After Iron Man, and the Hulk (again), that is?

Graeme McMillan, of the SF blog io9, has heard rumors about Thor (please no! can only be cheesy), the Avengers (too many of 'em! Plus: Thor), and Ant-Man (actually makes a lot of sense, now that small is beautiful again, but... small guy, giant ants = cheesy). Dissatisfied with these options, McMillan made a few other suggestions on Monday.

Like Doctor Strange, for example!

McMillan's pitch:

Created by Spider-Man's combination of [writer] Stan Lee and [artist] Steve Ditko, Marvel's "Master of The Mystic Arts" has all the potential to crossover to mainstream success. The story of an arrogant famous surgeon who survives a terrible accident but without the finger dexterity to keep slicing and sewing, only to become the world's most powerful magician after a Tibetan retreat, it's Nip/Tuck meets Iron Man meets Harry Potter. Get someone like Guillermo Del Toro to direct and George Clooney to star, and your summer blockbuster is all taken care of.

Sounds great. Except for

According to the always excellent nerd-culture blog, Topless Robot, the most-hated (by parents) of all toys we remember from the 1970s-80s is... Slime.

Topless Robot's Brian Heiler writes:

It was green, sticky, had an odd smell and served absolutely no purpose. Frankly, it looked like a jar of boogers, so naturally, we as kids had to have it. Whether the Slime was produced as its own toy or was part of a He-Man or Harry Potter toyline, it's always been the same putrid stuff, and kids have always done the same thing with it -- smeared it on furniture, carpets, the pet, a younger sibling, in the DVD player, or some other place that ensured total destruction-by-booger. If you are an adult who bought your child slime, you are an idiot. Just say no.

The second most hated toy? Fisher Price's Corn Popper.

Heiler writes:

The National Book Critics Circle has posted its Spring "Good Reads" recommendations, as voted by the reviewer-organization's 825 members, to its blog, Critical Mass. The list, which is intended to highlight good new books that you might not otherwise have heard about, is as follows:

Fiction:

1. Richard Price, "Lush Life"
2. Jhumpa Lahiri, "Unaccustomed Earth"
3. Steven Millhauser, "Dangerous Laughter."
*4. Charles Baxter, "The Soul Thief."
*4. Peter Carey, "His Illegal Self."
*4. J. M. Coetzee, "Diary of Bad Year."
*4. James Collins, "Beginner's Greek."
*4. Brian Hall, "Fall of Frost."
*4. Roxana Robinson, "Cost."
*4. Owen Sheers, "Resistance."

Nonfiction:

1. Nicholson Baker, "Human Smoke: The Beginning of World War II, the End of Civilization."
2. Drew Gilpin Faust, "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War."

A couple of years ago, Rhino Records released "Hallucinations," a collection of 1960s pop-psychedelic tunes; the cover of the CD boasted a period photo of a woman clad in a polka-dotted wimple, posed before a polka-dotted background. Whenever I see a vintage image quoted like that, I wonder where it came from... but never find out. Thanks to British designer John Coulthart, though, this particular riddle has been solved.

Coulthart, noted for his own neo-psychedelic CD covers, posted an item today to his blog, called {feuilleton}, about "the viral nature of design" -- meaning the repeated use of motifs and styles from one designer and era to another, the breeding and proliferation of typefaces, and so forth.

Jordan Ellenberg, a math professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, whose blog is called Quomodocumque, graduated from Harvard in 1993. His graduating class's 15th anniversary is coming up soon, so he recently read the class reunion report from cover to cover. His analysis is very funny. Here are a couple of excerpts:

* If you are a woman who went to Harvard and you're not presently working outside the house, you call yourself a "stay-at-home mom" -- but if you're a woman married to a male alum and in the same situation, your husband might call you a "homemaker," or even, in one case, a "housewife."

* Triathlon is startlingly popular among my classmates. Alternative explanation: each and every person who completed a triathlon mentioned this fact in their entry. Actually, both might apply. Travel to non-western countries enjoys a similar status.

* Harvard does thousands of great things to its students and a few bad things, one of which is to promote the idea that the people eating Chickwiches on either side of us are fated to be the rulers of the world we'll live in as adults. Not true, it turns out. On first glance, I think the members of our class most notable to the world at large are the executive producer of the Daily Show and the minority whip of the Florida State Senate.

