another un-review: bzrk

Maybe a week ago, I un-reviewed S.A. Bodeen's summer 2012 release The Raft.

So if you need to know what an un-review is, you can check that one out. Basically, I think that authors don't have any business reviewing other authors' works. Not unless they really want to get into a public pissing match -- which is always quite enjoyable -- or perhaps get into an overly-salivated public display of face-sucking -- which is always kind of gross.

Anyway, I am going to un-review Bodeen's novel again in August, which is when the book comes out.

But this one, BZRK, by Michael Grant, comes out on Tuesday.

You must get this book. That is all.

What is it with my writer friends getting all good and matured in their writing? I mean I get it and everything, but I so rarely see writers actually developing their chops over the course of their publication. This is true: Most writers keep churning out the same level of stuff (and usually the same plots and themes) over the course of their careers.

Yawn.

That's just not for me as a reader. As I said last time:

I once saw a man eat a fluorescent light tube!

He appeared to enjoy himself tremendously!

That's probably why I wanted to un-review both of these books. I have read Michael's earlier books (and S.A. Bodeen's, too), and I think Mr. Grant has really poured something deeper and more darkly grotesque from his black, twisted soul directly onto the pages of BZRK.

Read this book with latex gloves on.

Trust me.

Here's what you know from the cover: There is a little bug thingy, and it is inside an eyeball of what looks like an insane person.

That is really all I need to say.

Now I will tell you a story about Michael Grant.

This is a true story.

I believe we first met in 2008. I could be wrong. So much of the road behind me is distorted in the vibrations from the loose rear-view mirror attached to the windshield of my life.

It was at a writer's thing where there were lots of authors, librarians, booksellers, and bloggers.

That meant we were the only two men in the room.

[Anecdotal observation: In 2012, given the same environment, I think there would be four men in the room now.]

We have come a long way, baby!

Usually in these situations, I have to attach myself invisibly to someone's elbow. I did this to Jackie Kessler and A.S. King when I was in Chicago. I get so desperately paralyzed in these situations!

But at this particular event in 2008 I was absolutely alone, an orphan.

And it was in, like, this big hall of cheese.

Seriously.

It was desperate!

I was alone in a hall of cheese. There were all these fancy tables that looked like fantasy cities with towering spires of cheese cascades -- with currants and flatbreads and brie, brie, brie!

Oh.

And there was an open bar, too.

Anyway, I kept my eyes down. I was terrified and alone, and the only time I'd made eye contact that evening was with a matronly bookseller who'd assumed I had to have been a waiter, so she asked me to bring her a basket of fresh rolls.

What could I do?

I had to bring her some bread!

And she didn't even tip!

Okay. So Michael Grant was there. Towering against the wall, watching my pathetic performance art, poised beside a stack of his novel Gone, and ARCs of Hunger. I believe he held a glass -- Scotch with ice.

When he came up to me, I was nearly convinced he was going to ask me to bring him a fruit bowl or slip me a fiver and ask me to do a card trick, or shit like that, but I was wrong. Michael Grant actually knew who I was. His wife, who is such an amazingly talented writer -- Katherine Applegate -- had actually read my book.

Grant and Applegate -- that's some serious writer shit going on.

Anyway, he said something along the lines of how I looked immeasurably pathetic and didn't I think I should go have a whiskey with him and talk about guy stuff?

Michael Grant saved me!

He will always be my hero!

Mission for Monday: Go buy some latex gloves.

Tuesday: Go get BZRK.

My apologies to my usual book borrowers. I won't be lending out BZRK. There's something inside it.

Besides all the gross stuff.

It is this:

---

at least mitt romney's dog came back from canada!

flap copy

I did it.

I wrote a book for which it is impossible to write flap copy.

Even a moleskine can have flap copy.

But not this thing.

I will tell you about it as soon as I come up with something.

Here is what else I did: I saw the draft cover for Passenger, the sequel to The Marbury Lens.

My head exploded.

Poor Jack. He gets so messed up in Passenger. Everyone does.

A few days ago, when I wrote about S.A. Bodeen's The Raft, I mentioned something about the cover for The Marbury Lens. That cover is the only cover of all my books that I have had enlarged and framed, and it is currently hanging on the wall in my living room.

I had intended to get my other covers done that way too, but for some reason I never got around to it.

I am definitely going to do this with the cover of Passenger.

It is perfect.

Disturbing.

Kind of scary.

