MSNBC: “Levy is all but helpless, he says, when new e-mail arrives. He feels obliged to open it. He is similarly hooked on the news, images and nonsense that spill out of the Internet. He is also a receiver and sometimes a transmitter of ‘surfer’s voice,’ the blanched prattling of someone on the phone while diddling around on the Web.”

Hey, Levy, I’ve got two words for you: pro-active life.

I’ve become increasingly bothered by the idea that people feel “helpless” in our present day. Just about the only thing that mystifies me more are the people who proclaim that they’re “bored.” Bored? How can you be bored with all the crazy shit going on? Depressed? Delighted? Lustful? Geeky? Hell yeah. But bored?

For the “helpless” sort, I’m not talking about folks who have specialized interests and exchange knowledge about particular topics. That much involves a pro-active discussion in which various people are trying to wrestle with pertinent information, often in collusion with each other (sort of like these lit blogs). I’m talking about the folks who are incapable of moving the rudder even a smidgen, the people who feel compelled to use outside variables as an excuse.

I couldn’t balance my checkbook because I was catching the last episode of Friends.

I went shopping but I forgot my list and I was overwhelmed by the choices.

I couldn’t get up this morning because I was too mesmerized by my girlfriend’s accessory.

It never occurs to this type of person that filtering out the nonsense and focusing on the important information may very well lead him to a personal evolution. Or not. But, at the very least, it will get the person closer to who he really is, even if it involves taking steps and falling flat on his ass.

Levy follows up his whining with the idea that “it is part of our birthright as human beings to have space and silence for our thoughts.”

Well, it’s also part of our birthright to make decisions, sometimes without the benefit of considerable rumination, and to try things. That means seriously considering that 3AM call from Phil about an impromptu road trip to Vegas. To me, one of the most horrifying ideas of existence is to remain in a year-long passive stupor. Perhaps Levy’s idea angers me because I used to be like this, and I had pretty horrendous parental models involving passive self-entitlement that took years for me to personally reprogram.

Today, I cannot understand how anyone could ever live like this, let alone someone like Levy, who, at 53, is too old to be intimidated by everyday existence when, in fact, he can set up spam filters or unplug altogether.

A reader wrote in to say that she was mystified by the continued employment of Laura Miller at the Gray Lady. “I knew,” she continued, “like an unreliable vibrator, that every time I put a Laura Miller column into my hands, the sensation would start off pleasant and then sputter out because the electric current turned tepid and the vibrator itself was poorly designed. So now, in lieu of a pleasurable Times experience, I’ve been forced to call my man over every Sunday morning and have him ram me against the bedpost to iambic pentameter, while we both shout out Shakespearean sonnets. Fortunately, the downstairs neighbor, a professional drummer, appreciates our mutual syncopation.”

Yankee ingenuity is justly celebrated, independent and far away from Sam Tanenhaus’s hallowed millieu, but why subject yourself to an irksome book columnist when so many sublime ones are available? Every literature freak recognizes the threshold my correspondent has yet to cross: the moment you decide that a book columnist has jumped the shark.

For some, it’s like having your limbs tied up with hard hemp rope, your mouth gagged with a tight hankie, and a dominatrix referring to you as Phil Donahue. Even when you suggest that capital punishment should be aired on national television, there’s still the problem of being muffled by the handkerchief and manacled with the rope. And the dominatrix may, in a moment of kindness, get you your Sunday newspaper with that precious book section. But when the last page is Miller, as opposed to Margo Jefferson or that enjoyable comic strip, the dominatrix gains additional leverage, ruining what is, ostensibly, a perfectly deviant sex life.

But surely readers, who aren’t responsible for filtering through idiotic op-ed columns and deciding upon who gets a column and who does not, and who know what it’s like to suffer through silly book coverage offered by The Scotsman, are more generous? Not really. Even when columnists like Miller grab quotes from noted authors in an effort to justify their stature, it still cannot propel a 1,000 word column that can essentially be reduced to one sentence: “Don’t read the books you don’t want to, dude.”

The fact that these book columnists are so joyless and smug over book-related subjects that are essentially non-issues makes one wonder why these columns exist in the first place. Is the answer simply that Laura Miller is, as Chicha has suggested, sexually frustrated? If that’s the answer, then why the horrendous columns? Other great writers (HP Lovecraft, Emily Dickinson and Cornell Woolrich come to mind) have managed to produce greatness in stark contrast to their nonexistent sex lives. And they were writing fiction and poetry, not literary criticism, let alone a regular column.

There remains one ineluctable conclusion: Laura Miller has served her purpose. She must either produce something compelling in the next 60 days, something that recalls her early days at Salon, or jump over the Harold Bloom Memorial Bridge and throw herself into the Ponderous Hudson.

The Guardian: “Using sexual jibes and degradation, along with stripping naked, is one of the methods taught on both sides of the Atlantic under the slogan ‘prolong the shock of capture’, he said. Female guards were used to taunt male prisoners sexually and at British training sessions when female candidates were undergoing resistance training they would be subject to lesbian jibes.”

Scalia Erodes Free Speech for AP Reporter: “As Scalia spoke, a United States Marshal stepped in front of Denise and demanded that she turn over the digital recording she was making to back up her notes. She tried to say no, but the marshal ignored her and erased Justice Scalia’s words from memory on the spot.”

CNN: Judge orders couple not to have children.

I’m sorry if there hasn’t been a lot of book news lately, but when we live in a nation that restricts personal freedoms, obstructs the press, and teaches unnecessary sadism (later enforced) to soliders, it’s a bit difficult to dance a joyful jig.

Oh, and Van Helsing is easily the worst movie of the year. If you want vampires, see the old Universal horror films, any of the Hammer horror films, Near Dark, hell even Lust for a Vampire, anything other than this cinematic turd. I am convinced that Stephen Sommers will become a dreaded name in the annals of cinematic history. The film is so dumb and condescending that when we see a half-constructed Eiffel Tower framed prominently in an establishing shot, we also get a title card that reads “PARIS.” No shit? Paris? I mean, here I was thinking we were looking at that Paris hotel in Vegas or something.

So spineless is this film that there are no nipples on the flying vampire ladies. The film is an unrelenting headache of noise, futile shock moments and ADD editing. It’s something of an unintentional achievement to throw in Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster and a wolfman and not offer a single compelling moment. Kate Beckinsale is neither attractive nor capable of emoting beyond the level of a stale Saltine cracker. (Witness her bland delivery as she hears her brother howling in torture, which suggests an actress whose idea of human experience doesn’t extend beyond the hauteur of a Parisian catwalk.) Hugh Jackman does what he can, but not even Laurence Olivier could bring dignity to jejune dialogue like, “Guess it’s time to leave.” And Richard Roxburgh is the dullest Dracula I’ve ever seen. Lousy accent, even lousier delivery, the kind of inept thespian you expect to pop up at 3AM on the Sci-Fi channel, not some big-budget Hollywood movie. Think Wild, Wild West applied to Universal horror. Yes, it’s that kind of pain.

Thank goodness I saw this with an amazing moviegoing pal