Many authors have felt this way, but this is the first modern age author to admit it: Sci-fi writer Thomas Disch has announced on his LiveJournal that he is God. He is taking questions.

Dear God,

What is your favorite species in the whole universe and why?

Your friend,

zack

Disch’s response:

The Xloti of Aldebaran 4. They’d be your favorite too, if they weren’t invible to the human eye.

Hopefully, this is just to promote Disch’s new book, The Word of God, but if he gets enough of a positive response, I suspect that he might just stick with it. I guess that Norman Mailer’s death has left a vacuum in authors who believe they’re deities.

Here is the MySpace page for Cassie Wright, the porn-star main character of Snuff, Chuck Palahniuk’s new novel. Palahniuk will be reading at Town Hall on May 20th. On the MySpace page, there’s a video trailer for a fake movie, called The Wizard of Ass, starring the fake porn star. It’s also a trailer for the book. I’m not going to embed the video here, because, well, gross.

Also on the MySpace page is a list of fictional movies that the fictional Cassie Wright has starred in, with titles that have already been used in actual porn movies like On Golden Blonde and The Da Vinci Load. There’s also a message from Chuck Palahniuk himself:

Hey all,

Just Top Friended you. Let’s get this page some hits. Cassie deserves it.

It’s authors like Palahniuk that make me proud to have devoted my life to literature. That is all.

I love waking up to grammar corrections. I just got an e-mail this morning referring to this article, and particularly this sentence from the article:

It’ll be sad when Amazon isn’t based out of the looming Pacific Medical Center building anymore.

Here is the e-mail in full, minus the link to the story:

Perhaps I’m being petty, but how can Amazon be “based out of the looming Pacific Medical Center” when it is located IN that building?

I have no idea where or how the phrase “based out of” originated, but in this usage it is clearly an oxymoron. Indeed, I have never seen or heard a case in which this overused phrase was not.

I’m sure you meant that Amazon is based IN the looming Pacific Medical Center. Why did you not write that? The phrase you used is an affectation. Please do not use it again.

Thank you.

dr

I took the question to our copy desk, and they said that it means “to serve as a base,” and that the phrase appears frequently in the New York Times and “If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for us.” I agree. I just informed dr and am eagerly waiting a response. I’m thinking it’ll be a crisp “Good day, sir.”

Questions: Does this mysterious dr have a Google alert on “based out of?” Does s/he think of him/herself as a kind of grammar vigilante, swooping in to right wrongs? Does this Batman of usage ever sleep?

A ton of readings on a whole bunch of topics tonight, including a mystery book signing at noon and an open mic.

Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart read from Fixing Failed States, which seems to theorize a way to fix failed states, at Town Hall.

Up at Third Place Books, Charlie Ayers reads from his memoir, Food 2.0 : Secrets From the Chef Who Fed Google. Apparently, it’s a cookbook that suggests how to eat yourself into smartness.

At the University Book Store, book blogger Mark Sarvas reads from his debut novel, Harry, Revised. It’s a pretty good debut, with lots of good writing, but it’s a little too consciously literary. I look forward to his future work, and the Q & A for this reading should be a fun, name-dropping discussion about books, too.

At Parkplace Books out in Kirkland, we have Morgan Howell, reading from a fantasy trilogy. There may be elves in attendance.

And at Elliott Bay Book Company, Siri Hustvedt reads from her new novel, The Sorrows of an American. It’s always awkward to say this sort of thing, and many people will find it obnoxious and unnecessary, but Siri Hustvedt is married to Paul Auster. I find this sort of thing relevant not because of weird claims of nepotism, but rather because it means that Ms. Hustvedt’s book has an excellent first reader. She’s a very good writer in and of herself, and, having begun this book, I can say it’s probably one of her best.

Also, from the 7th through the 10th, Dinaw Mengestu, author the The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, will be reading at various libraries throughout Seattle. Check the Library’s listing of events on their website. There will surely be a reading somewhere near you.

There’s more going on in the full readings calendar.

In one corner: Michel Houellebecq, author of nihilistic and prurient French novels.

In the other corner: His mother, Lucie Ceccaldi.

He said:

In his international bestseller Les Particules élémentaires - translated as Atomised - he created one of modern French literature’s vilest mothers, a selfish, sex-obsessed hippy called “Ceccaldi” who leaves her young son in an attic in his own excrement then dumps him so she can enjoy free-love life in a bizarre cult. Elsewhere, he described the “fundamental psychic flaw” his mother caused in him. He hasn’t spoken to her for 17 years. He once told an interviewer she was dead.

She said:

She calls her son an “evil, stupid little bastard” adding that “this individual, who alas came from my womb, is a liar, an imposter, a parasite and above all - above all - a petit arriviste ready to do absolutely anything for money and fame.”

She also said:

“[His] book is pure pornography, it’s repugnant, it’s crap… ” In her own book, she speculates that he writes about sex because he doesn’t get enough. “What’s this moronic literature?! Houellebecq is someone who’s never done anything, who’s never really desired anything, who never wanted to look at others. And that arrogance of taking yourself as superior … Stupid little bastard. Yes, Houellebecq’s a stupid little bastard, whether he’s my son or not.”

And one more, for good measure:

“If he is unfortunate enough to use my name in something again, I’ll cane him round the face, that’ll knock his teeth out, that’s for sure. And [his publishers] won’t stop me.”