Just so you know, the cover for Passenger will not be revealed here on this blog. There are four bloggers out there who are going to do something special for the run-up to the book. They know who they are. They get to peek into the messed up worlds of Passenger first.

Not too long now.

October.

By that time -- actually pretty soon -- when I come up with flap copy for this new book for which flap copy and descriptions cannot be made, I will tell you all about it.

There is new news in the Andrew Smith library, and I can't wait to share it.

---

great big jar

I live in a very strange place.

It's kind of like the Wild West with a bunch of old guys wearing fezzes.

Yesterday, I was driving down the mountain and I passed a small house that had a big sign lashed to a tree right at the roadside.

The sign says this:

DON'T BELIEVE THE LIBERAL MEDIA

Just like that. All caps. Red text for the last two words.

Punchy.

I thought, wow. How thoughtful. If I hadn't seen that sign, who knows what I might believe this morning?

I thought about taking a picture of the sign to post on my blog, but I was confused. I didn't know what to do. And people who put signs in all-caps and red ink in their yards probably tilt more along the end of the spectrum indicating people who would beat a guy up for snapping a picture of their yard admonitions with his iPhone.

I'm more than a little disappointed, though, because I was counting on someone out there in the media to help me sort out my feelings about Lana Del Rey.

Now I just don't know what to do.

I am so confused.

---

why do they make purple skittles?

I read an awful lot.

I rarely talk about what I read, because I almost never read "current releases."

Nobody cares what I think about books, anyway.

Guess what? Nobody cares what almost anyone thinks about books.

Most books are horrible. It's funny, but it is my experience that it is easier for someone to stop reading a horrible book than it is for someone to walk out of a horrible movie, or stop watching an entire fucking season of a horrible television series. But what do I know?

I also don't talk about what I read because I am an author, NOT a reviewer or book blogger. I do not believe I could be both author and reviewer or book critic without feeling deeply troubled about my personal ethics.

Before anyone gets ticked off at me for saying that, note the use of the pronouns in the preceding paragraph. I am not making fun of you or talking about you, I am talking about someone who quite clearly is not you.

Same thing always comes up if I write about how I never watch television, can't recognize or name Hollywood celebrities, and have the inability to sit through a movie. People think I'm condemning their behavior or values. I am not.

I once saw a man eat a fluorescent light tube!

He seemed to like it!

Now that I have cleared that up, I am NOT going to write a critical review of S.A. Bodeen's upcoming release, The Raft. I am just going to explain why I liked this book very, very much.

But first, a side note: I really LOVE the cover of my book, The Marbury Lens.

[I know. You're probably saying to yourself: Is he really making this about HIM? Yes. Yes, I am.]

I can't even begin to tell you how many emails I received, complaining that the kid on the cover of The Marbury Lens didn't look like the way I described Jack (the main character) and how the glasses didn't look like the ones in the book.

I say this because there will be at least one absolute tool who will express outrage over Robie's hair on the cover of The Raft. I am never going to use this word publicly again, but the cover of The Raft is gorgeous.

Ewww.

I actually used that word.

The main character's name is Robie. It is pronounced Row-bee. I asked the author. I "hear" words when I read, so I needed to be sure.

Here's all I will say about the story part of this book: Robie gets stuck on a raft in the middle of the ocean with a guy who has a massive head wound.

Except for the head wound part, you could tell all that from the cover, anyway.

But things get worse. Not only that, but this book has a couple honest-to-God-I-never-saw-that-coming twists in it, too, which confirms my suspicion that S.A. Bodeen doesn't waste a lot of brain space memorizing goddamned email passwords and shit like that, so has adequate territory remaining to think up stuff that is really, really smart.

I have read all of S.A. Bodeen's YA books, beginning with The Compound. Here is my story about The Compound: I picked up an ARC of it right after signing my first publishing contract (squee.) when I traveled back to New York to meet Liz Szabla and Jean Feiwel. Maybe this was in 2006. I can't remember. I gave the book to my son, who was 12 or so at the time. I remember him sitting next to me, reading it, and he got to THAT ONE PART and he actually gasped out loud. So I had to read it, too.

The thing is, with The Raft, S.A. Bodeen's craft and technique have matured so much. The prose is at times poetic and often jangling; and the story jumps off the pages and grabs you by the throat.

Some of the first chapters are so short and punchy, you just can't stop turning pages.

Attention: Any parent who complains this summer about their kid watching too much television or playing too many hours of video games, shove this book into their twitchy little hands.