Quomodocumque, by the way, means "after whatever fashion."

MassArt (Massachusetts College of Art and Design) has produced several of my favorite artists and designers. These include: leftwing illustrator and cartoonist Boardman Robinson, whose antiwar cartoons led to the suppression, during WWI, of the socialist journal The Masses; the Providence, RI-based art collective Paper Rad; Ben Edlund, creator of "The Tick"; and Tony Millionaire, creator of "Maakies." Not to mention a few taented friends: Back Bay-based graphic designer Anthony Leone, who was art director of Hermenaut; Jamaica Plain-based multimedia artist Michael Lewy; and Brooklyn-based graphic designer Carol Hayes, who coedited "Taking Things Seriously." (Sorry, I'm not a William Wegman fan.)

Less well-known is the fact that MassArt has also produced some cutting-edge musicians, perhaps most notably the artist and DJ Christian Marclay ('80). A pioneering turntablist, Marclay started using LPs and turntables to create sound collages around the same time that hip hop artists did; one of his best tricks is to cut and rejoin different LPs into a single disc, which not only sound funny and cool but look excellent.

More commonly known as the Greatest Generation, the New Gods were in their teens and 20s in the Thirties (1934-43, not to be confused with the the 1930s), and in their 20s and 30s in the Forties (1944-53). Before I explain my decision to call these Americans the New Gods, here's a reminder of my eccentric periodization scheme.

BRAINIAC'S GUIDE TO AMERICA'S RECENT GENERATIONS

1904-13: The Greatest Generation Partisans
1914-23: The Greatest Generation New Gods
1924-33: The Silent Generation Postmoderns
1934-43: The Silent Generation Anti-Anti-Utopians
1944-53: Baby Boomers
1954-63: Baby Boomers OGXers (Original Generation X)
1964-73: Generation X PC Generation
1974-83: Generation Y Net Generation
1984-93: Millennials

Please credit Brainiac/Joshua Glenn whenever you use this guide. Got a beef with my periodization, or different generational name suggestions? Leave a comment on this post or email me. Born between 1954 and 1993 and still unsure about whether you're a Boomer, Xer, Yer, or Millennial? Here's a handy guide.

***

The 1914-23 generation came of age during the Depression, during which time they were kept busy by the Civilian Conservation Corps "getting things done, building things that worked, things that have lasted to this day," as it's been admiringly put. (Members of the older Partisan cohort, meanwhile, engaged in sit-down strikes in assembly-line industries, and questioned the inevitability of capitalism.) As adults, the 1914-23 generation fought World War II; note that a handful of Americans born in 1924, like George H.W. Bush, saw action in the war, and are honorary members of this generation. After the war, they saved American industry, tamed the business cycle, built the suburbs and moved into them.

This generation produced only one president, but it was John F. Kennedy, who brought the "best and the brightest" into the White House, faced down the Soviet Union, and put a man on the moon. Astronauts Alan Shepard and John Glenn are members of this generation; so is faster-than-sound test pilot Chuck Yeager. Other manly men, actors who played them, and novelists who wrote about them: Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck, William Holden, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, Jack Palance, Jack Lord, Ernest Borgnine, Telly Savalas, Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Charles Bronson, James Jones, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Charlton Heston, James Dickey, James Arness, Rocky Marciano, Jake LaMotta.

As children, the Anti-Anti-Utopians and Boomers revered members of the 1914-23 generation; and as adults, they've continued to do so. In their opinion, their juniors -- the Original Generation X, the PCers, and the Netters have failed to live up to "the greatest generation any society has produced," as Tom Brokaw puts it in his 1998 book, "The Greatest Generation." In their 1991 book, "Generations," meanwhile, pop demographers William Strauss and Neil Howe (who call the Greatests the "GI" generation) gush:

Every now and then I like to remind Brainiac readers of the great success that contemporary artists who once lived in Boston are having... now that they've left town.

Arnold Kemp, a friend of mine from Boston Latin School (Class of 1986) who went on to study art at Tufts and the SMFA, for example, was featured in three gallery shows that opened last month. If you're going to be in Los Angeles tomorrow or the next day, or in New York any time this month, you can still check out two of them.

If you see Arnold at one of these shows, say hi for me. He lives in San Francisco spends a lot of time in New York, now.

