The minute I heard the news that Tom DeLay had been indicted, I experienced a sudden burst of euphoria. I felt a wave of equanamity settle over my entire mind and body. I was good-natured and friendly. I didn’t mind if others won at the board games. Hell, I was feeling so good that I’d happily play the UnGame again.

The doctors took me into a room and gave me a checkup. Then Heidi (the doctor) took me aside and said, “I don’t believe this, kid, but not only will you not need any tricyclics again, but you won’t need yulthodranine. Why, you can walk right out that door if you wanted too!”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Not at all, Ed. You see, you’ve just taken in what’s known in Washington as a muckup mirabillis. Your mind and body was so overjoyed to see some small moment of justice in a hopelessly corrupt system that it responded instantly with bonhomie and defeated your mental malady.”

“No stress?”

“None. You’re a veritable Tesla coil of calmness.”

“I can leave today?”

“The orderlies will help you pack your things.”

I looked at the orderly whose finger I had bitten. I asked this orderly if I could give him a hug. He complied. He squeezed me a bit too hard. Then he gave me a roast beef sandwich with raw roast beef. At least the guy had a sense of humor.

The other orderlies helped gather my stuff and pretty soon, I was out the building.

I was cured all right.

I have to ask: What is the point of playing a board game when you can’t screw someone over? Is not the purpose of a game (whether life or Life) to win with as great a margin as possible? If I learned anything growing up in a chronically miserable and highly competitive family, it was this: If you don’t screw them over, then you’ll get screwed over. Play the game until they run to their bedroom sobbing.

I’ve played several games of Monopoly, tittering like a smug bastard every time someone lands on my hoteled Park Place and watching their hard-won and carefully accumulated savings go into my prodigious coffers just after they’ve mortgaged all their properties. In an instant, my opponents are down to nothing. But, so as not to completely humilate them (well, this is a bit of a lie, but at least the sentiment exists), I’m taking every property they own with the exception of the purple ghettos of Mediterranenan and Baltic Avenues, the latter involving a measly maximum rent of $450 with a hotel. In the rare moments in which I land upon Baltic Avenue, I observe my opponent’s eyes light up, collecting the $450 like a transient huddling over an unexpected yet meager fire.

I’ve also enjoyed invading multiple continents when playing Risk, strong-arming my way across the globe only after I’ve suggested to the other players that I am their friend and that I would never ever consider taking Brazil to complete my acquisition of South America. I suppose this is the closest that one can come to living out the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

Of course, since I play these board games to win, I’ve lost a few friends who didn’t understand the objectives. I’ve seen boards flipped over just before my final moment of conquest. I’ve had people not speak to me for weeks, telling me that if I’m going to play a board game that way, then I’m likely to stab them in the back during a birthday party or sleep with their girlfriends. I should point out that violence is not within my nature, but I argue that if the object of the game is to win, then what crime have I committed exactly? I’m only abiding by the game designer’s wishes. I’m only playing by the rules.

With these sentiments in mind, I sat down this afternoon to play the UnGame. My participants were a sixty-year old schizophrenic, a man whose wife had moved out with their children leaving only a note reading I WASTED THIRTEEN YEARS OF MY LIFE WITH YOU NOW I’M GOING TO FUCK ANYTHING THAT MOVES, and a teenage lesbian who had been forced into the hospital by her parents, insisting that the doctors could “make her normal,” whatever the hell that meant.

In other words, I was assured an almost complete and total victory. But au contraire. Much as one would expect from the rosy and desperate title, The UnGame challenges the traditional object by creating an entirely new goal: everyone wins! In other words, the UnGame challenges what is likely a healthy outlet for surviving in a ruthless capitalistic system and replaces it with some Kommisariat-style form of socialism. I expected all of us to be hauled away to the quiet room and shot sequentially with ruthless Soviet efficiency.

Alas, the executions didn’t happen. But bad feelings did. The man spurned by his late-blooming virago began to tell us all along that he had been an ass man and that his estranged wife wasn’t interested in sodomy. We shifted in our seats as he confessed these needlessly intimate details. The teenage lesbian, in particular, thought this was a hoot. The schizophrenic thought that he was talking about the gas man and began shrieking at the top of his lungs about a gas leak that the bastards upstairs had failed to tell us about.

