• As mentioned yesterday, Ursula K Le Guin’s review of Rushdie’s latest, The Enchantress of Florence, was a ululation of praise, a hosanna of “howyoudoin'” (as they might say in the backwaters of bad Rushdie fanfic), but The Complete Review has begun rounding up critical opinion and so far the verdict’s mixed. Peter Kemp’s review is particularly scathing.
• Come play: Old Hag is hosting a contest for two books by New Yorker writer David Samuels. The challenge is to coin a word or phrase to describe when a reviewer leads off his or her review with a personal anecdote of “dubious relevance.” It’ll be tough to top “‘I’-gression” but you should try.

Last week I discovered the show Damages and watched all 13 episodes of Season 1 over a marathon of on-the-couch dinners and before-bed cups of tea (see Top 5 at right). One of the best parts of the show is Ted Danson’s character of billionaire Arthur Frobisher, the defendant in an Enron-esque class-action lawsuit brought by the former employees of his bankrupt company. Danson was nominated for a Golden Globe for his part, and if the world were a right one, his giant block of a brow and his white, wolfish chompers also would have gotten nods.
As his case comes closer to trial, Frobisher is taking a p.r. beating in the media and, against the advice of his attorney, he arranges to have his biography written. Now Frobisher is very much Forster’s man on the golf course, and it’s clear he expects this project to be a glossy piece of hagiography, one that will chart his self-made rise to captain of industry, his triumph over childhood dyslexia, his family values, etc. etc. In due time, a biographer is procured — a nervous plug of a guy named George, “a fellow from Yale, writes fiction no one reads but he’s one hell of a biographer” — and the project commences. Yet as the interviews between writer and subject continue Frobisher’s confidence visibly wavers as he becomes more nervous about how his biographer (and hence history) will judge him. He pays a midnight visit to his biographer’s tiny city apartment to drum up camaraderie. The attempt fails, and, desperate, Frobisher tries one last sally:
FROBISHER: Tell me about your book.
GEORGE: My novel?
FROBISHER: Sorry, your novel.
GEORGE (looking pained & emo): It’s hard to describe.
FROBISHER: Just tell me what it’s about, will you?
GEORGE: On the face of it, it’s a love story. It’s about nostalgia and how that affects our core relationships —
FROBISHER (incredulous): Jesus, George! I mean, that sounds like crap! Are you kidding me? Look what you’re doing here? (motions around apartment) You’re living in — You’re sleeping on a futon. C’mon! Of course you’re writing about my life. You don’t have one!
A short scene but the “On the face of it, it’s a love story” line and the sputtering “You’re sleeping on a futon” (I do!) are killers.

“If you ask one type of man, ‘What does a novel do?’ he will reply placidly: ‘Well–I don’t know–it seems a funny sort of question to ask–a novel’s a novel–well, I don’t know–I suppose it kind of tells a story, so to speak.’ He is quite good-tempered and vague, and probably driving a motor bus at the same time and paying no more attention to literature than it merits. Another man, whom I visualize as on a golf-course, will be aggressive and brisk. He will reply: ‘What does a novel do? Why, it tells a story of course, and I’ve no use for it if it didn’t. I like a story. Very bad taste on my part, but I like a story. You can take your art, you can take your literature, you can take your music, but give me a good story. And I like a story to be a story, mind, and my wife’s the same way.’ And a third man he says in a sort of dropping regretful voice, ‘Yes–oh dear, yes–the novel tells a story.’ I respect and admire the first speaker. I detest and fear the second. And the third is myself. Yes–oh, dear, yes–the novel tells a story . . . The more we look at the story (the story that is a story, mind), the more we disentangle it from the finer growth it supports, the less we shall find to admire. It runs like a backbone–or may I say a tapeworm, for its beginning and end are arbitrary . . . It is a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence–dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death and so on. Qua story, it can only have one merit: that of making the audience wonder what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next. These are the only two criticisms that can be made on the story that is a story . . . When we isolate the story like this and hold it out on the forceps–wriggling and interminable, the naked worm of time–it presents an aspect both unlovely and dull. But we have much to learn from it.”
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, as quoted and elided by Samuel R. Delany in About Writing

• David Orr’s review of Elegy, a book of poetry by Mary Jo Bang, explores the difficulties of transforming great grief into art.
• After a couple clunkers, it sounds as if Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence, is a return to form. Ursula K Le Guin praises it to the “brilliant, fascinating” moon.
• Once more with feeling!: Three different accounts of the recent Buffy reunion panel in L.A. Each one contains different morsels of trivia, backstage gossip, and reads on the personalities, so if you’re a fan you’ll want to read all three. If you’re not a fan, you’ll, um, just want to skip the whole thing. (Via.)

• Bookslut pushes the poetry of Philip Whalen. In addition to those links, you can read some of Whalen’s poetry as well as explore other writings and biographia.
• Joan Didion, short and long.
• “Read this and never come back”: Marginalia of a county jail library. The jail is located in Dade County, Wisconsin, so Madison-ish. Here is the library’s “Most Wanted” list (jail humor!), and you can help with a book or two. (Via The Dizzies.)
• Speaking of breaking the law, one of the best news stories to emerge from Asheville in recent weeks was the arrest of (alleged) moonshine king Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton. The ATF has shut down quite a few moonshiners in the area in the past year; I don’t know the reason for the stepped-up policing, but it certainly invites some investigative reportage beyond “boy, it sure is harder to procure moonshine lately”. As Mountain Xpress notes, Popcorn once authored a book called Me and My Likker, which may have, you know, helped tip off authorities. The book’s out of print now so it’s impossible to verify the rumor that it included a fold-out map with the sites of Popcorn’s stills marked with big black “x”s.

Over the weekend both our cars were broken into. Nothing too serious, just a change box and the handful of CDs in the carrier — all the CDs, that is, except for one, which pointedly got left behind on the driver’s seat: My copy of Nilsson Schmilsson.
I love the record, Lowell hates it, and we’ve bickered about it a kazillion times the way you do when you’re married and go everywhere together and are appalled by what the other one wants to play on the stereo on the way there. You can tell Lowell feels super-vindicated that the car burglar took his side.

What a relief, The Return of Jezebel James has been cancelled. Out of loyalty to Amy Sherman-Palladino I watched the first two weeks and would have continued to watch — but it was painful. About five minutes in to the first episode it was clear the show was a bust, and after that it was just like sitting vigil. It felt like, if you had a friend who rammed her ship into an iceberg and everyone knows the boat’s sinking but you kind of owe it to her to stay on board anyway and drink with her until the whole thing goes down. Or something like that. It was bad.
So that laugh track was an abomination before God, but what else went wrong (I ask ye, the other four people who watched the show)? For me, Parker Posey seemed overly vague and drifting in her role, like she never clued in that she was a lead and had to hold the center down. Instead she played her part like a satellite character: A two-note sidekick.
And then, I think, part of the fault must lie with how her character was written, with scavenged Frankenstein-ish pieces of Lorelai Gilmore (e.g., the compulsive list-making, the fascination with girlie monstrosities like Hello Kitty) stapled on here and there, which made for an incoherent whole — again, at least as Posey played it. I hate to say this because I adore her, but these tics felt less like a return of beloved tropes, than a failure of imagination on ASP’s part*. She writes so well about neurotic, complicated, high-strung women, but I want her to push on.
* I felt the same way when Anna and April, Luke’s ex-girlfriend and daughter, were introducted in GG Season 6 — Anna with her fast-talking and her quirks, April as a bookish brainiac — and it was all a little too mirror, mirror on the wall to the Lorelai-Rory houseold.