The Elegant Variation

Maaz:

I agree with you: one can’t talk about books in polite company anymore without it metamorphosing into talk of movies.

And as if to prove the point, just wanted to say, first off, if you haven’t seen “Pitch ’n’ Putt with Joyce ’n’ Beckett” at YouTube, you should. Feckin’ brilliant, it is.

Back to books: Jane Smiley’s new novel about Hollywood is due to – MERDE! I’m doing it again…

Margin of Hopelessness: The kugel falls far from the deli counter, says Crooked Timber You want to get meta-meta? I just read about us reading about Crooked Timber and reading what Crooked Timber thinks we’re doing. Suddenly I’m very dizzy…

Dunno about you, but I don’t think I’ve ever had what I’m doing mentioned within the same paragraph as the fabled New York Intellectuals. But I suppose there’s a first time for everything, isn’t there? And other clichés. Ever wondered what it means to be “post-ironic”? I think I do: it’s when you think you’re being sarcastic but don’t realize you’re actually telling the truth. That is, talking “in quotes” about things that can be safely said without them.

As of this moment, no news yet from The Elegant Variation about Martin Amis’s teaching stint at Manchester Uni, so check it out at the Guardian. (The Mancs are going to have his balls for breakfast with his scalp as a side salad…) There is mention of Simone de Beauvoir being honored at the 16^th International Book Fair in Argentina. Didn’t the Times run a story a couple years ago that the English translation of Beauvoir’s Second Sex is actually rather shitty, and a generation of novice scholars might therefore have derived erroneous notions from it? Too bad this is the end of the line for discussion – would love to solicit your thoughts on that…

Big Bongo: Physicist and QED maestro Richard FeynmanOh, dammit, woman – you scooped me on Richard Feynman! Another late, lamented scientific mind. He and Carl Sagan. If you haven’t read Tuva or Bust: Richard Feynman’s Last Journey, you should. Would have been fun and interesting man to have hung around with: that stoner dewd who actually had a 180 IQ and excellent taste in music, lit, etc.

I read it first at Nerve’s Scanner: Al Franken is running for Senate, and Rudy Giuliani’s declared for president. Would have thought Giuliani’s cancer scare of a few years ago might have put him off the rigors of campaigning; and think Franken hasn’t a chance of winning, as he’s much too much fun to listen to. Think he’d get bored after awhile anyway. Drezner also weighed in with some drive-by thoughts on Giuliani worth pondering.

Maaz, my mighty heart is breaking. As we are being separated, perhaps never to see or hear one another again, I thought I’d bequeath to you a link of Joy Division performing “Love Will Tear Us Apart” as a sort of musical summing up.

Speaking of which: I knew a bit about Nerve and Elegant Variation beforehand but never really gave it a sustained look – so many wasted nights! Well, not anymore, buster. Crooked Timber, Drezner, and 3 Quarks Daily I hadn’t a clue, and am glad that I was clued in before I died. It’s been a pleasure sniping.

(Of course, Fiona, there is always e-mail, you know…)

Helke

Hi, Michael. By now, it should be evident that I don’t read blogs much. I have certainly never read as many or as much as I have this week. It’s been sort of fascinating. One tends to forget how much is going on out there. I have been chastened by the experience. I also realized that I do, indeed, know who Philip Rieff is, but that out of context, all this stuff just comes at me like unorganized data I cannot process.

Indie Presses Save LiteratureI just noticed on Elegant Variation mention of Dzanc Books and their first two titles. I’d never heard of them—which says nothing—but I was excited about what they are publishing. For one, the indie presses are keeping literature alive. They are publishing the stuff that’s too risky for most of the big houses—and by too risky I mean too weird and thus unpalatable to the majority of readers out there. I’m not trying to be a snob, it’s just that most people don’t know what to do with novelty. Because if you can’t turn it into a movie, what have you? I like that Dzanc quotes Gary Lutz and Brian Evenson because when you get endorsements from writers like these, and when you publicize them, you are pretty much saying: We are the real deal. And it’s true, they are.

