- Dan Green offers a contrarian take on Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker.
- There can be no better barometer for how little literary figures matter than the Seattle Times year-end death list, which overlooks Octavia Butler and Gilbert Sorrentino. Butler’s exclusion is particularly egregious, given that she lived in Seattle. Way to go, team!
- A smörgåsbord of best of the year lists can be found in last Sunday’s Newsday, including editor Laurie Muchnick, Emily Gordon, and Maud Newton.
- The Toronto Star whips up an Alice Munro profile, which reads as if it was cobbled together from the obituaries file. Folks, Munro is still alive!
- If Hermione Eye were a man, Eye opines that he’d whack her on the back. Not at all, Ms. Eye. He’d probably plagiarize you first.
- Now open for Wikipedia-like catastrophes of the first order: The Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Remember kids, only you can decide history, only to find your careful ruminations reverted ten minutes later.
- Is Jakob Nielsen serious or satirical?
- Mariah Carey vs. Mary Carey
- Conservative blogs losing popularity? Who woulda thought? (via Maxine Clarke)
- Ship lit? Okay, I get it. We’re going to see twelve trend pieces in the Gray Lady on “____ lit” before the end of winter. But given certain realities, that promising essay on “tit lit” ain’t happening anytime soon. (via Brockman)
- Sorry, Derik, you’re my grumpy sage too.
- Preposterous revisionism going down in libraries. Sorry, Maud, but I can’t stay out of this either. Rabid, raccoon-eyed, baby carrot-chomping librarians scare the fuck out of me too. But, man, does righteous indignation about books get the job done sometimes.
© 2007, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.
In fairness to the Seattle Times, that’s an AP-generated list of people who died. (Which reminds me of my long unfulfilled dream to one year have that Oscar montage, you know the one, actually SET to an orchestral version of “People Who Died.”)
Thanks for the link — I’ve arrived!!