Editor & Publisher: “After a typically contrarian column today (behind the Times’ paid wall) — in which he said that voters in last week’s election want ‘gridlock,’ not action, in the next Congress — Tierney suddenly announced: ‘Whatever they do the next two years, I won’t be here to kick them around. This is my last column on the Op-Ed page. I’ve enjoyed the past couple of years in Washington, but one election cycle is enough. I’m returning full time to the subject and the city closest to my heart: science and New York. I’ll be writing a column and a blog for the Science Times section.'”

Boy, between him and Jonah Goldberg, conservatives sure seem to be imploding these days. Wonder why that could be?

Eric Rosenfield feels the hate for NaNoWriMo, Max responds.

Reading Matters’ Kim Bofo serves up this preposterous post, about as absurd a stew as John Freeman’s tsk-tsking of bloggers back in June. Bofo’s apparent beef brisket is that litblogs should report whether or not a book under discussion has been received for free from a publisher. First off, Bofo assumes that, in every case where a litblogger receives an ARC or a finished copy, there is an automatic quid pro quo between publisher and litblogger. This is a preposterous contextomy, seeing as how any sane person is aware that it is impossible for any journalist, whether print or online, who receives fifteen to twenty books a week to review each and every one of them. The litblogger is under no duty to review anything, just as the publicist is under no duty to send free books.

Bofo further inveighs against “the industry’s deliberate manipulation of bloggers to promote books that might otherwise not receive the same level of attention from the mainstream media, and the apparent willingness of many book bloggers to be used in such a manner.”

I haven’t seen a conspiracy this nutty since Oliver Stone. This assumes that all litbloggers are incapable of free will and that they are all incapable of separating the wheat from the chaff. This assumes that they will lavish praise on anything they write about, like the dreaded Harriet Klausners or Nick Hornbys of the universe. It is a position that recalls the smug generalizations within Ortega y Gassett’s elitist tract, The Revolt of the Masses, where only a few select soldiers (which would presumably include that stalwart steed Bofo) are capable of ethics and the moronic masses cannot distinguish between shameful shilling and proper criticism. Well, I happen to think more highly of litbloggers and those who read litblogs than Ms. Bofo.

I didn’t receive the Simon & Schuster email that Bofo did, perhaps because the folks at Simon & Schuster know very well that I would have been adamantly against it. (And who pray tell were the blogs who, according to Bofo, “seemed to be banging on about this book?” In presenting her case, Bofo fails to cite a single example of a litblog transforming overnight into a marketing tool for Simon & Schuster. Further, is it not possible that some of the blogs who raved about Setterfield did so of their own independent accord? Perhaps they did not receive the email. Or must we impute, by Sofo’s paralogia, that all litbloggers are mere tools?)

Bofo, like Freeman, is a journalist as well as a blogger. (Or at least she is a “trained journalist.” A Google search doesn’t reveal a single print byline.) Journalistic ethics are a essential thing for anyone, blogger or book reviewer, to practice. And I should note, with strenuous emphasis, that it is egregious for anyone to accept money (or the promise of such) from a publisher to review a book. But in Bofo and Freeman’s cases, their collective anal retentiveness crosses over into the absurd, no different from the nutjobs who hole up in bunkers waiting for the apocalypse.

[UPDATE: More thoughts on the subject from Matthew Tiffany, Ron Hogan and Michael Orthofer. There’s also some fireworks in the MetaxuCafe thread. And Darby Dixon reveals the sordid truth.]

I’ve had Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country at the top of my TBR pile for a week (alas, I’m chained to reading other tomes right now), but this highly entertaining interview threatens to wreak havoc with my reading regimen.

This morning, the New York Sun reports that Dalkey’s planned move to Rochester has dissolved. The story was also picked up by Publishers Weekly, who reports that Chad Post is uncertain whether it will seek an arrangement with another institution. The arrangement Dalkey has with Illinois State is up on December 31, which gives Dalkey a month and a half to find new digs (or possibly extend the situation with Illinois State). I’ve sent an email to Chad Post with a list of questions to see if I can get any specifics on what went down.

[UPDATE: Jennifer Howard sends along this article, which has some quotes from Chad and John O’Brien.]

It’s fantastic that former Sun-Times book editor Henry Kisor has taken up blogging. But in a transparent effort to attract my attention, to upstage the careful online presence that I’ve built up over the years, he’s named his blog “The Reluctant Blogger.”

You can fire a gun all you want, Harry, but I am O.G. I was THE FIRST litblogger named Reluctant.

Plus, I can fire a pistol standing up!

Alan Moore’s famous creation made an appearance in Washington. Hilarious results ensued. “We see things like this. We don’t know they’re not weapons.” (via MeFi)

In New York’s feisty literary dens, there are plenty of people who will go one step further than you. This is because they are essentially talentless and, rather criminally, aren’t working at a gas station somewhere. Unable to understand their lack of talent, they have decided to get angry instead. One can look no further than Keith “Sweat” Fury, head of the new journal, n+2. Not only does Fury hate anyone and everyone who loves literature, but he even hates himself.

