• To paraphrase Groucho Marx, we’re going to speed things up here. If a blog readership orders a one-hour roundup, I’ll give it to them in twenty minutes. If they order a twenty minute roundup, I’ll give it them in ten minutes. If they order a ten minute roundup, I’ll give them my RSS feeds and let it work out for themselves. Time is limited. So here goes.
• Dan Green on the “marketplace of ideas” nomen. Since I have moved to New York, I have been contending more and more with people who view books as nothing more than a commodity and are not well-read and more taken with scarfing down canapes and free drinks at junkets than engaging with authors and books on even a remotely intellectual level. Even accounting for the reality that publishing is an industry, Dan’s words are well worth considering.
• Bill Benzon offers a provocative open letter to Steven Pinker about shared knowledge and stories.
• The Last Starfighter: The Musical. (via Jason Boog)
• On pumping out twenty books in six years. (via Slushpile)
• UC Santa Cruz plans to put its Heinlein archive online. I’d like to see more universities do this.
• Uncovered: A disturbing juxtaposition of Black Canary.
• You down with OED? Yeah, you know me. Crosswords, mothafuckahs!
• Tonight, 6:30 PM at the Bowery Poetry Club: Levi Asher and some other guy.
• Someone has stolen Erin O’Brien’s hat!
• Shame is the New Fame and related article.
• It appears that YA authors are using high school newspapers to market their books. I have a slight ethical problem with this, but there is currently no time to offer a lengthy argument. Perhaps later. (via Bookshelves of Doom)
• Timbaland on One Life to Live.
• I don’t see anything particularly wrong with the Harvard Classics approach to education, but is five minutes a day really enough time to take in a classic?
• And, finally, call me a prurient cad, but I’m extremely curious about the future of this man’s potency.

© 2007, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

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