Hate mail, bloodshed, and whack-funk exoskeletons, this week on Lost. Er, I mean, here. On my blog

Gay cowboys? Cowboy presidents? Oh, silly America! You know you ain't got nothin' on...

BULLET! *devil horns*

POINT! *power chord*

ROCK! *explosions*

• Tod Goldberg hates you. Er. No. I mean: Tod Goldberg hates mysteries, and you hate Tod Goldberg. At least, if your name is Mike Dorsey. Or if he's ever called you a fucktard.


• You got two links that lead you to this list here of the 100 best opening lines of novels. Ready...set...DEBATE! (The "two" link, by the way, leads to another list-in-development, which you should contribute to, though this week, your suggestion can't be possibly as wicked-awesome [hint, hint, for the astute, dedicated TDAOC reader!] as my own.)


• Want.


• It's gonna be a full-on rumble at the The Morning News 2006 Tournament of Books. Can you dig it? I can. Last year's winner, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, was awesome; this year, I just want to see some hits. A Jonathan Safran Foer/Nicole Krauss spouse-fight! Kazuo Ishiguro bitch-smacking Ian McEwan! Mary Gaitskill's Veronica being in like four places at once, Zadie Smith using a little Beauty to stun her opponents, Garner coming out of like nowhere and The Historian totally eating the turnbuckle! OH YEAH!


• No I mean seriously, want. In the future, all music will be created by animatronic-looking British women robot people. It's going to be awesome.


• Dan Green has lots of things to say about Stephen Dixon which I feel too dumb to even begin to agree or disagree with. Except for the line, "His relative lack of popularity among even readers of serious literary fiction is both surprising and understandable", which I'm pretty much totally in agreement with, though his explanation for that isn't what I'd have said, maybe. What I'll say is this: Stephen Dixon's books hit me in the gut in a way no other books do. And his prose style, which seems really out there, when you read it for the first time, it's funny, but you start to see it other places. David Foster Wallace, for example; moments here and there, you see Dixon's style melded in there, and you understand it better, in a way, for having known some Stephen Dixon along the way. Plus, you know. Dude's my cousin. And us Dixons, we represent. (Well, extremely distant, unrelated cousin, anyway.)