It could be sooner than you think.

It spells inescapable doom for intelligent life in the far, far future. No matter where you are located, the rest of the universe would eventually be receding from you at the speed of light, slipping forever beyond the horizon of knowability. Meanwhile, the shrinking region of space still accessible to you will fill up with a kind of insidious radiation that would eventually choke off information processing—and with it, the very possibility of thought. We seem to be headed not for a Big Crunch or a Big Chill but something far nastier: a Big Crackup. "All our knowledge, civilization and culture are destined to be forgotten," one prominent cosmologist has declared to the press. It looks as if little Alvy Singer was right after all. The universe is going to "break apart," and that will indeed mean the end of everything—even Brooklyn.

Even more interesting is this idea from Freeman Dyson:

Suppose the acceleration does turn out to be temporary and the future universe settles into a nice cruise-control expansion. What could our descendants possibly look like a trillion trillion trillion years from now, when the stars have disappeared and the universe is dark and freezing and so diffuse that it's practically empty? What will they be made of?

"The most plausible answer," Dyson said, "is that conscious life will take the form of interstellar dust clouds." He was alluding to the kind of inorganic life forms imagined by the late astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle in his 1957 science fiction novel, The Black Cloud. "An ever-expanding network of charged dust particles, communicating by electromagnetic forces, has all the complexity necessary for thinking an infinite number of novel thoughts."

How, I objected, can we really imagine such a wispy thing, spread out over billions of light-years of space, being conscious?

"Well," he said, "how do you imagine a couple of kilograms of protoplasm in someone's skull being conscious? We have no idea how that works either."

Lawrence Krauss, the most famous professor at my dear old alma mater, makes an appearance as well, with a more pessimistic ake:

"We appear to be living in the worst of all possible universes," Krauss told me, clearly relishing the note of anti-Leibnizian pessimism he struck. "If the runaway expansion keeps going, our knowledge will actually decrease as time passes. The rest of the universe will be literally disappearing before our very eyes surprisingly soon—in the next ten or twenty billion years. And life is doomed — even Freeman Dyson accepts that. But the good news is that we can't prove we're living in the worst of all possible universes. No finite set of data will ever enable us to predict the fate of the cosmos with certainty. And, in fact, that doesn't really matter. Because, unlike Freeman, I think that we're doomed even if the runaway phase turns out to be only temporary."

Some days I feel like I should just put an RSS Feed of Rake's Progress in the upper-left corner of the blog and be done with it. I find myself wanting to link to every other post over there. The latest is a fantastic link to a collection of Nabokov audio files at Salon.com, including one excellent snippet where he explains what makes James Joyce a genius and Henry James, well, not.

He's also got a good page of Nabokov interviews in his sidebar. Just scroll down until you see English words.

This is Yam Roll. He's the Happy Kingdom's most excellent cab driver and is friends with just about everyone due to his good nature and sweet, root-vegetable flavoring.

And he's the star of a new television series coming to the CBC, The Very Good Adventures of Yam Roll in Happy Kingdom. Here's a taste. You may want to get stoned first. (via Drawn!)

...if "simultaneous day-and-date releases of new films in theaters and on home video, cable and video-on-demand" is adopted. Sounds like a win-win.

The Minutemen have come to Vermont.

Somewhere near this spot -- where five men with lawn chairs and binoculars were watching the woods -- runs the long and mostly invisible border between the United States and Canada.

The New England Minutemen were here to guard this border.

They just weren't precisely certain where it was.

Glad they're on the case.

Sometimes Flickr gets it all right.

More than a quarter century ago the painter Ad Reinhardt declared that his new black-on-black canvases were the "last pictures which anyone can make." The critics raved, and many agreed with the "Black Monk" that his masterpieces would be history's "ultimate" paintings. Unfortunately, other artists refused to hand in their brushes, so art continued. Ever since, modern art has resembled a doomsday cult on the day after the deadline for the end of the world. The true believers awoke one day to find that the sun had risen, the mad prophet had disappeared, and they all had to find something to do with the rest of their lives.

This predicament is now called Postmodernism, and if you're confused about it, that's probably because you're beginning to understand it. If you're an artist, what follows will be old hat. But as a service to the layman I can define a few of the basic terms.

And just in case you missed it over the weekend, we're more than happy to say it again: we just found out from Greensboro's own Best-American-Essayist Paul Crenshaw that Stephen Kuusisto's essay from Backwards City #1 has been listed as an "other notable essay of 2005."

That's great news. I wish we could take some credit for it, but the honor's all Steve's. I can't even take credit for this post's title. Mad props to Jaimee for that.

Your dreams cartoonified. Here's a great one. (via The Huge Entity)

As She Climbed Across the Table is being made into a movie. I'll have to read the book before that happens; it's one of the few books of his that I haven't read yet. Additional good news for Lethemites everywhere: His most excellent Motherless Brooklyn [review] is also being made into a movie.

And have I mentioned he and Chris Offutt will be in Backwards City #3? I think I have. Maybe you should, you know, subscribe.

Genetic Explanations for Halloween’s Legendary Creatures.

Found this blog linked over on Linkfilter this morning under the heading "Is This The World's Best Blog?" Although your very own Backwards City still takes the prize, obviously, The Huge Entity is pretty good too. It's the blog for all excrutiating large things, for instance, consciousness, reality, religion, and Philip K. Dick. Check it out.

How absinthe works. I can't believe people drink this stuff.

Good Morning, Good Morning, Good Morning! Happy Turn-The-Clocks-Back Day, the greatest holiday of them all.

Fifty years of World Press Photo Award winners. Fair Warning: Some of these are intense.

Here is last year's winner:



In Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu, India, a distraught woman mourns the loss of a relative killed in the tsunami.

They're all this gut-wrenching. Amazing, though. (via Monkeyfilter)

Well, no, but it's nice to play pretend. Via Monkeyfilter, which also links to this incredible 1990 Watterson commencement address at Kenyon College:

In the middle of my sophomore year at Kenyon, I decided to paint a copy of Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" from the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling of my dorm room. By standing on a chair, I could reach the ceiling, and I taped off a section, made a grid, and started to copy the picture from my art history book.

Working with your arm over your head is hard work, so a few of my more ingenious friends rigged up a scaffold for me by stacking two chairs on my bed, and laying the table from the hall lounge across the chairs and over to the top of my closet. By climbing up onto my bed and up the chairs, I could hoist myself onto the table, and lie in relative comfort two feet under my painting. My roommate would then hand up my paints, and I could work for several hours at a stretch.