Here's Arnold:

And here's the exhibit info:

Greenwashing, as you know, is the practice of misleading consumers about a business's environmental practices or about the pro-environmental benefits of a product or service. Like this infamous recent Shell ad, for example, in which oil refineries emit flowers from their smokestacks:

An article in The Guardian today notes that the number of complaints lodged to Great Britain's Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) relating to environmental or green claims has more than quadrupled in the past year. In 2006, the ASA received 117 complaints about environmental claims in 83 advertisements; in 2007, they received 561 complaints about a whopping 410 ads.

According to the ASA's annual report, which was released this week, the number of complaints on advertiser's green claims became one of the two key emerging issues for consumers in 2007; the other issue was images of violence and weapons. Claims that products and services were carbon "neutral" or "zero" or "negative" were particularly open to challenge, notes the report; same thing goes for statements claiming products to be "100% recycled" or "wholly sustainable."

Also this week, the British ad agency Futerra, which calls itself "the sustainability communications agency; from green to ethical, climate change to corporate responsibility," released a Greenwash Guide. Here's what to look out for on advertising and packaging, they warn:

1. Fluffy language. Words or terms with no clear meaning, e.g. "ecofriendly."

2. Green products v dirty company. Such as efficient light bulbs made in a factory which pollutes rivers.

3. Suggestive pictures. Green images that indicate an (unjustified) green impact eg flowers blooming from exhaust pipes.

4. Irrelevant claims. Emphasizing one tiny green attribute when everything else is "ungreen."

Earlier this month, the literati of the blogosphere were buzzing about Lawrence Shainberg's forthcoming novella, "Crust." Now, the buzz is about "The Brooklyn Literary 100," a feature published on April 22 by The New York Observer.

"Manhattan -- especially the Upper West Side and Greenwich Village, and Elaine's -- for years occupied a special place in the city's literary landscape," notes Doree Shafrir in her introduction to the Observer's list of Brooklyn's 100 top authors, editors, literary agents, literary cocktail party hosts, magazine and newspaper writers, and bloggers. "But making the jump across the East River, and onto Carroll Street and Clinton Avenue -- along with the assistants and junior staffers and newly minted MFAs -- are now the likes of (No. 1 New York Times best-selling author!) Jhumpa Lahiri; Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss, who famously bought a Park Slope townhouse for $3.5 million in 2005; and the veritable Renaissance man Kurt Andersen, who makes his home in Carroll Gardens."

... is to hit a sharp-tongued critic in the face with a baseball bat. Or at least a cream pie. The latter fantasy came true, last night, for novelist Rick "Ice Storm" Moody, who in a 2002 review was described by The New Republic's Dale Peck as "the worst writer of his generation."

And that was just for starters. Here's more of what Peck had to say, in the course of reviewing Moody's "The Black Veil": "His intelligence does not make up for the badness of his books." * "What most readers think of as the subject of a story has [no] role in a Moody project beyond giving his tangled prose something to wrap itself around, the way a vine will wrap itself around the nearest thing to hand, be it trellis, tree, or trash." * "[His novels] bear the same relationship to Moody's career as his subjects do to his prose: the former come across as little more than a prop for the latter, incidental, interchangeable." * "I have stared at pages and pages of Moody's prose and they remain as meaningless to me as the Korean characters that paper the wall of a local restaurant." * "[Moody's 'The Black Veil' is] the latest in what I have come to regard as a series of imitations or echoes of Moody's more talented, or at any rate more authentically individual, peers."

At a Brooklyn fundraiser for the writers' retreat Sangam House last night, we read in an entry posted by ex-Ideas editor Jennifer Schuessler to The New York Times's books blog, Paper Cuts, Peck finally got what was coming to him. For every $5 raffle ticket sold, Moody would move one inch closer to his target, from a starting point 9 feet away. Schuessler filmed what happened next:

It actually looks as though Peck enjoyed the whole thing more than Moody did...

On Wednesday, the Boston Athenaeum will unveil its terrific collection of advertising prints, photographs, maps, sheet music covers, and large-scale chromolithographs related to vacationing in Northern New England between 1825 and 1900. The exhibit, which is free and open to the public through August 22, is titled "Always Delightfully Cool.” It reminds us that in the years between, say, the Louisiana Purchase and the construction of Disneyland, the nation's most popular vacation sites were the mountains, lakes , and beaches of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine.

