It can best be described as a stunning piece of experimental metafiction. What if a rote, ghost-written political memoir by a second-place vice presidential candidate was penned by a Faulknerian unreliable narrator? It's like The Turn of the Screw, only the ghost is Steve Schmidt. Our protagonist, "Sarah Palin," deliberately withholds and exaggerates, even dropping into italicized internal monologue to signify that a real whooper's on the way.

Palin's grasp of American dialect is more S.E. Hinton than Twain, of course (while occasionally stunning in its experimental ambition, it is her first published work). But what it occasionally lacks in conversational verisimilitude ("a big darn deal"?) it usually makes up for in unexpected humor. Here she is describing the moment when "Sarah Palin" first learns that she's "pregnant" with the mysterious talisman "Trig":

Slowly a pink image materialized on the stick. Holy geez!

"Trig" inspires this delightfully batty biblical allusion:

Yes Lord, I thought. My name is Sarah, but my husband isn't Abraham. His name is Todd!

Did Todd offer Sarah to the Pharaoh and come away with rewards and riches? When Todd asked for another son, did Sarah offer him her handmaiden, Meg Stapleton? So many questions!

Every so often, the tone abruptly (and cleverly) switches to a savage parody of the pretentious poetics that the sort of person who'd attempt them would call "high-falutin.'" Kakutani highlights a winner from the first page (didn't finish before your deadline, Michiko?)

I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier.

Exposing the useless charade of an loser would-be Veep expounding on history and foreign policy (as if anyone cared! as if we believed they came up with their insights on their own!) Going Rogue presents a 15-year-old high school basketball team captain's thoughts on the Iran Hostage Crisis, and what it revealed about leadership:

I had followed the Iran hostage crisis and remember wondering why President Jimmy Carter didn't act more decisively. From my high schooler's perspective, I thought the question was, Why did he allow America to be humiliated and pushed around? The new president being sworn in radiated confidence and optimism. The enemies of freedom took notice. In years to come people would ask, What did he have that Carter didn't? To me the answer was obvious. He had a steel spine.

She uses the Dan Rathermism "high on the hog" and complains of being called a demeaning term for the lower classes that she wears with pride:

"My family was made to look like a herd of hillbillies who had come to the big city and started living high on the hog, and that hurt me for them."

"And that hurt me for them." Brilliant.

In this bravura passage, "Palin" complains that a fat man told her to eat well.

He then launched into a discussion of nutrition physiology, holding forth on the importance of carbohydrates to cognitive connections and blah-blah-blah. As he lectured, I took in his rotund physique and noted that he used nicotine to keep his own cognitive connections humming along.

I interrupted his lecture. "Steve, you know what I really need? Half an hour to go for a run in these beautiful cities we're visiting. Also, seeing my kids does wonders for my soul."

He barreled on as if I hadn't spoken. "Headquarters is flying in a nutritionist, and for three days you're going to be on a diet balanced in carbohydrates and nitrates and —"

I'm a forty-four year old, healthy, athletic woman raising five kids and governing a large state, I thought as his words faded into a background buzz. Sir, I really don't know you yet. But you've told me how to dress, what to say, who to talk to, a lot of people not to talk to, who my heroes are supposed to be and we're still losing. Now you're going to tell me what to eat?

A fat smoker told "Sarah Palin" to eat a balanced diet and that made her mad. We cannot recommend this book highly enough. And you can get it for free!

Page scans via Celtic Diva, Wonkette.

Oh, and PS: It turns out that Sarah Palin talks like that because of Government Socialism. Seriously! Alaska's Mat-Stu valley region was populated by upper midwestern farmers relocated to Alaska as part of a New Deal agricultural program. This was basically exactly the sort of thing Stalin would do, and though most of those 200 Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan families who were resettled in Alaska to farm hated it immensely and eventually left, they left behind a legacy of talking like a goober. (Palin also has a western influence in her accent, because her family is from Idaho. And also, obviously, she talks like even more of a goober when she is on television trying to prove that she is as much of a reactionary moron as the reactionary morons she is trying to appeal to. We all know Real Americans don't fully pronounce the suffixes of present participles, etc. etc..)