I hope we don’t play the UnGame again. I don’t recommend it. Because without that pivotal conquest component, how can one enjoy one’s self? It’s miserable listening to the problems of the world. But perhaps that was the whole point of introducing the game. Never mind that the U.S.S.R. was a failed experiment at this sort of forced socialism.

Like other folks, I had seen this Heidi Julavits article on nudity just before I checked in. It was one of the last things I had read just before the men in white suits packed me into the back of the ambulance. In fact, it was not the straitjacket that had me howling in the back of the vehicle. Whenever my limbs are bound, I’m generally a good sport about it — particularly when the people binding your limbs are medical professionals who might have some input into how long you stay at a hospital. Had I not been in a straitjacket, I would have likely tipped generously.

Unfortunately, my politeness and good sense drifted away when I entered a primordial millieu — not unlike Spock resorting to his atavistic urges in the Star Trek episode, “All Our Yesterdays,” when transported into the past. Like Spock, I thought of the Julavits article and had the sudden urge to eat raw meat. The details are a bit fuzzy, but apparently I bit one of the orderlies. And when the orderlies could not calm me down, and the raw meat I desired could not be produced, I screamed, “HEIDIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!” and asked the orderlies to tear off my clothes so that I could jump in a hot tub myself and be photographed by a New York Times photographer performing fellatio on Dave Eggers or, failing that, giving his wife’s hair a good wash. Shortly after this, blood trickling down his hand quite close to where I had bitten him, I was injected with something that caused me to see a number of birds flying around my head in an elliptical pattern and passed out.

If I had to figure out just how the article enraged me, I suppose that what set my anger went over the pot (the entrepot of supposed ideas that the Gray Lady has continously promised us?) was this: Julavits, perhaps the closest thing the literary hipster set has to a sanctimonious and sniveling Emily Post type, could not perceive nudity within any other context other than checking out other people’s privates or being fundamentally aware of them. This struck me as a remarkably adolescent approach to the human body. So self-conscious was Julavits that she actually believed her “lobster-red bum” would have any real bearing on scheduling a reading.

Then again, I live in San Francisco.

Then again, The Believer is based in San Francisco. What the hell?

I wondered why Julavits would attend such a “naturalistic spa,” let alone write about such an experience, if she had so many personal hangups. Did not most people get over their initial fears spending a weekend prancing around in front of a trusted and intimately connected person such as a main squeeze? I wondered further whether this was a stunt to garner publicity for the Believer. After all, she had enlisted many of the staff members to appear for the corresponding photo. This seemed especially ironic in light of Julavits’ inability to accept her own body.

Now I myself have pale-white skin myself and went through years of being ashamed by it. I was called “albino” and “ghost” growing up and, for many years, did not deign to wear shorts or short-sleeved shirts. I thought of this as the men in white suits put the white straitjacket and shepherded me into a white vehicle leading me to a white building with shiny white linoleum floors, white walls and indeed white everywhere. White, white, white! But yes I could deal with this. What I couldn’t deal with was the contrarian view that somehow white (or “lobster red”) was somehow bad or verboeten.

This morning, I confessed all this during my individual therapy session. The doctor’s name is Heidi too. So our talks have been a little bit on the uncomfortable side of things. However, Heidi (the doctor, not the writer) has proven quite empathetic to the finer details of my collapse. She told me that she wasn’t the one who wrote the handwritten note. There was another doctor who was a bit on the drug-happy side of the fence. This doctor had a look at my file and had based his decision solely on a videotape of my entry into the clinic and a followup therapy session. This doctor, who Heidi did not name, has since been reassigned to another wing of the hospital, as apparently other patients had been doped up with tricyclics. Heidi told me that while I would likely be ingesting drugs that would help me, she didn’t want to place me in a total stupor. I thanked her for this.

Heidi (the doctor) has also told me that reading anything by the McSweeney’s/Believer crowd was likely to upset me. She has prescribed 10ccs of something called “yulthodranine” — a new antidepressant that pertains to people with my rare condition, namely those who get upset by people they perceive as “literary hipsters.” So far, I’ve been able to write about my Julavits experience without feeling like Spock, much less having a hankering for raw meat. Maybe this yulthodranine’s working!

Anyway, they’re asking me to come in and watch the late morning movie, which they tell me is an overlooked 1999 gem starring Kathleen Turner called Baby Geniuses. This movie will be followed by a hearty lunch and a few rounds of The UnGame, a board game in which everyone can win! My transition, so far, has proven quite exciting.

