Friday Afternoon Time Suck

If you're looking for something to do this afternoon, try typing the name of your favorite author into this Literature Map and watch the cloud of authors form around them. I like to watch the names jockey for position. Not sure how they determine the map, though. Some sort of algorithm, I guess. Whatever it is, they ought to tweak it. Barry Hannah shows up on every map. Anyway, it's still better than minesweeper.

Happy weekend, folks!

Happy Bloomsday, Everybody!

Today, June 16, is the day on which Ulysses takes place. So today, more than any other day, is the day when your friends and coworkers will pretend to have read Ulysses.

Friday is For Links

As the weekend looms, some links to send you on your way:

• The 1001 books to read before you die. I can just see myself getting really far into the list, like one book away, then finding myself on a doomed airplane. Plummeting to earth, my death just moments away, I stand up: "Shit! Does anybody on-board have a copy of Moll Flanders?" Making lists like this is stupid.
  

• The Morning News has a list of stuff they like on the Internet this year. They call it the 2008 Eddys. I was all jazzed to check out Colorwars, which they dub "what the web’s next wave will look like: Twitter-fied mob jollies, or, Improv Everywhere applied to Web 2.0." But then the link was broken.

• This is what happens when Mark Sarvas goes on book tour and misses a few days of blogging.

• Books aren't the only thing people like to list. "How this ranking of the parade of gleaming pneumatic women will affect young men isn't clear."

• Lewis Black is coming to Vroman's in June. I'm excited. You will be too after you watch this video (Warning! Audio is very NSFW. Dude shouts a lot):

• Apropos of nothing at all, how badass is Kingsley Amis' Wikipedia photo:
  

From the Annals of Better Late than Never

Keith Gessen appeared on the LA Times Festival of Books panel entitled "Fiction: Unconventional Visions." Tonight he will read and discuss his debut novel All the Sad Young Literary Men at Vroman's at 5:30. It's an odd start time, but I'm hoping for a good turnout. For once, the media machine is helping me out, as Sunday saw several write ups of Mr. Gessen. The New York Times featured an article about Gessen's contentious literary journal n+1. It revealed, among other things, that Gessen supported himself as a freelance book critic. As a book critic myself, I can tell you what a terrifying financial prospect that is. This post on the LA Times Jacket Copy blog revealed that, well, Gessen looks a little like Billy Zane. From Titanic.