We’re up for jury duty selection next week. Just in time for the sucking sound of the holidays. Low Culture has some ideas on how to get out of it, with a good point on the reading front. If we read, we’ll get selected. If we don’t read, we’ll go nuts in the poorly ventillated waiting area and start licking the dusty walls or becoming polymorphously perverse in an effort to pass the time. If we put a good trade paperback inside the latest issue of Hustler, our ruse will be found out in seconds. If any hard-core readers have any ideas about how to combat such an obsession while simultaneously appearing dumb and unqualified, we’d be interested in hearing your theories and techniques. We’re also tempted to invent prejudices and conspiracies during the questioning process, but we like to consider all points before taking the plunge. Your assistance is welcomed.

This morning, it was pointed out to me that Return of the Reluctant, being the version of edrants that has been (for the most part) literary, turned a year old just a few days ago. Let me thank you, my dear readers. You’re the ones who help keep the flame alive. The people I’ve met and the opportunities that have come from this blog have been incredible. And without going into too much detail, I think it’s very likely that this blog helped me in a subconscious way to make some very good moves in the last year.

Despite a few calamities on the personal and geopolitical front, it was a good year under the circumstances. And I’m looking forward to making ’05 an even better one — thanks in part to all of you.

While the bright burgeoning light of Segundo will shine again soon, who knows? I might even bring Miguel Cohen back.

I’m 37% Geek: “You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator.” (via Gwenda)

The Gaddis Drinking Club has had some difficulty of late getting conversation started (perhaps due to the holidays), but it’s still be-bopping for those of like mind. I hope to weigh in with a lengthy sliver of Recognitions lit boogeying once things settle down on this end.

Time, one of the silliest magazines that Americas must endure, profiles Michael Chabon and suggests that it’s somehow a bad thing for a novelist to be both literary and genre-centric. Missing the boat completely on the recent McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, Lev Grossman proceeds to decry the collection as “the promiscuous atmosphere of one of those speakeasies where socialites slum with gangsters in an effort to mutually increase everybody’s street cred,” but fails to cite a specific example that explains this purported circlejerk (not even mentioning the involvement of Julivats and Waldman).

Grossman seems truly astonished to learn that Joyce Carol Oates is capable of writing genre stories. Never mind that she’s been turning out speculative and gothic fiction for years, with regular appearances at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, among others. For that matter, Margaret Atwood’s best-known novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, might be styled “science fiction.” Even more unintentionally amusing is Grossman’s labeling of China Mieville as part of “the gangster side of the equation.” Is it because he wrote an amusing story about shifting streets?

Grossman seems desperate to find a fusion, but I suspect he didn’t read the collection when he penned this malarkey. For one thing, he references stories that appear near the beginning of the book. And the fusion angle he’s striving for couldn’t be any more clearer than Ayelet Waldman’s excellent story about a ghostly baby, which successfully maneuvered maternal angst (the stuff of literary kudos) into a spooky template.

Grossman’s uneducated take in a major weekly magazine is a pity. Because instead of dwelling upon the differences, he reinforces his own thesis: that Chabon’s noble effort is more of a stunt than a literary experiment. He couldn’t be more wrong.