt a new writing axiom: When a male essayist starts looking to Peanuts for a desperate introspective connection (instead of, say, the fascinating people around him), he’s gone well over the edge of needlessly confessional neuroses and must be stopped at all costs.

You have to hand it to Michael Crichton. Just when you think he’s hit the nadir, he somehow manages to slide down further into the morass.

Talking Points Muckraker points to this latest item. Earlier this year, Michael Crowley wrote an article criticizing Crichton’s stance on global warming. So what did Crichton do? Instead of engaging Crowley on his issues, he’s included a character in his next novel, Next, named “Mick Crowley” a child molester with a small penis.

Pardon me while I go into John Dvorak mode.

Google will buy a publisher before the end of 2007. And given certain Bertelsmann grumblings about profit, I have a feeling it may be Random House.

I could be totally wrong on this, but consider the amount of amount of time and money Google has sunk into Google Book Search. Consider also Google’s aggressive efforts to find out what Microsoft and Amazon are doing. And what better way to sidestep publishers’ quibbles over GBS’s copyright infringement and apparent cut into sales than to buy the publishers outright?

Furthermore, one must consider the financial payoff of the Google Book Search feature. Surely, this is a company that cannot be conducting all this out of philanthropy. One stalwart way to recoup costs is through a print-on-demand feature, one publicly available in bookstores. And what better way to approach booksellers than by purchasing a publisher who has a vested history of doing business, thereby pushing whatever POD (or, perhaps, an ironically named GOD) features through a distributor that the booksellers have a history doing business with?

Of course, all this is speculation. But if this all goes down, you heard it hear first.

Flat

Philip Gourevitch: “The interviews were invented, or devised, or struck upon, as a response to that challenge. How are we going to talk about writing without doing Lit Crit? So it’s very funny that in the process of doing an interview Plimpton gets clocked by Hemingway for doing Lit Crit.”

You want end-of-the-year lists? Miriam Burstein posts a delightfully taxonomic year in reading list containing such intriguing categories as “Best Victorian fiction not read previously,” “Most bizarre Anglican didactic novel acquired this year,” and “Paragraph that probably caused a number of Victorian Catholic readers to roll their eyes in disbelief.”

In this week’s New Yorker, Wyatt Mason serves up a R.K. Narayan profile. For more info on Narayan, check out Jhumpa Lahiri’s essay, which appeared a few months ago in the Boston Review, as well as Pankaj Mishra’s 2001 NYRB essay, and Nandan Datta’s biographical overview. More links can be found here.

Canadian Press: “A woman who used fondue fuel to set her boyfriend’s penis on fire will spend the holidays in jail.”

Renee has put up her first Booktalk podcast, which apparently replaces cars with books and involves Renee and some guy named Eli responding to various voicemails that people leave about books. In any event, do give them a call at 415-992-8622, tell them about “winter books,” and bemuse them with ten-cent words.

Bookfox reports on a reading with Glen David Gold which answers a most important question: will Glen David Gold write a followup novel to Carter Beats the Devil? The answer is contained within the Fox’s sly report:

The highlight of the Evening was Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil, who read from his new, as-yet-unnamed novel. He said it had been “kicking his ass for the last six years”, and read us the first chapter, which included a lighthouse-manning mother who wished for a disaster to relieve the monotony, her son as a rebellious idealist, and the sighting of a man in a sinking craft at sea who appears to resemble Charlie Chaplin. Afterwards, Gold said that because of the editing process and the period before printing, the novel won’t be out for another two years, give or take six months, which is too bad because we all can’t wait.

Friend: The Vogons were misunderstood.
Me: Are you kidding me?
Friend: They wrote poetry.
Me: The Vogons destroyed the planet Earth to make way for an intergalactic bypass. Even accounting for the questionable value of Vogon poetry, how, by any stretch of the imagination, can this action be redeemed? That’s genocide! That’s like Saddam gassing the Kurds!

Remarkable. (via MeFi)

A Different Stripe points to this Adam Kirsch article about the Goncourt Brothers, who were the naturalist forerunner of today’s gossip columnists. I don’t entirely buy the NYRB‘s claim that the Goncourt Brothers’ journal (recently republished) represents “a masterpiece of French literature written during the era,” particularly since this comes from the people who published the book. But an excerpt can be found here and this 1937 Time article suggests that the journals, among the few Goncourt texts to make it into the 20th century, are a “racy record” and the Goncourts considered their friend Flaubert to be “a great water of time, forgetting himself in things he picks up to read, and constantly running away from the book he is writing.” Perhaps the Goncourts were among the first litbloggers.