The picture took me months to do, and in fact, I didn't finish the work until very near the end of the school year. I wasn't much of a painter then, but what the work lacked in color sense and technical flourish, it gained in the incongruity of having a High Renaissance masterpiece in a college dorm that had the unmistakable odor of old beer cans and older laundry. The painting lent an air of cosmic grandeur to my room, and it seemed to put life into a larger perspective. Those boring, flowery English poets didn't seem quite so important, when right above my head God was transmitting the spark of life to man.

My friends and I liked the finished painting so much in fact, that we decided I should ask permission to do it. As you might expect, the housing director was curious to know why I wanted to paint this elaborate picture on my ceiling a few weeks before school let out. Well, you don't get to be a sophomore at Kenyon without learning how to fabricate ideas you never had, but I guess it was obvious that my idea was being proposed retroactively. It ended up that I was allowed to paint the picture, so long as I painted over it and returned the ceiling to normal at the end of the year. And that's what I did.

Despite the futility of the whole episode, my fondest memories of college are times like these, where things were done out of some inexplicable inner imperative, rather than because the work was demanded. Clearly, I never spent as much time or work on any authorized art project, or any poli sci paper, as I spent on this one act of vandalism.

It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves.

Only 18 days till I get to open my Complete Calvin & Hobbes.

The 2005 Nikon 'Small World' prize for best photograph taken through a light microscope is up. Some great pictures. Neil digs the velcro. I like it too, as well as Cleveland's own "Bacteria Grown in Petri Dish" and this cool-looking feather. (via Boing Boing)

Congratulations to Stephen Kuusisto, whose essay "Alfred Whitehead Is Alive and Well in Corpus Christi, Texas" from Backwards City #1 we just found out was listed as an "other notable essay of 2005" in Best American Essays 2005!

Mad props also to Greensboro's own Paul Crenshaw, who, you know, is in the thing.

Jaimee wanted to rent the Lemony Snicket kids' movie today. I went along with it, and good call on my part. It was really worth watching, so much so I'm almost tempted to read the books. (Wikipedia) I'm sure I would have loved them as a kid.

Amazon (dvd)
Amazon (books)
Netflix

I'm embarassed to even be putting this up: Yoda dancing to the hip-hop. And that about wraps it up for Star Wars. (via everwhere)

Rain Taxi is talkin' Bear v. Shark by BCR #2 hero Chris Bachelder.

In October 2004, I picked up the pre-election issue of The Believer. In that issue, in an article entitled “A Soldier Upon a Hard Campaign,” Chris Bachelder waxed philosophical on political and satiric writing, on the admirable zeal and regrettable prose of Upton Sinclair, and on the prescience of E.L. Doctorow. He also offered some unflinching self-critique of Bear V Shark, his first novel.

The book follows the Normans, archetypal American family extraordinaire, on a road trip to the sovereign nation of Las Vegas to witness Bear V Shark II, a bigger-than-1000-superbowls sort of event. The first time around the shark won, but rather than providing a conclusive answer to the age-old question (given a level playing field, who would win in a fight...), bear-backers have vowed revenge and once again it will all go down at The Darwin Dome. The Normans won free tickets when their son, Curtis, won an essay contest with an entry titled "Bear V Shark: A Reason to Live." Of this novel, Bachelder wrote “a satire first published late in 2001, [it] has faded quietly out of print after a pretty modest circulation run and disappointing sales here in the USA.” Toward the article’s end he wrote that the book seemed to him now “in fact, as disposable and ephemeral as the popular culture it derides.”

Chris, needless to say, is completely wrong about this. The book is fantastic (review 1 review 2) and damn near indispensible. It's a shame the book hasn't received wider recognition than it's received thus far; it seems to me to be almost entirely a matter of bad timing. I hope that changes as time goes on. (via Rake's Progress)

MSNBC profiles David Berman of the Silver Jews. (Also via Bookslut)

74. Is your book basically a rip-off of The Lord of the Rings?
75. Read that question again and answer truthfully.

(via Bookslut)

Good Smell Perplexes New Yorkers.

An unseen, sweet-smelling cloud drifted through parts of Manhattan last night. Arturo Padilla walked through it and declared that it was awesome.

"It's like maple syrup. With Eggos. Or pancakes," he said. "It's pleasant."

The odor had followed Mr. Padilla and his friend along their walk in Lower Manhattan, from a dormitory on Fulton Street, to Pace University on Spruce Street, and back down again, to where they stood now, near a Dunkin' Donuts. Maybe it was from there, he said. But it wasn't.

Mr. Padilla was not alone. Reports of the syrupy cloud poured in from across Manhattan after 9 p.m. Some feared that it was something sinister.

There were so many calls that the city's Office of Emergency Management coordinated efforts with the Police and Fire Departments, the Coast Guard and the City Department of Environmental Protection to look into it.

(via MetaFilter)

Just one of the many vintage circus postcards from the 19th Century Circus Posters Flickr group.



(via)

Philip Roth and the roads of North Jersey. Jaimee's hometown gets a shout-out. My hometown of Randolph is as usual ignored, but we get the last Philip-Roth-related laugh: Mt. Freedom's previous incarnation as a Jewish resort community is mentioned in one of his novels (Goodbye, Columbus, I think, or else American Pastoral). (via The Elegant Variation)

Harold Bloom has a few things to say about everything. Some of it is so important he'll say it twice in a row.

HB: ...I feel that in that Hamlet book I really let myself go, I allowed myself – if only once – to write for myself, even though I found myself saying things that I know other people have difficulty understanding and which they consider extravagant.

IL: What are some of these things?

HB: Well, for instance, that Hamlet starts to fight back against Shakespeare, that he attempts to rewrite the play that he is in, that he has a kind of authority of consciousnes, that even more than Falstaff he breaks away from Shakespeare. He is so gifted that, to quote Nietzsche, "He does not think too much, he simply thinks too well." He knows too well, he understands too well, he has thought to the end of thought. He has thought himself into an abys that is nothing. Of course, Hamlet moves us, because there are all these hints about transcendence, but to me, it's the darkest literary work I have ever read, its implications are simply shattering.

