Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: “A 33-year-old Grafton woman was fighting for her life Thursday night after she drank concentrated drain cleaner given to her by a man who then videotaped her violent vomiting for his sexual gratification, Milwaukee police said.”

Years in the making, Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain (which takes place over the course of 1,000 years) finally gets a trailer. The visuals are stunning. (via Ghost in the Machine)

Mr. Wilson (if indeed such a Jared come lately can even be called “mister”) has suggested that I am obsessed with bodily fluids. He alludes to an incident that once occurred at my Missolonghi pied-a-tierre regarding a woman with a tattoo of a dagger in a particularly sensitive anatomical region. Understand that I was not the one in the bedroom who embarassingly asked for a user’s manual, nor was I the one who propositioned the tattooed stranger at a watering hole located on the edge of the Gulf of Patras. If Wilson wants to evade the issue here (namely, the poor quality of his novels), rather than address my wholly legitimate concerns about his continued assaults on the written word, then it’s only fitting that he should throw the arc, as it were, upon bodily fluids, a pivotal element of Wilson’s unpardonable disgrace.

Allow me to quote you a stanza from Wilson’s abominable poem “She Stabbed Me in the Heart, She Kicked Me in the Ass” (inexplicably published in The Paris Review #121, where George Plimpton took momentary leave of his fine sensibilities):

In the shade of the glade, her boob had a blade
But the real brain bared was my own
If she stopped with her mouth, and her body swayed south
Then my nightstick might harden to stone

That such doggerel, with its childish rhyming scheme, its crude metaphors (“nightstick,” the “brain bared” ) and the preposterous allusion to the unnamed woman’s body swaying south, would hold any regard among today’s MFAs is yet another telling indicator that the apocalypse is upon us and that Jared Wilson is one of its chief instigators.

I know that my critics have taken me to task about the incident involving the tatooed B-girl (who spoke not a word of French!) and have assumed that my riff with Mr. Wilson stemmed from this unfortunate incident. Regardless of this calumny, my ultimate concern here is over Mr. Wilson’s skills as a novelist. I trust that this puts the matter at rest.

BusinessWeek: “The company said it could be forced into bankruptcy protection if a new credit agreement with lenders doesn’t become effective…..Antioco said Dallas-based Blockbuster might sell some game stores, but he stood by the decision to cut late fees, which accounted for 13 percent of Blockbuster’s revenue a year ago.”

Good riddance.

When I first met Jared Wilson, I knew instantly that I was in the presence of a small rodent who can’t refrain from burrowing into a skull he can never hope to penetrate. One encounters such muskrats, of course, on an everyday basis. But never ones quite like Mr. Wilson, who, not coincidentally I think, shares the unfortunate name of the most boring character (indeed, the one who deserves all vengeance wreaked by the young Dennis) ever created for the Sunday comics page.

Far from a mere bag of bones, Mr. Wilson is a walking accident who has clutched to the sad illusion that he is some kind of seminal artist. Unfortunately, when one writes Wilson’s novels — the kind of books that have the appeal of unwiped semen stains in a taxi cab seat — one wonders if Wilson subconsciously had a different sort of seminal in mind.

An epicurean with a solid literary instinct might sustain an ardent hope that parvenus of Jared Wilson would expire gracefully from the world of letters. But so long as the four steady notes of Wilson’s out-of-tune Fender guitar find favor with the charnel houses of the publishing industry, even the basest of literary arts is doomed.