Two from Dennis Cooper: Yesterday was “Neon Angel Day”, celebrating Cherie Currie of The Runaways and her new book Neon Angel: The Story of a Runaway, which is co-authored by one of our main men, Mr. Tony “O” O’Neill. the day before that, one of Dennis’s regular readers/community-members presented a list of 10 Graphic Novels “chosen…as recommendations to Mr. Cooper and his brilliant flock.” The list includes Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls, Derf’s My Friend Dahmer, and eight other fine titles besides, all with descriptions and excerpts. Also, Dennis, if you’re reading this, you were right about Return of the Grievous Angel–duh.

They’re talking about the James Franco Esquire story on Gawker, but here’s the interesting part- instead of burning the story themselves, they make light fun of it and then leave the real burning to us!

The litblog HMTLGIANT says of the story: “If it weren’t by James Franco, this 100% would not be in Esquire… Seems like a pretty typical ‘MFA story,’ if that’s even a type of story.” Burn? We are not literary critics, so let us just say this: James Franco is such a good actor!

Adrian Chen, if you are reading this, thanks for the link! I don’t know whether this is the first time we’ve been Gawker-linked, but it’s the first one I know of, and it made me feel great, even though that wasn’t even my post. According to the Tao Lin/Marty McFly reality-index, my hands are not see-through anymore, and I am allowed to make one facial expression of my own choosing–though obviously I’ll choose not to make one. But seriously, Adrian, I miss Foster Kamer. Also, from all of us to Nick Denton–feel free to start picking us off whenever. Imagine if instead of Ann Coulter, Peaches (naked) Geldof and Steve Jobs, the top stories on Gawker were about Harold Bloom, Natalie Lyalin, and probably Harold Bloom again. WHAT IF?

Lastly, the guy whose doppelganger I am, the other Justin Taylor (or JTO as I like to call him) has a short post called “On Scary Stories and the Moral Imagination.” It’s kind of the same argument Stephen King makes in Danse Macabre about horror as a fundamentally conservative genre, because it is founded on a fear of the other, except made by a believing Christian with a much narrower and more specific definition of “moral,” plus also it’s really short, and just quotes some other things, and so is not really very much like that at all. JTO, if you are reading this, sorry to have put words in your mouth kind of. It’s a big bridge between us, but I’m really committed to building it. What slowed me down, see, is that I can’t get my pdf copy of The Axioms of Religion by EY Mullins to print out properly–I’m trying to do it two-book-pages-to-the-printed-page–and so I haven’t been able to read it yet. But I WILL get there, and then we’ll have that to talk about. Anyway, my favorite part of your post was the Chesterton-opener, the note on which I will end-

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist.
Children already know that dragons exist.
Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.