Apropos the business of the good childhood, here comes the Netherlands. Crooked Timber reports UNICEF’s findings that the Dutch excel when it comes to the well-being of kids. Who doesn’t excel? We don’t, of course. The United Kingdom, too. There follows a paean to the Netherlands that has me wanting to immigrate and then an anti-paean that’s making me feel better about where I am, should I ever manage to have kid of my own.

Professor of Media Studies Jodi Dean: Her website, anyway (who says Crooked Timber's run by stuffed-shirts?)This is what I like about Crooked Timber—they aren’t so bad at flipping the coin, despite the overall lefty bias of the thing. What I don’t like is how self-referential some of the posts are. Like that bit about Jodi Dean and formal modeling; not only is Dean’s post unintelligible, but so is the discussion that follows, if only because this guy assumes we know something about formal modeling beyond the obvious. I suppose most people who regularly read this blog do know about such matters. Me? I’m done. Can’t say the same of Drezner who, apparently, reads Crooked Timber with regularity.

I wanted to watch his bloggingheads tv thing, but I guess I need some intel-based mac plugin. Worth the trouble? No. Maybe I should just read his new book, which looks hot.

Richard Feynman on 3 Quarks: most satisfying. Likewise the snippets from the Orr/Dennett smackdown. It’s getting personal. By time it’s over, they will have long departed from debate over The God Delusion. Did you read The God Delusion? It’s on my pile, just below Anna Karenina, but above Catch-22. Props to 3 Quarks: I learned more from reading the site this week than I have in months.

Unfortunately, I also learned one great way not to get any work done is to read the aforementioned. I have been so unproductive! It’s a little depressing. And when depressed, instead of taking a walk or reading a book, I’ve gone to the Nerve Scanner. Today’s array? A clip from the startlingly unfunny “The Half-hour News Hour,” evidence that John Mayer looks like Edward Scissorhands, and a posing of the age-old question: is Vladimir Putin looker or loser? In short, what 3 Quarks inspires—brain activity, I guess—the Scanner destroys.

I’m signing off, Michael. It’s been fun corresponding with you. Maybe when we meet in the flesh, we can talk cupcakes.

Cheers,

fiona

[Note: Movable Snipe is a week-long feature wherein two writers read and evaluate five blogs, sending each other one letter a day. This week's Snipers are Michael Helke and Fiona Maazel. Michael's first letter can be accessed here; Fiona's response to it, here. Day Two: Michael; Fiona. Day Three: Fiona; Michael. Day Four: Michael.] 

Happy VD, Helke. I once wrote a song called “Immaculate VD” for a friend of mine. “Immaculate VD is what she had, woke up one day predictably sad…” And so on. Awful stuff. But oh, the memories.

Nobelist Dissident: Orhan PamukYou know, I was thinking about the anniversary of the fatwa against Rushdie today. 3 Quarks didn’t even have to remind me. My love life is such that this is the sort of thing I associate with 2.14. Rushdie, on the other hand, has little to complain about in this department. Especially since Turkey is the new Iran when it comes to harassing or, I suppose, killing dissident writers, e.g. Ömer Asan, Elif Shafak, and Orhan Pamuk, who, Elegant Variation tells us, has immigrated to the U.S. To New York, in fact. Don’t you feel like there’s a neighborhood bar somewhere in this story? If your country wants to kill you, dollar beers at the Beekman Arms.

Apropos Dawkins on 3 Quarks, I wonder what he’d say about this Dr. Ross fellow who, according to the NYT, is a “young earth creationist” cum paleontologist who dates the earth back 10, 000 years or 65 million, depending on which hat he’s wearing. I cannot understand this at all. The man’s a scientist working with fossils and data who somehow disbelieves the material he works with all day? Dawkins would probably call him a fool. Have you ever seen the Atheism Tapes? A bunch of interviews with renown atheists, Dawkins and Arthur Miller, among them, conducted by the somewhat windy but always fascinating Jonathan Miller? I recommend them, if they slipped your radar.

As for Drezner and the Center for American Progress’s poll, what do you expect? No conservative wants to hear that even his campadres are jumping ship. I checked the list of participants and while I didn’t recognize a lot of the names—besides Drezner, of course—I did notice the bit where the CAP asked the participants to characterize their bias. I can only assume the self-proclaimed conservatives are actual conservatives, not liberals hellbent on infiltrating the CAP’s poll. On a side note, didn’t that graphic of the poll results seem sort of fancy for Drezner? Ugliest site ever, but nice graph!