This afternoon, as I was holding a cold compress to my lower lip, hoping that my toothache would go away, I found the following handwritten note that I thought I’d share with you:

Patient shows signs of chronic self-loathing and repeated hyperbole. Patient spent most of afternoon session talking about a writer named Dave Eggers and revealed closet fantasy of writing novel and having it eviscerated by Dale Peck in a metropolitan newspaper. Patient repeatedly used the word “ass-fucking,” alluding to the New York Times, and insisted upon accessing my laptop so that he could “blog.” Continues to make vague references to “tramodol” and “penis implants.” Despite medication, patient shows no immediate signs of recovery. Bipolar condition is chronic and [illegibile word]. Recommended course of action: more tricyclics.

The Los Angeles Times: “The paperback publisher of Tom Wolfe’s unevenly reviewed latest novel “I Am Charlotte Simmons” is hoping that a dramatically redesigned cover — and a youth-oriented marketing campaign, complete with a contest featuring a trip to Cancun — will help draw young adults to the book, mocked by some reviewers who found the septuagenarian author’s accounts of campus sex life unconvincing.”

INSIDE A MANHATTAN OFFICE, NINE MONTHS AGO:

“Ladies and gentlemen, I have some terrible news.”

“Dave Eggers wants us to publish a book of McSweeney’s lists?”

“No.”

“Jonathan Safran Foer wants six covers for the paperback release of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close?”

“No. Even worse. We’re handling the paperback campaign for Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons.”

“But nobody liked that book!”

“That chick at the Seattle Times did.”

“But she was the classical music reviewer! Not a book reviewer!”

“That’s exactly right, Hank. Sometimes you have to think outside the box.”

“But who’s going to read this book?”

“I’ve got two words for you: youth market.”

“Look, Samantha, we’ve marketed crap before. But have you lost your mind? This thing won the Bad Sex Award. ‘Slither slither went the tongue.’ All those STATICs. The PlayStation 3? The poorly realized characters? Do you really think today’s youth will go for it?”

“All good points, but we landed this deal. And there’s no way out. It’s the only chance we’ve got. Now I’ve had Jo, that new color specialist we just hired, look into this problem. And she says that green is the new black. Green is the color that the human eye sees the best. It’s one of the reasons why it’s used for night vision goggles. Jo says that a neon olive will probably ingratiate us with the martini crowd.”

“Um, Samantha, I may not be the hippest cat here. I don’t understand Beyonce or Kayne West. In fact, you folks don’t pay me enough. So I can’t very well set foot inside a Crate & Barrel. But I can tell you this: lounge revival is so 1997.”

“We’re thinking a nondescript young lady on the front. Perhaps something for the Lindy Hop revival set.”

“Samantha, did you even hear a word I just said?”

“Yes, goddammit! But can’t you see we’re painted into a corner here? Tom Wolfe’s fans have already read this. The literary set has already read this. There’s nobody left! And we’ve got to sell this thing!”

“Guys, calm down. I think I might have the answer.”

“What?”

“Earlier, you mentioned thinking outside the box. Well, what about this? We don’t even have to put the title on the book! We can take your lounge revival motif and just put the name TOM WOLFE on the front. Those who haven’t heard about the book, that youth market you were talking about, might be vaguely familiar with the name and they’ll scoop the book up. We just have to make sure that we buy out all the remainders so that they have no frame of reference.”

“That’s not bad, Hank.”

“Now here’s the other thing. You can never go wrong with black. We may not stand a chance in hell, but I have to say: black is audacious. It implies that there’s something deviant and steamy within the pages.”

“It also implies that this book is the prodigal son of literature.”

“Even better!”

“Well, does anyone else have a better idea?”

Silence.

“Okay. Let’s roll with this.”

(Hat tip: Jeff.)

Courtesy of Tito comes this Leah Garchik item: “Tyler Sterkel noticed that someone had covered the ‘Dolores’ street sign at 24th Street last Thursday with a facsimile of standard signage reading ‘Lolita.””

And Golden Rule Jones reports that there was more Nabokov celebrating in Chicago.

