The Orange shortlist a) is dour b) should be dubbed Operation Debut Storm c) demonstrates that the judges actually do read--enough to leave out Toni Morrison and Monica Ali in favour of Andrea Levy.

"I had an epiphany one soporific mid-morning when I stood up in my cubicle to stretch myself awake. Turning slowly in place, I scanned a complete 360 of the cube horizon. The scene was slightly underlit, and while I could hear all sorts of human activity—talking, phones ringing, keyboards clattering—I couldn’t see another living person. I felt as if I was working in a room full of ghosts. The alienation of cube life was suddenly revealed to me as something gothic, a variation on the creeping dread of a Poe character. I could be walled up alive inside my cubicle and no one would even notice—the Cube of Amontillado. Immediately I dropped to my seat and jotted down a paragraph that appears almost without revision in my new book, Kings of Infinite Space."
James Hynes wants Cubicle Gothic? Come to Delhi, my man. In one of the last offices I worked in, we were pulling the late night shift watching with ill-concealed jealousy as luckier souls exited. This office was fully equipped with a lift, which no one in their right minds ever took because the thing was a) prone to getting stuck for hours in between floors and b) soundproof. So we listened resentfully as these people clattered down the stairs to freedom.
And then we heard them running back up, not a wise move in a building where the stairs were permanently carpeted with a sludge of stale food and regurgitated paan juices. They were noticeably greener, though that could just have been the general seediness of the place rubbing off on them. "There is," said the first one in, "a dead baby on the landing of the first and second floor."
This is a difficult observation to respond to, but our editor rose to the occasion. "Surely," he said, "you mean on the landing of EITHER the first OR the second floor." (N.B. The police showed up some hours later and exhibited absolutely no surprise that someone would choose this particular office as a dumping ground for the corpses of small infants.)

From Edge: "Choose science, and you have something important to write about. Not just important but fascinating. Not just fascinating but open-ended: you'll never run out of subjects, where the effort of simplification repays the writer as richly as the reader." Richard Dawkins offers advice to the young science writer.

Pankaj Mishra's been having fun at the Hong Kong Literary Festival. "During the festival, Pankaj Mishra, who has been hailed as one of the most significant of India's new generation of novelists, engaged in heated debate with Professor John Carey, the critic, reviewer, and broadcaster.
Carey accused some Indian writers of rising to prominence with a 'lyrical, playful, Disney style of describing often horrific events.' Carey singled out Arundhati Roy, author of The God Of Small Things. 'I find her gap between manner and matter quite worrying.' Mishra, who as an editor discovered Roy, jumped to her defence: 'The same problem of a lack of political concern or moral concern that Professor Carey claims to see in novels by Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie. . . one could point to that in Kipling.' If anyone has the text of the complete discussion, please do mail me (hurreebabu@yahoo.co.uk)

In an earlier post, I'd wondered what a column on Sex and the Umma would have to say. The answer is plenty: Mohja Kahf's first two columns (short stories, to be precise) for Muslim Wake-Up were hilarious, touching and provocative in equal measure. If you missed them, do yourself a favour and catch up now. And don't miss the Comments section on each column: those are mini-novels in their own right!
Mohja opened with Lustrous Companions: "Do we get dick in heaven?' my best friend’s Aunt Maryam whispers to me during the ladies’ Quran study halaqa at the Jersey City Mosque. We are doing 'The Merciful,' the chapter of the Quran where all the sexy virgin babes are promised to men in paradise. 'Men get pussy. Do we get dick?' Maryam says. I snort laughing, but turn it into a coughing fit and cover it with the scalloped edge of my headscarf."
This week's offering is Exquisite Parts: "Maryam comes home with a big leatherbound Arabic book tucked in her canvas bag. 'Got something a little more high class than that magazine of yours,' she announces. 'This girl who just came from the B’lad brought this for her sister who’s about to get married. She’s letting me borrow it.'
It says 'Tuhfat al-Ursan' in gilt lettering: The Bride and Groom’s Treasury. I open randomly. 'Advice for the Groom on the Wedding Night, based upon the Sunna of the Prophet, Peace and Prayers Be Upon Him: Caress her and finesse her, but do not distress her.' Good, good, but we’re way past that."
I'm sitting here wondering why it took me so long to discover Mohja Kahf. After eons of reading politically correct women writers whose books fall into the "oppressed, depressed, repressed" category, as a friend of the Babu's puts it, it's sheer relief to find someone who can write with humour and sharp wit about sex.

