My nightly satire comes from The Daily Show and my morning satire used to be Neal Pollack's blog which is currently on hiatus. After some withdrawl, I found that Google News obligingly sends the most current articles on the topic of your choosing and today was paydirt an interview @ Popmatters. What I love about Mr. Pollack is his brutal yet, hysterical, honesty.....
PM: In your opinion, what were some of the notable literary happenings of 2003?
NP: Well, Stephen King got a lifetime achievement honor from the National Book Award people. That really brought out the snobs. Millions of zombie-kids and their helpless parents dressed like wizards to buy a doorstop that will be made into a movie before most of the kids hit puberty. Jessica Lynch refused to play the fool for Rick Bragg, who'd earlier left The New York Times in disgrace. There was some brouhaha over a book called The Bookseller of Kabul, but I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Heidi Julavits, in The Believer magazine, wrote an influential essay in which she decried the use of "snark" in book reviewing, and then a bunch of people who have never written a book and never will fell all over themselves trying to parse what she meant. Crap. I get tired thinking about this stuff. more here.
And so it goes, lol.