To Mr. Reluctant:

Sir! It has been mere hours since I last sent you my all-important message. And you have not recognized the Power of Trump. When I say that I will destroy you, I mean business. Why have you not yet acknowledged the true evils of this world? Does your lack of response indicate that you side with the Mark Singers and the Jeff McGregors of this world? I am a man capable of accurately pinpointing manic depression after being interviewed for two hours by a New Yorker staffer. Understand that you are treading on dangerous ground.

As you sit there enjoying the comforts of your lower middle-class hovel, Reluctant, I am making precisely $2,425.37 for every breath of air I take in. Do the math. That’s a lot of revenue from inhaling alone. You should see what my ledger looks like any time I have blood work. It is frightening, Reluctant. It moves mountains. It is more income than you will ever see in a single month.

I will fly to you on my private jet, Mr. Reluctant. I will humiliate you on my television show, The Apprentice, and make you sorry that your momma ever popped you from her womb. I will use every resource at my disposal to articulate to you that you are clearly in the wrong and that your thoughts are without validity.

Mr. Reluctant, if that is indeed your real name, the New Yorker was saved only recently by blatant advertising — advertising that I helped to effect. David Remnick is a good man, one who has serviced me now for some years. Why are there no advertisements on this petty website of yours? Why aren’t you cashing in on this blogging trend?

I have read Dale Carnegie. I have read Lee Iacocca. I have read the masters that you deign to dismiss. Because of this, you will never find me without a clean pair of socks or enjoying a day without an expensive hot meal.

I hope, Mr. Reluctant, that you are wise enough to understand that, by joining me and allowing me to subsidize your editorial content, you are not selling out, but buying in. You too can have a Melania. (And no, her name is not pronounced like melanonin! That’s your problem, Reluctant. You continue to find humor in the strangest topics. Who do you think you are? A Merry Prankster? Yes, I have read Ken Kesey too!)

Why not have a hearty taste of my kind of America? Everybody else is.

Have your people call mine and take out a high-interest loan with my company.

DONALD TRUMP
New York

• Chicago Tribune: “First it was Hurricane Katrina chasing them away. Now it’s the fans of the Miami Hurricanes. Hundreds of storm refugees are being evicted from Tallahassee hotels to accommodate fans coming to Tallahassee for the Miami-Florida State game Monday night. ‘There is absolutely no compassion here whatsoever,’ Lynne Bernard wrote on a Web bulletin board of The Times-Picayune of New Orleans.”
• Katrina causes environmental debate in Germany.
• Factoid that needs to be followed up: Bush Administration cut New Orleans flood control by 44% to pay for Iraq.
• Fats Domino is missing.
• More reports of unrest at the Superdome.
• New Orleans police quadrupled.
• In the Lower 9th Ward, bodies are being pushed back. Rumors of rape and murder.
• From WWL blog: New Orleans Homeland Security Chief Terry Ebbert calls FEMA response an embarassment.
• Town of Waveland, MI completely washed away.
• Reports on museums.
• TMFTML puts insensitive Gothamist in its place.
• Scott points to this item of Condi taking the town while this disaster’s going down.

• A prescient article from Scientific American (2001) (via MeFi).
• Jesus. Superdome evcuation stopped because of gunfire: Tens of thousands of people storming out of buildings hoping to pile onto buses, firing at rescue helicopters.
• WWL blog: Many people without food or water for days. Bush enlisting help from Dad and Clinton for “private fund-raising.”
• Many maps from New York Times indicating impact.

SFist beat me to the punch on this, but it is my sad duty to report that the incomparable Kepler’s has closed after fifty years of business, the victim of what they style an “economic downturn since 2001.”

• Daily Kos performs crazed self-immolation of credibility.
• Strategic oil reserves opened; economists fear major gas crisis.
• Some good news in light of lootings and price gouging and general displacement: Millions have been contributed in relief.
• Interesting info about Bush: “Bush cut short his working vacation in Texas by two days — even though aides have long contended that his duties are uninterrupted when he spends time at his ranch in nearby Crawford, which has White House-level communications capability.”
• Death toll in Miss. remains unknown.
• More info on Miss.: “A 30-foot (10-meter) storm surge in Mississippi wiped away 90 percent of the buildings along the coast at Biloxi and Gulfport.”
• Current estimate of people trapped in New Orleans: 80,000.
• More: Dozens of carjackings overnight, with people firing at rescue helicopters.
• The name of the oil company that will be receiving the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is unknown. Anybody have a good guess?
• In the Glenn Reynolds universe, you shoot first and ask questions later. Apparently, Reynolds doesn’t understand that a major disaster often causes people to resort to crazy behavior, both authorities and looters.