Samit Basu (author of The Simoquin Prophecy) asks whether Sarnath Banerjee's graphic novel, Corridor, could be the start of a revolution in the creaking world of Indian comic books.
Jonathan Lethem has an essay on reading comic books: "In the mid-1970s I had two friends who were into Marvel comics. Karl, whose parents were divorced, and Luke, whose parents were among the most stable I knew. My parents were something between: separated, or separating, sometimes living together and sometimes apart, and each of them with lovers."
And from Nerve (nb: not quite x-rated but if you're under the age of consent, remember that Kitabkhana refuses to deal with letters from irate parents complaining that the Babu's been leading their kids astray; you click either on this or on any of the Sex and the Umma posts, you're on your own), this neatly kinky essay by Neal Pollack celebrates the joys of lusting after superheroines. Especially when they're in the middle of a costume change.

It's all over the papers today, but it's still creepy enough to warrant a posting. Lancelyn Green, Sherlock Holmes sleuth, may have succumbed to the Conan Doyle curse. He was found in his home garrotted by a shoelace, surrounded by "gin and cuddly toys". The man apparently thought someone in the Sherlock Holmes Society had it in for him, though opinions differ as to whether this was paranoia, delusion or (given the garrotting) the plain truth.

The Whole New Story meme is beginning to spread. The fun continues at Zigzackly if you want to join in. Anvar Alikhan says he didn't come up with the original idea, but since he's the most creative and most prolific of us all, and he tweaked the game, the Babu offers him our heartfelt thanks. Anvar, you will be remembered in our will.)

From Zigzackly, courtesy the Margin Alien, via Anvar Alikhan.

Change one letter in a book title and you get a whole new story..
The Bobbit
Small man with big feet tries frantically to find someone in Middle Earth who can re-attach his penis.
The Catcher in the Rue
Sensitive French kid walks the cold Parisian streets, filled with angst. He has a beret with big earflaps, which he insists on wearing backwards.
The Gropes of Wrath
Sexual harrassment in the Depression.
One Hundred Bears of Solitude
Alas, there are only about 8 dozen of them left in Colombia today.
The God of Small Thongs
Arundhati Roy's haunting story of a South Indian lingerie tycoon.
The Fridges of Madison County
The history of refrigeration in Iowa.
Sour Man in Havana
Disgruntled tourist in cold war Cuba.
Uselyss
700 pages of drivel.
The Sound and the Furry
The only really useful guide to healthy animals in the American Deep South ...

Got more? Add them to Zigzackly. This is what the Babu has to offer:

To Bill A Mockingbird
From the old South, a tale of racist corporations out to bankrupt a fine and upright man by overcharging him for everything
The Wind in the Pillows
Tragic love story centering around what happens when flatulent hero sleeps with head the wrong way around
Mom Jones
Chicklit goes grey when a dissatisfied suburban housewife decides to craft her own picaresque adventure
Withering Heights
The king of the killer review gets his comeuppance on the moors
The Call of the Mild
The ultimate gerbil adventure story

No idea where this originated--if it's from you, Anvar, take a bow. If not, tell me whose idea it was originally.