(via A&L Daily)

How to Build a Flying Saucer And Other Proposals in Speculative Engineering. I love the way this writertake gaps in knowledge and run with them, weaving a web of theory that's intricately and delightfully almost plausible:

Modern Americans are not altogether unlike the barefoot Patagonians who were psychologically blind to the sight of a superior technology. There are historical records of time travelers among us, but they ate not perceived even by the people who read them. The twenty-fifty chapter of Exodus was written over three thousand years ago. Regardless of the distortions accumulated over the millennia of successive translations, there is not the slightest doubt that the King James Version has been reproduced to the letter for over three centuries; antique copies are still available to anyone determined to establish the date of printing. Now, if you follow the directions the Lord gave to Moses for constructing the Ark of the Covenant, you will build yourself a spark-gap radio transceiver powered by a Leyden-type condenser, almost identical to the models Marconi began his experiments with. Shittimwood is no longer stocked, and the price of gold is a barrel of oil, but pine and aluminum foil can be substituted. The Ark of the Covenant has been recognizable as an electronic device for the past hundred years; finding a modern radio in ancient Judea is as significant as finding a flying saucer in modern America.

(via Cynical-C)

The New Yorker's best writer makes an appearance in this week's issue. Print edition only, though.

...to comic artists Chris Ware and Charles Burns on The Dark Pages, an open-source radio show. Listen here. (via a whole boatload of places)

Should a book that cannot command sales of 500 be published at all? [BookNinja]

I suspect there's more than a few literary journals don't like where this conversation is going.

Look, I love Joss Whedon as much as the next guy, but how else do you explain Firefly and Serenity taking the #1 and #2 slots overall, much less Serenity beating The Empire Strikes Back by over 600 votes? (via Gravity Lens)

The NES is 20 this last week. That's older than most of my students. Which is very frightening.

You won't stop playing until you WANT to stop playing. (via)

New Yorker Cartoons, 1913-1951. (via Drawn!)

Everybody loves Katamari Damarcy speedruns.

William Hootkins, who played Jek Porkins in the first Star Wars movie, A New Hope, has died. (Link goes to Whatsonstage.com, where they have the story as well as a tribute and write-up of his last UK theater performance, Hitchcock Blond.)



Here's more about the character, who seems to get more love than the real man, at Wikipedia and Tribute to Porkins, quote:

All I have to say is this: PORKINS IS STAR WARS. Without Porkins, the movie just wouldn't be worthwhile. I mean, this guy had flames on his helmet, and he even refused to wear his chin strap. Could he be much more of a bad ass? I think not. Ladies and gentlemen, I think it's time to give a moment of silence for Porkins. And the next time you see Star Wars, you had best represent for the man, Porkins... If you aren't down with Porkins, you ain't shit.

The Loggernaut Reading Series takes on Sam Lipsyte.

LRS: Is fiction still relevant?

Lipsyte: I guess it's about what kind of scale you're interested in. I read something once about the screenwriter Robert Towne, who wrote Chinatown. He was talking about the golden age of Hollywood up until Watergate and Vietnam and all that. Before those events, the Hollywood movie was rooted in a certain idea: America is basically good; there's corruption, but we can root it out. The system itself is a good thing and the narrative was built around that assumption. And then, after Vietnam and Watergate, everyone still agrees, but now everyone agrees that everything's fucked and the system itself is rotten. You have your anti-heroes, but basically everyone's still on the same team.

The problem is that after that period, everyone became dispersed and everyone's in a different niche, so there are no common assumptions. I don't think this precisely applies to literature, but I do think it's an interesting point. So people talk about the novel being dead—it's not that it's dead, it's that the novel is no longer necessary to a lot of people.

People no longer have to fake reading books the way they used to. There's no basic assumption from which to work from anyway. So, very urbane, literate people talk about video games at cocktail parties. That's the new Dickens—it's Halo.

Outstanding optical illustrion from Ian Rowland. brownpau at Metafilter has a great animated gif that simulates the effect.

Via Cynical-C's link to the list of unseen characters comes a link to Wikipedia's master list of lists of fictional characters, including lists of literary characters with nine fingers, one-time characters on The Simpsons, characters in Don Quixote, and many others.

Shaft! Ya damne righte. (100% via MetaFilter)

What the hell happened to the weather? Wasn't it like 90 degrees last week?

Ooh baby. Goodbye productivity. IGN has an extensive review.

L.A. museums open their walls to comics as true works of art. Is it long overdue, still an odd mix, or simply inviting cartoonists to a party they may not want to attend? (also via Bookslut)

Well, they don't. Updates on what became of the entire cast (photographed here in let's say 2003, though sadly not by me). Via Cynical-C.

Editor and Publisher reports that The Complete Calvin and Hobbes is one of the most expensive books ever to make the New York Times bestseller list, while the AP tries and fails to sniff out Bill Waterson in his hometown. (via Bookslut)

There's a huge package from Amazon sitting in our living room that I'm not allowed to touch. Either it's The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, or I'm gonna be one disappointed little boy.

The Munch Museum in Oslo is selling a board game about the armed theft of "The Scream," the expressionist masterpiece taken from the gallery more than a year ago. (via)

.

Two from BookNinja: A piece from The Weekend Australian on missing literary masterpieces (such as Hemingway's first novel, Plath's Double Take, and Shakespeare's elusive Love's Labours Won) and a piece from mediabistro wondering whether Watchmen might be overhyped (it is not).

Since the Spanish conquistadors arrived in Mexico in 1519, the story of that country's indigenous people has largely been told by others....

But in 1992 a small organization in Chiapas, Mexico's poorest state, began to correct this imbalance by providing cameras and basic photography instruction to the local Maya Indians, many of whom could be descendants of those who were depicted by outsiders in the past.

Cool story at The New York Times.

The Rake has a few words about Jaimee's favorite prose writer, Stanley Elkin (whose work she obsessively collects), including a link to this interview at The Paris Review.

UPDATE: As Rake promises, "A Poetics for Bullies" is a good story. You can read it sub-legally here.

At the Morning News.

The following are excerpts from actual one-star Amazon.com reviews of books from Time’s list of the 100 best novels from 1923 to the present. Some entries have been edited.

Catch-22 (1961)
Author: Joseph Heller

“Obviously, a lot people were smoking a lot of weed in the ‘60s to think this thing is worth reading.”

The Great Gatsby (1925)
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

“It grieves me deeply that we Americans should take as our classic a book that is no more than a lengthy description of the doings of fops.”

Lolita (1955)
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

“1) I’m bored. 2) He uses too many allusions to other novels, so that if you’re not well read, this book makes no sense. 3) Most American readers are not fluent in French, so to have conversations or interjections in French with no translation is plain dumb. 4) Did I mention I was bored? 5) As with another reviewer, I agree, he uses a lot of huge words that just slow a person down. And it’s not for theatrics either, it’s just huge words mid-sentence when describing something simple. Nothing in the sense of imagery is gained. 6) Also, to sum it up, it’s a story about a pedophile.”