I promise.

This is a book for summer. It comes out in August.

I recommend that you do not do what I did and read it on a very turbulent airplane. If you are a real thrill-seeker,  you may want to read it on a hot beach. Um. Maybe not.

---

as seen on facebook...

counting down

Having a book come out is kind of like being pregnant.

Um.

I watched my kids being born. It looked like it hurt.

Just think: If you got pregnant last month, you could be reading Passenger in the delivery room!

If you got pregnant last month, and you were reading Passenger in the delivery room, the earth will have traveled 450 million miles through space from where you were at the moment of conception.

I'll bet you did not say to yourself, "I think I will travel 450 million miles and then deliver a child."

And the way the universe is going, it is getting harder and harder to crash into shit. Sorry to dampen the anticipation of the big asteroid hitting us two months after Passenger comes out.

A while back, I listened to a cosmologist speak about the existence of alternate universes and what is actually real. It was kind of research on Marbury. He said something like, every time you get out of bed in the morning, there is another you in another universe who sleeps in, and other yous in other universes who have not been born yet.

He was smoking some real top-notch weed!

But seriously, I feel like I've been kind of neglecting Jack and the kids because of all this other book stuff that's been going on. And I realized, after having made corrections and approvals to all the final little hyphenations, word mutations, and punctuation marks in the 540 pages of Passenger, how much I missed being in Marbury after all this time and so many miles of space travel.

Passenger will be here sooner than you think.

I had a dream last night that I received the artwork for the cover. I can still picture what it looked like. It was just a dream, though. The cover, as far as I know, is still millions of miles away.

But I thought I'd tell you a little bit about the story.

You want to know, don't you?

Here goes. Jack and Conner try to "fix" things, so all the boys (Jack, Conner, Ben, and Griffin) won't feel so lost and hopeless when Jack and Conner go back to England to attend school.

Things get messed up. Big time.

Marbury and the kids' California hometown blend together. The kids are all dumped in different places at different times. They don't even know each other. When Jack gets back home to Glenbrook, his best friend doesn't know a thing about what's been happening, Ben and Griffin are gone forever, and the police are investigating why Jack Whitmore has something to do with the murder of a doctor whose body was found abandoned on a country road.

And it gets even more messed up than that.

8 months to go.

Happy space travels.

---

the mixed-gender mixer

I have been thinking about things.

Again.

It was very nice to see Stick listed in The Horn Book's Recommended  LGBTQ Books list.

It's a great list of books, by the way.

Let's talk.

If you've read my books (and, thank you), maybe you'll have noticed something: My characters often challenge popular constructions of gender. These taken-for-granted attributes have become so fortified in society, education, and especially in popular media over the past decade or so that they are accepted as being innate, hard-wired, and immutable.

You want to take a look at how popular media build up constructs of gender?

Take a look at the covers of "Young Adult" novels.

I would really like to post some examples, but I don't have the balls. [cue ironic music]

I think it would prove to be a very interesting study for some graduate or doctoral student to analyze the gender representations and constructs of masculinity and femininity on the covers of books aimed at kids (including young readers and MG).

You can tell them you heard the idea here.

Because this is how we start to shape kids as to exactly what we expect of them. Images, like book covers in school libraries and on the shelves of the "YA" (yuck) section, have a tremendous impact on the ordering of kids' perceptions about themselves.

I have this idea that the so-called "Boy Crisis" in literacy has been largely manufactured by external forces that do a very good job at telling boys what, exactly, is expected of them -- what "good" and "normal" boys do.

Even the well-intentioned social leaders who attempt to bridge the achievement gap and focus only on gender (when, in reality there are much more pronounced achievement gaps in literacy when you study socioeconomic and ethnic groups) by approaching literacy in a this-is-what-all-boys-like manner, actually WORSEN the problem by perpetuating the external expectations of what it means to be a good, normal boy.

Think about that.

Here are two studies that looked at the "Boy Crisis" in literacy. First, a 2009 study conducted in Australia found that schools enlisting teachers as desired male role models to increase the literacy achievement of boys had an overwhelming tendency to select teachers who were athletic, straight, white, and disciplinarian.

Because everyone knows that's what good and normal boys need.

The study suggested that male teachers who do not fit that dominant perception of masculinity may likely have the greatest potential to influence the lives of boys and girls alike.

Food for thought.