A researcher named Shigeru Watanabe taught pigeons to call paintings good or bad by feeding them treats when they made the right choice. The paintings were by children, and had been rated by a panel of human nonprofessional art assessors. Then he showed the pigeons new paintings that they'd never seen before, and their assessments matched up with the panel's.

The birds' critical faculties weakened significantly when Watanabe showed them the same paintings without color, leading to the conclusion that they took color composition into account in their decisions.

We think Damien Hirst's work would make them pretty uncomfortable.

[Via 3 Quarks Daily.]

Here's what Hoffman, who deactivated her Twitter account after we published her angry tweets last night, said in her statement:

I feel this whole situation has been completely blown out of proportion. Of course I was dismayed by Roberta Silman's review which gave away the plot of the novel, and in the heat of the moment I responded strongly and I wish I hadn't. I'm sorry if I offended anyone. Reviewers are entitled to their opinions and that's the name of the game in publishing. I hope my readers understand that I didn't mean to hurt anyone and I'm truly sorry if I did.

Now, maybe we're nitpicking here, but doesn't this apology seem sort of, well, half-assed? Would it have been that hard to string the words "I'd like to apologize to Roberta Silman" together somewhere in there? Because when you read the statement, Hoffman doesn't really address Silman directly—She mentions how she wishes that she hadn't "responded strongly" and issues a blanket "I'm sorry if I offended anyone" statement, but she doesn't bother to apologize to Silman directly. After crapping all over Silman's literary credentials, which she never took even a second to research, calling her a "moron" and an "idiot," publishing her phone number and encouraging her readers to call and harass her, you'd think that perhaps Alice Hoffman would have felt slightly compelled to offer Roberta Silman a direct apology, no? Or maybe we were just raised differently than she was.

UPDATE: It appears as though Hoffman herself has been the subject of another writer's rage after she wrote a lukewarm review of the author's work in the New York Times.

Jerry Spiegel, a professional mixed-martial arts fighter, was charged with assault in connection with the attack. There, uh, aren't too many details yet, but the Times-Union story features this compelling line:

The arrest of 36-year-old Jerry Spiegel of Troy comes as law enforcement sources said Guilderland police are continuing to examine connections between Spiegel and an Albany restaurant that Steve Barnes, a food critic, had written about last year.

Let this be a lesson to all of you: never criticize anything, ever, or blog. Or just stay the hell out of Albany.

Ben Stein, the Nixon speechwriter who was kind of funny, once, in a kind of funny movie, and was then in a series of successful contact lens solution ads, released a movie about how no one takes Creationism seriously. Ben Stein, who is an intelligent, educated person, does not actually believe in "intelligent design" but it's a useful little tool for furthering the "Christian conservatives persecuted by the liberal establishment" myth.

Anyway. This movie, Expelled, was not taken seriously by really anyone, least of all Roger Ebert, who responded to demands that he review it by posting a nutty column about all the crazy things creationists believe.

That, apparently, did not appease either those demanding Ebert take the film seriously or those demanding Ebert eviscerate the film amusingly, so yesterday he posted a million-word takedown of Ben Stein and pseudo-science and evangelical Christianity and everything, basically.

And there is worse, much worse. Toward the end of the film, we find that Stein actually did want to title it "From Darwin to Hitler." He finds a Creationist who informs him, "Darwinism inspired and advanced Nazism." He refers to advocates of eugenics as liberal. I would not call Hitler liberal. Arbitrary forced sterilization in our country has been promoted mostly by racists, who curiously found many times more blacks than whites suitable for such treatment.