The lithographs of enormous Victorian hotels in Moosehead Lake, Maine, for example, or Plymouth, N.H., are a blast from the past. But I'm particularly charmed by the frolicking beachgoers on the 1881 timetables for the Boston & Hingham Steamboat Co. and Nantasket Beach Railroad Co. True, those of us who grew up in the past half-century, during which the amusement park at Hull's Nantasket Beach was torn down, Hingham residents opposed the restoration of the Greenbush commuter line, and the waters of Boston Harbor were polluted, may feel like we missed out on all the fun. But these days, the Harbor is clean, Hull's bath house and carousel have been spruced up, and the 48-years-dormant Greenbush line is back in action. Let the frolicking begin.

Here are a few samples from the Athenaeum's collection. Click on each image to see a larger version.

Great Britain's Man Booker Prize, which is awarded annually for the best original novel, devoid of humor but crammed with quality vocabulary words, and written in English by a citizen of either the Commonwealth of Nations (formerly known as the British Empire) or the Republic of Ireland, turns 40 this year. Now one hears that a panel of judges was appointed to choose the best overall novel to have won the prize since P.H. Newby snagged it for his 1968 Cold War thriller "Something to Answer For."

As tough as this task sounds, it's made even tougher by the fact that the Booker Prize has rarely been awarded to a novelist for his or her best effort. It's like the Lifetime Achievement Oscar, only for literature. How do you choose between, say, Iris Murdoch's "The Sea, The Sea" (perhaps her fifth-best book) and "The Blind Assassin," Margaret Atwood's worst?

Oh, well. Not that anyone has asked, but I'm casting my vote for Kingsley Amis's "The Old Devils" (1986). Not Amis's best, but at least it's a hoot.

Here's the full list:

1969. Something to Answer For by PH Newby

1970. The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens

1971. In a Free State by VS Naipaul

1972. G by John Berger

1973. The Siege of Krishnapur by JG Farrell

1974. Holiday by Stanley Middleton (shared)

1974. The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer (shared)

1975. Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

1976. Saville by David Storey

FULL ENTRY

Members of the ambitious, brilliant, utopian (and later, largely anti-utopian) Partisan generation were in their teens and 20s in the Twenties (1924-33; not to be confused with the '20s), and in their 20s and 30s in the Thirties (1934-43).

I've decided to call those Americans born between 1904 and 1913 "Partisans" after Partisan Review, a journal founded in 1934 as a literary organ for the Communist Party's John Reed Club in New York by William Phillips (b. 1907) and Philip Rahv (b. 1908). In 1938, Partisan Review was relaunched by Rahv, Phillips, Dwight Macdonald (1906), F.W. Dupee (1904), and George L.K. Morris (1905), and it became the most influential literary-political journal of both the prewar anti-Stalinist Left, a.k.a. the New York Intellectuals, and the postwar era's chastened liberals and early neoconservatives.

Before I say anything else about the Partisans, here's a reminder.

Earlier this month, over at the website Project Rooftop, which is devoted to superhero costume design, illustrator and cartoonist Dean Trippe announced a contest to redesign Iron Man's armor.

Nearly 80 entries were submitted, and the winners have been chosen. Here's the grand prize winner:

Here's what Trippe has to say about this design:

It looks functional. It's stainless steel and rivets. When I was a kid, I grew up playing in my grandfather's garage, while he built an RV-4 plane. The serious grounding in a brains, metal, and hard work world really sells this one for me. The red and gold racing stripes feel more Tony Stark to me than I would've expected. I like that it looks aerodynamic and tough, but also that there are possible weak points that could be exploited by an opponent in a fight. I think that'd just look awesome. And that Stark Technologies logo is the coolest thing I've ever seen. (And don't miss the infinity symbol / "i" in on the chest.) I absolutely want to read this Iron Man's adventures.

Click here to see the other winning designs.

I blogged about plans for ROFLCon -- a weekend-long conference of "internet microcelebrities" originally planned by Harvard undergrads -- back in February. So this Saturday, I thought I'd better head over to the MIT campus to check it out. I wasn't disappointed.