The second study, from 2005, showed that teachers in single-sex classrooms have a tendency to adopt practices that simply conform to taken-for-granted assumptions about how boys and girls learn as a group.

When boys are labeled as at-risk, or "lagging behind" other groups (such as girls), given the dominant presentation of this-is-what-a-real-man-looks-and-acts-like, they seek out other sources of gratification and empowerment that manifest in these externally perpetuated "masculine" attributes, even if it leads them into underachievement.

You want to take a look at some representations of what popular media presents as normed constructs of masculinity (and femininity)? Spend some time looking at this website: The Gender Ads Project.

It will probably make you think about things, which is good.

---

where else would things fall if not into place?

So.

I wrote this new book, which will be coming out next year, in 2013.

I know, you are probably saying Winger is coming out in 2013, and that is true. But I also have another book that is going to come out in 2013 as well. Winger is coming out in spring, and this other one is coming out in fall.

If all goes smoothly, I will be able to tell the entire story of this new book, which has a name and everything, soon.

I am dying to tell about this book, but I can wait.

Just look at that sentence up there.

The one that begins, If all goes smoothly...

Writers live in universes in which time cannot be measured by the predictable motion of objects in other known universes.

Think about that.

Everyone else knows exactly what they can expect: birthdays, tax returns, shadow-seeking groundhogs, and so on, based upon the rotational speed of the earth and how long it takes for us to run a circle around the big yellow thing in the sky.

Not writers.

This is shit they do not tell you at writer school: When writers want something to happen, planets must rotate, suns must be circled, and on and on; when someone else wants something from a writer, you are already late.

Universes. They are impossible to live with.

Yesterday, I did not come home until evening time, which is rare for me.

There is only a single two-lane road to the neighborhood - if you'd call it that - where I live.

There was an accident on the road, and a telephone pole and power lines came down. Gravity, and shit like that. The power company, like snow plows and such, rates the area where I live as "low priority."

There was no way home!

According to the not-very-cheerful volunteer sheriff manning the roadblock, the earth was going to travel an estimated 280,000 miles through space before the power crews showed up to begin work on clearing the road to my house.

That's a lot of space!

---

your ashtray is getting rather full

When all is said and done, it is bound to be rather quiet and boring.

I realized something yesterday.

This is a true story.

I received an email from Daniel Kraus, concerning this upcoming panel of speakers at the 2012 Booklist Youth Forum I will be a part of to kick off the American Library Association's Annual Conference in June.

The panel is moderated by Daniel Kraus, author of the book Rotters, which is one of my favorite books from 2011. The topic of the evening is: Men at Work: Guy Writers Talk Guy Readers.

I have an awful lot I could say about that. I may bring some puppets.

It has been more than a decade since Christina Hoff Sommers published her War Against Boys. Although she makes some valid points, I think the conclusions drawn from her work -- and where we have gone since that time in regimenting an expectation of failure when it comes to boys and literacy -- are mistaken and harmful.

But that's not exactly what I realized yesterday.

I realized this:

I am on this panel with Michael Grant, Jon Sciezska, and Daniel Handler.

Am I spelling Scieszka correctly? Nearly every time I see someone post something about him, they spell his name differently.

Maybe he has lots of email aliases.

That is not what I realized, either.

I realized that Michael Grant and Jon Scieszka both have "people" who answer their emails and make appointments for panels and shit like that.

Holy shit.

Not only that, but Daniel Handler wasn't even included on the email at all, even though he was spoken to in the body of the message.

Holy shit again.

Daniel Handler has a fucking INVISIBLE person who answers his email and makes appointments for panels and shit like that.

I am such a nobody!

---

exile in eden

This is a true story.

My mother came from Italy.

I was the first in the family born in America.

My family is pretty much entirely Catholic.

Not me.

No.

Even though I write about Catholic stuff quite a bit. Never. No.

I am surrounded by them.

My kids are Buddhists. I am not making that up. Both of them. They have official Buddhist beads and certificates, and shit like that.

That proves it!

I have a godson in the Catholic church. I had to get special clearance, a full body probe, and a microscopic chip that produces searing pain implanted in my brain in order for the Catholic church to grant permission for me to be his godfather.

Because I am not one of them.

But there is a document!

I have kind of exiled myself from the past. Since I have four books out, though, people I have been lost to have found me. It is a remarkable thing.

It's not like I have been hiding or anything. You don't really need to hide when you are invisible.

The last time I saw my godson, he and his mother were moving somewhere far away. He was a baby.

