• So sorry that it’s been nuggets and roundups of late. Some podcasts and more substantive posts will be unfurled soon. Bear with me.
• Leave it to the Rake to tell the truth about James Wood. Yes, indeed, let’s praise weirdness, shall we? It seems to me that only a dull and incurious mind would rally against the fabulous possibilities of literature. But James Wood ain’t a dummy. And yet…and yet….
• Mark Thwaite on the Sony Reader.
• Business 2.0: Dead.
• Richard Dawkins on Hitch. (via the hard-working Jenny D!)
• Nathan Englander: I call you out! Just because I can. You’re getting too much press these days, you curly-haired Hungarian Pastry Shop-frequenting writer, you! And I demand that you do something silly! Name the time and place, and I will destroy you in a game of Connect Four!*
• Gavin Grant makes a cameo appearance at Jacket Copy.
• If you care to draw a correlation between the NYT mouse problem and Sam Tanenhaus’s far from cuddly disposition, your crazed speculations are welcome.
• Erin O’Brien on corn chowder!
• So what the hell does USA Today mean twenty-five years later? A four section daily newspaper that drastically underestimates the American capacity for force-fed news? An enduring homage to 1982? A considerable improvement upon FOX News? Incidentally, Rupert Murdoch’s interested in buying it.
• Katie Couric, you’ve had your time.
• I have seen the future and it does not involve John Sutherland.
• And what of Anne Hathaway?
• Terry Teachout on video.
• And John Cleese clarifies the anti-Semitic nature of Monty Python.

* — Yes, Daniel Mendelsohn was also challenged to a game of Connect Four on these pages. But he refused to take up the offer. The time has come to expand the board game testosterone to writers with needlessly curly hair.

From Publisher’s Lunch:

Dale Peck’s BODY SURFING, a dark literary thriller about a race of demons who possess their prey, moving from body to body via sexual release, and the female hunter bent on destroying them, to Peter Borland at Atria, by Richard Abate at Endeavor (NA).

Richard Dooling writes in to report that he authored an op-ed piece pertaining to L’Affaire Lamott. The piece appeared in the Omaha World-Herald, but is not available online. But Dooling has it up on his website.

Publishers Weekly: “Random House reported a 8% decline in worldwide earnings for the first half of 2007, to 44 million euros ($60 million) while parent company Bertelsmann posted first-half losses primarily due to Napster legal difficulties.”

Thanks to Julia Prosser, here is what I’ve been able to find out about Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke. There is not yet a subtitle to this 800 page opus, but the book is described as “a meticulously researched, astonishingly new perspective of the political, social, religious, and economic events throughout the world in the years preceding World War II—an invaluable work of nonfiction and an impassioned, persuasive call for pacifism.”

The book’s editor is Sarah Hochman, who has also edited the German writer Maxim Biller.

The release that I have also describes it as “a unique, deeply moving indictment of the treasured myths that have romanticized much of the 1930s and ‘40s—and a testament to non-violence and pacifism that applies as much to our own age as to any other.”

It also describes Human Smoke as “weav[ing] together the events and individuals that unnecessarily enabled or prolonged the irreparable damages of the war, including hundreds of often-overlooked facts, quotes, and articles that were frequently published in The New York Times, TIME, and countless other sources, which have been easily accessible to readers for generations.”

So yeah, I’d say that we might be seeing a good deal of that Baker-like precision here. The big question is just what specific elements Baker will be looking into to support his thesis for pacifism.