• Closing levee breaches is National Guard’s top priority.
• A helpful history of hurricane flooding.
• Katrina is equivalent of Ivan in some parts of Alabama.
• Inflation worries.
• Overview of Katrina’s effects, at a glance.
• Latest from WWL: Navy now sending three ships from Gulf Coast. Four dead in St. Tammany.
• More at Brendan Loy’s about the levee breach threat abating and the potential threat from the Mississippi, given Katrina’s work up north.
• Nearly two days after this all started, Bush finally gets around to delivering a statement. Remarkable. Of course, there’s no mention of monies earmarked for federal aid. Will this prove to be as embarassing as the bargain basement Asian tsunami funding?
• From the WWL TV stream, river is back to normal height. Flooding now coming exclusively from lake.
• < a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1758006,00.html">“This is our tsunami.”

• Another account inside the Superdome. (Lengthier report here.)
• Total insurance bill: $25 billion.
• Prescient series showing worst-case scenario.
• 1 million can be left homeless.

• WWL is now reporting: A LEVEE BREACH OCCURRED ALONG THE INDUSTRIAL CANAL AT TENNESSE STREET. 3 TO 8 FEET OF WATER IS EXPECTED DUE TO THE BREACH…LOCATIONS IN THE WARNING INCLUDE BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO ARABI AND 9TH WARD OF NEW ORLEANS.
• Live WWL newscast reporting “substantial portion of roof” now off. Estimated number of peoplet here: 8,000 to 9,000.
• New Orleans facing environmental disaster.
• Correction: “Half of roof is pretty much gone.”
• Superdome Seating Chart: people now being moved to concession stands.
• Brainwidth reporting from Lafayette.

• Confirmation of Superdome roof: “I can see daylight straight up from inside the Superdome.” The Superdome is 273 feet high and encased in 20,000 tons of structural steel. Hopefully, there will still be bleacher space high up for the people inside as the rain comes in.
• “New Orleans may never be the same.” Oh really?
• 4,000 National Guardsman prepared to mobilize for New Orleans post-Katrina.
• Stocks down.
• Metroblogging New Orleans offers some personal reports.
• Latest satellite images.

The erstwhile Michelle Richmond will be chatting with Lynn Freed on Word by Word. Show date is September 7. She’ll also be at the Sonoma County Book Festival on September 10. It seems that Ms. Richmond is in the North Bay more than she is the City these days.

It’s stuck in my head! Make it stop!

Just a friendly reminder that there’s only one week left for the Naughty Reading Photo Contest. We have two entries and we’re hoping for more. So send those bad boys in before August 31 and you could be the winner of a $20 Powell gift card.

James Tata does indeed like more than the Boss. Oh yes, he does.

The time has come to declare war on a culinary obstruction that has caused untold grief for contemporary eaters. I speak, of course, of the crouton: a vile, square-like embellishment that gets in the way of tasty vegetables and is completely incompatible with a salad’s raison d’etre. Should our war be successful (and I assure you, it is a jihad), I shall not be sorry to see the crouton expire. No Geneva Convention can possibly apply here. For the crouton is bunk and must be exterminated as swiftly as possible.

Let’s quibble first over the crouton’s texture, which is often as hard and as impenetrable as the Berlin Wall. When one plunges a fork into a salad, one expects the tines to pierce through like a smooth needle through fabric. But let’s say that a crouton happens to be inside the natural trajectory of the fork’s thrust. As the fork dives into a pleasant leaf of lettuce, perhaps hitting a modest portion of a tomato or onion, perhaps pleasantly lubricated by viscious vinegar, the fork is hindered from its final descent because of this dreadful crouton. The fork user looks down, perplexed, and is likely to cry out, “What the fuck?” A moment of perfection, involving fork plunging into salad, forkful of salad moving to the mouth, and tasty digestion, has been denied. And it’s all because of the crouton.