Minnesota's Jay Maynard, better known as Tron Guy, thanks to his awesome illuminated unitard (based on the one that Bruce Boxleitner wears in the 1982 trapped-in-a-computer movie "Tron"), was there. He and Matt Harding, a video game developer from Seattle who became a cult figure after he filmed himself dancing badly in exotic locations, spoke about what it's like to be famous... online. I wasn't there in journalism mode, so my notes are sketchy:

I also visited a panel discussion featuring Martin Grondin of the LOLCat Bible Translation Project, Cheez of the LOLCat site I Can Has Cheezburger, Ryan and Arija of LOLSecretz, Stephen Granades of LOLTrek, and Adam Lindsay of LOLCode.

Thank you, Associated Press, for alerting us to this useful concept. You can read about it in today's Globe.

Yesterday, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction released an audit suggesting that "many reconstruction projects were being described as complete or otherwise successful when they were not." For example, in 2004 the US Agency for International Development contracted with Bechtel Corp. to construct a children's hospital in Basra; after monthslong delayes, in 2006 the project was "descoped."

What does that mean? Instead of terminating the project -- and thereby admitting failure -- US officials modified the contract to change the scope of the work. "As a result," notes the AP, "a US database of Iraq reconstruction contracts shows the project as complete 'when in fact the hospital was only 35 percent complete when work was stopped,' said investigators, who added that this practice known as 'descoping' occurred frequently."

The earliest Iraq-reconstruction-related article I've seen on descoping, which has been described in a scholarly paper written by three members of the California Institute of Technology faculty as "the strategic abandonment and/or weakening of objectives," was published by AlterNet in 2006. Excerpt:

Parsons, a firm that's worked in the Middle East for years, was contracted to build 150 primary health clinics (PHCs) in Iraq, a project the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, Stuart Bowden, called "the most important program in the [country's] health sector."

After a surreal series of cost over-runs and missed deadlines, it turned out the company would only be able to finish 20 of the clinics. The Army Corps of Engineers, which contracted the job, blamed "contractor performance and lack of openness in addressing schedule and budget issues in a timely fashion." The inspector general noted that, while all the money had been paid, the remaining PHCs are half-built, and the equipment for all 150 clinics was delivered and is now sitting in a warehouse in Baghdad with questionable security. But there's no penalty built into the contract for unfinished work. The 130 half-finished clinics will simply be removed from the contract -- "de-scoping" is a new word one picks up quickly when looking at the hundreds of aborted projects in Iraq.

I think descoping is a bad thing when it comes to Iraq reconstruction. But I also think that the practice could really catch on here on the domestic front, in the war on clutter and overscheduling. Those of us who yearn to slow down, simplify, and do less might want to take our cue from the US Agency for International Development.

For example, ever since I abandoned a half-written book about "outsider intellectuals," several years ago, I've felt burdened by the knowledge that my huge pile of notes is going to waste. But no longer. Thanks to descoping, I've decided that I don't have an incomplete manuscript; I have a complete pile of notes. Mission accomplished!

Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of The New York Times Book Review and Week in Review, is also a historian. He's written books on McCarthyism, Greenwich Village, Whittaker Chambers, and Louis Armstrong; and he's working on a William F. Buckley biography. In an essay on John McCain titled "When the Times Make the Man," published in today's edition of Week in Review, he attempts to answer the questions: Will John McCain be the first American born in the 1930s to be elected president? If so, why? If not, why not?

Despite warning that it is never wise to "generalize too broadly about decades," because they are "arbitrary time divisions," Tanenhaus is perfectly willing to generalize about American generations -- i.e., cohorts of Americans born during time divisions that (it logically follows) are by no means arbitrary, since certain "generational distinctions," as Tanenhaus puts it, can be discerned between those born in one time division, and those born in the preceding or subsequent divisions.

Brainiac readers who have been following my efforts to reorient common notions about the Greatest Generation, Boomers, Generations X and Y, and the Millennials, know that I believe that generations aren't entirely a subjective matter; I agree with Tanenhaus, in other words, that "generational distinctions" exist. Unlike him, however, I'm willing to take the next logical step and generalize about decades. In order to do that, however, we have to rethink what a decade is.