On Crooked Timber—these people are really starting to scare me. Why do they all know so much about the American Maoist Movement? And why do I know so little? I went to school with one of the Weathermen and I still know less than these people. What the hell is the Klonskyite CP(M-L)? The farther along I got in the comments, the more my eyes glazed over. I feel like this is a self-indictment, though I am trying hard to make it their fault.

Thank God for the Scanner! I’m not reading Nerve for the content—sorry, Waters—I’m just in it for the laughs. That period lesbian song from Buffy they featured today? Hilarious. She levitates. She cums. She cums under a “Willow” tree. Stop reading the main pages, Helke, and just go to the Scanner.

She went to parties, but grief accrued
Immaculate VD is solitude.

G’night.

f.

My turn again. Guess your jams and jellies are just going to have to wait, Maaz.

Word to the wise: all the world’s holy texts have some Get-Out-of-Jail-Free clause, which allows its users to commit the occasional murder. Okay, perhaps not Buddhist texts – though I’m cynic enough to believe that even their works have that clause encoded between the lines somewhere.

To Rushdie With Love: Iranian Valentines better left unsentA lot of great links at 3 Quarks Daily today. Am wondering exactly what the “sort of Valentine’s card” the Islamic Republic of Iran sends Salman Rushdie every year. Are we talking a heart-shaped card with naked little cherubs brandishing AK-47s poking in every which direction, above an inscription which reads “Still thinking of you, sahib”? Am also wondering which is worse: an Iran headed by literal-minded clerics or clerics with a sense of humor like that; Thant Myint-U contributes an essay to the London Review of Books about a subject very dear to his heart (“What to Do about Burma”). Am just now getting into his book, The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), as it’s been recommended to me left and right; and Tariq Ramadan, the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine profile by Ian Buruma, offers “What the West Can Learn from Islam” for The Chronicle for Higher Education. It’s an embarrassment for this country to have revoked his work visa right before he was set to take up a professorship at the U of Notre Dame. It sends the message that the country is Islamophobic, and that’s a notion we ought not to be encouraging at this point in time.

One final thought: does Richard Dawkins strike you as the kind of guy who would get upset trying to explain to an uncomprehending child why Santa Claus doesn’t exist?

A post at Drezner’s site had me fuming for a few moments. That was “So How’s the Global War on Terror Going?”, which shows that the Center for American Progress, along with Foreign Policy magazine – not exactly a bastion of fiery left-wing propaganda – conducted a poll, asking respondents if they felt the world has become safer or more dangerous for the United States and its people. Survey says: 12% believe it has become safer, while 81% beg to differ. Was it the study that raised my temperature? Hardly. Below the YouTube clip of Caroline Wadhams of the CAP is a comment that seeks to cast aspersions on the whole study by pointing out that the CAP is, in fact, LEFT WING. Holy shit! What were those Foreign Policy idiots thinking even talking to those CAPpies?! That throws the whole enterprise into complete chaos! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!

At Crooked Timber, Scott McLemee reminds us, in “Boldly Uphold the Revolutionary Use of Stilted Language from ‘Peking Review’ Circa 1974!”, that English majors really have no place within Maoism. Dearest Fiona, how would you like to have received this message today? “Progressive And Revolutionary People Everywhere, Resolutely Uphold The Militant Bolshevik Spirit And Revolutionary Romanticism Embodied In Comrade Valentine!” Or “Decisively Smash Retrograde And Joyless Ultra-Left Lines Which Disparage Proletarian Love And Desire!!”

Is that the swelling of violins I hear? Well, Happy Valentine’s Day, my dear.

Campus Crusade for CommiesActually, I remember back in my college days hearing some Communists speaking on campus in that very stilted speech, and not through a megaphone; so there really isn’t much room for parody here. They’ve already done a bang-up job for us.

Though I’ve grown quite fond of you within the oh-so-brief time we’ve been corresponding, Fiona, I must confess I’m also quite jealous of you. As you intimated in your last dispatch, you live in a city where you can run into writers and engage them in conversations about bloodshed. In Chicago, I’d be lucky if I might bump into a writer and get an “Excuse me” out of him/her – let alone a discussion on, say, Darfur. I’m thinking it’s got to be the weather.

