On Friday, I was parked for 3 hours in a neighborhood full of wee million-dollar bungalows, surrounded by cars worth a lot more than my 9 year-old Toyota. Why, then, the asshole decided to crash through my back window with a rock is mysterious. The window-smasher didn’t get much: not my stereo, not the emergency five bucks in the glove compartment, not the change or the books.

The take: a 1995 SXSW giveaway canvas bag (my grocery/book bag); a black cardigan sweater that shed its sequins and bled black when it got wet ($5); a cream-colored vintage nightgown coverup with a scary bloodlike stain on the front with fur collar and cuffs ($5).

If there was a logic to the break-in, it must have been that fur. Anyone who’s seen fur collars in thrift stores knows they’re not worth diddly, but I figure the rock-wielder didn’t know any better. I’m bummed, though — I liked wearing those sweaters, and they’re too crummy to be sold and too little to be worn by just about anyone.

And the window cost me just shy of $200 to fix.

I live in a much worse neighborhood; I’ve been mugged here, and last year a homeless guy was burned to death a few blocks away. But never in broad daylight has my car been broken into in Koreatown. Or in the dark, either. It’s immensely frustrating to go to a good neighborhood only to be robbed.

“Exercising the blogging might help curb the desire to pollute Twitter,” Young Manhattanite writes. While I would like to think my tweeting has low levels of toxicity, it’s clear that the blogging needs a little exercise.

I reviewed Nothing Right by Antonya Nelson for the Barnes & Noble Review, which went up this week.

the stories here are, in one way or another, about a time of in-between. It’s not what we’re trained to expect from short stories, which with their compact size are built for speed, tight epiphanies and decisive character change. But Nelson — the author of three novels and raft of carefully wrought short stores — works against that convention in this new collection. She’s going for the moments where nothing really happens, or when we have to live with the consequences of what has happened before…. Like less whimsical versions of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Nelson’s stories dwell in the spaces that fiction typically skips over.

Quoting myself is lame, but it’s slightly better than paraphrasing my own writing. Other book reviews and whatnot are pending elsewhere; more excerpts on the way.

The LA Times Festival of Books has posted its panels schedule, and I am thrilled to pieces to be moderating two:

On Saturday, April 26, at 12:30 (it says AM; I hope it means PM). Enough About You
Moderator   Ms. Carolyn Kellogg
Mr. Tod Goldberg
Mr. Seth Greenland
Mr. Ben Greenman

Three very funny guys; I’ve read some of their work but I’ll get my hands on the latest tomorrow. But basically, my job on this panel, as I understand it, is to be Gracie Allen — which shouldn’t be a stretch at all, as I’m two inches taller than her. Ba-dum-dum. Thanks folks, I’ll be here all week. I won’t, actually; I’ll be in Young Hall CS 50 for that panel and then elsewhere. Including:

Korn Convocation Hall on Sunday at 3:00pm: Fiction: Closing Time
Moderator   Ms. Carolyn Kellogg
Mr. Robert Boswell
Mr. Patrick DeWitt
Mr. Wells Tower

Wells Tower’s debut collection is hothothot — and is fortuitously titled “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned”; Patrick deWitt’s “Ablutions: A Novel” is praised by Luc Sante and Salvador Plascencia. And I’m not sure if I’ll get to read Robert Boswell’s novel “What Men Call Treasure” or “The Half-Known World: On Writing Fiction” — I wager it’s the novel, but either would make me very happy.

And holy moses, I just discovered Robert Boswell is married to Antonya Nelson. Let’s hope they didn’t hate the review.

Yesterday I wrote about The Morning News’ Tournament of Books on Jacket Copy. It started interestingly, with both an obvious win and an upset. On the no-duh winning side, big fat 2666 by Roberto Bolaño; the come-from behind winner on day two was A Partisan’s Daughter by Louis de Berniers, which took down the PEN/Faulkner-Award winning Netherland by Joseph O’Neill.

I bet my friend Mark Sarvas was upset about that loss, because he’s been praising Netherland on his site The Elegant Variation for ages. But then comes today, when Mark’s debut novel Harry Revised went mano-a-mano with Booker Award-winning The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. And Harry won.

Congratulations, Mark!

Judge Jonah Lehrer (Proust Was a Neuroscientist) didn’t care that Adiga had won a Really Big Award; he just liked reading Mark’s book more. It’s this kind of surprise, subjective measure that makes the Tournament of Books fun.

And it looks like the zombie round is going to be fierce….

At the online journalism review, Tom Grubitsch writes of Jacket Copy:

But the blog, with its multiple authors, lacks personality.

His other complaints I’ll leave alone, because I’m sure there are those far better than me to discuss how the paper approaches Books online and the high standards set by previous book review editors.

Instead, let me address this personality thing.

First, I haven’t counted lately, but I’m still posting 75% or more of the blog. And I have plenty of personality, Mr. Grubitsch. Right now I would describe it as personality that is, on the whole, grumpy (although sleepy and some other dwarves are in there, too).

Asserting that a blog with multiple authors can’t have personality is just plain wrong. Gawker? Wonkette? LAist, Gothamist, blogging.la? Boing Boing? Many bloggers. Much personality.

I agree with Grubitsch that Jacket Copy and the rest of Books at the LA Times would benefit from more resources. Heck, I would benefit.

But until then I’m happy to be scrappy, literary, contrary and occasionally giddy. The kind of personality you’ll find on Jacket Copy.

Now I just need to find a couple of ebooks and take the thing out for a spin.

I took a picture of artwork based on the writing of David Foster Wallace (it’s the 3rd slide).

I didn’t know Wallace; I just happened to be near the artwork when it needed a photo taken. And I had a digital camera in my backpack.

So: if you really want to get into the New Yorker, I say, carry a camera.

Writing well probably helps. But carrying a digital camera can’t hurt.

Cecil Castellucci’s book Beige is coming out in paperback, and to celebrate she’s asked a bunch of people to giver her punk music lists. Mine is personal, rather than definitive — but it includes videos! Because Douglas Wolk included videos in his list, and it seemed like a good idea.

BTW, I cannot quote Dashiell Hammett. Cecil has confused him with Raymond Chandler, over whose writing I swoon.

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