The Stranger’s Paul Constant on the Disney buyout of Marvel Comics.

a question: do you like to hang out with other “writer types/academic types/artist types” or do you prefer hanging out with people who aren’t those things, at least not professedly.  and why is that.  i am really interested in what people think about this.  also, to preempt, i mean “instead of being alone,” which is obviously preferable to both.

In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world. (“This world”! As if there were any other.)

The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.

– Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation”

Laura van den Berg’s website has been hacked by AYS Federal Atack Team.

Update: it has been fixed.

It’s really not OK to like and support everything. It’s just not.

The guy who shot those women at a gym had a website. Catherine linked to it a while back. It shared all his weird, angry thoughts about women. The guy who did this? He has/d a blog. It’s really fucked. I will likely spend the weekend reading it.

I like Artifice Magazine’s submission wishlist.

Slate’s got President Obama’s summer reading list, along with analysis of same-

• The Way Home by George Pelecanos, a crime thriller based in Washington, D.C.;
• Lush Life by Richard Price, a story of race and class set in New York’s Lower East Side;
• Tom Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded, on the benefits to America of an environmental revolution;
• John Adams by David McCullough;
• Plainsong by Kent Haruf, a drama about the life of eight different characters living in a Colorado prairie community.

Over at The Rumpus, Jami Attenberg says that Everything Matters! by Ron Currie Jr. is that last book she loved. Coincidentally, this is also the last book I loved. Currie is a smart, funny writer, and his book is fantastic.

Some sort of discussion about race, gender, economic class in indie lit ongoing at Pank.