The Independent called Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi's The Last Song of Dusk "an exuberant performance". The Times of India called Shanghvi "India's newest, youngest and possibly best-looking exported guru of sex and spirituality", though the article went on to qualify the praise considerably. India Today burbled across three pages about 2004's "hottest literary sensation".
So the Babu opened the book and almost choked on the very first sentence: "On the day Anuradha Patwardhan was leaving Udaipur for Bombay to marry a man she had not even met in the twenty-one years of her existence, her mother clutched her lovely hand through the window of the black Victoria and whispered: 'In this life, my darling, there is no mercy.'" Aside from the really important questions it raised (whose lovely hand? do we really need bathos in the opening para?) it made me wonder whether Shanghvi's manuscript had ever been introduced to an editor.
Many pages later, I knew the answer. The writer who could produce a truly funny riff on India seeing the first mini-sari as "nothing short of cultural blasphemy", with the Rakshash Junta Party ("an extremist right-wing group of thugs") waving banners of protest saying ("The LAND that WORSHIPS the COWS Will NOT Have WOMEN Showing Their CALVES!") could not possibly be responsible for sentences like this, from a passage where Dr Hariharan starts to beat his wife:
"This went on with merciless delight--thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash,
thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash,
thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash,
thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash, thrash,
thrash, thrash, thrash--until with a pregnant woman's ferocious instinct for
survival, Mrs Hariharan fought back. Kicking, biting, clawing, kicking, biting,
clawing, kicking, biting, clawing, kicking, biting, clawing, kicking, biting, clawing,
kicking, biting, clawing, kicking, biting, clawing, kicking, biting, clawing, kicking,
biting, clawing: as much as a woman with an infant stored in her womb could."
This kind of proves my thesis, which is that Shanghvi is an exuberant, energetic literary sensation who never had an editor do more than breathe on his manuscript for two seconds. Because any editor worth his or her salt would have:
"Begged him to delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete,
delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete,
delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete,
delete, delete, delete."
Unless of course this was suggested and Shanghvi protected the imminent rape of his fine prose by kicking, biting, clawing for all he was worth.

Mills & Boon Land, where the rules never change: "No inter-racial relationships ('though sheikhs are OK'), no adultery, no one-night stands, no politics, religion (presumably the sheikhs are of the non-muslim variety) or other gritty social issues, no subplots, no same-sex couplings. The hero must be an 'Alpha Male'. He cannot be bald, ginger or short. He cannot be German. The heroine must be of childbearing age (ideally 22-34), she's allowed one illegitimate child, she cannot smoke and she cannot be the man's superior socially or financially. I realise with a stab of disappointment that not only am I unlikely to make it as a romantic writer, but, as a 35 year old, I don't even qualify as a romantic heroine. Elizabeth has worked herself up into a righteous lather by this stage. 'I'm tempted to sue Mills & Boon,' she declares." Joanne O'Connor boldly goes where you couldn't pay me to venture--into the heart of a course in romance writing.

The Rushdie wedding is covered here and here and here. Frankly I have a hard enough time keeping awake when people show me pictures of weddings I've attended (including my own, which was a three-ring circus that still gives me nightmares), so I've never seen the point of checking out pictures of weddings I'm not invited to. Anyway. This is marriage number four and we all hope Salman and Padma will live happily ever after etc etc etc.

Just a brief note to say that the Nebula winners have been announced. I'd read several of the nominees before (if you're interested, browse here) and not for the first time, I was struck by the relatively high standards this sci-fi award sets compared to most "literary" awards. And the mainstream blinkered view that sees science-fiction as third-rate writing about little green men and nubile earthwomen clad in very little seems stuck in the dark ages of the genre.
Karen Joy Fowler's Nebula-winning 'What I Didn't See' is light years ahead of any of the New Yorker stories I've read this year (okay, bar the one by T C Boyle) and most of the short literary fiction that's come my way in terms of concept and execution. And for strictly personal reasons, this is one of my favourite passages from the story: "Eddie had this idea once that defects of character could be treated with doses of landscape: the ocean for the histrionic, mountains for the domineering, and so forth. I forget the desert, but the jungle was the place to send the self-centered."

