cutting the internet into links; snortinglit-related
-John Updike's won the PEN/Faulkner Award for his story collection, The Early Stories. "What signal is being sent here about the state of American fiction?" asks the Lit Saloon. "…Its contents were all previously published -- the newest story almost three decades ago (and some half a century ago)." Meanwhile, Rake's Progress quotes from Nicholson Baker's U&I: "…and I was stunned to recognize that in Updike we were dealing with a man so naturally verbal that he could write his fucking memoirs on a ladder!"
-The NY Times reports on Anne Fadiman's departure from The American Scholar. "[John Churchill, the publisher of the journal] declined to specify what changes the society envisioned for the journal, saying only that Ms. Fadiman's successor would be asked to reduce a budget deficit of about $250,000 by 50 percent."
-The NY Times finally gets around to Andrew Sean Greer's The Confessions of Max Tivoli. (Btw, I didn't know Andrew has a twin brother, an unpublished novelist. Given their identical DNA, do you think Andrew's success gives the brother hope, or suicidal ideations?)
-Ralf Zeigermann (aka, the Cartoonist) has updated his page of Finnegans Wake illustrations.
media
-Pocket movies, clips designed for your Pocket PC or Smartphone.
-Another lame Virginia Heffernan piece, this time about Kerry's appearance on MTV's "Choose or Lose." (I've always hated the vacant young person finally confronts politics and feels something trope, which V-Heff uses to frame this piece. Its last sentence, piggybacking on its first: "Somewhere, the girl in the red sweatshirt is nodding with great intensity, furrowing her young brow for the first time." Oh, give me a fucking break.)
-I don't think she looks good.
more, other
-test your site's readability
-eblots: cut rate internet therapy
-vintage toy collection
-another instance of creepy food anthropomorphism
-It's an easy transition from being "quirky children" to being "quirkyalones." "George has an unusual obsession — the vacuum cleaner. 'We have photos of him hugging it at 6 months of age,' the authors write."