My favorite line from The Moviegoer, Walker Percy’s classic novel of lust and longing in New Orleans, is this: “To become aware of the possibility of a search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”

Which brings me to the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco, tonight, where the writers who take the stage at Inside Storytime will be reading short pieces based on the theme Searching. In the lineup: Michael Disend, author of cult classic Stomping the Goyim; Barry Wildorf, author of Bring the War Home; Elizabeth Koch, who will be reading from The World Tour Compatibility Test; Roger Pinnell, and yours truly. I’ll be reading from my new San Francisco-centric novel The Year of Fog, which opens with the disappearance of a child on Ocean Beach. You can read the story behind the book here in the San Francisco Chronicle.

In addition to The Moviegoer, other books that come to mind when I think of “searching” are two older Ian McEwan novels: A Child in Time, and The Comfort of Strangers. For readers who came late to McEwan with the mainstream successes Atonement and Amsterdam, the two earlier novels might show you a side of McEwan you haven’t seen. Both are very short and deeply moody, and both are absolutely chilling.

New York Times: “Along the way, he discovered a fact that many small-scale recording artists are coming to terms with these days: his fans do not want merely to buy his music. They want to be his friend. And that means they want to interact with him all day long online. They pore over his blog entries, commenting with sympathy and support every time he recounts the difficulty of writing a song. They send e-mail messages, dozens a day, ranging from simple mash notes of the “you rock!” variety to starkly emotional letters, including one by a man who described singing one of Coulton’s love songs to his 6-month-old infant during her heart surgery. Coulton responds to every letter, though as the e-mail volume has grown to as many as 100 messages a day, his replies have grown more and more terse, to the point where he’s now feeling guilty about being rude.” (via Jenny D)

This is priceless. This blog has become my favorite nonfiction novel.

From Cynthia Ozick’s excellent essay “Literary Entrails” (Harper’s, April 2007), which I hope Harper’s eventually makes freely available. Ozick’s essay should be read by anyone who has any interest in the current book reviewing climate, particularly as very few of the participants have the effrontery to look inward.

When, not long ago, the New York Times Book Review asked a pool of writers to name the best novel of the last twenty-five years, the results were partly predictable and considerably muddled. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a tale of slavery and its aftermath, won the most votes. Philip Roth, John Updike, Don DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy were substantially represented. In an essay musing on the outcome of an exercise seemingly more quixotic than significant, A.O. Scott noted that the choices gave “a rich, if partial and unscientific picture of American literature, a kind of composite self-portrait as interesting perhaps for its blind spots and distortions as for its details.” Or call it flotsam and jetsam. You could not tell, from the novels that floated to the top, and from those bubbling vigorously below, anything more than that they were all written in varieties of the American language. You could not tell what, taken all together, they intimated in the larger sense — the tone of their time. A quarter-century encompasses a generation, and a generation does have a composite feel to it. But here nothing was composite, nothing joined these disparate writers to one another — only the catchall of the question itself, dipping like a fishing net and picking up what was closest to the surface, or had already prominently surfaced. All these novels had been abundantly reviewed — piecemeal. No reviewer had thought to set Beloved beside Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (both are political novels historically disguised) to catch the cross-reverberations. No reviewer had thought to investigate the possibly intermarried lineage of any of these works: what, for instance, has Nick in DeLillo’s Underworld absorbed from the Nick of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby? The novels that rose up to meet the Book Review‘s inquiry had never been suspect of being linked, whether horizontally or vertically. It was as if each one was a wolf-child reared beyond the commonality of a civilization; as if there was no recognizable thread of literary inheritance that could bind, say, Mark Helprin to Raymond Carver. Or if there was, no one cared to look for it. Nothing was indebted to nothing.

One of the more interesting moments in history to me is The Lincoln Assassination. It’s kind of been stuck in my brain since I visited John Wilkes Booth’s grave.

Well, I’m tooling around the internet this morning and I find a news story on Yahoo regarding how modern doctors think Lincoln would have survived had he been shot in the same place today.

If Lincoln had survived, American history would probably have changed dramatically. Would Andrew Jackson still become president? Would the South find a way to rise again? Would there be repeated attempts to kill Lincoln during his recovery?

I wonder if Lincoln was wounded and weakened if it would have changed how the war ended. Lincoln became a martyr and, though the war was technically over, members of the south still wanted to fight. I wonder if a wounded and weak Lincoln (whether in office or not) would have spurred the south to fight on.

What do you think?