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

“In the novel, they often speak of a planet called Tralfamadore, where he was displayed in a zoo with a former movie star by the name of Montana Wildhack. I thought that the very concept of a man who was kidnapped by aliens was truly unbelievable and a tad ludicrous. I did not find the idea of aliens kidnapping a human and putting them in a zoo very plausible. While some of the Tralfamadorians’ concept of death and living in a moment would be comforting for a war veteran, I found it relatively odd. I do not believe that an alien can kidnap someone and house them in a zoo for years at a time, while it is only a microsecond on earth. I also do not believe that a person has seven parents.”

I'm pretty sure that last one has to be a gag. (via Pandagon)

UPDATE: More here.

At the Guardian, via MetaFilter.

This site collects unusual spellings of a particular kind, which have come to be called eggcorns. Typical examples include free reign (instead of free rein) or hone in on (instead of home in on), and many more or less common reshapings of words and expressions: a word or part of a word is semantically reanalyzed, and the spelling reflects the new interpretation.

We went to Xanadu: Home of the Future on my first trip to Disney World. They just tore it down. (via Gravity Lens)

We'd sell it for half that.

Imagine a world without copyright.

A world without copyright is easy to imagine. The level playing field of cultural production - a market accessible for everyone - would once again be restored. A world without copyright would ffer the guarantee of a good income to many artists, and would protect the public domain of knowledge and creativity. And members of the public would get what they are entitled to: a surprisingly rich and varied menu of artistic alternatives.

(via Bookslut)

Romance of the Jedi.

Among other things, newly discovered comics blog Monitor Duty also has a good three-part feature on the history of Superman.

Part I
Part II
Part III

There's also one for Aquaman.

My reward for finishing the bulk of my fellowship and grad school applications today was the Crisis on Infinite Earths trade paperback, which I've wanted to read for quite a long time but could never justify purchasing. (This was, needless to say, the something else I mentioned in yesterday's other comics post.) As someone who was really into the DC Universe as a kid it's fascinating stuff, even if a lot of the more-obscure continuity flew over my head. Comics were even more juvenile in '85 than they are now, and some of the art and language seems particularly outdated and old-fashioned -- but Crisis still worth revisiting, especially in light of the current DC worlds-will-live worlds-will-die superultrawickedmegacrossover. Much of Infinite Crisis consists of callback to iconic events from the original Crisis.

Earlier in the month I posted a bunch of Crisis links you might want to check out, if you're into that sort of thing. In that earlier post I missed this page, which is probably the most useful of all, an excellent multi-part retrospective and primer on the entire apocalyptic affair.

Two thousand years of sexual advice from The Times Online.

“The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind.” Dr William Acton, Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1858)

Can MP3 players cause hearing loss? I smell a lawsuit.

Check out pretty pictures from:

The Agent 002 Cabal
Kenichi Nakane
Marcos Chin (whose "New Boston" is pictured below)



(via Rashomon and Drawn!)

In Japan we have many stories about God and Goddess.
But we forgot them little by little.
So, this site treats them mainly.

You're going to hell just for knowing about this. Via Cynical-C.

Way back at the beginning of the blog I mentioned Superman: Red Son, an Elseworlds story about Superman crashing in the Ukraine instead of the U.S. Well, I bought it from Barnes and Noble today after stumbling across it while looking for something else, and it's just as good as it seemed. Highly, highly recommended. Best trade paperback ever.

Mary Roach set out to write a skeptical account of the afterlife and wound up a believer. Salon interviews. The San Francisco Chronicle reviews.

Meta-comic from Wally Wood. Cute. (via Bookslut)

Neither Bookslut nor Slate is especially impressed by the much-discussed Marcus-Franzen fracas. From Slate:

We might expect Marcus to point out that Franzen's essay is a caricature of this very old debate, and that in other contexts Franzen has shown himself to be extremely reluctant to label himself a popular author—notably, his confessed ambivalence at having been named an Oprah writer. Instead, Marcus treats us to a humorless diatribe, as if he and Franzen had invented their respective positions and were obliged to defend them like nuggets of newly panned gold. Dismissing The Corrections as "a retreat into the comforts of a narrative style that was already embraced by the culture," he claims that Franzen has become a public advocate against "literature as an art form, against the entire concept of artistic ambition." Most curiously, he blames Franzen for putting the small publisher FC2 in jeopardy with the NEA by writing a New Yorker "Talk of the Town" piece in which he mistakes a package from FC2 for a bomb. We'd all like to think that a novelist's 300-word anecdote could prompt a congressional hearing. But to make this kind of claim seriously is to betray a certain willful paranoia. It's as if Marcus just can't resist playing David to Franzen's Goliath.

Your childhood is calling. All is forgiven.

I owned so many of these. (via Cynical-C)

Statues of Lenin from around the world, from Mother Russia (naturally) but also Italy and even the U.S. (via LeninFilter)

The NYo on evo devo, the new new revolution in evolutionary science which holds that genes' turning on and off is the primary engine of evolution.

Evo devo, punk-band-inspired slang for “evolutionary developmental biology,” holds the promise of a radical new way to look at life’s evolution. Its central thesis is simple. Organisms show two kinds of change through time: during the lifetime of a single animal (you don’t look much like the egg you started as) and during the evolutionary history of a biological lineage (you don’t look much like your three-and-a-half-billion-year-old ancestor). Evo devo’s key claim is that the first kind of change can provide important insights into the second.

Backwards City residents national and international, we desperately need your help in spreading Backwards City contest flyers regarding our upcoming fiction and poetry contest ($400 prizes in each category) and poetry chapbook contest ($250 dollars plus fifty copies).

Do you know a place where writers congregate? Wouldn't that place look better with a Backwards City contest flyer hanging there?

Writing programs, English departments, coffee houses, used bookstores, street corners: these are all places that might be beautified with the addition of a Backwards City contest flyer.

As with so much else, we will owe you. Big. Thanks.

Great Flickr collection. (via Rashomon)

Finally, a proposal I can get behind. The writer specifically mentions Zadie Smith's author photos, which reminded me of one of the great lightbulb moments from my undergraduate years: the accidental discovery by one of my classmates of a British edition of White Teeth in the library.

