Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for September 5

New Believer is out!...Mediabistro has an article ("Scoring an Article at Your Dream Pub") about an article in this issue (Jason Boog's excellent "Skinning the Americans"), which I can't read, as it's behind a subscription wall; it possibly contains some quotes from me...who knows?!...Really cool piece on Borges by Gustavo Turner...Some Psychic activity...Alter-Ed has news of Nicholson Baker's upcoming book...(I guess you can't say he never does the same book twice—A Box of Matches and Room Temperature were perhaps variations on the strategy of The Mezzanine—but his range is impressive and I'm thinking about Perec these days and Baker might be one of the more Perecqian writers working today, in terms of appetite, range? This new book is "an 800-page opus"!...vs. the superslim Checkpoint, which really would work as a playlet)...("writers working today" = FormulaWatch™ would not be pleased!)...Want to inaugurate a new meme/contest via Jenny D but will do so next week...Sure, it's preaching to the converted, but this might be the hottest Atkinson blog post yet..."smirking Barbary ape"..."every limb-scattered intervention"..."teeters on the cliff-edge of nonsense"...This Poetry Foundation podcast is pretty great (listening to New Yorkers read aloud from those "Poetry in Motion" things on the subway)...

The compleat completist

Yesterday during the umpteenth installment of FormulaWatch™, I praised A.O. Scott's very funny spin on "This movie is for [actor's name] completists." Alas, I got so excited that I didn't finish the review, which ends:

But the movie seems to exist mainly so that some critic might say: If you see just one table tennis martial arts parody this year, make it “Balls of Fury.” I’m afraid I can’t go that far.

That is something to avoid, the "If you see just one [hodgepodge genre] movie this year..." setup. I say all these things only because I know I've done them. I am just trying to weed them out of my system.

Anyway, on the plus side, I do want to point out (as I have in the past) Scott's very consistent whistleblowing—pretty rare for a mainstream critic—on vaguely racist b.s.: "There’s borderline-offensive ethnic humor (Asians talk funny! They eat strange food and speak a different language!)..."