Putting out a one-page literary broadsheet once every ten years (the first issue of n+2 has yet to appear, but Fury said that it would come once he had “come back from San Francisco with Dave Eggers’ skull sucking my cock on the jet ride home”), n+2 has become one of the most talked about literary magazines in recent memory, assuming, of course, that your memory extends to how you got that girl home with you last night from the bar whose name you can now not remember. (Along with Fury, Benjamin Cuntless, author of the bestselling I’m More Manly Than You, is a founding editor.)

We caught up with Fury when he was busy berating a barista who had failed to recognize his literary genius but who was, nevertheless, working a twelve-hour shift.

Return of the Reluctant: Did you really have to do that?

Keith Fury: Absolutely. The hate is everywhere until the world recognizes that Benjamin and I are the sexiest, most literary motherfuckers on the planet. We will not stop until we are walking out of the King Cole Bar ready to talk Musil, inflate our hubris and, if we feel like it, snort a few lines of coke off of Marisha Pessl’s chest.

Return of the Reluctant: But how is this really literary? You sound more like Joe Eszterhas circa 1985.

Keith Fury: What we do, Reluctant Boy, is indisputably literary, because we declare it so. For we are, after all, n+2, which is one more than those other interlopers named Keith and Benjamin. In fact, I’ll bet those pussies wouldn’t even last thirty seconds in an arm wrestling match with us. Can those motherfuckers offer epigrams in Russian? No. In fact, I’m so certain they’re a bunch of poseurs that I’m willing to stake my penis on it. If Ben Kunkel and Keith Gessen can outdo us in Russian epigrams, then I will gladly castrate myself. You need to be angry, Reluctant Boy. You also need to boast and always have the sense that you are right.

Return of the Reluctant: But I’m…uh…not angry and don’t feel the need to boast.

Keith Fury: This is not a civics lesson, you spineless son of a bitch. You litblogger! I am angry. I am angry at you. I will have your left arm for breakfast and your scrotum for a midnight snack. Don’t diss the Sweat. Don’t diss n+2.

Return of the Reluctant: When can we expect the first issue of n+2?

Keith Fury: Whenever we damn well feel like it. It’s the most intellectual cohesive issue we’ve ever done. You’ll read it when we’re ready. We may have it out in January. Or February. Or maybe May 2010. See, that’s the way it works here at n+2. I unzip my pants, you suck me off.

Return of the Reluctant: You’re a preposterous man.

There’s a Firmin book giveaway going down at the LBC. If you’d like a free copy of this extraordinary little book, hie away to the LBC and join the fun!

Be sure to visit the Litblog Co-Op today. Sam Savage makes a guest appearance.

Associated Press: “Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, architect of an unpopular war in Iraq, intends to resign after six stormy years at the Pentagon, Republican officials said Wednesday.”

I’ve decided instead to participate in this MeFi thread rather than pollute this blog. Right now, it boils down to Virginia. If Virginia happens, there is a chance the Demos will take the Senate. Current results:

99.28% Precincts Reporting:

Webb 1,148,750
Allen 1,146,952

• A stunning early lead for Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota.
• I don’t have CNN here, but as I understand from a phone call, CNN has called the Maryland Senate has been called for the Senate.
• Webb-Allen: gritting my teeth.
• Tasty bourbon.

Associated Press: “A couple that began squabbling in a motel room Friday morning carried their dispute over to an adjacent Waffle House restaurant in the nude, police said.”

Number of conversations overheard involving the phrase “Doogie Howser is gay”: 5
Number of conversations overheard about the election: 1

Sad.

Over at the LBC site, the folks are discussing Sam Savage’s Firmin, which is this quarter’s Read This! pick.

Be sure to stop by. Sam Savage himself will make an appearance on Wednesday and a podcast interview will follow on Friday.

“You know, we’re human. We’re all bound to make some mistakes in our lives. So, uh, okay. Let’s not get into that.”

Due to last night’s circumstances, it was necessary to galvanize my flaccid corpus with a capacious breakfast — a meal involving an omelet, fruit, and terrifying but tasty potatoes topped with a dollop of sour cream (the latter I partially resisted) — that would take me well into this afternoon’s mean. I brought no books with me this time, nor did I call upon anybody to accompany me. I secured the last remaining booth in my establishment and found myself situated between two booths.

I am, as anybody who knows me, an inveterate eavesdropper. It is something I cannot help and that I cannot apparently curtail. I rely upon peripheral vision and peripheral hearing to impart a better understanding of my fellow humans — that is, when I am not directly talking with them.

