Weekend Edition: 1-22

Blog Headline of the Week

• Sneezy After Sex? You Could Have Post Orgasmic Illness Syndrome

Blog Lines of the Week

• “Anyone who thinks that six-year-old girls can’t make convincingly feral wolves has never had a six-year-old girl.”
• “Hey, how come all the newspapers and magazines are ignoring this Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother book? Come on, journalists! Write something about Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother!”

Worthwhile Reading in the Interweb Tubes

• Responding to Another (“Predictably enough, the symposium on “Why Criticism Matters” in the January 2 New York Times Book Review primarily if unwittingly illustrates just about everything that’s wrong with literary criticism as practiced in most general-interest print publications.”)
• A manifesto for the simple scribe – my 25 commandments for journalists (“Words have meanings. Respect those meanings. Get radical and look them up in the dictionary, find out where they have been. Then use them properly.”) (via)

Bookish Linkage

• I was thrilled to get the email announcing that Melville House is launching The Neversink Library, which “champions books from around the world that have been overlooked, underappreciated, looked askance at, or foolishly ignored.” So thrilled that I immediately sent an email asking if MH would consider a subscription package for the books.
• The 16 contenders for the 2011 Tournament of Books have been announced (as have the judges). I’ve read three (Room, Freedom and Super Sad True Love Story.)
• The Milliions plays with Amazon’s auto-complete search.
• Bob Dylan reportedly has a deal to write six more books, two of which would be the second and third volumes of his memoirs.
• Edward Champion is brave (or crazy) enough to take on all of the books in the Modern Library’s list of the top 100 novels of the 20th Century.
• So there’s a book coming out based on the concept of what the world would be like if Princess Di had lived. Although likely contrary to how it will do on the bestseller lists, I can’t help but ask, “Who gives a rat’s ass?”

Nonbookish Linkage

• How to not die at work — Soviet style. (via)
• Science Proves You’re Stupid (via)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations