Random links: The Borgasboard edition

...because, you're either with us or against us!

• Or so Keith "I dislike babies and puppies" Gessen would have you believe, I guess? I dunno, I haven't been following the recent litblogs vs. n+1 flamewar all that closely--who's got the time, right? You miss one blog-vs-media fight, you can always catch the next one in fifteen minutes. I hear they've got them running in loops now. From what I've gathered of the current round of huffery puffery, Scott's got it about right.
  
  I've said it before, and I hate that it has to be said again: if you, in the literary criticism and analysis world, make fun of people who should naturally be your primary audience (i.e., people who love literature and love talking about literature and love responding to discussions about literature and generating new discussions about literature), you are a huge recursive tool. I'm sorry, but it's true: you are a monkey wrench you have thrown into your own self.


• Imani is reading Half of a Yellow Sun and she can't put it down. I think she's the second or third person I've known who has said they pretty much can't part from the book in a real physical sense. (I probably would have been the same way had I not started my job when I was right in the middle of the book. I might have been too tired to hold on to the book for a while there.)


• SINCE U BEEN GOOOOO-OOOOONE!!!!!!!!!!! Ian McEwan's Saturday hasn't stopped sucking ass!


• Dan Wickett found five free minutes in his schedule and has decided to fill it with an entire month of short story action. You know, I picked up a math minor in college (while other boys were picking up hot girls, ah, but I digress), but absolutely nothing in my Fractal Geometry and Chaos Theory background can possibly be used to model Mr Wickett's activity levels. Dude's a publisher too, now, you know that? I'd salute him, if I could figure out which of the fifteen clones of himself he's got doing his work for him is the real him.


• Go check out the debut issue of Hot Metal Bridge. They've got an interview with TDAOC-fav Dan Chaon, and they've got fiction and poetry and creative non-fiction, too. And it's free! On the Internet!


• Speaking of TDAOC-favs, Slate recently re-ran a piece by Jennifer Egan on Cormac McCarthy's The Road. That piece may or may not have been instrumental in convincing me to give the book a shot (after I'd read--and hated--and hated--and hated--All the Pretty Horses).


• Plus here's an interview with AL Kennedy that I think I still need to read, myself. She's awesome.


• If I ever get rich, I'm so funding a television cooking show, hosted by Erin O'Brien. ("Get a good cold-ass Bud or Stroh's or some shit like that to drink while you're doing this shit. No goddamn candy-ass nancy beer that comes in some weird-ass big bottle with an effing cork and that you're supposed to have at some effing particular temperature or anything like that. That shit sucks.")


• And uh, yup. That's it. Nothin' left for this post.
  
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  N+1? More like N minus Fun :(
  
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  Ha ha! Couldn't resist. Oh, damn. I was doing so well...