This may be the first reading campaign that has expressed the urgency of reading, while simultaneously berating its audience. And that’s not all. The spot also demands, “Your body needs water. So drink that shit,” among other angry catechisms evocative of better living.

I’d like to see more people reading and if this gets at least one kid to read a book, then it can’t be bad. It also takes a truly deranged mind to put BO on one buttock and OK on the other, suggesting in a rather hysterical sense that reading is sexy or as empowering as a booty call. I hope that the crazy motherfucker who came up with that idea is hired for something else.

But there’s an anachronistic groupthink approach to this ad — a sense of severely underestimating the audience’s intelligence — that greatly troubles me. I simply do not believe that people are this dumb or that they will be coaxed into reading because an animated guy named D-Mike says so. (And what’s wrong with the sports page anyway?)

I don’t think Tony Soprano has whacked the novel or that books are going away anytime soon. But surely there’s a better way to promote literacy than this unintentionally hilarious video.

Publishers Weekly: “The HM Riverdeep Group has agreed to acquire the U.S. business operations of Harcourt Education for $4 billion. The deal, which is expected to close later in early 2008, includes the Harcourt’s elementary school publishing businesses as well as Harcourt Trade. The price includes $3.7 billion in cash plus $300 million in an equity stake for Harcourt in HM Riverdeep. Total revenue of the properties involved in the sale was $1.11 billion in 2006 with the vast majority generated by the school and library operations.”

Tom Wolfe and others on the blog’s tenth anniversary.

Once again, the Beatniks wish to tarnish the good name of realist literature — truly the only form of literature that’s good for you. The latest nonsense comes to us from a thirty-year-old whipper-snapper from San Francisco fond of reciting obscenities. It is rather childishly called “Howl.”

Let us examine this “poem”‘s first few lines:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,

And so on. Ginsberg cannot get to the point. He prefers nonsensical religious imagery like “angelheaded hipsters” and “Mohammedan angels.” He cannot put the adjective before “tenement roofs” like a proper writer.

If I were forced to play Pin the Tail on the Donkey after several shots of Stoli, I could easily identify this, without effort, as the kind of prose fashionable among the beret-wearing riff-raff who declare themselves “artists” or “poets” or “writers.” What does Ginsberg mean by ‘dragging themelves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix?’ Streets are not racial! How is a fix angry? One does not bare one’s brain to Heaven. There is no El in San Francisco last time I checked. Ginsberg can’t even decide on what one must hallucinate. Is it Arkansas or Blake-light tragedy?

I certainly cannot see any literary scholar taking such a preposterous poem seriously fifty years from now.

My profile of Marianne Wiggins can be found in this week’s issue of Time Out New York.