- I knew I wasn't the only one who needed a creative outlet other than writing! (via Maud)
- Great LA Weekly interview with Matt Taibbi on "how the U.S. is like Ike Turner"
- Lovely little surprise to find that the NYT's The Lede blog has quoted yours truly re: w00t madness.
- J.P. O'Rourke reviews Starbucked - a book I just finished and will be writing an LAist piece about in the coming weeks. I, for one, found the whole thing frightening. And: I'll never shop at a Starbucks again. Even if it's the only coffee in the airport. But: the book debunks some widely held myths about how bad Starbucks really is (contrary to popular belief, Starbucks has helped more mom and pops than it has closed). As you might imagine, it also uncovers some previously undiscovered calculations that made my stomach turn. Good fun.
- As has been noted elsewhere, Salon's list of favorite books in 2007 is about as safe as a list can get. I remember speaking to Josh Getlin at the LA Times about this earlier in the year - that the same books are reviewed in every paper on any given Sunday. Such is also true of the lists. How can the smaller presses and lesser known novelists ever break through the cold, unified front-of-a-wall that is these lists? They all look the same. They all list the same books. Ugh. Although, props to Ferris because we dig him, unified front of a list or not.
- What is really interesting, is Salon's coffee-table book list, which I'll examine in more detail shortly. Might compare it to Vogue's extravagance, as I see some of the same titles listed.
- Rachel Donadio at the NYT has an interesting profile of J. M. Coetzee and makes me ever-so-impatient to get my hands on Diary of a Bad Year which many of you have told me I must sit down with at once. Must get it first. A snippet from Donadio's piece:
In his 1991 essay “What Is a Classic?” Coetzee writes about T. S. Eliot’s decision to leave America, become a British citizen and convert to Catholicism. That process, Coetzee writes, is “one of the most spectacular that occur to me of a writer attempting to make a new identity, claiming that identity not on the basis of immigration, settlement, residence, domestication, acculturation ... but by defining nationality to suit himself and then using all of his accumulated cultural power to impose that definition on educated opinion.”
Perhaps Coetzee, for all his reticence, has similarly grand ambitions.