Wednesday Hangovers

After a lot of heatedness and some yellingness, the car situation may be resolved. For now. Why do I now not trust any auto shop on Earth? Anyway, on with the show:

• This will blow your mindlets: Seona Dancing.
• Sara Ryan on the pleasures of The Wire. (Which really is the best, most consistent drama on TV.)
• There’s just something about those Aussie authors; witness Rosie Little: "Fellatio," Rosie says, "could lead the uninitiated to envisage something ornate, baroque even — perhaps some sort of decorative globe, or a wrought-iron birdcage, encrusted with stiff black vine leaves."
• The huge summer-autumn double issue of Endicott Studio’s The Journal of Mythic Arts is now online and features more goodies than I can even touch on here. Check it out.
• Ursula Le Guin on Margaret Atwood’s latest collection of stories.
• A great LA Times piece on the retirement of a Delta librarian after 30 years; everyone who thinks librarians and libraries are important should read this. (Via Jeff.)
• An investigation into allegations of (more) cheating on Project Runway? Say it ain’t inconclusive.
• Laura Bush on dirty books, in which it is revealed that Jenna highlighted sections of Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty: "Jenna had read it and underlined it and it was very interesting to see what a 25-year-old would underline," she recounts. She found herself lingering, a literary voyeur, over a passage her daughter had highlighted. "It was about the way a girl felt about her father, so it was revealing in that way." She can’t remember it more specifically, Bush says, except "of course it was a loving line." Of course.
• The Happy Booker hosts Janis Cooke Newman, author of doorstopper Mary, with a short essay about the book and Mary Todd Lincoln’s white cake. I interviewed Janis for PW’s BookExpo newsletter and found her fabulous, witty and full of excellent MTL tidbits. I’m looking forward to tackling Mary at some point, but for now, I may just settle for MTL’s white cake recipe.
• Andrew Wheeler puts that troubling statistic that The Book Standard (and O.G. Jeremy Lassen!) sent out into the world into perspective: The exact quote is "93 percent of ISBNs sold fewer than 1,000 units in 2004, according to Nielsen BookScan." Now, he didn’t say the universe was of books published in 2004, but of ISBNs, which includes every book in print, and plenty of books that are now out of print (ISBNs have been standard worldwide since 1970). So what he’s actually saying is that, in this one given year, only 7% of all of the books published since 1970 moved more than 1000 units. This is not particularly controversial. Still, too many books out of print, people reading less fiction than I want them to!
• My own personal favorite story of the day: dueling magicians.