Parodies of David Foster Wallace are usually unsuccessful. Here is an exception. Scroll down to the bottom of the first page. [via Gawker]

Wikipedia edit of the day: Nicholson Baker's mom is a wikipedian as well.

Is Philip Roth having cybersex? Surely that's the implication of these remarks, from an interview with Der Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: You have email and don't use it?
Roth: I use it with one person, one person only, because I don't... I don't want to be bothered.
SPIEGEL: May we ask who the one person is?
Roth: One person. I have to have some fun.

I have this kind of self-important rule about not seeing movies of books I really like. (When T and her dad went to see Atonement over Christmas I saw Juno instead, which, incidentally? Schmaltz for hipsters.) But I will make an exception for the Coen brothers.

Via DF, a 1996 interview with David Foster Wallace on Infinite Jest:

Part of the stuff that was rattling around in my head when I was doing this is that it seems to me that one of the scary things about sort of the nihilism of contemporary culture is that we're really setting ourselves up for fascism. Because as we empty more and more kind of values, motivating principles, spiritual principles, almost, out of the culture, we're creating a hunger that eventually is going to drive us to the sort of state where we may accept fascism just because -- you know, the nice thing about fascists is they'll tell you what to think, they'll tell you what to do, they'll tell you what's important. And we as a culture aren't doing that for ourselves yet.

Your recommended reading for today: Sam Anderson's funny review of How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read.

Another James Wood piece, this one from the Boston Globe. Wood's rep seems to have congealed around the fact that he sometimes criticizes books by famous and admired writers. As a corrective to this unfortunately reductive idea, see his reviews of McEwan's Saturday and Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty.

Midweek readings

We wanted to do comedy that was about something, have the character articulate something about the baby-boomer generation that is now getting old and disconnected with the world. Nobody has properly articulated that.

Steve Coogan on Saxondale

The font is one of the oldest tricks in the book. You typeset text in a regular font, I think this was Rotis, and then you blow it up really big on a Xerox machine and then you shrink it down really small. The trick is to see just how much you can distress it and keep it readable. It's gotten harder to do because Xerox machines are so much better.

Chip Kidd on designing book jackets
for Amis, McCarthy, and Updike

Hansen and NBC News maintain that law enforcement and Dateline simply conduct “parallel investigations” that never influence each other. But by this afternoon, in front of Bill Conradt’s house, whatever wall may have once divided Dateline and the police has essentially collapsed.

Esquire on NBC's "To Catch a Predator"

Interview with Reading Comics author Douglas Wolk:

There were a bunch of chapters where I found myself going, “Dude, you’re talking about the story. Use your eyes. Don’t just read the words. Use your eyes, Douglas.” It’s something that because I’m such a word person that it’s hard for me to do, but I realize also that this is how comics work on my brain. This is how comics work on everybody’s brain. And it’s hard to talk about visual things in words in the same way that it’s hard to talk about music in words.

My #1 intellectual hero James Wood is leaving the New Republic for the New Yorker. I have wondered when this was going to happen. Political correspondent Ryan Lizza made the same move a month ago, which is maybe what's behind this comment from Leon Wieseltier: "The New Republic plays many significant roles in American culture, and one of them is to find and to develop writers with whom the New Yorker can eventually staff itself.” Meow!

"Reading Comics"

Signs of comics' maturity are coming thick and fast these days -- I was in Forbidden Planet last weekend, and I swear there was at least 40 percent women in there -- but one of the most hopeful is Douglas Wolk's new book, Reading Comics. The book isn't a history of comics or a survey of the canon or an Understanding Comics-style dissection of the medium's mechanics. It's an intelligent critic's attempt to think about his responses to works of art. It works because Wolk is a a terrific reader -- attentive, insightful, sensitive, broad-minded -- and because he's very good at explaining his enthusiasms in layman's terms.

Wolk (who I've hung out with a couple of times) is unusually good at addressing initiates and novices at once: there's enough hand-holding for the reader who knows only, say, Maus and Persepolis, but even the most remedial paragraphs are larded with nuggets of interpretation and commentary for afficionadi to chew on. The bulk of Reading Comics comprises essays on specific cartoonists and works -- some canonical, some contemporary, some pure pulp. There's no attempt at completeness: Kirby and Crumb, among other colossi, are absent. (The book also largely ignores manga and strip cartoons -- the latter a surprising omission, given the reprint boom and the influence of Herriman, Schultz et al on art comics.) Some of Wolk's readings are clearly intended to upset a few applecarts -- Eisner and Ware come in for sober reappraisals -- but he's never ungenerous or capricious. In every case, he points out things I hadn't noticed in the work, even when he discusses cartoonists I've spent a lot of time with.

