Just when I thought I’d never agree with anything Dale Peck said, he goes and says this in an interview with Ellen Heltzel:

Why does literature have to be so boring? And why, when it is funny, does it have to be so juvenile? Dave Eggers does the post-modern, “I’m talking about the book that I’m writing inside the book I’m writing. Isn’t that funny?’’ No, it’s not funny. It’s a lot funnier on “The Simpsons” than it is in Dave Eggers’ book.

It’s somewhat amusing to see that John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, a novel that was on Stanford’s Summer Reading List for incoming freshmen when I was getting ready to enter college, is still a fixture—this year it’s on the UC Berkeley Summer Reading List. (Oddly, Stanford doesn’t seem to have its reading list—if it’s still doing reading lists and hasn’t fallen behind Berkeley in that category too—online.)

I didn’t particularly like the novel when I read it back then, partly because it was so cynical. Maybe it’s time to revisit it.

It’s also gratifying to see Samuel Pepys’ diary on the list, though of all the books, including selections by Neal Stephenson and Will Self, I would wager that it’s the least likely to be read.

An Okie brings new meaning to the term ‘Activist Judge:’

‘While seated on the bench, an Oklahoma judge used a male enhancement pump, shaved and oiled his nether region, and pleasured himself, state officials charged yesterday in a petition to remove the jurist. According to the below complaint filed by the Oklahoma Attorney General, Donald D. Thompson, 57, was caught in the act by a clerk, trial witnesses, and his longtime court reporter (these unsettling first-hand accounts will make you wonder what’s going on under other black robes). Visitors to Thompson’s Creek County courtroom reported hearing a “swooshing” sound coming from the bench, a noise the court reporter said “sounded like a blood pressure cuff being pumped up.” Thompson, the complaint charges, even pumped himself up during an August 2003 murder trial. The AG’s petition quotes Thompson (pictured above) as admitting that the pump was “under the bench” during the murder case (and at other times), but he denied using the item, which was supposedly a “gag gift from a friend.”’
—The Smoking Gun

The Smoking Gun charmingly titles the article, ‘Here Comes the Judge.’

Thompson is the same judge who in 2002 barred enforcement by the state Health Department of anti-smoking rules in restaurants, then promptly left town for a two-week vacation, dodging all questions. He also issued an injunction at one point enjoining the state from enforcing the voter-approved cockfighting ban. He was reversed both times.

I’d never really listened to the lyrics of Sheryl Crow’s “Soak up the Sun” before (it was playing in the Village Apothecary when I went in yesterday afternoon). Not bad for a pop song, but what unbelievably irritating lyrics: “I’m gonna soak up the sun/Gonna tell everyone/To lighten up.”

God, the combination of Pollyanna-ish reverie and finger-wagging judgmental bossiness is almost overwhelming. And here I’d thought it had just been a mellow Beach Boys ripoff.