• Who was Henrik Ibsen? (via Book Ninja)
• At the Frankfurt Book Fair, Korean publishing has been a dominant presence.
• Are zines still viable?
• Another year, another theory about who might have been the “real Shakespeare.” This year, Shakespeare may have been Sir Henry Neville.
• A profile of E.L. Doctorow.
• Every year, the kids get younger.
• Apparently, the young ‘uns aren’t fans of Ba Jin.
• And this doesn’t relate to literature at all, but holy shit! Rush-R30! A two-disc DVD set of Rush’s career! Aw yeah, mofos!

M.J. Rose may have received a strange letter with two unwanted galleys, but I believe that I can top her. For I received an equally baffling letter accompanying a package of books last week. The letter in question made me so uncomfortable that I took three cold showers in a row, turned into a serial caller for four hours, talking with sympathetic friends and using up what few favors remained, and basted my brain in a bit of Gaddis shortly after eating a jar of Gerber’s Apple Sauce for lunch that I had obtained from a thirtysomething mother who saw my sad face as I was walking in the park and promptly gave me the sustenance out of the kindness of her own heart and ran away when a ruffian tried to mug her (who then promptly mugged me instead, although he wasn’t interested in the apple sauce).

Anyway, I hope that I won’t have to experience a day like that again. But for informative purposes, I have reproduced the letter below:

Dear Friend of a Friend of a Litblogger:

I want to have your children. I want to tie you up and make you my slave. Your new name will be “Piñata” and you shall stare at my menacing wooden stick. And I’m sure that after you’ve read the six 2,000 word novels that I’ve enclosed, you’ll understand why we were meant to be together, reproduce, and move to a small shack, sans DSL connection or running water, in the Kansas prairies.

Do not think for a minute that I am not aware of your situation with regard to the opposite sex. I’ve paid a lot of money to a private investigative agency to install video cameras in your apartment, violating your privacy in every way possible. I’ve tracked the number of times you’ve masturbated in the past month. (Please see the attached bar graph if you have somehow lost count. Each “incident” is meticulously logged by time and duration.)

The good news, Mt. Champion (can I climb you?), is that I can give you lots of sex and I can give you lots of books. If you don’t believe me, please consult the attached 400-page analytical essay for the accompanying tomes. It will demonstrate my impeccable taste. I had tried to submit this as a Ph.D. dissertation, but, alas, I didn’t realize that one had to be enrolled in school to earn the appropriate degree.

In any event, I hope that all this will lead to a fruitful relationship which you can then, in turn, publicize on your blog site thingy. If you like, I will install the third nipple before I meet you in person.

Very truly yours,

Juanita M. Underside, FELLATIO PRESS

• Soft Skull now has a blog, demonstrating to the world that Dan Wickett may have some competition from Richard Nash in the We Never Sleep Department.
• If there was any doubt that Lev Grossman was a chickenhead, his status as Chickenhead of the Decade may be confirmed. Judy Blume? Jonathan Franzen? Tolkein [sic]? C.S. Lewis? All authors in their own right, but hardly the names one would expect to see on any serious list concerned with singling out literature. Then again, given Time‘s roots as a magazine devoted to lackluster summaries of news and culture for mass consumption, the list makes sense. Bawk bawk indeed.
• A seven year old has won a book contract. This kid better have life experience or we’ll have someone steal his lunch money.
• Chinese author Ba Jin has died. He was 100.
• Creative Artists Agency has pledged that it will go after “100 percent market share.” A CAA spokesman also contended that it had settled on an operations method predicated on “100 percent hubris.”
• Chekhov: Not a prude and possibly a womanizer.
• Is a major production of Dickens’ Bleak House the reason for the BBC license fee increase?
• Boston Globe on Sara Faith Alterman: “Getting ”15 Minutes’ published was surprisingly simple. She sent her text to multiple literary agents. One quickly picked her up, and ”My 15 Minutes’ was sold to Avon Trade, a division of Harper Collins.” Simple maybe if you’re a flouncy 25 year old whose author photo will sell the book alone. But try telling that “surprisingly simple” story to some talented yet eczema-ridden 55 year old novelist with bad teeth.
• A spirited defense of Pinter’s politics.
• “Phil, I don’t know what to write about this week.” “Well, Bob, what author do you like?” “Philip Roth’s really doing it for me right now.” “Well, then why not take a road trip and write about it. No penetrating insights. Just rambling text.” “You mean it? I mean, you’ll actually buy a column from me without a point?” “Bob, you wouldn’t be on staff if you weren’t pointless. Now let’s go knock back some shots. Drinks are on me.”
• Vikram Seth hates being late.
• Apparently, Jonathan Safran Foer bridges the gap between the hipsters and the philanthropists. There must be some mistake.

[UPDATE: Litkicks has some interesting memories of Lev Grossman: “He was a nice guy, undoubtedly smart, literary and perceptive….But I also found Lev Grossman bland in conversation, and decidedly uncontroversial….Nothing about Lev Grossman shouted out ‘I will be Time’s book critic in five years’.”]

For those who recently took me to task for attacking Somerville, MA, it appears that I was indeed wrong. Massachusetts is the smartest state in the union. My own state, California, is 43rd on the list. In other words, we’re the seventh dumbest state in the union. Dumber than Oklahoma, Texas, and Tennessee. Far dumber than Ohio and South Carolina.

Of course, we also have a hell of a lot more people (33,871,648 of them in fact). So we you consider the law of means, it’s quite likely that, numerically speaking, we may have a larger cadre of smartypants to draw from. And we still have the world’s fifth largest economy and very nice weather. And where would you be without all the vapid movies coming from Hollywood? Resorting to low-budget Canadian films, no doubt. And as dumb as we are, we didn’t vote for Bush in the last two presidential elections.

If there’s any bright side to this, pun fully intended, this should put an end to the whole red-states-they-dumb, blue-states-we’re-enlightened argument. Intelligence, it seems, is entirely relative. Now pardon me while I try to white-out this grammatical mistake on my monitor.

Immaculate gaiters, svelte form prepped for genteel debauchery
Throat cleared, quorum present to reproach murderers
Renowned and redoubtable, he dug into his deepest pockets
To empathize with these wild-eyed machine haters
Interferring with the steady flow of industry
Monied but knowing the worth of a dime
And the starving mouths motivating the massacres

Lone but unfazed, he trivialized the phase
That the expensive parts mulching up and down could not suspend
Gordon pled that perhaps they were going a tad too far
The life of a man not worth the life of a machine
Would they exact vengeance upon these irreplaceable specimens
These ad hoc homicidal men destroyed by progress?

Torrents of commiseration rippled through the great hall
But his listeners were the captains of the ship
And these men o’ war could not accept
Masting down the price of doing business
Where Gordon stayed a sobriquet for unfettered beauty
These others sailed upon avaricious waters

While Gordon stirred the few observers
The mongers relented their time to ferment
It went down, deadly and predictable
Leaving Gordon to weep quietly
For the lives lost in the name of melodramatic justice