A quick comparison revealed some interesting differences. The author photo in the back of the British edition portrayed Smith as bookish, almost librarian-like, with huge glasses, freckles, and confused, curly hair done up haphazardly behind her head. In the American photo we've all seen, of course, she looks like a model: no glasses, straight hair, flawless skin, a sultry pout, and (worst of all) it looked to us like her skin tone had even been digitally lightened.

Seemed to say a lot. [via Bookslut]

This makes my stomach hurt. [Flash] [via Monkeyfilter]

The Guardian on conceptual art. [via Bookninja]

Did Jewish intelligence evolve in tandem with Jewish diseases as a result of discrimination in the ghettos of medieval Europe? That’s the premise of a controversial new study that has some preening and others plotzing.

It's still pseudoscience, but at least this time it's complimentary.

The smug-looking picture of Larry David that accompanies the article is the best part of the article. (via A&L Daily, though Matt Yglesias was talking about this yesterday too)

Escape it. [Flash] Warning: Levels, including time and items, are cumulative, which makes things expontentially more difficult as you progress. (also via Cynical-C)

Neat Flash applet (via Cynical-C) allows you to make your own police sketches. Just for instance, here's Backwards City's own Tom Christopher, currently wanted in twelve states:



(What began as a cheap burn quickly became a labor of love.)

Via Rake's Progress comes The Morning News's interview with forthcoming Backwards City #3 contributor* Jonathan Lethem, whose comments in the interview explode the gap between fiction and nonfiction, between realism and experimentalism, and between literature and a quilting bee, among other things. I'm tempted to just quote the darn whole thing, but I ought not, so here's what I thought was by far the most important bit, about the widespread, inexplicable critical uneasiness with the speculative/the experimental/the surreal/the what-have-you:

JL: ...Certainly, yes, there’s a kind of relentless bad faith expressed when reviewers or critics remark on one element in a novel as though it’s a remarkable piece of metaphor or surrealism, as though they’ve never encountered such a thing before. They’re shocked, just shocked that something is being proposed—they act as though it is utterly unfamiliar to them, what they really mean is that they object to it on principle, on class or political grounds like those I just described. So, by reacting as though the incursion were new, instead of familiar, it permits a kind of disingenuous head-scratching: “Hmm, perhaps this new method is of interest, or could be, in the hands of the most serious of writers. We’ll have to watch closely and see.” You saw this happening when Roth’s new book was reviewed. Roth’s use of the “alternate history” was treated, in certain quarters, as though, first of all, Roth himself had never written a book that challenged mimetic propriety—suddenly The Breast didn’t exist, suddenly The Great American Novel didn’t exist. Suddenly Counterlife didn’t exist. To write about this thing with a 10-foot pole, and say, “What’s this strange method? What have we got here? One of the great pillars of strictly realist fiction has inserted something very odd into his book. We’ll puzzle over this as though it’s unprecedented.” It was as though there had been no Thomas Pynchon. As though Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut, Angela Carter, Robert Coover had been thrown into the memory hole. Was there never a book called The Public Burning? Do we really have to retrace our steps so utterly in order to reinscribe our class anxieties? Not to mention, of course, the absolute ignorance of international writing implicit in the stance: where’s Cortazar, Abe, Murakami, Calvino, and so very many others? Well, the status quo might argue, patronizingly, those cute magical-realist methods—how I despise that term—are fine for translated books, but we here writing in English hew to another standard of ‘seriousness.’ Not to mention, of course, the quarantine that’s been implicitly and silently installed around genre writing that uses the same method as Roth’s with utmost familiarity. Well, the status quo might argue, sounding now like an uncle in a P.G. Wodehouse novel: Ah, yes, well, we all know that stuff is, how do you say it, old boy? Rather grubby. No, I say, no. This isn’t good enough, not for the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books, in 2004. Let me say it simply: there is nothing that was proposed in Roth’s book that could be genuinely unfamiliar to a serious reader of literary fiction of the last 25 years, 30 years, 50 years. To treat it as unfamiliar is a bogus naiveté—one that disguises an attack on modernism itself, in the guise of suspiciousness about what are being called post-modern techniques. It actually reflects a discomfort with the entire century.

RB: Seemingly smart and savvy people fall prey to this impulse.

JL: I agree. Which is why I was so exercised. It’s not remarkable when some well-meaning but misguided, not particularly well-read reviewer from a not-trendsetting newspaper says, “Oh wow, what have we here? Roth’s history isn’t real history.” But when responsible critics with access to the wealth of methods and motifs and strategies that have been employed in contemporary fiction, American fiction, play at being unsettled by the deployment of such an overtly familiar technique, what they’re doing is retrenching. They’re pulling up the drawbridge. I think there’s a lot of that going on right now.

Oh, hell, I'll quote twice, because I've thought a lot about one question of Robert's ("Where is the seam or break in your career trajectory?") when thinking about Lethem, and I was glad to see him answer it:

JL: There’s a big one right now. A lot of people are led, understandably, to thinking of Fortress as a break with what proceeded it. In my view, though, it’s the opposite. Fortress is the culmination of what I’d been doing to that point. It recapitulates almost every interest and every concern of the early books, and utilizes all the tools I’d accumulated, all the methods and motifs I had been exploring and gathering.

RB: They think that because it’s more personal and—

JL:—yes, and because it’s twice as long as the other books, and because it has a more extensive commitment to mimetic tricks. Since it’s so personal, it can seem that I must have shaken off what I was doing in order to get to that place, but actually what I’d been doing led inevitably to that effort. It’s the work that comes next that’s a real break. Precisely because I’ve now discharged a lot of my original material by exploring it in this immense fiction—and then going even further with the essays, explaining some of the personal material that fueled that fiction. So, I’m not bloody likely to need to transpose childhood trauma into Marvel comics again—for perhaps the rest of my life (laughs again).

Read the whole thing™.

--
*We just found out about this. He and the also-excellent Chris Offut have given us a collaborative humor piece. It, too, is excellent. Backwards City has arrived. Backwards City #3 will overturn paradigms and unsettle small minds. Perhaps you should subscribe?

Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons talks to Publisher's Weekly to promote the new collector's edition of Watchmen, which includes supplemental material like the original proposal and script pages. For Watchmen annotations, there's still no better place than The Annotated Watchmen.

References to Nabokov in other works.

I still don't know that a one-note parody of Bill O'Reilly can really carry a whole show, but Stephen Colbert's gonna give it his all, by gum. You can see the opening monologue to last night's Colbert Report at One Good Move.