Nothing much to say about The Elegant Variation today, except that it is required reading for the lit-minded. That, and if Floyd Landis wants to impress us with his honesty, he should hold off on the book and send us a urine sample. Now.

Finally: would have mentioned it before, but I didn’t want to blow my load in one post: excellent interview with John Waters at Nerve. Resolutely Uphold the Camp Aesthetic against the Incursions of Humorless Mullahs, Commies, Writers in a Hurry and Richard Dawkins Everywhere!!!

Love,

Helke

Ms. Maazel:

Your outlook regarding the fan mail as evidenced by your response to the anonymous hangman: too right.

Re: real threats to one’s health and reputation: doesn’t Daniel Drezner know that Vladimir Putin can have him killed? Drezner shouldn’t be surprised to wake up one day to see the contents of his stomach glowing through his shirt.

That's him! That's the terrorist who hit the Snooze button this morning!Of course, as Matt Yglesias of Crooked Timber points out, there’s something to be said for living a life of spying and espionage. Saw Munich the other night and thought, “At least I’d have an excuse for sleeping on the floor of my closet.” Was reminded of key scenes from Tony Kushner’s script after reading this essay at 3 Quarks Daily. Particularly when Avner has that intense discussion with the Black Septembrist in the squat. If they only had Alon Levy refereeing for them.

On a related note: read the following letter by Beirut-based Waleed Hazbun when you’ve got a free moment and tell me what you think.

Re “The Good Childhood”: if you survived, period, then it’s good.

Was going to catch the discussion on that very subject at the Central Library in Madison, Wisconsin, at 7 PM (Central) when I realized that 1. I don’t live in Madison, and 2. I’d be missing American Idol anyway.

See? You’re not lacking for company in vacuousness…

Re upbringing: solidly middle class. And don’t think I don’t make a fetish of it in the right circumstances.

Don’t you find yourself wishing that Drezner was your dad? At least he’d give you a ride to school, come rain, sleet or snow, in which the Midwest is wrapped like a frosty gyro.

Causabon and His Dorothea: Phillip Rieff and Susan SontagRe Phillip Rieff: he was Susan Sontag’s husband, wasn’t he? Helped give the world David Rieff, among other contributions. Sontag said she felt she had married herself into a modern-day version of Middlemarch when she fell in with him. Shudder.

Joan Acocella’s 2000 New Yorker essay on Sontag appears in Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints (Pantheon). Ever read her? (Acocella, that is. Would be very surprised to hear that Sontag never appeared on your syllabus.)

Agree with you about layout of Elegant Variation: very user-friendly. And reading the Wednesday bullet points, one is surprised to see Orhan Pamuk, who is in fear of his life from Turkish nationalists, having chosen the States to live in exile. I would have thought Sweden, myself. Or Canada (particularly Toronto). Pamuk hasn’t exactly had the best things to say about the States, but so what: hope he enjoys however much time he chooses to spend here. At least I hope he receives better than Salman Rushdie, whom the government seemed only intermittently concerned with protecting during the years of Khomeini’s fatwa.

Speaking of the consequences of extremist activities, another shudder passes through me: Justin Clark’s story at Nerve about Gordon Lee, a comic book store owner in Rome, Georgia, who’s been harassed for the past three years for the “knowing dissemination” of images of "sexually explicit nudity, sexual conduct, and sadomasochistic abuse" to minors. Source of the flap? The Salon by Nick Bertozzi, a graphic novel murder mystery set in turn-of-the-century Paris, where Picasso is portrayed painting in the nude. A copy unwittingly made it into the hands of a minor. Call out the National Guard: three years later, it’s still being fought over. Bertozzi weighs in with this interesting observation:

“The Disneyfication of culture has helped contribute to that lack of understanding… I think people unfortunately see cartoons and they see a nice thick line — a lot of cartoonists including myself are influenced by that nice thick line. It's assumed to be childlike.”

I think there’s more to it than that, but it’s a nice starting point for a discussion about how the peculiar oppressive forms cultural ignorance can adopt. Care to weigh in?