I thought about the kid every day. Seriously. If the chip in my head ever went off, it would have been a sign from the Catholic church that I had to assume the responsibility of nurturing the kid's spiritual development.

Good thing he made it without me!

I could have singlehandedly initiated the collapse of one of the world's great religious movements.

Nobody would want that to happen.

His mom found me about a year ago, maybe more than that, because of Facebook.

I talked to the kid yesterday on the phone.

The kid is not so much a kid anymore. He is a fully-grown man.

It was nice to hear him articulate speech, as opposed to gurgling saliva and throwing up steaming baby formula on me.

I have a lot of questions about history for him.

As an exile, I am fascinated by history.

I will let you know.

---

what made this country great

A while back, I mentioned something about a speaking engagement I had coming up in June at the American Library Association's Annual Conference, which will be held in Anaheim, California this year.

I'll be on a panel alongside Michael Grant, Daniel Kraus, Daniel Handler, and Jon Scieszka. The event is going to be a Friday evening gathering, and it is usually one of the most well-attended meetings at ALA. I'll post more details on the panel as June approaches.

At that conference, we are set to have Advance Copies of Passenger.

You know.

The sequel to The Marbury Lens.

I have been reading Passenger again this week, for, like, the 200th time.

I think there are only about three or four people on the planet who've read Passenger. Even my son is going to have to wait until the ARCs come out.

I am not entirely certain what this group of guy writers is supposed to talk about.

A natural assumption would be that we will share intimate stories about the burden of shaving and internalizing suppressed emotions.

If it has anything to do with being a guy, writing, and especially reading, then I will be prepared to put on a rock show.

I want to talk about a paper that was presented before the International Reading Association in 2010 about the panic over boys' literacy underachievement relative to girls. It seems that the majority of our most recent media-fueled attention has tilted toward some erroneous conclusions about boys and how they are genetically predisposed to failure.

This is what we've been teaching boys, after all, for the past 20 years or so.

The paper quotes J. Titus' study on the cultural politics of education (2004): "some learned behaviors can be deeply ingrained and difficult to modify."

It makes an interesting point, and you can bet I will be talking about this IRA paper here in the coming weeks and months.

---

nobody would ever take an army of communists without balls seriously

I forgot to tell you.

I am opening a commune.

It will be a commune for artists -- writers, painters, musicians, poets -- my kind of people.

I am not sure if my commune will have electricity or not.

Every night, just after our mystical barbecue ritual, we will sit around drinking Absinthe.

Some of us will probably smoke cigarettes.

You know what's funny?

I kind of like the smell of cigarettes.

I do not smoke. I do not need to smoke. I still hack up streaming wads of lung diarrhea from all those years of driving in the backseat of a Ford Falcon station wagon while my parents smoked like fucking chimneys with all the windows rolled up.

Yeah.

We used to have to "roll" windows.

Can I tell you? I came to an epiphany yesterday.

I am not afraid to admit that I am wrong. Here goes: After all these years, I realize I have been doing everything wrong, wrong, wrong!

Who knew?

That is why I am opening my artists' commune.

I am also not afraid to admit I am a socialist.

Except I am kind of anti-social.

I will do almost anything to avoid going to a "party."

Or a get-together.

I have already received applications for membership at my commune.

I put the applications onto a number-2-pencil Scantron matrix and feed it into my admissions computer.

So far, my computer keeps generating the same form letter response.

The response is this:

No. We regret to inform you that you may not join our artists' commune. You are too much of a douchebag.

The wonders of technology!

---

monsters to kill

I write long books.

Dear people who enjoy reading my books: Please. When this one arrives, try to not finish it in one sitting and then bang out an email asking when my next book is going to come out.

This was dropped off on my doorstep yesterday.

It is 536 pages long, the final copyedited version of Passenger, which comes out this October.

This is the copy Liz (chimes!), my editor at Feiwel and Friends, gave me to put on THE STACK.

THE STACK is now up past my knee.

I am not short.

Having worked with more than one major publisher, I can say this now: Each publishing house has its own method and timeline for getting things done.

Maybe a lot of that has to do with the author, I can't say for certain. I have never had to change thousands of words on any manuscript I've ever had turned into a book. In fact, I have a manuscript now that was just recently finished and despite it being over 100,000 words, I honestly believe there is not even one typo in it.

There probably is. Who knows?