In the booth behind me, a redolent waft of sebaceous body odor overpowered me. Fortunately, the Kinks were playing over the speakers. And the grand comforts of “Autumn Almanac” and “Waterloo Sunset” were enough to overlook this olfactory intrusion. The aroma came from a man of indeterminate age between thirty and fifty, someone who was now in the process of drinking his life away. He was accompanied by a portly woman in a tie-dyed tee, who I had thought was committing an act of charity by buying this man, who spoke in staccato slurs, a large and tasty meal to sober him up. But I was wrong. No. This was a couple. And she was ashamed. They were apparently going to catch a MUNI bus immediately after and I wondered if they were skipping town. And he slurred his words, beckoning for another beer. And he shouted to the waitress, who was a bit inexperienced and apologetic (I tipped her well), not to “take 200 years” in returning with the change. It was this last solecism, one of many, that caused the woman to demand that he not embarrass her in restaurants like this. Perhaps detecting the upward prick of my ears, knowing that she was attracting attention (although nobody would look at them directly), I then observed her kissing the man on the cheek. From what I can tell, she wasn’t dumb. But I could not stop pondering what it was that made her stick with this boorish man, who showed no discernible signs of intelligence. He had a drunken philosopher’s wit that many years before might have aided him in divagating through dives, believing perhaps that he was charming the bartenders when in fact it was their laconic stances that had brought forth more drinks and bountiful tips. But now this was gone and he was just plain sad. So what made her stay with this guy? Was it a kind of personal altruism related to the tie-dyed tee? Was this a person who had applied a naive idealism to her personal life? Or had she truly settled for the worst simply to belong to anyone? I don’t believe this man deserved her. In the state he was in, he couldn’t take care of himself. And I wondered what positive qualities he could have possibly displayed in private. There had to be something. Nobody is completely evil and love is often a strange thing.

The table in front of me, by contrast, offered an altogether different scenario. A young couple in their late twenties was in the process of charming a mother. It was one of those infamous breakfasts a couple often has about six months into a relationship, where you take a parent out to breakfast in an effort to better acquaint yourself. But I was absolutely fascinated by the conversation’s safe and pedantic nature. The bespectacled woman — her skin unsullied by tattoos or birthmarks, representing the kind of disturbing pristinity you see from someone who is religious with skin cream, her hair cast safely, perhaps lazily, in a blue bandanna, was remarking upon the situation at work, and how callow her fellow employees were in pinpointing the smell of her skin cream and remarking upon it. And in light of what I was observing behind me, I was struck with how trivial this grievance was compared with the broken man behind me. Indeed, this couple, being relatively young and happy in their relationship, had filtered out the entire world beyond that table. And if the woman’s story was the worst of her troubles, then I wondered if she was even aware of the alcoholic-hippie couple behind me. I wondered if this trio was cognizant that such people exist and that these kind of comparisons really put your own troubles into an appropriately insignificant perspective.

This is something to be saved for tonight’s National Drunk Writing Night, but this year, the propositions in California scare the hell out of me. It is not so much the language which is terrifying and also amusing, in much the same way that the Book of Revelations is. No, what scares me is that these propositions may, in fact, pass. I’ll remark on all this nonsense after a few drinks.

For now, I’ll just say that I saw Sedge Thompson in action at the Booksmith this morning and the man is good. While I appeared to be one of the youngest people there (why do live radio shows along these lines almost never attract people under 40?), it was interesting to see Thompson work live. Imagine if someone, through some miracle, managed to extract the stick permanently wedged up Garrison Keillor’s ass and you have some idea about what makes Thompson work. It’s safe to say that West Coast Live will never present anything close to irreverence, but as innocuous, wry and laidback shows goes, it ain’t bad.

Inbox finally under 200 messages. I’m replying as fast as I can.

The Smoking Gun: “where r da videos? youtube rox man, but what heppen to videos?”

A.S. Byatt: “Cyclists. I really hate them. I wish they would not be so self-righteous and realise they are a danger to pedestrians. I wish cyclists would not vindictively snap off wing mirrors on cars when they were trying to cross in front of the car at a danger to motorists and pedestrians.”

The Old Hag has broken her silence! And she addresses an issue that I’ve been frankly too lazy to pursue: is there not a single publicist at Viking who will send out copies of Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics? I still don’t have a copy.

[UPDATE: Perhaps concerned with their public perception on the accommodation front, Viking has contacted me and they are indeed sending me a copy of the book. Many thanks!]

Stephen Elliott, a writer who I don’t believe will ever appear on the Bat Segundo Show, has been ably interviewed over at Pinky’s Paperhaus. One interesting revelation from the interview: Paul Auster Billy Corgan* doesn’t believe in voting.

* — That’s what I get for paying continuous partial attention. Apologies to Mr. Auster for the error.

Stuff: “The Te Uku-bred Barnevelder chick – hatched at Marlene Dickey’s property at the start of last month – has died. But it wasn’t the extra legs that led to its death, more likely an extra anus, Mrs Dickey believes.”

Sun: “David Hasselhoff is so protective over his teenage daughter, he has threatened to chop her boyfriend’s penis off if he hurts her….’To him I said: “If you hurt my daughter in any way, I will take you outside and I will cut your thing off. I have no problem spending the rest of my life in prison.”‘”

BBC: “There will be virtually nothing left to fish from the seas by the middle of the century if current trends continue, according to a major scientific study. Stocks have collapsed in nearly one-third of sea fisheries, and the rate of decline is accelerating.”