Hangovers

• Harold Pinter wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.
• Kirby Gann week continues with several more posts at the LBC.
• Hal Duncan is breaking beats over at the Geek Show.
• Sharyn November posts a fabulous article by Rachel Safko pining for the glamour days of publishing (from PW).
• RuPaul loved In Her Shoes (and I love RuPaul’s blog). (Via Jennifer Weiner.)
• Alan on Serenity’s box office.
• The WaPo gets in on the J.T. Leroy handicapping action.
• And Paul Di Filippo reviews David Morrell’s thriller Creepers.
• Margo Lanagan writing a lot makes me happy.

• First, I put up a review of the Fairy Tale Review’s blue issue over the weekend (or um, it’s right below this post); read and buy, my friends. I’d also love to hear from anyone else who’s read it.
• When being wrong feels so good, who wants to be right? Ed: it’s okay. Who knows where those books would have ended up if not for you? You rescued them. Dude, you are fiction’s hero.
• Max over at The Millions has seen J.T. Leroy and still isn’t sure whether he’s a real person. That takes skill.
• The Donald Maas Agency’s Jennifer Jackson on "The Proper Care and Feeding of Your Literary Agent" at Romancing the Blog. (Doesn’t she have a great photo?)
• The new Chizine is live, featuring the winners of its annual short story contest, which was judged by Hannah Wolf Bowen, Kelly Link and Elizabeth Bear. Early word is good.
• Losing sleep is bad.
• Le Cineclub on Dandelion, in which Lauren and Emma sort of disagree and two peonies are awarded.
• Da Vinci and the science behind Earthshine.
• Jeannette Winterson on touring.
• Meghan McCarron, moody and wise beyond her years.
• Poems to read while drinking whisky, supposedly. But who reads poetry when they’re drinking a good whisky?

• So, re: spiders. Kristin is living what I would generously call my own personal third circle of hell.
• Everybody loves the 1918 flu virus. (Are we really still calling this the "Spanish flu"? Why not the "Kansas flu"? Can’t we all just stick with the Great Influenza? If you were a strain, wouldn’t you want to be the Great one?)
• Jeff has the latest on the new snake-handling for kids: swallowing goldfish for Jesus. (Who always was a bit of a drinker and party trickster.)
• Bookgasm finds a lot to like in the new McSweeney’s YA anthology with the really long name. (I’m looking forward to this one.)
• Julian Rubinstein guest blogs at TEV. Ask him about Hungarian criminal geniuses.
• Mattia Valente rounds up the three new shows that want to be Lost. (I personally find Threshold watchable because of Peter Dinklage and the sheer B-movie unbelievability of it. Haven’t seen the others. Haven’t seen much of Threshold–but I love it when a black helicopter swoops in to pick up a girl.)

Sorry for the sparse content; busy, tired, distracted, all of the above. Last night was the first night in a couple of weeks I’ve been too tired to do any work on the book at all. The not working is its own punishment, as always.

• The Old Hag interviewed in her capacity as Empress of Girl’s Life on a beigey web site. (I posted her calll for submissions awhile back; more information about what GL is looking for in the interview.) (And I’m buying Ms. Skurnick’s poetry chapbook as soon as the wallet recovers from the Car Bill of Doom.) Oh, and she’s running a contest. (Interview link via Cynsations.)
• Toni with an excellent long post about writing and publishing (read it!). Hard work and "luuuuuuuuuuuuuuvvvvvvvvvvvve" are the watchwords.
• Jenny D recommends the most excellent sounding The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine by Paul Collins. Sez she: "… lots of skeletons and weird medical-history facts, aside from its other charms." I’m in.
• Mely at Coffee and Ink adds cooking to her polymath list — a long, charming, envy-making post (me + kitchen + cooking = emergency room visit) about her first three months learning to cook.
• New Mary Roach book. (If someone sent me a copy, I’d be very, very happy… Just saying.)

• A Hallmark card erodes, but spiders in amber last forever.
• Emma Garman and Lauren Cerand (aka Le Cineclub) discuss Going Shopping. (Sometimes, I think reading their back and forths would actually turn out to be better than seeing the movie.)
• To celebrate the giant squid find, fabulous poetess Erin Keane posts her "The Giant Squid Mourns the Loss of His Privacy," which is also in the latest issue of Full Unit Hookup.
• Matthew Brooke, 26, was charged Friday with felony theft of library materials and criminal damage to property. He went to the Historical Society on Thursday, according to a criminal complaint, and smashed the window on a second-floor antique display case with his elbow. He allegedly swiped the "Pennsylvania Evening Post" from inside the case. And later in the story: Brooke told detectives he took the book because he wanted to read a story on page 106 about a historical figure named William Hill. Dan Brown and Nic Cage: call your agents.
• Is this The Jet Li?
• Dr. Shrinker: who knew?
• Bizarre little NYT story about Threshold, which looks down its nose at SF the entire time. (Yeah, it must not be science fiction if it’s good, right? This is STILL happening?!)
• Rebecca Skloot on the truth about quicksand and how to get out of it.

Feeling slightly better, good enough to spend the day writing/editing and things. Everyone who goes to see Firefly start saying what you think; I want to talk about it. (But I’m going to see it again before I post about it.) The only review I’ve read so far is Salon’s, which is right on target. If you read any other reviews worth taking a look at, drop a note in the comments.