In any event, Passenger didn't even get an editorial letter, just a few emails here and there and then notes written by Liz (chimes!) in the margins of pages she sent back to me at the end of summer.

I know some people who write (or receive) editorial letters that are like 20 pages long.

Now that's an editorial letter!

An editorial letter that long had better contain specifics for unraveling the secrets of the universe.

Assuming I could ever get through an editorial letter in excess of 20 pages in length without driving out to the desert and shooting myself in the head, I would probably first have to translate it into boyspeak by putting individual steps on numbered index cards.

Actually, this is what I always have to do with editorial letters.

They tend to be so rambling and holistic, and shit like that.

I am, after all, a boy, and therefore incapable of sitting still and paying attention to more than ONE THING at a time.

[that is a joke. see yesterday's post about brains and shit like that.]

Of course I can pay attention to more than one thing at a time!

You should see me text and drive!

Actually, the family in the crosswalk yesterday should have seen me text and drive.

Poor family.

Natural Selection favors distracted drivers!

Where was I?

So. Now I have to read through this 536-page monster and see all the red marks my favorite copyeditor  used to lasso the mutations of language that bubble to the surface of the simmering cesspool in my distracted brain.

At this point, the manuscript will go pretty seamlessly, like a greased cadaver on a pool slide, into the ARC production, and that will be that.

Oh... and, by the way, to those devoted readers who invariably will read this monster in one sitting: The NEXT book, Winger, will be out about 6 months after Passenger.

---

the why chromosome [2]

Probably the most significant reason we began seeing a decline in literacy among boys during the 1980s and 1990s was that we expected that decline in performance to fit our understanding of the way boys' brains worked (or didn't work).

Lowering expectations on a group as an entity is one of the worst (and easiest) things you can possibly do as a teacher, but for some reason, the educational system has embraced this preconception regarding boys and literacy -- and the results have transferred erroneously onto popular culture, art, bookselling, and publishing.

In recent years, due largely to the popularization of theories that began circulating in the 1990s regarding the innate helplessness of boys when it comes to such things as mastering written and spoken language, as well as developing an enjoyment for reading, boys have been erroneously labeled as populationally -- as a culture -- less than literate.

The theory has caught hold and taken off running in education, publishing, and bookselling.

In a study published last July (2011) on neuroscientific analysis of literacy and gender, David Whitehead (English Teaching: Practice and Critique) points to the recent popular generalizations about brains, gender, and literacy which characterize all girls as being multi-taskers who can sit still and listen, and all boys as spatially-oriented whirlwinds who can't focus on more than one thing at a time.

Whitehead says of these assumptions (and he gives plenty of physiological evidence to criticize these generalizations): "At best, they seem misleading, at worst, they seem driven by a commercial imperative."

Among the consequences of the popularization of certain claims are what Whitehead calls "Unwarranted extrapolations":

Understanding that boys' brains have more testosterone than girls should not transfer into language policies that advocate boys should read action novels.

Very recent studies, published in 2009 in Brain and Language, seem to refute the popularly-held idea that girls and boys have significant innate and physiological differences when it comes to language abilities. Author M. Wallentin writes, " ...A careful reading of the results suggests that differences in language proficiency do not exist. Early differences in language acquisition show a slight advantage for girls, but this gradually disappears."

If modern neuroscience can show that gender-specific differences in language processing abilities disappear (by grade 6), and we continue to buy in to the notion that boys don't read, projecting such expectations onto a population of students is likely harmful.

This is probably why I have seen (in my own lifetime) the gradual de-evolution of literacy expectations and performance of boys as a population in public schools.

The harm, according to Whitehead, is that, since the 1990s, teachers and parents (and the broader community) have bought entirely in to the idea that anything appearing in popular media that was remotely "brain-based associated with boys' education had an unassailable empirical legitimacy."

There will be more on this...

---

louis asks a rhetorical question

I wanted to talk about popular media and brains today.

I know that there is not too much evidence of brains in popular media, but I have a somewhat radical interpretation of what the popular media's misinformation has done to our beliefs about brains.

I have never eaten brains, by the way.

And all this teasing is actually leading nowhere, because I am going to write about brains tomorrow.

Except for one thing: I rather enjoy the way that Danny Marks' brain works.

He has good taste in books, and he put The Marbury Lens right smack next to one of my favorite writer friends on his Best Of list.

Enjoy this video posted yesterday from Danny Marks' Book Show Book Show:

...and tomorrow, unless something goes wrong with mine, I will talk about brains.

---