I just saw the leader of the free world reduced to a quiet stammering marshmallow. Who knew?

Congratulations, Mr. Balk (formerly known as TMFTML). Rest assured, now that Mr. Balk has very publicly sold out to the man, boiling a few live babies just before walking to the Times office, and lighting up Havanas underneath Bloomberg’s very own nose, it is clear that Mr. Balk has become too untrustworthy and hopelessly corrupted to be useful for the blogosphere’s purposes. We will be certain to write blasphemies about his work, with the same pragmatism with which we use Tanenhaus’s NYTBR issues for our furnace. Mr. Balk cannot be trusted ever, ever again. (via Maud)

The National Book Award finalists have been announced. For Fiction:

Madeleine is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Florida by Christine Schutt
Ideas of Heaven by Joan Silber
The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck
Our Kind: A Novel in Stories by Kate Walbert

This may be the first time in National Book Award history that all the nominees were women.

Vendela Vida: “I need help finding smell in contemporary fiction — please help me.”

From Cynthia Ozick’s Heir to the Glimmering World: “I rode the bus to a corner populated by a cluster of small shabby stores-grocery, shoemaker’s, dry cleaner’s, and under a tattered awning a dim coffee shop vomiting out odors of some foul stuff frying.”

From Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s My Nine Lives: “…she leaned forward to kiss me, enfolding me in the warmth of her breath, her perfume, the smell and taste of the good strong coffee she drank all day long, even at tea-time.”

The first two lines of Walter Mosley’s Little Scarlet: “The morning air still smelled of smoke. Wood ash mainly but there was also the acrid stench of burnt plastic and paint.”

David Lodge, Author, Author: “pressed up against her sweet-smelling, gently yielding form in the dark”

Maggie O’Farrell, My Lover’s Lover: “…Lily finds a small office smelling faintly of wet coffee granules.”

And that’s all from first chapters.

Personally, my favorite smell passage that I’ve read recently comes from (of all people) Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: “High school teachers faced with a large group of students in study hall or a school assembly will tell you that teenagers, even when freshly showered and groomed, reek of the hormones which their bodies are so busy manufacturing. Any group of people under stress emits a similar stink, and Jake, with his senses tuned to the most exquisite pitch, smelled it here.”

If there’s been a particularly bitter tone that’s crept onto these pages of late, my apologies. My heart has remained broken for at least sixty-six different reasons (and, yes, it’s at least sixty-six; they’ve all been logged down privately, along with prospective ways out) over the past couple of weeks, and I’ve tried to rebound from this by submerging myself into work, which to my mind includes this place. Certainly the insomnia helps. But it hasn’t completely extinguished a tone of nastiness that really doesn’t serve anybody. It doesn’t help my writing, much less the research I’m trying to do right now for the next play. (After all, not that I’m trying to draw any comparisons here, we all know what happened to John Fowles.)

So I’ve decided to withdraw from these pages for a while. It’s more important for me to find solid ground and a certain faith in humankind again than to kvetch about picayune shit like Stanley Crouch’s latest piece of irrational detritus. In the meantime, the David Mitchell interview I posted a few days ago should keep you folks busy. But do visit the smart and sturdy souls on the left.