Most recent comics criticism wants to see comics as a new kind of literature, rather than a thing in itself, and thus winds up missing comics' drawn-ness. Wolk, on the other hand, is really good at looking: he's alert to the small touches that add up to a drawing style, and he loves the fact that such a style creates reality for the reader. This leads him to focus more on the nuances of illustration than on the panel-to-panel mechanics of comics storytelling (the kind of thing Scott McCloud emphasizes). Peeking out from behind Wolk's judicious tone there's a personal aesthetic. He particularly likes: pages that work as unified designs; comics that explore the connections between parts of a system; thorny, scratchy, "ugly" drawing styles; wild spatial abstraction. (Every item on that list is associated with Steve Ditko, the book's secret hero, and I suspect that if Wolk has an agenda it's to elevate wiry, intellectual Ditkoism to a position alongside massive, kinetic Kirbyism in the American tradition.)

Because Reading Comics is such a personal book, everyone will take issue with a few of Wolk's conclusions. He doesn't have much time for virtuosity, which causes him to underrate Crumb and Ware and to begin a strong essay on Locas by saying that "it's easy to like Jaime Hernandez's comics for the wrong reasons." (Really? Enjoying attractive drawing and witty dialogue is wrong?) And his long discussion of Grant Morrison probably has more to offer the converted than the newbie: he makes The Invisibles sound like an elaborate New Age metaphor, without capturing the punk dynamism and humor that make it a thrilling elaborate New Age metaphor. (I have a similar problem trying to convey what makes Morrison so awesome: if there were a parallel earth that was exactly like ours except that on this one I hadn't read any of Morrison's work, and if in some "Roth of Two Worlds"-style crossover I got to meet my counterpart and was encouraging him to read New X-Men and Seven Soldiers, I'm pretty sure my descriptions would be unconvincing and I would wind up waving my hands and shouting, "No, you don't understand -- it's awesome!")

Far more often, though, Wolk made me want to go back to work I've loved -- Love and Rockets X, Chester Brown's Yummy Fur, Ditko's Spider-Man -- armed with his insight, or to pick up things I haven't read yet. He gets Sim, Moore, and both Hernandezes dead-on. Mostly, he demonstrates that a love of comics can be as meaningful and as rewarding as a love of books or music. Recommended to fans and the curious alike.

When you're writing a novel, you start to sort other people's novels into the following categories: novels that you're confident your novel will be better than, novels that you hope your novel will be better than, novels that you'd love for your novel to be as good as, and novels that you know your novel has no hope of coming close to. (This came to mind because I'm finally reading Mating, which is squarely in the last category.)

When you are feeling low, it is fun to laugh at the stupidity of others: So here's a blog post about Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, which I've just finished reading for the fourth time. Check out the comments, both from David Cawley. Cawley thinks that (a) Hollinghurst himself is the author of the blog entry; (b) Hollinghurst will enjoy hearing his novel compared to Bonfire of the Vanities; (c) Hollinghurst would like to begin a sexually charged e-mail correspondence with David Cawley. The first two, at least, are obviously false.

Shocking decline in literacy among moralizing newspaper columnists

Bad writing is everywhere, of course, but when it shows up in a piece bemoaning the death of reading, it's particularly enjoyable. The piece in question, by one Kathleen Parker, is from the Orlando Sentinel's website. The opening sentences have already been mocked by Bookslut, but they're worth mocking again here:

People who read books are different from other people. They're smarter for one thing. They're more sensual for another. They like to hold, touch and smell what they read.

That's funny for two reasons. (a) It's not true, or at least it's completely speculative. You can maybe infer that book-readers are smarter than average (although then you get into semantics about the word smarter), but you'd have to bring some data to substantiate the "more sensual" claim. (b) It's entirely off-point. If reading books is a good thing, that has nothing to do with what books feel like or smell like.

Then there's this funny thing Parker keeps doing where she uses hyperbole -- a legitimate linguistic device with a long pedigree -- and then turns around and apologizes for using it.