• Sources have informed me that the awesome Colleen Mondor has a new blog, and if the first couple of posts are any indication: it’s about time. Go chase Ray (Bradbury) with her.
• Ed Champion is cracking me up, as he frequently does, with a series of Auctorial Doppelgangers that starts here. My favorite so far is number two: Michael Chabon and Gaius Baltar from Battlestar Gallactica. (And Tito joins the fun as well.)
• SuperLibrarian Nancy Pearl recommends her favorite short story collections. Anyone read A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories  by Victor Pelevin (translated by Andrew Bromfield)? That sounds fab.
• Over at the LBC, which I hope you agree is way more interesting this time around, Steve Stern responds to the dialogue and Paul Slovak, uber-editor (and the book’s publicist), gives his thoughts on the process of editing Stern.
• Scientists think they’ve found Homer’s Ithaca.
• Congratulations to you crazy kids. Much happiness!

• Birnbaum vs. Paul Collins. Check it out.
• San Franciscans go see Miss Cecil Castellucci and Her Purple Daisy Electric Guitar on Friday. Details here. For the record: This whole writers who can also play music and make movies and have tons of other talents thing is just totally unfair.
• Make sure you check out all Tingle Alley‘s fine content related to The People of Paper, a most excellent and wonderful novel.
• The tireless Dan Wickett on the origins of the contents of BASS.
• Lucius Shepherd reviews Paul Di Filippo’s The Emperor of Gondwanaland and Other Stories in the WaPo and finds much to like. 
• They’re coming for you.

• Battlestar Gallactica interruptus reviews: at Strange Horizons by Dan Hartland and by Abigail Nussbaum at Asking the Wrong Questions. The truck-drivable-through holes in the most recent episode (President Roslin’s complete and convenient disappearance halfway through being the most rankling) were par for the course, but I’m still liking the show despite its flaws. Both these reviewers give insightful takes.
• Chris McLaren’s got lots of goodies, including Harlan Ellison being Harlan Ellison and a post about words we don’t have words for in English.
• Meanwhile, Writing Queen and Birthday Girl Justine Larbalestier (Happy, Happy!) and Writing King Scott Westerfeld post competing chronicles of the running of the bulls in San Miguel de Allende. I know those pics they’re posting are envy provoking, but rest assured, having stayed in that house and knowing it’s actually even more Eden than in the photos, all our eyes should be completely green.
• Islam in science fiction. (Via Morrow Planet.)
• Pam McNew posts at Short Form about two stories in the current double issue of F&SF that I also really enjoyed: Dale Bailey’s "Spells for Halloween: An Acrostic" and Jeff Ford’s "Boatman’s Holiday." (Yes, yes, I know it’s all Jeff Ford all the time around here lately, but tell me, you have picked up The Girl in the Glass, right?)
• Moorish Girl posts some responses to Author’s Guild Vs. Google Print. If only I could work up the care about this one. Get with the future, people. (Also, check out this entry about Salman Rushdie asking her to sign his copy of her book…)

• Toni Causey writes a beautiful post about her own Louisiana. A small taste: Like my dad, I was born there, in pure Cajun country. Unlike my dad, I would never know the language, not in its full, rich glory, neither French, nor a corruption of it, but an altered language, spoken still in old cafés with threadbare linoleum and formica countertops in small towns, dim and dusty and far from the interstate. My dad spoke only Cajun until he was in the first grade, when the teachers had been instructed to force all of the kids to speak only English, and stabbed a heritage in its soul without a single blade falling.
• Jed Hartman on several upcoming movies and the development-ridden Last Unicorn, along with some other interesting Peter Beagle updates.
• An extremely entertaining Night Shade thread of guessing about the identity of John 12 Hawks (you remember, that guy, turquoisey mirrorshade ads for his book guy); Tod Goldberg‘s popping his head in is the best part. (Via the S1ngularity blog.)
• C‘s been reading The Futurians and he dug up this fabulous photo of Carol and Ed Emshwiller at the 1959 WorldCon.
• These people are just not getting the Banned Books Week spirit: Meanwhile, in Newark, New Jersey, parents such as Greg and Tina Angeletti are waging a campaign to ban Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison’s book Song of Solomon from high school English classes. According to the Angelettis, Morrison’s work is “pornography”. School officials disagree, pointing out the whole “Nobel Prize-winning author” thing. Proof that it doesn’t only happen in states that start with K. (I was thinking of Kansas.)
• Poetry and politics at the National Book Festival. (Great piece.)
• You lost me after the first two…
• Is this pointing out the obvious or is it just me? (Perhaps it’s really controversial.)
• Finally, a piece on Curtis Sittenfeld and Prep in the Guardian, with some charming bits. (I updated the Reads column over on the left this weekend with my own nominee for best boarding school book of the year; mileage may vary.) This is my favorite part: ‘Most, if not all, of what I experience now I’ve experienced a variation of it before,’ she goes on, jadedly. ‘If I went to my first dinner party, I’m sure I would notice everything the hostess said and everything people were wearing and everything people talked about; now I’ve gone to enough that they just blur together. These are the biggest chunks of blue cheese I’ve ever seen in a salad,’ she adds as our food arrives, endearingly rubbishing her point. This seems perhaps not the best strategy for experiencing, y’know, life.  The end of the article says her next novel is called The Man of My Dreams, but I’m sure it’s litrature and not chick lit.

And on that note of snark–which hurts me, really and truly, it does–happy Monday. At some point this week expect posts on: life in glasses, Marcy Demansky’s fabulous novel Twins, television goodness and conspiracy theories. Or at least some of that stuff. A few other Monday items below…

And then I go (re)write till my ears bleed.

• New York Verses by Carrie, who, in case you hadn’t noticed, is one of People magazine’s Funniest People Alive.
• Lauren Cerand and Emma Garman discuss Green Street Hooligans.
• Clare Dudman (whose 98 Reasons for Being I’m reading at the moment and loving) on the joy of coffee AND how good it is for you. Almost makes me want to switch back from tea. Almost. (For some reason, coffee tends to make me sleepy. Go figure.)