Saw this over at Maud Newton--posted by the marvellous Stephany Aulenback, who also blogs there--and haven't stopped laughing yet.
"I need an agent. I want to produce a board book called "Beckett for Babies." Much like that Baby Einstein book I've just linked, this book will feature photographs of small babies and toddlers. In this case, they will be photographs of small babies and toddlers struggling to do small baby and toddler things. Each photograph will be accompanied by a suitable Beckett quotation.
For instance, a photograph of a baby wobbling on the verge of her first step will feature the text "I can't go on. I'll go on."
A series of photograph of two toddlers earnestly stacking a pile of blocks only to knock them back down will be accompanied by this dialogue:
First baby: That passed the time.
Second baby: It would have passed in any case.
First baby: Yes, but not so rapidly.
And a close-up of a distraught, wailing baby imprisoned in his high chair will read "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful."
I could go on, but I won't. Anyone who can help make this dream a reality (and me as rich as that Baby Einstein lady) should email me at stephka@maudnewton.com immediately.
Posted by Stephany Aulenback

"It is commonly conceded that Dumas rescued historical fiction from the plodding, turgid style in which Sir Walter Scott and his many imitators had entombed it. He took considerable liberties with historical truth -- as, indeed, have most writers of historical fiction -- but he knew how to keep a plot under full steam." Jonathan Yardley on The Count of Monte Cristo. I have to disagree slightly. Went through a huge phase in my youth (longlost, alas), where I thought the most dramatic line ever written came from Ivanhoe: "Beware, Saxon, lest you strike horse!"

"I've struggled back and forth between my desire to make science fiction into a visionary literature of great emotional and literary intensity, and the publisher's desire to make a lot of money. Every decade or so I've walked out in anger saying I can't cope with this dichotomy anymore." Robert Silverberg, this year's Grand Master awardee at the Nebulas.

Twain's frog might get government protection.

"As one of the doubles of the son of the dictator, I am often to be found in the Palace of the End." The Guardian has a new short story by Martin Amis.

Two words you do not want to see the interviewer employ when she's face to face with Margaret Atwood: "Blimey. Okay." Despite the dumbing down, Atwood (even packaged Lite), gets off a couple of interesting ones: "There's always been a popular literature, which people look down on and which vanishes from memory. As a writer, it's just a question of what piece of tin can and rusty old springs are you going to make into a beautiful sculpture today?"

Could it be--cryptomnesia? Long peroration on whether Nabokov cribbed Lolita from another book and whether, if he did, he meant to. I don't know about Writer Type Writers, as in the Real Thing, but I once cribbed four paragraphs of a piece from...an essay I'd written roughly four years previously. Which probably means that if imitation is the best form of flattery that I'm a flaming narcissist. (Note that there are four 'I's in the last two sentences. Five if you're counting the last three.)

* Schadenfreude and the Babu: Some of you (yeah, yeah, the ones who wrote mocking letters) might remember a post from a while back on the strangeness of reading to an audience of two people. I'm in exalted company. According to this NYT piece on a book about author humiliations, Carl Hiaasen and William Trevor have shown up for readings to find no one there. (I had two readers, Carl, two! Count them and weep!)

The Babu owes Orson Scott Card. He reminds me that an author is not his books, that much as I may have loved the Ender's Game series, I don't need to like or even agree with the man's opinions. Card's earnest diatribe against same-sex marriage ducks a key issue. The institution of marriage has, in the past, been a strictly commercial relationship, barred people of the wrong caste (or colour) from marrying, been used as a conduit to a woman's property, blah blah blah: to cut it short, the exalted state of marriage that Card and others of his ilk seek to protect never really existed. It's only in the last century that men and women have been seen as equal partners within the institution; it's only since Dr Spock that child-rearing has been treated as serious business. (Via MaudNewton.)

