[EDITOR’S NOTE: Is Otto Peltzer Otto Penzler? Note the surname.]

Not that I want to say anything negative about literary critics, for I am a literary critic. I am indeed the best literary critic. When it comes to blowhards, there can be no better specimen than myself. And I have the trophy wife and the bookstore to prove it. If you don’t believe me, I can show you my chaise longue and perhaps we can come to a financial agreement pertaining to what you can do with something nestled beneath my own zipper.

Yet it often seems that other literary critics remain lost and troublingly incompatible with my dignified and nonpareil tastes, which are better than Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, and Edmund Wilson combined. I, Otto Peltzer, have long understood that the Caucasian male is the only qualified author to write the major literary works of our time. And yet looking at the National Book Award nominees, one sees some mousy chick named Lydia Davis among the lot, who has apparently been awarded something called a MacArthur fellowship. This was a fellowship in which I had no say and thus must be disregarded. Who are the people responsible for Davis’s inclusion in the longlist? And why do they threaten the white male’s domination over today’s literature?

I am convinced that Denis Johnson is responsible for this. It has been impossible to avoid Tree of Smoke because it is big and fat, and written by a white male, and thus “important” in some way. I’ll spare you supportive examples. I am Otto Peltzer and you’re just going to have to take my word for it. Tree of Smoke is bad because there are two nouns in the title and because I couldn’t get past the first sentence. Although I should observe that Johnson was born in Munich, which is certainly a promising nation for the literary master race.

I can also tell you, without citing anything specific, that Denis Johnson is as baffled about Lydia Davis as I am. A distant cousin tells me that his friend read an interview with Denis Johnson written by another friend. In this interview, Johnson confessed this. Therefore, this must be true.

Who’s read Denis Johnson? And who’s read Lydia Davis? Otto Peltzer has. And that’s all you need to know.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be settling into my den with some claret and my Hardy Boys books — far more important than any of the National Book Awards finalists and celebrating the experience of white male power in a manner that this year’s crop of finalists certainly cannot.

And if you think that’s bad, you haven’t seen this (definitely NSFW and via Erin O’Brien, of course!).

Honest words from Millard Kaufman.

• So this winter thing — my first here in Brooklyn — seems to be setting in with the dipping temperatures. And I have to say that it’s pretty fantastic! Much preferable to the hot and humid summer in which I was stopped in my slumber by the logy sweat that started to appear in places where I hadn’t sweated before just in walking from one corner of the room to the other. Although I may change my tune when the balls-shriveling lack of mercury kicks in. For now, the crisp brisk cold leaves untold promising days for hot chocolate and ice skating: the former secure, the latter of which I will have to attempt! Why the weather reports? Incredibly deranged dreams — no doubt incurred from the crazy books I’ve been reading of late or perhaps the general burden of an imaginative mind — have jolted me out of bed. The good: lots of solid, hard-core sleep that has kept me rested and peppy through the day. The bad: dreams so intense that it can take me as long as an hour to recalibrate my bearings. So if I’m clinging to a conversational topic that is a bit safer than my usual repertoire, I hope you will understand.
• Terry Teachout has a thoughtful essay in Commentary reconsidering classical music Neville Cardus and asking the question of whether his disinclination to embrace modern offerings has caused him to be forgotten. (via Books, Inq.)
• Joe Bob Briggs — and his more sober self John Bloom — can be found (among others) at The Wittenburg Door.
• I’ve felt that because Richard Donner was only half-justifiably fellated with that Superman II — The Richard Donner Cut DVD (which revealed that the best version of Superman II is probably some bastard hybrid we’ll never see involving Donner’s technical chops and Richard Lester’s light comedy), the incredibly talented Lester has been left unduly in the lurch. But thankfully, Lester’s two great Beatles films have been put out and Keith Phipps has managed to track the director down.
• And in additional defense of the inventive Lester, who nearly every Superman fan seems to have declared an untalented hack, here’s “The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film.” (Part One and Part Two)
• So will the WGA strike effect the literary world? A few agents now fear that many option deals may be quelled.
• Margaret Atwood and husband Graeme Gibson brought their own dinner in a box to the Giller Prize reception to protest a Four Seasons development that threatens the endangered Grenada dove. They said they could not accept food and drink from the Four Seasons, although they seemed to have no problem occupying the premises. (Would it not have been more effective to simply not attend the ceremony, thereby protesting the Four Seasons and letting the Giller people know that there are consequences to scholarship? I can’t help but ponder whether this particular resistant approach is more of an upstaging of the nominees. Much like her LongPen solution, I simply don’t understand why Atwood would bother to participate in a process if it’s absolutely painful, unless there’s a self-serving satirical intent.)
• Incidentally, it was Eliabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air that took the award.
• It seems that Oprah isn’t a very careful reader. First James Frey, and now a book pulled from a reading list on her website: Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree. Carter, of course, was a speechwriter for George Wallace, giving us the mantra: “Segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” Okay, not the most ideal thing you want to hear from an author. But I’ve long wondered, like Sherman Alexie (quoted in the article), if Little Tree was — in some sense — an act of atonement and whether it is entirely fair to dismiss a good book simply because it’s written by a racist. It’s a tricky question, but I submit to you that we have no problem accepting D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation or Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will as significant parts of the film canon. I, for one, absolutely despise Griffith and Riefenstahl’s life choices, while also appreciating the technical components of these two films. It’s possible that Oprah and other detractors may be clinging to a set of politically correct assumptions just as vile as racism: the tendency to conflate an author’s work with an author’s life and the discounting of the former because there are extremely unpleasant aspects within the latter. If Oprah “couldn’t live with that,” as she claims, then how can she have any reasonably sophisticated take on our complicated world? The world is not always a place where artistic achievement is grounded on a rosy Runyonesque life. Art often emerges from an ugly and turbulent existence. Must we discount some works of art because we learn unpleasant things about the artist? Or can we be mature enough to judge art on its own merits?

[UPDATE: George has more thoughts on the Oprah snafu: “But, besides raising the question of how to view the merit of a work vs. the author’s bio, what this does illustrate is exactly how far removed this woman is from both her books and the everyday impact of her opinion on the army of mindless couch weights (like paper weights for furniture). Does she ever even get near this stuff anymore or does one of her handlers just draw up a list and sign her name at the bottom? Does she have any idea how her purported love of books is being used for corporate shilling, base taste-making, and political gain? Did she even notice this herself or was it another handler who noticed? When your whole life is outsourced like that, what can people trust you take seriously?”]