Tanenhaus is on safe ground when he refuses to generalize about, say, the 1930s. If we insist on dividing decades into periods of ten years in a dating system that always begins with a 1 and ends with a 0 (the 1930s: 1931-40), then yes, that's arbitrary. Therefore it's a stretch to make claims about the years 1931-40, or 1941-50, or 1951-60, and so forth. However, my independent research and analysis reveals that when we divide decades into periods of ten years beginning with a 4 and ending with a 3, generalizations suddenly become very plausible. The Thirties (1934-43), the Forties (1944-53), and so forth: Yes! That works really well. NB: I haven't researched whether this periodization scheme works in any other century besides the 20th. My hypothesis is that it does work; but I'm not willing to argue the point yet.

Anyway, back to Tanenhaus. His Week in Review essay argues that an understanding of "generational distinctions" reveals important insights into the character of those Americans who've been elected (or nearly elected) president during the 20th century. It might be, for example, Tanenhaus writes, that "Americans born in the 1930s lack the particular qualities we look for in our national leaders." Young people in the 1930s "typically came of age in the 1950s, when consensus reigned, and with it conformism," he notes. "Young Americans were collectively disengaged from politics and distrustful of ideology. They were the 'silent generation,' content to be guided by their elders...."

I blogged recently about the death of Raymond Leblanc, the Belgian publisher who brought us Hergé's "Tintin." And last summer, I blogged about the good news that "Tintin Au Congo" was going to be published in the US for the first time by Little, Brown. I suggested that parents use this very entertaining, but offensive book as a teaching tool about racism -- like my (antiracist) father did with me.

Here's more good Tintin news: "Tintin and the Secret of Literature" (Soft Skull/Counterpoint), a chatty yet scholarly introduction to the world-famous comic, has just been published in the US. There have been a handful of other books in English about Hergé and his most famous creation, the globetrotting reporter/adventurer Tintin, but the "shockingly talented" (Gawker) British novelist and public intellectual Tom McCarthy has taken Tintinology to a new level. "Secret" brings the sharpest tools of literary theory to a comic strip which got its humble start as a serial in the children's supplement of a Belgian newspaper in 1929, and finds his efforts amply rewarded.

But don't take my word for it. The book was excerpted in The Guardian when it was published in England in 2006. Here's a sample:

Should we, when we read the Tintin books, treat them with the reverence we would afford to Shakespeare, Dickens, Rabelais and so on? Should we bring the same critical apparatus to bear as when analyzing Flaubert, James or Conrad? In the last two decades of the 20th century and the first of the 21st, writers of cartoons, hugely indebted to Hergé's work, have deliberately launched bids for literary status, producing "graphic novels" that are often quite self-consciously highbrow and demanding. The huge irony is that the Tintin books remain both unrivaled in their complexity and depth and so simple, even after more than half a century, that a child can read them with the same involvement as an adult.

I've written about the Newton-raised literary critic, n+1 editor, and one-time Ideas contributor Keith Gessen before.

Gessen's first novel, "All the Sad Young Literary Men" (Viking) is getting mostly positive reviews that can, it seems to me, be aggregated and boiled down to the following sentiment: Gessen's brainy, neurotic, politically engaged and historically aware yet awkward and self-absorbed characters sometimes get on the reader's nerves. However, the author obviously knows exactly what he's doing. Besides, he's smart and funny!

He is smart and funny. See for yourself: Gessen will be reading twice in the Boston area this week, tonight (Wednesday, April 23) at the Harvard Book Store at 7 pm, and Thursday at Newtonville Books in Newton.

PS: Gessen was interviewed in the Phoenix last week. Excerpt:

PHOENIX: Reading the recent n+1 pamphlet What We Should Have Known, I was struck with how the panel you had assembled talked about these very highbrow books by Adorno and Foucault with a fannish, very down-to-earth enthusiasm, as if they were indie-rock nerds talking about their favorite albums.

GESSEN: Because we're in America, I think, and because there's all this important business that America conducts, there's a feeling that the business of books is not an important business. And anyone who thinks otherwise is just Peter Pan. It continues to be weird to me that even within American literary culture there's an embarrassment about books and how important books can be. There's a kind of love of books. You know, people are like, "I love books." But there's always a kind of apology. The whole revival of the idea of genre fiction, where people are saying, "Well, we're not really writing literature, we're kind of doing a mass art." That feels to me like a form of apology.

I'm aiming to be at the reading tonight. See you there, I hope!