Random Passage (From Return of the Reluctant, link via MaudNewton):

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

This is what I came up with:
"Here I am, writing and writing, but nobody sees what I write," he declared, more in anger than in a bid for sympathy.
(Andrey Kurkov, Death and the Penguin)
Dear Lord. Of course it's a sign from heaven, but why pick on an atheist blogger, is what the Babu would like to know.

"For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away." Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Also this: "Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well." Now that you have two good reasons to read the man on writing, go right ahead.

One of my all-time favourite series is George McDonald Fraser's Flashman books, which took Flashy out of school and sent him swaggering, blustering and rogering his way across several continents as an adult. Charlie Higson's been commissioned to do a Flashy in reverse on James Bond, who will feature as a teenager. And his secret weapon will be--acne?

Back in the days when I was a hormone-driven young teeanger, I had an experience that I now realise qualifies as an "interfaith sexual experience". (In those days, we called it "making out" without reference to caste, class, faith or denomination, but then we were old fashioned.)
If you're wondering what exactly the "Muslim sexual experience" is, this website will explain. "Sex in Islam is not a dirty word or a forbidden subject. Thus MWU! feels the time is right to launch a special section that deals with this vital human subject in an honest and forthright manner.
We are pleased to introduce 'Sex & the Umma,' a series of bi-weekly columns regarding the issue of sexuality and Islam. Mohja Kahf, poet and professor at the University of Arkansas, and Asra Q. Nomani, author and former reporter at the Wall Street Journal, will alternate as columnists." (Link courtesy Tim and Shehla--thanks!)

It's going to be the man's fourth marriage, so of course Vanessa Thorpe thinks this is the perfect time to remind us of the intellectual importance of Salman Rushdie. Oh please. Just say it's gossip and be done with it. (Link courtesy Zigzackly's Peter Griffin.)

* Margo Jefferson has unwittingly set out the Blogger's Creed: "I used to wish I could live through the words of other writers. Unpleasant questions would be parried with crisp couplets and song lyrics; strong feelings and opinions would be given third-person protection. I wouldn't have to censor myself because my own prose wasn't up to the mark. Unreliable or omniscient, I would be the narrator in control." She kept notebooks of quotations; I link. (Which is just as well, because at present the only wisdom the Babu has to offer the world is the observation that nothing takes the joy out of murdering a mosquito as much as the discovery that you now have your own blood on your hands. Also, the reason why posts are uploading at such weirdly sporadic intervals today is because I'm busy playing TextTwist) and chatting online with friends who are thinner than me, make more money than me, and lead more interesting lives than I do, which leads me to wonder why I'm friends with them at all.)

"There's a certain comfort level you need to attain before you can emotionally handle a guy quoting you back to yourself in the bedroom, and it goes way beyond the comfort level required to get naked together." Everyone needs to be allowed to whinge about the drudgery of work. Even sex writers.

If you're so inclined, drop in at the Asimov site at 9 pm (EST) on April 13 and chat with the Nebula award nominees--Eleanor Arneson, Kage Baker, John Kessel, Ian R Macleod, Eleanor Arnason, Molly Gloss and James Van Pelt. They've cleared up that business about Asimov's being full of "sex, drugs and molestation" stories, sort of. Instead, they have Robert Silverberg on 'Toward a Theory of Story' (how's that for hardcore action, Mothers Of America?). He's well worth reading:
"Am I, then, tracing a direct line of evolution from the frantic ancient festivals of Dionysus to the Foundation series of Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert’s Dune?
Yes, I am. But I’m by no means through with this theme."

More on the Nebula: the ballot's up here and awards will be announced on April 17. Links to the rest of the nominees are available here. This is what I love about SF: especially when it comes to short stories and novellas, you can usually find what you're looking for online--and then you go ahead and buy the anthologies anyway. Someone explain this to the people in mainstream publishing, where even "chapter one" excerpts are hacked off at the knees.

