Hoo Boy.

Read Tom Scocca On Jonathan Safran Foer's New Nonfiction Book [If You Like To LOL]

Tom Scocca: My advice to young would-be reporters is to write a novel, because once you've written a book-length made-up story, you're qualified to write about any sort of factual business you please. [via the Awl, honestly just read the Awl every single day]

Important Blog Reading Message [Not Spam]

My friend Adrian Chen is in a gladiatorial blogging competition with other members of the chattering class for an open editorial position at Gawker.

SO: Click on all his posts! Read them! Comment upon them! Go Biz-0nk3rzzzz!

It totes won't be a waste, because someone there already posted about him being funny, like a whole year ago!

[Gawker Repost] "Adorable Literary Hoax Goes Entirely Unnoticed"

In a 2004 issue of academic journal Modernism/Modernity, David Foster Wallace's short story collection Oblivion was reviewed by Jay Murray Siskind, a professor at Blacksmith College, and a fictional Don DeLillo character. And no one noticed!

[Full Gawker Post Here]

The Babysitters' Club Theme Song

Summary: Giggling holiday consumerism. Headbands in vibrant colors. A reaffirmation of the reliability of friends, specifically girlfriends who share membership in a childcare guild.

Sherlock Holmes Trailer [Pallet Cleanser]

Having read most of the Conan Doyle Holmes books, I am happy to see this.

It's actually no more inaccurate an adaptation than the staid, refined Basil Rathbone version of Sherlock Holmes that's ingrained in our collective pop culture consciousness. And, frankly, I am delighted to see the pendulum swing this far in the other direction.

Finally, Holmes' drug habbit and Watson's athletic build will get some (over)representation.

Thanks for getting divorced from Guy Ritchie, Madonna.

"The Road" Trailer [Do Not Want]

Nothing about this filled me with more dread than the "Dimension Films" logo. Did I really want to think of this adaptation in the same line-up with Scream 3, Halloween H20, Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return and Hellraisers 3-8?

Mary Gaitskill Interview: The Believer Issue 02.09

I sometimes feel like I come off like Ed Wood talking about Orson Welles (as depicted in the film Ed Wood) whenever I'm talking about writers and how they've conducting their lives: that is to say, earnest and more than a little embarrassing.

In any event, this Mary Gaitskill interview was good—and I don't have much more time tonight to devote to this subject than to say that. Personal highlights included (but were not limited to):

• Sentiment as false-feeling.
• Her notion of what a wife is, and more importantly the, frankly, heartwarming post-print-publication addenda.
• The bit about repetition in Dickens and the proceeding tangent on (essentially) everyone's natural tendency towards apophenia.
• The differences between guilt and shame.

When Haruki Murakami Chose To Be Poor

Part something-or-other in an ongoing series wherein I read things about great authors whose early-30's were not exactly financially successful — largely to comfort myself with delusions of being in good company.

From a truncated version of Murakami's "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" that appeared in (as with the first installment of this series) the New Yorker:

For three years I ran my jazz club-keeping the accounts, checking the inventory, scheduling my staff, standing behind the counter mixing cocktails and cooking, closing up in the wee hours of the morning, and only then being able to write, at home, at the kitchen table, until I got sleepy. I felt as if I were living two people's lives. And, gradually, I found myself wanting to write a more substantial kind of novel. I had enjoyed the process of writing my first two books, but there were parts of both that I wasn't pleased with. I was able to write only in spurts, snatching bits of time-a half hour here, an hour there-and, because I was always tired and felt as if I were competing against the clock, I was never able to concentrate very well. With this scattered kind of approach I was able to write a few interesting, fresh things, but the result was far from complex or profound. I felt as if I'd been given this wonderful opportunity to be a novelist, and I had a natural desire to take that opportunity as far as I possibly could. So, after giving it a lot of thought, I decided to close the business and focus solely on writing. At this point, my income from the jazz club was significantly more than my income as a novelist, a reality to which I resigned myself.

Preliminary Minutiae: Mini-Comic (Very) Roughs

[Click to enlarge]

Why Orwell Chose To Be Poor

Part something-or-other in an ongoing series wherein I read things about great authors whose late-20's were not exactly financially successful — largely to comfort myself with delusions of being in good company.

From a recent New Yorker review of Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London" by some guy:

That’s a long time to be poor and living as hard as Orwell did. It suggests more seriousness of purpose and staying power than some comments would grant him. It’s true that he came from some rung of the English middle class (“lower upper middle” he once called it, subcategory military), but it wasn’t a social world that leant itself to sponging off your parents. His decision to become poor was just that, but it wasn’t a joyride that he could easily have gotten off once under way, and it carried psychological as well as financial dangers. So why did he do it?

Orwell’s explanation, given a few years later in “The Road to Wigan Pier” (which is a far more sociological and political book, about the unemployed poor in northern England), connects the experience to his years as an imperial cop in Burma:

I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate. I suppose that sounds exaggerated; but if you do for five years a job that you thoroughly disapprove of, you will probably feel the same…I felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed; to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants. And, chiefly because I had had to think everything out in solitude, I had carried my hatred of oppression to extraordinary lengths. At that time failure seemed to me to be the only virtue. Every suspicion of self-advancement, even to “succeed” in life to the extent of making a few hundreds a year, seemed to me spiritually ugly, a species of bullying.

