Perez Hilton has stolen from Pamela Ribon, who, like all WGA members, is on strike!

There is an exotic gentleman named Joshua Henkin now blogging at The Elegant Variation. He is guest blogging with some prolificity and even referring to previous guest blogging appearances. I get the sense that if it was possible for him to guest blog for eternity, he would do so if he had the chance. In fact, I’ve now hit Page Down six times and there are still posts by Joshua Henkin. Which leads me to believe that it is no longer the place to find Mark Sarvas, but the place to find Joshua Henkin. Whether the exotic gentleman will become an exotic dancer, perhaps posting a YouTube video offering indisputable evidence that he has in fact made the switch from “gentleman” to “dancer” (or perhaps he is both!), is one of those maddening questions that leaves me in some suspense. I am convinced that Joshua Henkin may do something very crazy, something that will make my jaw drop like the final scene of a Hitchcock film.

Anyway, the whole point of this post is to suggest that you experience the Joshua Henkin Experience. And if you don’t want to do this, you can always live vicariously through me with this post. And if that option isn’t good enough, you can always leave a comment here informing me how out of touch I am, or reminding me that I haven’t yet touched Joshua Henkin. And I will respond later with needless over-the-top bravado. All I have to say is thank heavens I’m wearing pants right now.

James Tata reconsiders that particular strata known as the mid-career (b. 1960 or thereabouts) Great American Novelist. It is, of course, most regrettable that Age should matter, but with so many GANs dropping off of late (Vonnegut, Mailer, et al.), one wonders who will be taught in tomorrow’s classrooms. The current crop identified by Mr. Tata do in part fall into a certain rubric of, as he suggests, “nothing more than comic book characters and escapist fantasy,” which suggests a new concern for the next hopeful pantheon. But this “hopeful” qualifier presumes that these writers care about being listed in syllabi, much less proscribing their concerns for what is Important Literature by writing Serious Novels. So I put forth the question to the peanut gallery: Who, born between the years of 1960 and 1970, has a shot at being tomorrow’s Great American Novelist? Is the list that Tata offers the True List? Or is it too early to tell? Has literature become something too specialized to make such a judgment call? (I respond “yes” to the last rhetorical question, but I don’t necessarily think that this is a bad thing.)

27 minutes.

John Leonard on The Spooky Art: “Still the book feels like one of those late-night cable commercials for Roy Orbison’s Greatest Hits, or Conway Twitty’s: act now, call this toll-free number, and we will also send you, at no extra charge, a cool tool to sharpen your knives, whiten your teeth, and screw your neighbors.”