There were some pretty good bits in there, but his pronunciation of the show's title was the best joke by far.

I just don't see why he had to leave The Daily Show in the first place. Is this the end of This Week In God? (via Cynical-C)

Steven Souter examines the Drake Equation and takes a stab at how many advanced extraterrestial civilizations we might expect to find waiting for us in the Milky Way. Assuming we don't ruin the planet and kill ourselves first, of course. (via Gravity Lens)

A 40th Anniversary Tribute to Rubber Soul. (Link includes several track samples.) With Ted Leo, Sufjan Stevens, The Fiery Furnaces, and others. [Amazon]

At last, a definitive list! Now no one ever has to talk about this again.

In all seriousness, where's my Calvino?*

Impressed/glad to see Watchmen (Amazon) and Snow Crash (ditto) make the cut. And Vonnegut and Heller, natch. Nabokov rightly two-peats.

Infinite Jest, though? Really?

(also via Bookninja)

--
* UPDATE: English-language novels my aunt fanny.

So says Book Standard.

McMeel says the shortfall was not the result of a mistake, but rather the publisher’s desire to create a collectible “limited edition.” Rebecca Murray-Schuler, director of publicity, said that calculations for the print run were based on the performance of The Complete Far Side, which sold well with an initial run of 150,000. “Given the labor intensity of this project, we were not in the position where we could go back to press at a moment’s notice,” she said. “Powell’s situation is not unique. We are hearing from many accounts that expect to be sold out well before the traditional holiday shopping rush begins.”

So if you want to get me this for my birthday, you better hurry. (via BookNinja)

Now with cover by Chris Ware. (via Drawn!)

Philip Pullman scrawls 'Narnia sux' on the wall of the men's room, and the New Zealand Herald is there:

To millions of readers of the original C. S. Lewis books, the story is a childhood tale of wonder and triumph, but a celebrated fantasy author, Philip Pullman, has warned they are stories of racism and thinly veiled religious propaganda that will corrupt children rather than inspire them.

...

Pullman, an avowed atheist is the noted author of a trilogy, His Dark Materials, which has itself drawn strong criticism from some religious groups.

Dear Mr. Pullman: There is this thing called irony...

(via Bookninja)

Very cool applet at krazydad.com.

Like the unlikely potential side effect of losing the last fifteen years of your memory. It happened to Jonathan Cott.

An essay. Via A&L Daily, which is also talkin' Dada.

Clicking on this Rashomon link for vaguely Magritteish, somewhat folk-artsy, very cool illustrator Stefano Vitale led me to the Web site of Lindgren & Smith, agents who represent a whole slew of excellent artists. I like Brian Zick's hyperreal stuff a whole lot.

That's what Robert Winston wants to know.

Metafilter has a good thread going right now on New Games Journalism, including a recent Guardian gamesblog article on ten 'unmissable' articles in the genre.

Neil points to Cory pointing to this hilarious wuss-rock cover of "Baby Got Back." (Direct link to MP3.) Well done, sir. It just gets better as it goes on.

I don't usually do a "Book of This Arbitrary Length of Time"-style pick, but Chris Ware's new book (The Acme Novelty Library Final Report to Shareholders and Rainy Day Saturday Afternoon Fun Book) absolutely is the Book of This Arbitrary Length of Time. It's gorgeous and beautiful and deep and subtle and timely and evocative and true and funny and very sad and all those things. Every page* is perfect. It's the single best thing (in any medium) that I've looked at in recent memory.

I'm really in love with the book, and possibly also with Chris Ware, and despite the Library's rather pricey nature (the one drawback), if you've bothered to read the post this far I'm certain you will be too. Salon's review last month is much more eloquent than I can manage this morning, so I'll just say it's really, really, really good and leave it at that.

(And the aforementioned, unrepentant excellence of The Acme Novelty Library goes to show just how jumping-the-gun wrong that silly New Yorker article I linked to the other day was, already proclaiming the Essential Mediocrity of Contemporary Comics and The Inevitable Death of the Medium and such. I'm not convinced. Call The Acme Novelty Library Defense Exhibit A.)

Here is the image from the book referenced in the post title, which incidentally you can no longer buy prints of from Buenaventura Press but can still occasionally from eBay. More spellbinding images from The Acme Novelty Library can be peeped at the Chris Ware exhibition at the Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago. The image at left, a self-portrait, was shamelessly stolen from this Austin Chronicle profile of Ware. I really have no way to work in this previously-linked French Documentary on Chris Ware, but it's also very good. Wikipedia continues to exist.

Speaking obliquely of Jimmy Corrigan, I'm teaching it for the first time in my Intro to Lit class in a few weeks. I'll let you know how it goes. I suspect it will go well. I'm excited.

--
* Some of the text-ad pages are frankly too texty for my tastes, and I couldn't get the much-lauded glow-in-the-dark map of the constellations to work with my eyes last night. I couldn't make any shapes out. (Maybe if I had given my eyes more time to adjust to the darkness. Or maybe I'm suffering from glow-in-the-dark-blindness. Or just run-of-the-mill blindness.) But these are minor, infinitesimal criticisms, applying to about five pages in the whole book, if that. Please ignore this footnote**.
** Seriously, get the book.

Revealed.

And my long-cherished "Dr. Claw was really the Chief" theory finally meets its end. (via MeFi)

Propaganda posters trumpeting the burgeoning Chinese space progream.

This one is my favorite.

This one too.

(via Boing Boing)

Foreign Policy celebrates 35 years of publication with a look at 2040, asking famous thinkers to "speculate on the ideas, values, and institutions the world takes for granted that may disappear in the next 35 years." Say goodbye to:

The Sanctity of Life

The Euro

Anonymity

Monogomy

and many others

(via MetaFilter)

How much further can graphic novels go? asks The New Yorker.

Nearly all art movements are launched by work that, when the dust clears, turns out to have been their definitive, peak contribution. “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” looms over the busy ramifications of Cubism as “The Waste Land” looms over the modern poetry that it inspired. Accordingly, there may never be another graphic novel as good as “Jimmy Corrigan,” even by Ware himself—whose current serial in the Times Magazine, though tangy, bespeaks a style on cruise control.

Couldn't you say the same thing about novels after Don Quixote? Or movies after Casablanca? Or any arbitrary art form after any arbitrary achievement in said art form?

But why would you?

Harold Pinter wins the Nobel Prize.

