While you await the inevitable long-form posts:

CURRENT AFFAIRS:

• Portuguese poet Eugenio de Andrade has died. He was 82.
• The San Francisco Chronicle declares Michael Houellebecq one of the “most compelling novelists today.” He’s also been claimed the “most hated man in Europe.” No word yet on whether Houllebecq will be accused of molesting an infant or whether he will be appearing as a mafioso in an upcoming reenactment of the Kefauver trials for Court TV.
• Is there a detente in literary London?
• Apparently, there’s a concerted effort to break the long-term reading record. 100 hours of continuous reading, according to Guinness. That doesn’t seem so tough, but then I’m an inveterate reader and an insomniac..
• Who is Trevanian?
• Lionel Shriver: “I acted like a man.” That still doesn’t explain the way she kissed her Orange Award.
• Apparently, there’s another version of No Exit written by “John-Paul Sartre.” Was this Jean-Paul’s brother? Or some fly-by-night impostor? Hopefully, the Centre Daily Times fact checkers here will be more diligent in their pursuits than their copyeditors.
• Current theatrical plays are “excellent television scripts” but very few “really show a sense of how to write for the theatre.” That’s the verdict of some anonymous literary manager at a theatre. But if theatre is transforming into what is essentially live television (and the many “theatrical” reenactments of films and television, with their one-man performances of the Star Wars trilogy and the like suggest that this is the case), the interesting question here is how theatre can draw in the short attention spans while remaining true theatre.
• And we’ll be a lot less lazier than this when we offer our final BEA upcoming titles post.

STEPHEN DIXON: For those who caught my post at the LBC site this morning, here’s some more Dixon info:

• Small Mouth Press interview: Dixon has published 425 stories and has “another fifty stories” lying around.
• Stephen Dixon on Thomas Bernhard: Was Dixon influenced by Bernhard’s long paragraphs? (Rain Taxi)
• “Shoe” — early excerpt from I (from 1999).
• From McSweeney’s: J. Robert Lennon, Jonathan Lethem, a Dixon interview, and another excerpt from I.
• Stephen Dixon at work.
• Excerpt from Phone Rings.

Several unexpected obligations and occurrences over the weekend (resulting in lack of sleep) pretty much derailed my update plans and I’m still catching up. But I hope to get the final BEA post, the latest Tanenhaus watch, and my thoughts on the book-length version of James Kuntsler’s The Long Emergency up in the next few days. In the meantime, I’ve posted a writeup of the book I nominated for the LBC.

• Which famous modern American poet are you? (Me: Sylvia Plath, apparently.) (via Gwenda)
• There’s an interesting niche blog, Living with Legends, which caters to books for residents of the Hotel Chelsea. This is a nice supplement to the literary map of Manhattan.
• The new Bookslut issue is up and there’s a good interview with Jon Scieszka.
• Still behind on email backlog. Bear with me.
• And my final BEA post should go up sometime this weekend (I hope).

In 2003, Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police chronicled the often ridiculous lengths that school textbook publishers resort to not to offend anyone. For example, according to some of the mandates, a dinosaur can’t be mentioned because this implies the theory of evolution. Further, no stories or pictures of a mother cooking dinner are allowed because this reinforces a stereotype. (Unsurprisingly, many of these ideas, which involve preposterous gender-neutral rephrasings of questions and promoting abstinence over contraception, were whipped up by McGraw-Hill. One professor, Sean G. Massey, was so furious that he initiated a boycott.)

As if publishing approaches to school textbooks wasn’t absurd enough, McGraw-Hill is now hoping to target children in Canada with ads placed within their textbooks. The Toronto Star reports that McGraw-Hill has been “quietly trying to coax companies into buying advertising space in their texts.”

McGraw-Hill has a history of doing this. In 1999, a McGraw-Hill mathematics textbook featured an equation asking students to figure out how much money they needed to save to buy a pair of Nikes. The outcry resulted in AB 116, banning commercial images in public school textbooks in California.

Hopefully, the Canadians might take a cue from this.

A House subcommittee has voted to cut all federal funds for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting within two years. That’s $400 million a year, comparative chump change in the federal budget, to destroy a broadcasting conduit that offers educational and alternative programming to the public.

These creeps truly want the public to remain uneducated. Super Bowl, yes. Sesame Street and Frontline, no.