Now granted, the optimist is likely to try again. But if the salad is polluted by too many croutons, then she will face the same calamity. The only cure for this condition is to adjust the alignment of the fork so that it resembles a spoon and scoop sideways. But since this is lettuce we’re talking about here, and since a fork is not, in fact, a spoon, but a four-pronged instrument featuring small rectangular abysses, the lettuce, being often a thin sheath that requires a forced coupling, is likely to fall between the tines. Even if we presume that the lettuce has formed a blanket to prevent any remnant vegetables from slipping through the cracks, the weight of the crouton might allow a fantastic shredded piece of carrot to fall asunder. Gravity, being what it is, will force all remaining salad components to fall from the fork, which is enough to bring even the most hearty optimists of our world to the same ineluctable cry: “What the fuck?”

From a taste perspective, the crouton also fails. Since the crouton has been fricaseed beyond any redemptive value, it seems designed to provide a harder counterpart (in short, variety) to the soft and naturally crispy texture of vegetables. But while you will encounter humans gnawing on raw carrots and tomatoes, you will very rarely see them snacking on a box of croutons. If the crouton itself cannot stand alone, why then should it partner up with the salad?

Further, there is the troubling fluctuation in the crouton’s hardness. Some croutons are somewhat manageable. Other croutons will crack molars. Nobody has been able to come up with a consistency or standard. Thus, the eater plagued by invasive croutons is doomed to this Russian Roulette.

Who was the asshole who came up with the crouton? Was he a sadist? And why did the crouton catch on? Surely, the crouton’s enduring legacy means that someone must like it. If this is the case, where then are the crouton fan clubs?

Perhaps the ultimate test is the crouton’s cultural bearing: While one might prepare a sonnet to a lover, comparing testicles to ripe cherry tomatoes or wanting to “wrap around you like lettuce” or “lick your sweat off like dressing,” can one ensconce the crouton in a salacious or even a romantic context? Not at all. There isn’t a part of the body that is as square or as tough as the crouton. No surprise that, when compared with the crouton, the human body is much more interesting.

Jeff points to the sad honest truth. The Pixies are sellouts. Big time. Their ticket prices are aprocryphal (anywhere from $35-60 a show). And this concert rider illustrates that the Pixies are no different from any other bloated band making the rounds.

“Veggie platter with hummous and sour cream dip?” Exactly 48 bottles of non-alcoholic beer? Fuck you, Black Francis. Eat me, Kim Deal.

I have, in the face of several opportunities presented to me, resisted the impulse to plop down such a staggering sum of cash for a Pixies show in 2004 and 2005. It hasn’t been easy. But now, after this unexpected hummous news, it’s a slam dunk decision. The Pixies are dead to me.

It would be one thing if the Pixies were honest about their avarice. Perhaps calling this “The Pixies Retirement Fund Tour” would come closer to the truth. That’s essentially the approach the Sex Pistols took a few years ago and I resepcted John Lydon for his unapologetic and forthright commercialism. Which was more than you can say for most reunions that hide behind the shady veneer of “We’re getting together just for old time’s sake!”

But if you were of a certain age about fifteen years ago, the Pixies encompassed a sound and a feeling that was uncompromising, independent, and sui generis. The Pixies demonstrated that goofiness and rage and bitterness and carrying on with a strange optimism could stem from a carefully produced guitar sound that nobody else cutting records back then came close to — a sound that, in fact, Kurt Cobain unapologetically pilfered.

They built up their audience with impressionable listeners like me, who lapped up Surfer Rosa and Doolittle, knowing that what was on these albums was genuine and unadulterated. So in the Pixies’ case, it’s especially a shame that these days, the Pixies are more about replaying the greatest hits and cashing in, rather than how it used to be: giving a good show and evolving their sound.

While some publishers refrain from reading anything in the slush pile (with understandable justification) and it’s safe to say that vanity presses remain for the most part a successful mechanism to gouge unpublishable authors, this Telegraph article imputes a potential “gold mine” within these flashless fens.

Consider the unlikely success of medical professor David Alric. Alric wrote a children’s novel called The Promised One and his tale of a schoolgirl who can talk to animals couldn’t find a publisher for his fiction — despite having authored several books on medicine. Alric paid out £10,000 to a vanity press and has managed to sell 80-100 books every Saturday at his local bookstore. He ordered a second run and he keeps the spare copies in his garage.

Alric’s success had no marketing behind it. There are no reputable reviews that appear to be available online. Nor does Alric have a website. There would seem to be little going for Alric but word of mouth.