Soon, who knows? Maybe we'll be burning books in the town square chanting: We don't need no dadgum books. We got Innernet porn 'n' satellite TeeVee! OK, so maybe the end of civilization isn't nigh, but the systematic gutting of culture from newspapers is symptomatic of a broadening illiteracy that bodes ill for the republic. [Italics mine]

If you think a book-burning riff will help make your point, go for it. If you think it's a bit far-fetched and might undercut the seriousness of your argument, leave it out. (I'm with option B -- people don't burn things that they don't give a shit about -- but it's your call.) But why on earth would you include it and then dismiss it as unrealistic? Parker does something similar in the last graf:

The loss of yet another book editor and the homogenization (or possible loss) of another review section may not cause the Earth to shift on its axis, but it is symbolic of the devaluing of American letters.

Why raise the possibility of the Earth shifting on its axis only to dismiss it?

Parker's main point is that newspapers that are eliminating book-review sections are "apparent signatories to a suicide pact."

From a practical standpoint, [such cuts make] no sense. Clue: People who read newspapers are also likely book readers. So why do newspaper editors and publishers think that killing one of the few features that readers might -- big word here -- READ is a smart move in an era of newspaper decline?

Because the people who run newspapers have never thought about any of this even once in their lives, and they need Kathleen Parker to tell them which side their bread is buttered on.

Listen, Kathleen: I'm as anxious about the decline in book-reading as you are. (I am, after all, writing a book, and I'm hoping there will be people to buy it when I'm done.) I like book reviews too, maybe more than you do: when you say that Florence King, of the National Review's Misanthrope's Corner, "elevated book reviewing to a literary art form," it makes me wonder if a voracious reader like yourself has gotten around to Virginia Woolf or Edmund Wilson. But if there's one thing book-reading in America doesn't need, it's an illiterate newspaper columnist for a champion.

It's particularly funny watching David Brooks flail around trying to make sense of Darwinism while Robert Wright, who wrote the book on it, is a guest columnist. Today he nails the kind of piece Brooks was trying to write on Thursday. (Wright is kind of my hero, and his The Moral Animal and, especially, Nonzero are crucial pieces of my mental furniture.)

Great promo website for Miranda July's new book. (Via DF.)

Newsweek book critic Malcolm Jones explains why he didn't finish Vikram Chandra's 928-page Sacred Games:

My time is precious. Your time is, too. Who has enough time in the day to do all that we want? When I go home after work, it’s triage every night. I can listen to music. Or I can play music. Or I can answer letters or write. Or I can read a book. Or watch TV. Or watch a DVD on TV. Or go out to a concert or a movie. And those would be the nights that I don’t have to clean up the kitchen, do the laundry or help with homework.

Um, yeah, except — dude? You're a book critic.

Kevin nation army

My friend Kevin Shay (or, as he's known to the media, "former McSweeney's online editor Kevin Shay") has a charming and funny novel out, The End As I Know It: A Novel of Millennial Anxiety. Set just before the turn of the century, it's about a guy driving across the country trying to convince his loved ones that the Y2K bug is about to destroy civilization.

Remember when all we had to worry about was the Y2K bug? Good times ...

Anyway: you can buy the book at Amazon, or you can check out Kevin's swell website. Fun feature: "On This Day Pre-Y2K" -- a look back at some really nutty prognostications, given an innocent and nostalgic glow by subsequent events.

Fact checking: Hey, Gawker? You know I love you, right? And you know how happy I am that you have discovered The Swimming-Pool Library, perhaps my all-time favorite novel. So you know I'm only telling you this out of love: The Line of Beauty is not Hollinghurst's second, it's his fourth.

(Regarding the other two: The Folding Star has some neat stuff in it, but it's set in Belgium; The Spell is kind of mechanical, except for the excellent bureaucrat-on-ecstasy scene. Both, though, are filled with the carefully wrought observations of social behavior, architecture, and anal sex for which Hollinghurst is justly admired.)

So A.N. Wilson was writing his new biography of Sir John Betjeman, and someone sent him a copy of a passionate love letter revealing that Betjeman was having a torrid affair. Wilson included the letter in his book, as evidence that Betjeman had a livlier sex life than was commonly believed.

The Sunday Times has just pointed out that the first letters of each sentence spell out "A.N. Wilson is a shit."