Lit Bits & a Bit about The Zero

• Cruelest Month has the Bukowski poetry winners - they had to write a poem as if it were Bukowski's last. Good fun. Or, you know, drunk and hollering fun.
• Quick overviews of the LA Times Book Prizes Biography Nominees are up at LAist. I think these summaries are kind of a snooze-fest, but they were my idea. Oh well, must press on.
• The week in LA author readings is also up. I'm looking forward to the Ben Marcus reading on Sunday at the Hammer Museum.
• Ben Schott's piece that I fretted over earlier, may have been cribbed from Anne Fadiman. It's one thing to plagarize books. It's quite another to plagarize someone else's ideas about how to vandalize books, no? Or is there, as Gawker suggests, an entire army of literature-loving chambermaids who seek to right the wrongs of book-abusers everywhere?
• I'm halfway through The Zero by Jess Walter, which I'm reading for another LAist review (as part of our ongoing series about the LAT nominees), and I have to say: ugh. I like the sentences, some of the language is crisp in a way that no other writer can "crisp" and I kind of dig it. But overall, these memory lapses seem an excuse to not have to pull it all together. To let the plot run amok instead of making sense. Am I wrong? I hope I'm wrong. Tell me I'm wrong.