Happy mother’s day, everyone.

Last night, I went down to Elliott Bay Book Company to buy Mother’s Day gifts to mail to my mom and to attend the Aleksandar Hemon reading (he was very charming, by the way, in an aloof, Eastern European way and, while he’s not the best reader of his own work, he did bring a Power Point presentation of the gorgeous photos in his most recent, very good book The Lazarus Project).

When I got there, customers and employees alike were abuzz with a recent happening: it seems that a furious customer had just shouted at an employee about the books lead that I wrote about Amazon.com’s lack of contributions to local arts organizations.

Now, I do quote an Elliott Bay employee’s blog—a blog not sponsored by Elliott Bay Book Company—in my article, but Elliott Bay had nothing to do with the story beyond that. The employee tried to tell the customer this, but the man was inconsolable. He said that, due to their involvement in that hack-work passing as journalism, he was never going to shop at Elliott Bay Book Company ever again. And then he threw his frequent buyer’s card at the employee and stormed out.

To which I have to say: You, anonymous angry consumer guy, are a total jackass. Way to protest my pointing out that a locally based global retailer doesn’t support local arts by boycotting a local retailer. You’re really making a case.

A poetry slam, a book about mothering, and other readings that are almost 100% guaranteed to have nothing to do with primary season going on tonight.

At Third Place Books, Elizabeth George is reading from Careless in Red. George is the mystery series writer who killed one of her main characters in the last book in this series. It caused a huge uproar among her readers—I guess one of the unwritten rules of writing a mystery series is that you’re not allowed to kill any of the main characters or change anything important, because readers don’t like actual change in their mysteries—and, even though I’ve never read any of her books, it made me fall in love with Elizabeth George.

At the University Book Store, William J. Bernstein reads from A Splendid Exchange, which is about the history of trade. For some reason, this fascinates me. I’m about the farthest thing from an economist that there is, but I’m probably going to wind up reading this book. I can’t explain why. It certainly doesn’t have anything to do with the cover, which is super-bland.

At the Good Shepherd Center on Capitol Hill, Bethany Wright and Roberta Olson, the authors of many books of poetry and such, will read as part of Subtext’s reading series. Subtext does good work supporting non-commercial writing, and we should all pay attention to them, even if we don’t appreciate all the writers they bring on: the scene would be a lot poorer if there was no Subtext reading series.

And to bookend the Reading Tonight post with mysteries, Dominic Stansberry reads from The Ancient Rain, which is a mystery that has something to do with the Beats. This is sure to be exciting, because nobody’s ever published a book about the Beats before. If you were going to this reading, please consider going to Elizabeth George instead.

Also, from the 7th through the 10th, Dinaw Mengestu, author the The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, will be reading at various libraries throughout Seattle. Check the Library’s listing of events on their website. There will surely be a reading somewhere near you.

For your non-Mengestu readings needs, consult the full readings calendar.

Over on his blog, Terry Teachout (theater critic for the Wall Street Journal) reminded me about the Jane Chord:

The Jane Chord, to which Bill Buckley introduced us years ago, is a concept originally promulgated by Hugh Kenner. The idea is that if you make a two-word sentence out of the first and last words of a book, it will tell you something revealing about the book in question. Or not: the Jane Chord of Pride and Prejudice is It/them. But every once in a while you run across a Jane Chord so resonant that it makes the room shiver—the chord for Death Comes for the Archbishop is One/built—and even when a famous book yields up nonsense, it’s still a good game to play.

Miranda July noticed her own Jane Chord for No One Belongs Here More than You here.

Some Jane Chords in books on shelves and desks around the office:

On God by Norman Mailer: Scientists experience.

Atonement by Ian McEwan: The sleep.

Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban: He sea.

Please Feed Me: A Punk Vegan Cookbook: We delicious.

Gifts of the Body by Rebecca Brown: I mourned.

United States: Essays 1952–1992 by Gore Vidal: I sanity.

Brothels of Nevada [a photo book]: Visits imperative.

And Democracy in America by Tocqueville: Among misery.

According to the New York Times, Peter W. Olson, the chief executive of giant publisher Random House, and a man who looks like the main character in a 1980’s John Updike novel—

—will resign. Or will be forced to resign by a penny-pinching boss, because profits at Random House (one of the three biggest publishers in the US) fell 5.6 percent last year. At least Olson was a heavy reader, and so he was likely to read a lot of the product he was responsible for. I shudder to think what’ll happen if Bertelsmann, the German company that now owns Random House, puts an accountant in charge. Get ready for the book version of Ouch My Balls!

Harper Collins has posted a desription of Anathem, which is local sci-fi author Neal Stephenson’s next (and first post-Baroque Cycle) book:

Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400–year—old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians. There, he and his cohorts are sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, and unpredictable “saecular” world, an endless landscape of casinos and megastores that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, dark ages and renaissances, world wars and climate change. Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides it is only these cloistered scholars who have the abilities to avert an impending catastrope (sic). And, one by one, Raz and his friends, mentors, and teachers are sent forth without warning into the unknown.

I generally trust Stephenson to at least write very, very good pulp. But this sounds a little too reliant on the Red State/Blue State thing, which is, as we all know, so 2004. Hopefully he’ll pull through, though, because he’s one of Seattle’s best mainstream authors publishing work today.