I must say that I enjoy reading Crooked Timber dispatches such as this one concerning reaction to an interview with Danny Postel, where the reader response fairly overwhelms the article to which readers respond and takes on a life all its own. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote about the “marketplace of ideas,” and it’s a lot of fun to envision the occasional intellectual slugfest erupting in the midst of it. That’s what the ‘Net was made for, I believe.

Now let’s see what jams and jellies you’re offering…

We Love You Guys: The Saudis do Philo-Americanism right?

Hey, Michael. You read the paper today? At Yaddo, there’s always much talk about which house gets the Times and how best to leave it for others once you are done. Me, I read it online. And today I was reading about Iran—Iran is supplying weapons to the insurgency, here is the evidence, here are the serials—let’s start another war. Because that’s what this is, right? Prelude to war? Or maybe I’m just a cynic. 

Yes, yes I am. And so is our good man Drezner. His bit on Barbara’s Slavin’s USA Today piece—the Saudis love us and aren’t afraid to say so!—made me laugh.

I mean, I had to read it a couple times because there’s something weirdly incoherent about the man’s prose style, but once I got with it—the ultimate endorsement of pleonasm—I laughed. He’s a cynic. So the Saudis make nice with us, so what? It’s only a gesture. Or: they’re just getting in bed with the winning side. Or: they’re getting in bed with the lesser evil. We’re doing good! We suck. You get the feeling he thinks we suck. And he’s right. Especially now that Bush wants to bleed even more money from the arts, ostensibly to fund his New War. Because when I need money, the first place I turn is the arts. Jeeze. Does anyone read anymore? I’m serious.

Tonight at dinner, someone was telling me the average novel sells 4-6 thousand copies. How grim. Grimmer still is that a lot of these novels are kick-ass. Collections of short fiction, too. Like The Dead Fish Museum by Charlie D’Ambrosio. Such a good book. Featured on Elegant Variation, which is always stumping for books people are not reading but should. It’s depressing. Sarvas has impeccable taste, and just not enough people are caring. Course, I think I liked the site better before he wrote up what you and I are doing. We’re reviewing blogs? I didn’t realize that’s what we were doing, and now I feel like a lowlife for it. I thought we were just talking about stuff of interest. 

Does the Koran Endorse Bloodshed and Martyrdom?E.G. Hooray for David Markson! I didn’t know some of his early books were hopping back into print until the EV told me. Need book news? Go to the EV. Need to save your life? Not a bad place to start. I saw Markson recently, in New York, and we talked about whether the Koran actually endorses bloodshed and martyrdom, which I rather think it does, though in the same way the New Testament sees Jesus encourage everyone to kill the Jews. I like how in New York there’s such a concentration of writers and artists, you can actually run into one of them and get talking, spontaneously, about bloodshed. I appreciate the city, but I can’t really deal with these bromides about what is New York and who’s got the right to call a spade, and so on.

I’ve been reading 3 Quarks and I like these guys, but there’s still got to be something else to write about. Fuck you, Adam Gopnik? Should talk of New York, in all its irascible and protean glory, really incite this kind of passion? I sort of prefer ye old Crooked Timber. For one, it’s got eye appeal. I’m all about the serif font and feng shui arrangement of text, and the CT pleases me well. Plus they are writing about things that are a little off the beaten path. 

Putin on election monitoring? Most interesting. I have been waiting for him to rewrite the constitution so he can be reelected, but I see that’s not happening. I guess he’s going to take over a large conglomerate someplace, from which he can oversee illegal elections in neighboring countries.

FemBot: Liz Wurtzel's twins aren't nearly as versatileNext post: embodied energy. What the hell is that? I have to go to some other website to read about this thing—energy consumed in creating one unit of product X, wha?—and then back to the CT to read more? I don’t have time for this. Do you have time for this?

Part of what stuns me about the ubiquity of blogging is that people find the time a) to post and b) to read. My life is replete with niggling obligations and tedium—it’s not like I’m saving the world instead of blogging—but still, I have scant room in the day for all this. How do other people manage? My best experience of the Internet continues to be the piffle collected on Nerve’s web trawl. Just a bunch of stupid shit to brighten my day.