The remains of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Lockheed P-38 have been found, settling at least the question of what happened on his last flight. He disappeared on July 31, 1944 while doing a recce; in 1998, a bracelet engraved with the names 'Consuelo' and 'Antoine' was found in the Mediterranean. In one of the last letters she wrote to him, his wife, Consuelo, with whom he shared an often fraught relationship, wrote: "And I am happy to think of you, to dream of you. Despite the fear I feel, knowing that you are the oldest pilot in the world, mon cheri--imagine if all men were like you!" The author of The Little Prince was 44 years old when he died.

The world's first really serious sci-fi museum is due to open in Seattle.

"To an extent, as a relatively young, unheard-of writer, you have a slight idiot's freedom... " Patrick Neate filled in for the DJ in Bangalore.

Pullet Surprises: They happened while Kitabkhana was awol, but here's the dope anyway.
Anne Applebaum, who won for Gulag, wrote on prize-eve in The Washington Times (*): "I'm not quite sure how it got to be this way -- writers of heavy books on one side, mass media on the other -- because it wasn't always so. The great American cultural blender once produced whole art forms, such as Broadway musicals and jazz, that might well be described as a blend of the two. But nowadays, that gap is so wide that I'm not even sure the old descriptions of the various forms of "culture" -- highbrow, middlebrow, popular -- even make sense any more. Does Edward P. Jones, the Washingtonian whose eloquent novel, The Known World, won a Pulitzer Prize this week, even inhabit the same universe as MTV? Does anybody who reads one watch the other?"

One From the Trashcan: An unpublished Kipling story that even the author may have thought wasn't up to scratch has been unearthed. It's from the Stalky & Co series; incidentally, still the best primer to schoolboy sadism I've encountered.

The British Book Awards, popularly known as the Nibbies since we're going to pretend that everyone still uses the fountain pen in the age of a) fancy ballpoints b) those box-like thingies called word processors, saw Lynne Truss in the unlikely company of Monica Ali (Newcomer of the Year) and David Beckham.

Wanted: Awards for novels that showcase the "spirit of resistance", the "spirit of now" and (why not?) the "spirit of St Louis". In my humble opinion, the Ondaatje award, for a book that best captures "a spirit of place", deserves company.

If you called BT recently with a customer complaint, you may have had author Siddhartha Deb at the receiving end.

The Babu has been absconding--"irritable in the sun", as this Joseph Conrad quote puts it, but without the final consequences: "You very red, Mr. Kayerts. If you are so irritable in the sun, you will get fever and die--like the first chief!" pronounced Makola impressively." (From 'An Outpost of Progress'.)
Ray Bradbury, incidentally, came up with a chillingly accurate description of fever in 'Fever Dream'.
"Now he no longer had any arms or legs, and his body was beginning to change. He did not move on the bed, but
looked at the vast blank ceiling space with insane concentration. Now he was silent, his hands strapped to his legs.
He felt the walls of his body change, the organs shift, the lungs catch fire like burning bellows of pink alcohol. The room was lighted up as with the flickerings of a hearth.
Now he had no body. It was all gone. It was under him, but it was filled with a vast pulse of some burning, lethargic drug. It was as if a guillotine had neatly lopped off his head, and his head lay shining on a midnight pillow while the body, below,
still alive, belonged to somebody else. The disease had eaten his body and from the eating had reproduced itself in feverish duplicate."
Some of you might quibble that I couldn't possibly have felt exactly like this, since Bradbury's protagonist was in the process of changing into something distinctly non-human. Then again, anyone who had the dubious pleasure of sharing an office with the Babu will suggest that the transformation happened quite a long while ago.

Old age doesn't creep up on you so much as it acts like the friendly neighbourhood flasher. I fear for my brain cells: forgot to post on this wonderful concept--marry the titles of your favourite books. Like this:
The Long Goodbye to All That
The Secret Diary of Anne Frank, aged 13 3/4
Gone with the Wind in the Willows
From Russia With Love Story
(Link via Bookslut and Zigzackly. Two reminders there. My Alzheimer's is kicking in.)

