National Book Awards Coverage

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Folks, I’m wiped after a day that started at 5:00 AM. But I hope to have a somewhat lengthy report from tonight’s 5 Under 35 event up after I’ve had a few hours of sleep.

Also, we’ve assembled a crazy crew of bloggers, including Jason Boog, Marydell, Levi Asher, and Sarah Weinman, who will be providing you with live coverage of the National Book Awards on Wednesday night. We’ll have text, pictures, video, and just about every damn thing that technology will permit us to do in a few days as the awards happen! You’re not going to want to miss this, folks. And if you have any specific things you want this group to uncover, let us know and we’ll see what we can do.

I also have a few exclusive items that I’ll be posting on when the report goes up. Needless to say, after my conversations tonight, it appears that Denis Johnson is considered to be the favorite, but there appears to be a consensus that there could be an upset victory from Jim Shepard. We’ll see how the speculation holds out.

Okay. Now about to collapse. More craziness to ensue!

The Guest Blogger

There is an exotic gentleman named Joshua Henkin now blogging at The Elegant Variation. He is guest blogging with some prolificity and even referring to previous guest blogging appearances. I get the sense that if it was possible for him to guest blog for eternity, he would do so if he had the chance. In fact, I’ve now hit Page Down six times and there are still posts by Joshua Henkin. Which leads me to believe that it is no longer the place to find Mark Sarvas, but the place to find Joshua Henkin. Whether the exotic gentleman will become an exotic dancer, perhaps posting a YouTube video offering indisputable evidence that he has in fact made the switch from “gentleman” to “dancer” (or perhaps he is both!), is one of those maddening questions that leaves me in some suspense. I am convinced that Joshua Henkin may do something very crazy, something that will make my jaw drop like the final scene of a Hitchcock film.

Anyway, the whole point of this post is to suggest that you experience the Joshua Henkin Experience. And if you don’t want to do this, you can always live vicariously through me with this post. And if that option isn’t good enough, you can always leave a comment here informing me how out of touch I am, or reminding me that I haven’t yet touched Joshua Henkin. And I will respond later with needless over-the-top bravado. All I have to say is thank heavens I’m wearing pants right now.

A Diversion for Writers

If, like me, you’ve written somewhere in the area of 5,000 words to meet various deadlines over the past three days, I highly recommend Alien Arena as a way to stay sane. It’s an open-source first-person shooter that offers pretty solid texture and lightning, a humbling AI (I am still suffering the taunting computer voice repeatedly telling me in hard mode, “The bots have won. You will have to replay the level again.” Or maybe my fragging skills have atrophied.), and it runs quite smoothly on a mid-grade processor.

One thing’s for sure: you can never go wrong with robots and lasers as a diversion.