I am still looking at the kangaroo man, though he’s old news. He’s been surpassed by eleven gems of culture, like Christina Ricci’s retractable breasts.  Wish mine could do that.

F. 

The -Ist Factor: Late 90's novels end with the same insufferable suffix

Hey, Michael. I did just read that anonymous response to my letter. But since I’m so vapid and adolescent, I can’t muster the emotional wherewithal to care.

Gerry Adams: PW called A Farther Shore “suspenseful, biased, subversive, blunt and often funny.” The NYTBR said of Before the Dawn, “There are frequent flashes of good writing.” Some guy said of Cage Eleven, “I don't believe a terrorist, with a hatred of all things British will give a honest account of the UK justice system.” Adams has written nine books. Is this funny about, uh, Sin and Cessation? Yes. Yes, it is. Dear Anonymous: for more enlightening news about what goes on in the world of literature, do visit The Elegant Variation.

I’m pretty interested in this stuff about the good childhood, too. Crooked Timber is plugging a symposium on the topic, which seems just interesting enough to excuse the soporific and, I guess, pointedly derivative title of the event. The good soldier, the good daughter, I guess such titles are in vogue, sort of like the ubiquity of the “ist” suffix in novel titles of the late nineties. The Archivist, The Intuitionist, et al. Just read Sally Schrag’s 2-page précis, which you can download off the site. It’s compelling. Is a good childhood middle-class? Is that what the phrase means? Hey, Michael, did you have a middle-class childhood? Was it good? Mine was not so middle-class, not at all, and—oh, wait, I am being pithy again. Alas.

Here’s the thing I can’t handle about 3 Quarks Daily: it makes me feel stupid. Dear Anonymous: You’re right, I am stupid. Certainly unversed in a lot of what 3 Quarks thinks I should know, or rather, presumes I should know. This bit about Philip Rieff is apropos what, exactly? And who the hell is Philip Rieff? And why are none of these book titles in italics? I’m supposed to know Philipic (sic) Fellow Teachers is a book? And why is this post lifted from this month’s Book Forum with no attribution? I am totally confused.

So much so that I have no energy left to talk N. Korea except to say that Drezner is appropriately skeptical about today’s agreement with N. Korea. Kim Jong-Il is, I think, quite mad. I am simply waiting for him and Ahmadinejad to join forces and effect Holocaust. Oh, Anonymous, I almost forgot! For a more sober and conservative—and considerably less frivolous—discussion about Korea’s nonproliferation agreement, see Drezner.

Michael, I have to split. Will save delights arrayed by Nerve for later.

Cheers,

Fiona

Even Terrorists Get the Blues: Gerry Adams wants you to love himFiona my Nona:

Dear me! Did you get a chance to read that Anonymous response to our first post? Scribe tried to lay down the law as if s/he were Officer Krupke disguised as Moses. (Or Lynne Truss disguised as Katherine White.) I’m assuming that s/he hasn’t read too many blogs.

And I love that last parting shot: “Yo, Helke, this applies to you too.” Does our first offense make us the blogospheric equivalent of gang-bangers? Grammar-bangers, perhaps?

After this cartoonish chiding, I just had to revisit Nerve.com and re-read some of the articles devoted to their latest issue’s theme, comics. Favorites include “Subterranean Homesick Blues: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was my Sex and the City” by Will Doig, and Peter Smith’s interview with Peter Bagge. Bagge’s storytelling makes me howl, though I’m among the die-hards who would have preferred it if he had left Hate as a black-and-white title; and I never would have thought that a pack of sai-sporting terrapin might have anything to do with a clatch of Gucci-sporting urban terrorists. Thank you, Doig, for opening my eyes.

The tenor of my evening thus elevated, I turned to The Elegant Variation – and wondered if the anonymous scribe might have been associated with Jarvas’s enterprise. Nah, concluded I: the Variation’s much wittier. First item to catch my eye: “Why Didn’t We Think of That?”, wherein we learn that Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin will only publish the third volume of his memoirs if good reviews can be guaranteed. See how many sublimely absurd notions you can find within the following sentence: “’Like most creative people, Gerry Adams is surprisingly sensitive,’ said Irish Times literary editor Ulysses Grant. ‘He finds it difficult to finish anything unless he’s absolutely sure that everyone will love it.’”