Princess Bride: The Musical. Sweet. It makes no sense, but sweet. [via BookNinja]

We have seen the future, and it wants to kill us. That's how it looks, anyhow, thanks to the increasingly popular view of the past as a chronicle of disasters unforetold but colorfully retold in a string of ubiquitous books. In Seattle Weekly. [via Bookninja]

The New York Times tackles Infinite Crisis. More on this just down the page.

Blockbuster Could Have Bought Netflix for $50 Million. Netflix is now worth over 1.4 billion dollars, $600,000,000 more than Blockbuster. (via Waxy)

It's about time. I really don't know why it took so long.

Geek alert.

Twenty years ago DC Comics launched the Crisis on Infinite Earths [Wikipedia, trade paperback], a universal reboot that eliminated the multiverse from DC continuity. Today they launched the sequel, Infinite Crisis, which to all appearances SPOILER - HIGHLIGHT TO READ looks to be bringing the multiverse back. Picking up on threads left over from the last several months of build-up (as well as several threads left over from the original Crisis), this is shaping up to be a huge comics event. I read the first issue today and I was pretty impressed with what I saw, particularly the big reveal on the last page. I'll definitely be picking up the remaining six issues.

Want a a primer on the ins and outs of obscure DC continuity before you buy IC #1? All this I can truly deliver.

Sequart's Twelve-Part Guide to Infinite Crisis

Crisis Counseling at DCComics.com

Comics 101's Guide to the Crisis on Infinite Earths Parts I and II

The Annotated Crisis on Infinite Earths

The Continuity Pages on Crisis

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 8:59 PM  |

Also outstanding. (via MeFi)

Outstanding.

Via Rashomon.

The worst scifi sentences ever published.

Spoiler-laden summaries of recent superhero comics. A+. (via AskMe)

UNCIEF has a new antiwar ad campaign:



Smurfette is left for dead. Baby Smurf is left crying and orphaned as the Smurf's village is carpet bombed by warplanes -- a horrific scene and imagery not normally associated with the lovable blue-skinned cartoon characters. [Link] [Another Link]

Here's the video.

'Howl' is alive with rhythm and reason and risk, working together. It does what you hope every good poem should do: knocks language about a bit, twists language with new reason, and says something in such a way that makes you lift your head from the page and think about the world anew. A testament to the power of 'Howl' is that it is still being printed - the edition I have is the fifty-ninth such printing - since its first publication in 1956 (which instigated an obscenity trial). The committal to print is an important part of the development of poetry, of why poetry is more than a throwaway rant or the la-di-da of a happy pop lyric. And yet, this notion that a poem is language arranged in a form that has the power to speak - to shock - beyond the immediate person is under heavy and consistent assault in contemporary poetry circles.

Ironically, it is performance poetry that is eating away at the universal characteristics of poetry. Voice has become, not something that is welded into lines of language on a once-blank page, but a fetishised thing of personal ownership - my voice, with my accent and all I have to say with this voice is to do with me, me, me. That's why the only way you can experience this language is if I personally perform it for you.

(via Bookslut)

Reinventing Newark: Visions of the City from the Twentieth Century. Proposed civic improvements to Newark that were never actually accomplished. For instance, 1983's somewhat derivative Newark Tower:



(via my dad)

Yet another Kurt Vonnegut interview. (via MeFi)

SciFi Themes Invade the Literary World. [audio] Ideas and themes once found only in science fiction are now a staple of films and novels. But not all writers dipping into the genre want to be associated with it. Rick Kleffel of member station KUSP reports. At NPR. Among other things, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and (spoilers for) Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go are discussed.

(via Gravity Lens)

Clever little metareview feature from Entertainment Weekly.

The second season of my new favorite television show is out Tuesday.

Neat little article on Bread Loaf from Seven Days, Vermont's alt-weekly.

Yes, I know it's supposed to be "paper bag." My point stands.

I read two very good books on the plane ride back to Greensboro today. The first was the much anticipated Magic for Beginners by UNCG's own Kelly Link. Like any short story collection, Link's book has one or two stories that don't quite hit on all cylinders (for me, it was "The Hortlak" and "Stone Animals," the latter of which was inexplicably chosen for The Best American Short Stories 2005) -- but the rest are fantastic. Check out, just for instance, "The Faery Handbag," or "The Great Divorce" from a recent One Story. Truly great book. You can also read Link's first collection, Stranger Things Happen, which is also great, and available for free online.

After Link I turned to Aimee Bender's The Girl with the Flammable Skirt. Yeah, I know, 1998 called, it wants its Book of the Year back. But it was new to me -- and definitely worth reading.

Top 15 Biblical Ways to Acquire a Wife. (via Cynical-C)

On the subject of "Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It," I don't have a tremendous amount to say which Patrick hasn't already said. The essay, which is very good but which is very much not perfect, which I agree with almost completely but find myself compelled to argue against, suffers from precisely the flaw that rebecca articulated in the comments of Pat's post: the article focuses way too much on Franzen personally and not nearly enough on experimental writing as a worthy literary pursuit in and of itself.

Now by no means do I want to blast the article. I love Ben Marcus. I love that someone is saying these things, and in Harper's, no less. As someone who deeply loves what is called "experimental writing," who reads it for fun and who has even been known to dabble in such a thing from time to time with mixed results, I am beside myself with agreement when I see Marcus say something like, for instance, this:

If literary titles were about artistic merit and not the rules of convention, about achievement and not safety, the term "realism" would be an honorary one, conferred only on writing that actually builds unsentimentalized reality on the page, matches the complexity of life with an equally rich arrangement in language. It would be assigned no matter the stylistic or linguistic method, no matter the form. This, alas, would exclude many writers who believe themselves to be realists, most notably those who seem to equate writing with operating a massive karaoke machine. In such a scheme, Gary Lutz, George Saunders, and Aimee Bender would be considered realists right alongside William Trevor, Alistair MacLeod, and Alice Munro. It would be a title you'd have to work for, and not just one you inherited because you favored a certain compositional style.

This is almost precisely the fine line Patrick and I try to walk with Backwards City Review's fiction: a style that might be called experimental realism, fiction that captures reality but loads the wrong speed film, leaves the apeture too wide, and then overexposes the negative. The stories we want to publish are the stories that surprise us, that work us hard but which in the end point back to something tangible and felt and real. In the fiction department of this magazine he's the neat one and I'm the messy one, he's the realist and I'm, well, not -- and while we're hardly ever on speaking terms, we both hope that the product of our unholy union is something that can't be impaled on either horn of fiction's false dilemna.

