Well, almost.

Oprah’s back, that is; she announced today that the book club will soon be back from the dead.  Interestingly, Oprah’s Book Club, Take Two will focus on the much-maligned Dead White Men of the world of “literary classics.” Says Oprah, she “cannot imagine a world where the great works of literature are not read.”

Is it a coincidence that a mere 24 hours earlier, another cultural phenomenon announced the imminent death of its undead realm?

Gene Weingarten at the Washington Post believes himself to have found “the worst novel ever published in the English language.” Moreover, he has gotten an interview with Robert Burrows, the author of said opus, The Great American Parade.  It’s a shame, quite frankly, because the idea of the parade itself, in the hands of David Foster Wallace, say, or William Gaddis would be a set-piece of beauty.  One quickly understands from the interview, however, that it simply was not to be.

Sorry for the protracted radio silence; we’ve been in the home stretch of a search here, and I’ve been spending an astonishing amount of time going to job talks, conducting interviews, and generally glad-handing about.  Then, in the interstices, there’s been that little teaching thing, and sometime late at night, occasionally, preparation for said teaching.  So all my grand plans about regularity-in-posting were very quickly abandoned.

As of today, however, the search is complete, and I can get back to something approaching something like a regularly insane schedule.  Expect more scintillating book-talk soon.

In the meantime, however, I’ll share with you this tidbit:  yesterday in class, we wrapped up our discussion of Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix (which is pronounced with a short /a/, instead of like a split-personality version of the Keanu Reeves movie, as Sterling rather pissily points out in the introduction to our edition), and I was very proud not to have to be the one to point out that the end state of the character Kitsune puts one a bit too much in mind of a giant vagina planet.