The things that turn up in the garbage on April Fool's day: Tagore's missing Nobel medal has been found in a dustbin, according to this story. Not a very funny joke, and I hereby warn Mid-day that they will be spammed by a hundred irate Bengalis. Not me; I just get spammed a lot myself by a hundred irate Bengalis (yeah, yeah, the same guys each time), so I know.

Euphemism of the day: "visa misunderstanding".

"But the hallmark of a good bookshop is the way it knows what its readers want, and so has those books upfront. Then you are not searching for you don?t know what, but discovering layers upon layers of just what you were looking for. And if the shop itself covers a tidy area then there are that many more subject areas to be delved into." Subir Roy on Bangalore's bookshops.

"Color lexicons vary, first of all, in sheer size: English has 11 basic terms, Russian and Hungarian have 12, yet the New Guinean language Dani has just two. One of the two encompasses black, green, blue and other 'cool' colors; the other encompasses white, red, yellow and other 'warm' colors. Those languages with only three terms almost always have 'black-cool,' 'white-light' and 'red-yellow-warm.' Those having a fourth usually carve out 'grue' [green-blue] from the 'black-cool' term." Why the number of colours a language can express is important. (Link via 2Blowhards.)

Pollack is back.

The Babu regrets he's taken so long to link to The Literary Dick, which is fast becoming one of my favourite sites. The LD welcomes questions about literary mysteries and scandals. He's done a lot on Henry James, has investigated the question of whether Proust was gay (not enough evidence, but it is true that Proust's father sent him to a brothel to cure his masturbatory habits), and right now he's examining the relationship between Dickens and the author's wife's sister. Jonathan Ames, thank you for brightening my week.

And several people pointed out that I missed the Sven Birkets piece on the book reviewing culture. "Psychologically it is a landscape subtly demoralized by the slash-and-burn of bottom-line economics; the modernist/humanist assumption of art and social criticism marching forward, leading the way, has not recovered from the wholesale flight of academia into theory; the publishing world remains tyrannized in acquisition, marketing, and sales by the mentality of the blockbuster; the confident authority of print journalism has been challenged by the proliferation of online alternatives."

The only thing bigger than the Babu's mouth (and the feet he frequently puts there for safekeeping) is his paunch. I've been considering various diets after giving up on exercise (it works; my muscles get bigger and bigger, unfortunately so does my appetite), and finally came across one that sounds good.
From Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand, this is the unofficial Jockey's Diet:
There's fasting: "Most jockeys took a more straightforward approach: the radical diet, consisting of six hundred calories a day... Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons confessed that during his riding days a typical dinner consisted of a leaf or two of lettuce, and he would eat them only after placing them on a windowsill to dry the water out of them..."
There's bulimia, recognised on the track long before it became a fashionable teenager disease: "Many riders were "heavers", poking their fingers down their throats to vomit up their meals."
There's laxatives: "Helen Luther once watched a rider step on a scale, only to see that he was over his horse's assigned impost. He shouted to the clerk of scales to hang on, raced to the bathroom, emerged a moment later with his pants still at half mast, and made weight. Such results could be had from a variety of products, including a stomach-turning mix of Epsom salts and water--chased by two fingers of rye to stop the gagging reflex--a plant-derived purgative called jalap, or bottles of a wretched-tasting formula known as Pluto Water."
And there's the method of last resort: "Contact the right people, and you could get hold of a special capsule, a simple pill guaranteed to take off all the weight you wanted. In it was the egg of a tapeworm. Within a short while the parasite would attach to a man's intestines and slowly suck the nutrients out of him. The pounds would peel away like magic. When the host jockey became too malnourished, he could check into a hospital to have the worm removed, then return to the track and swallow a new pill."
I dunno. Maybe I should just join one of those I-Love-My-Fat support groups. But do yourself a favour: never, never, search Google for the phrase "I Love Fat". It's a very sick world out there.