I was told there'd be blogging

1. So there have been other reviews of Laura Warholic! Check out what Dizzyhead Darren dug up—Dizzies fave Richard Stern writing on Theroux in the Chicago Tribune. It begins:

Want to know what J. Edgar Hoover's three favorite drag ensembles were, or the names of the women who invented the safety pin, goat cheese, the child's car seat and the circular saw, or the kind of patrons a "doom-dark," "cavernous" club called The Sewing Circle attracts? Want to read brilliantly virulent tirades against women, whites, blacks, Jews, Christians, Generation X, the U.S. and mankind a la Alexander Pope's "Dunciad" and Juvenal's satires?

If so, the novel "Laura Warholic; or, The Sexual Intellectual" is the book for you.

(Can't find a link, but will e-mail the text if you like.)

2. Why I love country music: The Sweenster on Porter Wagoner:

I feel especially lucky because my wife and I were able to see him perform twice this year—once at the Opry on our trip to Nashville, and again at MSG when he opened for The White Stripes, which we saw the night after we were married. Porter was there for us when we needed him...

3. Via Hua, Buffalo's own Mercury Rev covers "Isolation."

4. Excited about these recent arrivals on the new doorstep—two less similar books, there can not be!: Sloane Crosley's I Was Told There'd Be Cake and Lynne Sharon Schwartz's Emergence of Memory: Conversations With W.G. Sebald.