Just wanted to say that everyone should read Ulysses Grant’s memoirs of the Civil War, as they really put you at the scene of this historical event. Also, that Adams, like all writers, is a sensitive human being. Look at Louis-Ferdinand Céline. The capper, however, has to be that Adams is so sensitive that Grant suggests that he hasn’t even finished the volume yet. He wants those positive reviews etched in stone before he’s going to let the process proceed another millimeter. And you thought he was tough on the Oranges…

On to Crooked Timber. Must remind myself to catch the discussion “The Good Childhood: Does It Exist?” when it posts later today. I just want to know what kind of wheels they put on the word “good.” Could make for a nice philosophical workout.

3 Quarks Daily brought me down, as now I’m mourning the absence of Carl Sagan all over again. Nice to know that the New York Times – the paper of note, don’t you know – felt it proper to open with a disquistion on Sagan’s tendency for dragging out the word “billions.” But you do have to agree with the Times: when Sagan died, he seemed to have taken a lot of erudition and understanding with him. Witness the battle over the teaching of evolution in schools, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and the American government’s refusal to address the realities of climate change seriously.

Thought I saw some light at the end of the tunnel at Daniel Drezner’s site: news that a tentative deal with North Korea on the nuclear issue was at hand. But, of course, we should be wary, for as Drezner points out, we’ve seen this kind of thing before, back in 1994, with the Agreed Framework. Moreover, “There is one big difference between 1994 and 2007… the Democrats now control both houses of Congress. I'm not sure, therefore, whether conservative opposition will be as big of a problem as it was before. Of course, it's possible that the 8% of the Democratic caucus in the Senate now running for president will use the deal as an opportunity for foreign policy posturing.”

Like I said, I like Daniel Drezner and his point of view. But sometime he can be such a mood-killer.

I waded through seven inches of snow to bring you these words, Fiona. What have you got for us?

- Helke

Our inaugural run with Spencer Ackerman and Melissa Lafsky was a bit up and down the wicket, so we decided to alter the format of Movable Snipe. What's Movable Snipe? you ask. An ingenious idea the Jewcy brass had a while back to get two writers to correspond with each other over the course of a week about five blogs pre-selected by little old me. Politics, feminism, pop culture, sports, literature, pornography – every purview is fair game and every Technorati eminence worth taking the piss out of.

Think Andrew Sullivan’s gone from conservative conscience to histrionic martyr? (I know nothing about that.) Here’s the platform to let his bloggy lordship have it.

As this is Jewcy, and as we can never do anything in a straightforward way, we've given our Snipers their own epistolary playground for a week: They can write rambling letters on whatever topics they choose, but they must incorporate all five blogs in each missive. It's like a clickable Mad Libs. But warning: some qualitative analysis of the internet may occur.

Your Snipers this week are:

Michael Helke, the books editor of Chicago monthly Stop Smiling. (It’s Jack Shafer’s favorite mag and – full disclosure – the first publication to ever print your humble servant, even if it was a pro bono gig.)

Fiona Maazel, former managing editor of the Paris Review, Jewcy contributor and current resident of Yaddo, that famed writer’s cloister where Jonathan Franzen is said to have kneaded the Muse into giving the world The Corrections.

Michael and Fiona’s quarry:

3 Quarks Daily: A nifty macedoine of science, literature, gossip and politics, beloved by Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and David Byrne. (Taking your sweet time with that blurb, aren’t you, Freeman Dyson?)

Nerve.com’s The Scanner: Another all-purpose jobber, only with more sex and fewer science geek endorsements.

The Elegant Variation: Mark Sarvas’ attempt to list all the great books you aren’t reading, though not because you’re spending all your time reading about not reading them.

Daniel Drezner: I emailed the newly tenured professor and old battle horse of the blogosphere to tell him that somebody loves him well enough to pay people to tweak him for a week. He appears gratified.

Crooked Timber: Named for Kant’s famous remark – “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made” – that was much co-opted by Isaiah Berlin to account for his milquetoast liberalism, this lefty blog has too many contributors to keep track of. I suppose they’ll be more carpet-bombed than sniped.

To answer your questions preemptively: a) shameless self-promotion, b) because tikkun olam doesn't do TrackBacks.