Gossip column news

Lance Bass of NSync: "I'm gay!"

Livejournal: Duh. And?

(Apparently this is news to many people. And, you know, it's a People Magazine exclusive.)

Also: "[Bass] is in a "very stable" relationship with model-actor-Amazing Race winner Reichen Lehmkuhl, 32, and is developing an Odd Couple-inspired sitcom pilot with Fatone in which his character will be gay."

123 of 1001 Must Read Books - best not die soon

What I've read from this list from the book 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Apparently, per amazon.com, said books are selected by "Derek Attridge (world expert on James Joyce), Cedric Watts (renowned authority on Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene), Laura Marcus (noted Virginia Woolf expert), and David Mariott (poet and expert on African-American literature), among some twenty others."

( 1001 whole books )

Things this says about me:
1. A ridiculous number of bolded books are things I read before I was sixteen, as part of my attempt to read early genre fiction or adventure novels. (The Poe, the H.G. Wells, the E.R. Burroughs, the Scott and the Dumas, and more I'm not remembering right now.)

2. A ridiculous number of the remaining books are things I read for school and despised. (Edith Wharton, Scarlet Letter, and so on.)

3. I still cannot for the life of me remember the titles of Samuel Beckett novels, and I had to look every one of 'em up to remember which was which.

4. Admittedly, I started at the bottom of this list and worked up, so I was starting to get bored up near the top, but still: nearly all of the "great books" that I've read are pre-1970.

Things about this list:
1. Pre-1700 works are hardly represented at all. Only thirteen worthwhile books were written before 1700? I don't think so. And "book" is defined very loosely here; novellas/screenplays are included (Graham Greene's The Third Man), short story collections are included (Adventures of Sherlock Holmes), children's stories are included (the Thurber), and works of epic poetry are included (Metamorphoses).

So there's no excuse for leaving out things like Canterbury Tales, the Iliad, the Oddyssey, Beowulf, the Ramayana, Journey to the West (which I always call "you know, the Monkey story"), Dante, Milton, and King Arthur from somewhat earlier than The Once and Future King. They'd fit into the definition just as well.

Oh, and while we're at it? Shakespeare. But apparently today we're defining "book" to include Walden and Metamorphoses, but not Hamlet. I mean, at first I thought it was just novels, so they had an excuse for not including some of the things I mentioned above, but then... Walden! Metamorphoses! WTF!

2. Nine Tailors and Murder Must Advertise are better'n Have His Carcarse and the other DLS books with Harriet Vane? Hmph. Oh, and: Cause for Alarm is the best Eric Ambler? Martin Eden but not Call of the Wild?

3. There's a lot of author repetition: regardless of how much I like Douglas Adams, should both Dirk Gently and Long-Dark Teatime be on the list? Should there be that much Beckett? (Eight novels, and the list doesn't even include Waiting for Godot.) Every Jane Austen novel? Do J.M. Coetzee novels really make up one percent of the books you must read before you die? I mean, one Mark Twain and eight Ian McEwans? More de Sade than P.G. Wodehouse?

4. Based on a cursory glance at the dates, about a third of these were published after 1970, and more than half were published after 1950 . There have been 69 "great books" since the year 2000 -- meaning that there are something like five times as many great books of the 2000s as there are great books before 1700. In other words, this list is top-heavy.

Ann Coulter: Bill Clinton a latent homosexual

Okay, I am posting way too much today, but ... I can't leave this transcript of an Ann Coulter interview alone.

Sample discussion, c&ped from Wonkette's transcript:

Ms. COULTER: I think that sort of rampant promiscuity does show some level of latent homosexuality.
DEUTSCH: OK, I think you need to say that again. That Bill Clinton, you think on some level, has — is a latent homosexual, is that what you’re saying?
Ms. COULTER: Yeah. I mean, not sort of just completely anonymous — I don’t know if you read the Starr report, the rest of us were glued to it, I have many passages memorized. No, there was more plot and dialogue in a porno movie.

And it gets weirder! Again c&ped: "Ms. COULTER: No. I think anyone with that level of promiscuity where, you know, you — I mean, he didn’t know Monica’s name until their sixth sexual encounter. There is something that is — that is of the bathhouse about that." It's all so mind-boggling that I could have easily cut and pasted the whole darn thing here. I mean! Ann Coulter's assertion that promiscuity = "obsession with your own — with your own essence" and is "reminiscent of a bathhouse."

Go read it and stare in astonishment. (Watch out for the comments, though, as there are a number of sex and sexuality-based ad hominem attacks on Ann Coulter. I mean, she makes no sense, and I call her stuff bullshit all the time, but some of the comments contain content that I find pretty darn offensive.)