The good Dr. Jones has been outstanding enough to chronicle David Lodge’s appearance at the Chicago Humanities Festival.

• Newsweek gets some dirt from Stewart O’Nan and Stephen King on Faithful.
• Seems that everybody’s a novelist. Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos is set to write a novel.
• Can people please stop interviewing Tom “::::::::STATIC:::::::” Wolfe? Now he’s dissing Carl Hiaasen for not having enough cash.
• While the New York Times whiffs the low air of sophisticated populism, the Sacramento Bee‘s been doing some nice work on the literary front, sans the pretension. They’ve served up an interview with Lily Tuck.
• Dan Brown has been named New Statesman‘s Man of the Year. No code to crack there.
• Robert Pinsky has edited a new poetry anthology. It includes a DVD that compiles 27 shorts of Americans reading and talking about their favorite poems.

Jesus, it’s been a crummy year in the death department. Dimebag Darrell too? Courtesy of a deranged gun nut?

The incomparable Robert Birnbaum talks with Francisco Goldman. Along the way, they mention Walter Benjamin. Now if you’re like me and you encounter an author you haven’t read three times in print or conversation during the course of a single week, you immediately take pains to add him to your bookpile. Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, as referenced by Goldman, involved years of research and years of transformation and appears to be one of those hefty volumes that almost got away and didn’t quite make it to its inevitable form. (The version which can be found today was recovered Kafka-style from a friend.) Composed of notes, lists, labryinthine references, quotes, and more, all of it taking on some momentous expression of consciousness, one suspects that Vollman got more than a few ideas from him. I’m straddling the fence on whether to get sucked into Benjamin. But he was the guy who came first.