[Via The New Yorker]

Thing I Never Knew

This may be old news to some of you, but: Wow, Gordon Lish is like the Malcolm McLaren to Raymond Carver's Sex Pistols. [via NYT]

Ok, I'm Going To This ...

... whether or not I am still coughing up new characters for "The Mucinex Expanded Universe."

I have no idea which one of my friends would also want to go, and I'm frankly enthusiastic about doing something by myself, but I'm just gonna throw this out here anyway:

SUN, MAR 15: Lizzie “Elizabeth” Skurnick reads from Check-in — which [Lauren Cerand] once bought a dozen copies of, and then resold them in ten minutes, it’s that good — on Sunday evening at KGB, along with John Reed and Amy Koppelman. 7PM, FREE.

[Event via Maud Newton. Video below via Caketrain.]

"The Disease Was Life Itself"

Fiction author and Rolling Stone contributing editor David Lipsky chronicles David Foster Wallace's life-long battle with depression in this harrowing feature for the aforementioned publication.

Silver Jews' David Berman Writes To The NYT's [Actual Hot Air]

I haven't been able to find out if this letter in today's New York Times Sunday Magazine is the David Berman, but it's fun to pretend:

David Frum’s political view of inequality (Sept. 7) reads like an internal memo from the court of Louis XVI — equality is not a value to be pursued for its own sake but a concession that might have to be endured to avoid imminent revolution.

Equality is the value with which the framers began our founding document and what the progress of civilization has been primarily about. In fact, the redistribution of wealth — a conservative’s most feared and hated thing — is most of what governments do. Reasonable people can disagree about precisely how much wealth should be redistributed and where, but to say that “equality in itself never can be or should be a conservative goal” is tantamount to rejecting the last couple centuries of progress.

David Berman

Berman's comparison is particularly interesting as former presidential speech writer David Frum hails from the court of George Bush II. He's widely known to have written the "Axis of Evil" speech—though, his draft read "Axis of Hatred," which was changed, presumably, to avoid alienating the GOP's pro-hate wing. [via NYT, orbviorsly]

The Simultaneous Decline Of Reportage and Rise Of Pollsters

In his ceaselessly amazing ability to digest the stalest of middlebrow horseshit from the (assumably overly generous) book deals granted our country's pundit class, Thomas Frank compares the arrogant and (incite/insight)ful coverage of the '68 Chicago riots by Norman Mailer to the fluffy, self-congratulatory "adventures in polling data" found in political consultant Douglas Schoe's Declaring Independence and pollster John Zogby's The Way We’ll Be. Here's the meat:

At the pinnacle of all these trite formulations, the pollster places the sleepiest, most shopworn cliché of them all, the cliché to which Zogby has dedicated his book and apparently his life: the “American Dream” and its “Transformation.” To me the idea is so thickly meaningless, so impenetrable, that I would rather just forget the whole thing. Zogby insists, however, that the American people get it and even adore it. Yes, “the public understands the new American dream just fine.” Apparently, what he means is this: Americans used to want merely to get rich, but now they understand that there are limits, and so they want greenness and authenticity and all the other aforementioned clichés, clichés that (by the way) powered countless similarly banal books all through the 1970s and beyond.

I mock, but the American Dream is a banality that apparently never requires definition and yet is capable of launching our pundit class on endless expeditions to the shimmering El Dorado of . . . the center.

Ah, the center! Now there is the place to be. The existential radical Mailer wouldn’t be caught dead there, but at least he was willing to identify its coordinates correctly: In 1968, “the center” obviously meant the Great Society liberalism that was shared by Democrat Hubert Humphrey and Republican Nelson Rockefeller alike. Corporate liberalism was simply the logic of the nation’s political machinery, and everyone knew it—although plenty of people hated it. These days, of course, the proper political writer is no existentialist, and he dares not locate himself anywhere but the almighty center, that omphalos of triangulated righteousness. It is simply understood that you cannot possibly have anything worthwhile to say about American politics unless you can see the error of “both extremes” and know in your heart that the two parties behave in every situation as precise mirror images of each other.

There’s another telling difference: When our contemporary pundits take up the banner of centrism, they never mean Great Society liberalism, even though it’s easy to find polls that show the public still strongly approves of, say, national health care, safe workplaces, equality, the public financing of Social Security, and so on. To them, “the center” always seems to mean a sort of soft libertarianism: free markets, free trade, low taxes, and no more of that infernal bawling about moral values. The center, in other words, always turns out to be a perfect reflection of the political longings of the white-collar class.

[via Maud Newton]

I Want Every Issue Of This 'ZIne

The Hermenaut, produced by some of the sharpest Gen-X academics, IMHFO.

Calling all H.P. Lovecraft Readers

I need you to let me know if this is an accurate imitation — or merely Lemony Snicket-style gothic camp masquerading as a highly specific and intellectually engaged parody:

SELECTIONS FROM
H.P. LOVECRAFT'S
BRIEF TENURE AS A
WHITMAN'S SAMPLER
COPYWRITER

[Excerpt:]

Chocolate Cherry Cordial
You must not think me mad when
I tell you what I found below the
thin shell of chocolate used to disguise
this bonbon's true face. Yes!

Hidden beneath its rich exterior
is a hideously moist cherry cordial!
What deranged architect could have
engineered this non-Euclidean aberration?
I dare not speculate.

Yeah, no kidding it's from McSweeney's. [via Maud Newton]