But the real question here is whether this is a case of publishers being out of touch with the public or, if Alric’s book is a shaggy dog and if the peanut gallery here is ready to leap atop the elitist parpaet, the public perhaps having a paucity of literary taste. Either way, Alric’s success clearly indicates that the chasm between authors, publishers, and reading audience remains wide and needs to be bridged. And it’s enough for this showtunes-loving heterosexual to start singing “Matchmaker” and perhaps start a new publishing house styled “Chava & Hodel.”

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a delectable Friday, which means, aside from tonight’s unchronicled evening efforts of certain literary types who actually attempt to read a book while swinging back the shots (a multitasking enterprise that I am both incapable of and in awe of), this week’s final morning installment of the patented morning roundup. To wit:

1. That the continued ascent of one Helen Oyeyemi, a mere twenty-one years old, continues unabated.
2. That, despite quibbles from certain rakes, it would be incontrevertible to deny that this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest winner, with its inestimable contribution of the “carburetor breast” fantasy, is amusing, albeit puerile. (The winner was a Microsoft analyst from Fargo, no less!)
3. That we kept up a moment of silence for actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, who we enjoyed most throughly in Wuthering Heights and The Pawnbroker and who lived a long life.
4. That Kem Parton, a railroad worker-turned novelist was given cavil and calamity by his boss when he published a novel about the railroad, including terrorist elements. To the railroad itself: for shame.
5. That Betsy Burton (chronicled in our Books by the Bay report has been chronicled, along with other bookseller-related books, in Newsday.
6. That The Da Vinci Code did not win a recent UK book popularity contest and that literary Britons preferred books set in exotic locales.

The literary news junkie can make of these headlines or bypass this advocate’s occasional editorializing as s/he sees fit. But let it not be said that this advocate did not fulfill his morning constitutional.

Thank you and good morning.

Ms. Tangerine Muumuu herself alerts us to this review of the new Rushdie novel by none other than William T. Vollmann himself! (Regrettably, the review is inaccessible from the Publishers Weekly site and must be perused through Amazon.)

It’s a starred review, but Vollmann quibbles over Rushdie’s depiction of Los Angeles, which “relies on references to popular culture that the place becomes a superficial parody of itself.” He notes that Rushdie’s female characters are “less plausible” than the male ones, his “sermonistic parallelism or repetition” (ironically, criticisms leveled at Vollmann’s The Royal Family) and his reliance upon slapstick. But overall, the Vollster digs Shalimar the Clown, calling it a “powerful parable.”

Dear Bloglines: Do you love this RSS feeds or not? You’re updating in spurts and, of course, I love you! Surely, you’ve received my dozen long-stemmed roses by now! So work for me with some regularity. Kiss kiss, Edward Champion.

Local photographer Thomas Hawk was harassed by security goons when taking photographs of One Bush Street:

Yesterday I was shooting some photos of One Bush St. (the building where Bush and Market Streets intersect) when their security guard came out of his little glass jewelbox lobby hut to ask me to stop taking photos of the building. He said it was illegal. I moved to the sidewalk and continued taking photos and he again asked me to stop. When I told him I was on a public street sidewalk he said that actually they owned the sidewalk and that I was going to have to stop taking photographs.

The security guard then followed Hawk as he took various photos of the building on the public sidewalk.

This saga, however, is far from over. It seems that another guy is holding a contest for a variety of One Bush Street photos. Mat Honan will give the winner a $10 iTunes certificate. Word on the street that a litany of photographers will be meeting this Saturday at high noon to take several photographs of the One Bush Street building.

I’m going to try and be there myself. Failing that, I plan to introduce a new weekly feature to Return of the Reluctant: the One Bush Street Photo of the Week. Photos will be appearing on these pages every week until this ridiculous enforcement is waived in its entirety.

Taking a photograph of a building is neither a terrorist act nor a copyright infringement. The time has come to take a stand against this irrational fear and unreasonable (if not outright illegal) prohibition. I urge anyone with a camera in San Francisco to exercise their rights to free expression and snap a photo, if you happen to be in the Financial District.

(via SFist)

For any and all North Bay readers, the Michelle Richmond, Bruce Bauman Jordan E. Rosenfeld, Susan Henderson and David Fromm. It’s happening on August 2 at 6:30 PM. More details can be found here.

We’d go ourselves, but aside from not owning a car, there are pre-planned existential events happening that evening which must be quietly attended to and feted.