In a phrase, George Saunders Is Our King. (And if anyone ever asks you just what the point of BCR is, this is the post to point them to.)

So Marcus starts out saying very good things I agree with completely. Why, then, does the final two-thirds of the essay -- degenerating at one point into a silly strawman over Fog Index readability scores -- become such a petulant Franzenfest? Isn't Franzen completely beside the point? Sadly, Marcus opens himself up to exactly the criticism he tries to slough off with a joke, that he is in fact "the opportunistic writer who tried to take down Franzen, the reigning lit king." The scope of this essay is much bigger and much more important than just countering Franzen's skewed opinions, and I wish Ben Marcus had taken just a moment to reconsider the essay's focus before sending it along.

Besides Franzophobia, the article also suffers from a second, subtler problem, which is that it commits the very sin of self-aggrandizement and self-congratulation that Marcus repeatedly accuses Franzen of. According to Marcus, experimental writers are "striving for individuality", "ambitious" people "who appreciate the artistic achievements of others ubt still dream for [themselves], however foolishly, that new arrangments are possible, new styles, new concoctions of languages that might set off a series of deliciosu mental explosions." In short, they're literary Jesuses, literary saints. It's all a bit much.

But I'm trashing the article again, aren't I? Shit. Look, personally I agree with 99% of what Marcus says and about 5% of what Franzen says. And when Marcus gets going, boy, he really knows how to turn a phrase:

What I find difficult, when I read, is to encounter other people's achievements passed off as one's own. I find it difficult to discover literary tradition so warmly embraced and coddled, as if artists existed merely to have flagrant intercourse with the past, guaranteed to draw a crowd but also certain to cover that crowd in an old, heavy breading. I find it difficult when a narrative veers toward soap opera, when characters are explained by their childhoods, when setting is used as spackle to hold together chicken-wire characters who couldn't even stand up to an artificial wind, when depictions of landscape are intermissions while the author catches his breath and gets another scene ready. I find writing difficult that too readily subscribes to the artistic ideas of other writers, that willingly accepts langauge as a tool that must be seen and not heard, that believes in happy endings, easy revelations, and bittersweet moments of self-understanding. I find writing difficult that could have been written by anyone. That's difficult to me, horribly so. Mr. Difficult? It's not Gaddis. Mr. Difficult is the writer willing to sell short the aims of literature, to serve as its fuming, unwanted ambassador, to apologize for its excesses or near misses, its blind alleys, to insult the reading public with film-ready versions of reality and experience and inner sensations, scenes flying jauntily by under the banner of realism, which lately grants it full critical immunity.

This is good stuff and all exactly correct, and the essay is filled with gems like this. Which is why it's too bad that all anybody's going to remember about this article in a few months is that it was that nasty hit piece on Jonathan Franzen.

After a week of disappointment and heartache, nytimes.com finally coughs up the A.O. Scott article on Vonnegut J.T. mentioned in the comments to this post. Check it out.

Jaimee and I visited the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts today to see the current exhibition on landscape painting in Provence, as well as the permanent collection. Great stuff, particularly in the Decorative Arts and contemporary collections. Obviously, a webpage cannot do a museum justice, but check the place out if you're ever in le area.

There are also a number of good pieces in The New Yorker this week as well, including this oft-linked essay on denial-of-service-attack internet extortionists and the people who fight them, an offline-only Medical Dispatch on reflex sympathetic dystrophy (Wikipedia), and a very good short story about not making it from Jeffrey Eugenides.

And I'm only just now seeing about the earthquake in Southeast Asia. Good lord. How terrible.

...but which *aren't* the infamous Ben Marcus experimental-fiction smackdown on Jonathan Franzen (which Patrick already had a few words about) [excerpt]. I'll have some words about that myself later. I just wanted to give a shoutout to the whole magazine, which is one of the better Harper's I've seen in a while, with excellent essays on the inevitable (and, yes, already fully underway) abuses of the Kelo eminent domain decision and Zadie Smith's oeuvre, as well as two short pieces from Margaret Atwood. Unfortunately I can't link to any of these things, because for reasons known only to them Harper's hardly puts anything online.

Despite a lackluster-at-first-glance table of contents, the current issue* of The Believer satisfies, with an interesting interview with Wes Anderson composer Mark Mothersbaugh [full text online] and a fantastic analysis of the recent twenty-seven-year Cerebus series by genius artist/absurd misogynist David Sim [only an excerpt available online].

Intriguingly, they also have a letter to the editor which seems to oddly echo the whole Marcus/Franzen blowup in Harper's.

--
*And when I say "current issue," apparently I mean "last month's issue." I feel like I only just got mine.

Every so often, for no reason in particular, it's nice to link to Exploding Dog.

it's more about where i am going
mine
but where am i?
someday you will be a star
i must kill all of the robots
when i was young it seemed that life was so beautiful

"Fiction in the Age of Poverty," by Laila Lalami. Via Bookninja.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that, in the last decade, American fiction has been fixated on the middle and upper classes. The suburban novel dramatized their love affairs, their existential crises, and their boredom with a life of carpools. (The Ice Storm, Little Children.) The chick-lit novel enjoyed tremendous popularity by featuring women who worry about their weight, their shoes, and dating the right man. (The Devil Wears Prada, Bergdorf Blondes.) The campus novel brought us academics' anxieties over racial discrimination or tenure or old age. (The Human Stain, Wonder Boys.) Meanwhile, the poor were stuck with silent or supporting roles. Something very tangible happened to American protagonists in the last ten years. Unlike a great many of their fellow countrymen, they stopped worrying about making rent.

On the plane today I finally had time to read George Singleton's recent (and highly acclaimed) novel, Novel, and pretty much the only word I have to describe it is madcap. Insightful, biting, and meta in all the right ways, it's funny, frantic, and very very good.

Next up: That other beloved UNC-Tate St. MFAer, Kelly Link.

Neat list of musician bloggers, including Radiohead, Ted Leo, William Shatner, and (sigh) Adam Duritz. (via Kottke)

Also of note: On the Couch with James, Kids Respond to "Little Eyes", and Yo La Breakout! [Flash]

It wasn't me who said it, it was the Catholic Church.

Now you can watch the first nine minutes of Serenity online. I don't know if this is a good sign for the chances for a sequel, or a bad sign. Perhaps it doesn't augur anything for the sequel either way. In any event, I continue to have trouble with this sexy/swordwielding River picture. It has nothing to do with the character. (via AICN)