Ben Stein is only getting warmed up. He takes a field trip to visit one "result" of Darwinism: Nazi concentration camps. "As a Jew," he says, "I wanted to see for myself." We see footage of gaunt, skeletal prisoners. Pathetic children. A mound of naked Jewish corpses. "It's difficult to describe how it felt to walk through such a haunting place," he says. Oh, go ahead, Ben Stein. Describe. It filled you with hatred for Charles Darwin and his followers, who represent the overwhelming majority of educated people in every nation on earth. It is not difficult for me to describe how you made me feel by exploiting the deaths of millions of Jews in support of your argument for a peripheral Christian belief. It fills me with contempt.

Yeesh. Not since Deuce Bigalow has Ebert been so critical.

(Then, just just for kicks, Ebert answers a letter from a reader regarding our post on the "Worst Review Ever" by publicly naming the letter-writer as the former U.S. editor for FHMOnline, i.e. the person who is pissed off at being unemployed while reviews like that one get some idiot paid. Hah.)

Joel continues: "You didn't bring any of this up during the interview, and I certainly would have welcomed the opportunity to discuss those kinds of things, person to person. I believe that it's always best to be upfront with someone when you have strong opinions about their work or their image, simply as a gesture of respect, or if the respect isn't there, then purely as professionalism. Had I known you felt this way, I still would have done the bloody interview, but your comments reveal you to be already critically predisposed and somewhat insincere. You are still welcome to attend our concert in Auckland, but just as a safety precaution, please wear a hockey mask."

Zing!

Smithies defends himself, saying—Oh wait, he just kind of squirms: "I've had letters before from the bass player in some local band who is pissed off because I said his record is crap... but I've never had a letter from someone in the big league before. It's actually made him go up in my estimation. He just wants respect for his work and I think good on him for making direct contact. He was great to talk to and no matter what I think of those songs, other people clearly love them because he's sold over 150 million records." [Sunday Star-Times]

[Via Galleycat]

By my reckoning, there are five valid, logical criteria for choosing one beer over another. 1) Flavor. 2) Calorie count. 3) Packaging (because who doesn't love the functional advantages of wide-mouths, minikegs, tallboys, and forties?). 4) Alcohol content (because some beers get you drunk much faster than others). 5) The good or bad corporate citizenship of the brewer. Everything else is just meaningless imagery.

Ha, yes. Yes it is.

[Read Stevenson's entire uncharacteristically earnest beer ad rant here.]

And here, Cohen vents righteously about the righteous venting of the PR industry in response to Cohen's original righteous venting.

· Everything about her is hard: her chiseled jawline, her abs—even her eyes, which can radiate fear and anger with such force, are incapable of softening enough to make her turn as Holly, who is supposed to be klutzy and lovably unfocused, believable. [Chicago Tribune]
· This movie doesn't have enough fresh air to play on Oxygen. Its agenda might be epistolary, but its brain is covered in Post-its. [Boston Globe]

· "Pulling our strings is one thing; taking us for a fool is quite another - the puppet-master must play fair. Which is why P.S. I Love You, adapted from the novel by Cecelia Ahern, is so damned annoying - this sappy thing is a two-hour cheat that never plays fair for a nanosecond." [Globe and Mail]
· "Chick pap. FYI, there's zero chemistry between P.S. I Love You's two commodified headliners." [EW]
· "Has any two-time Oscar winner ever made as many bad movies as Hilary Swank? A protracted piece of schmaltz, "P.S. I Love You" looks like a hand-me-down from Sandra Bullock and Drew Barrymore." [NY Post]
· "This is a movie that will leave you stunned and stupefied from beginning to end, if you don't head for the exits first." [SF Chronicle]

And a positive one:

· "There are several cringe-worthy set pieces, some involving Mr. Butler and a guitar...yet it charms, however awkwardly." [NY Times]

Poking around a bookshop in Paris last December, I came across a small handsome book. It was an unjacketed volume, bound in severe black cloth of the sort usually associated with spanking erotica. Picking it up, I found that it was actually more like a breviary, the title embossed in gold, the edges of the pages gilt, with a ribbon bookmark in ecclesiastical red; "La Base" is, in fact, a stylish little cookbook.

Hate that! Hate that so hard!

The Way We Eat: Solid Gold [NYT]