Despite the fact that a Bob Hope Centenary question should be in order, I've come up with exactly bupkis in that department, so we're moving on. Therefore, what with the pre-quiz comments (see the chatter attached to yesterday's headlines) heading for Dollywood and other parts where the Wombat rarely treads, it seems appropriate to pose the following as today's exercise in pointless factoidalization.

The great country artist George Jones (who incidentally, while in the Marines, performed as "Little Georgie Jones, the Forrester Hill Flash" and was nicknamed at one point early in his career "The Possum") had his first country #1 record in 1959 with a hit written by a man generally famous for completely different reasons.

Who wrote George Jones' first #1 country single?

First correct answer posted to comments wins a pair of thigh-high tarantula-skin boots with rhinestones on the instep which spell out "Lenny" on the left boot and "Squiggy" on the right. Worn once, with a small Southern Comfort stain on one toe. No Googling or emailing that know-it-all Tanya Tucker. One guess per comment, but post as often as you like.

Well, let's see here...looks like President Karl G. Brushove is re-emphasizing loyalty in his choice of aides. Maybe the new kids can help figure out how to save Endangered Species even though it looks like it's too gosh-darned expensive.

On his centenary, Bob Hope receives praise from Connie Stevens and a punked-out Kelsey Grammer. According to Stevens, "He's done as much for America as any president."

Meanwhile, in Iraq it's Mullah Time!

So, continuing on from my rant lat week about Virginia Heffernan's piece in Slate. Here, about a week late, is part two.

A few months ago, a new monthly, dedicated to the world of Artz 'n Letters appeared -- perhaps mostly the Letters part -- called The Believer. Given that this was back in March, you probably already know all about it: backed by Dave Eggers and the McSweeney's publishing operation, headed up by Vendela Vida (Eggers' wife), it arrived with a bit of a media splash, and editor Heidi Julavits' inaugural essay seemed to announce that its purpose was to counter a dominant book-review culture of self-serving cleverness, envious hostility toward experimentation and creative risk, and just literary playa-hatin'.

I don't mean to overstress the link to Eggers. However, given his well-documented frustration with critical negativity, the founding/naming of The Believer and Julavits heigh-ho concerning its project definitely suggested the extension and fulfillment of something he's been vocal about: re-orienting our literary culture toward more appreciation and support of the literary artist (I'd put that all in quotes, but what the hell's the point?).

I got to thinking more about this after Eric Messinger's Q & A with Julavits in the NYT a couple of weeks ago. In the interview, Julavits decries a "thumbs-up, thumbs-down" culture of book reviewing, and connects the "hot new writer" phenomenon with the practice of overhyping unproven start-ups.

All to the good -- despite the fact that at one point she characterizes The Believer as essentially a vehicle for whatever the editors (herself, Vida, and Ed Park) happen to fancy. Not that there's anything wrong, exactly, with that, especially given that it's my policy here. But, then, I'm giving this away for free: I was a little surprised that when asked by the Times for her editorial mission, there wasn't more than "you know -- good things!" on offer.

Not to worry, as the essay linked above provides copious evidence of there being something more than whim here; indeed, the "Call for a New Era of Experimentation, and a Book Culture That Will Support It" is indeed thoughtful, and full of the evidence that there is a Reason for Doing This (sorry, those Capitals are Catching). She writes of James Wood's bloody-minded review of Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man (and here I am, circling back to Smith) as an example of the danger even an honorable and brilliant reviewer can get into: concocting the review as a means to a different end than critically responding to the work in question in a way that engages the reader's needs. She argues that in using Smith's failure to bash away at a whole subdepartment of literature Wood reviles (the fast-paced, highly referential and by some lights post-psychological fiction practiced by Smith, DF Wallace, Eggers and others -- Wood's list, not mine) he's betraying his own otherwise manifest "faith" in the power of literature to produce (in Julavits' phrase) "feeling on a grand scale." Since, she argues, he's said that he thinks Smith is a talented and intelligent writer (but working in a literary idiom he hates) to crucify her in print runs against what his optimism about literature should tell him to do -- to love the sinner, even while he hates the sin.

Or at least to pass on the assignment, since, she argues, his mind was sort of made up ahead of time. Later in her essay, Julavits points out a review by Sam Sifton of a novel by Mark Nesbitt which used the space to denounce Yaddo and Harpers' magazine, and in short seemed like a vehicle for complaint against the ill-defined mass of MFA-borne writers. Sifton (like other's who spent writing time in the splenetic world of the New York Press) has never lacked for venom, of course. Again, what seems to be the problem is the rather transparent use of the review for a rant against a school, group or method. Hard to disagree -- such reviews are, if sometimes entertaining, usually misleading, and they usually reveal themselves to have begun with their conclusions -- a condition which makes them, in the end, rather stale in the chewing.

Yet as Julavits unfolds her argument -- which gestures back to the Golden Age of lit-crit-wit and namechecks Bunny Wilson as a man who could piss on whom he chose and still retain a clean-handed dignity -- we get into murkier territory. The whole review industry, it would seem is contaminated with self-serving cleverness, and although she's charted it's long pedigree admirably, Julavits insists (without, I think, proving her case), that it's a new thing. "This hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt, is, I suspect, a bastard offspring of Orwell's flea-weighers. I call it Snark, and it has crept with alarming speed into the reviewing community..."

I'll admit it: it flat-out bugs me that Julavits capitalizes "Snark," a word (particularly in the form "snarky") that's been so overworked over the last half-decade that some sort of better-than-Safire investigation into its Carrollian origin and subsequent lexical hijack into the territory of sarcasm is more than required. The arrogation to herself of its use is baffling, but the royal pronunciation that attends it is where this essay breaks in half for me. By itself, this is a trivial tone-misstep: since it's true that what she's describing is what many people have termed "snarky," she's not wrong in her use of the term. But I think Julavits runs off the rails her when she lands on this concept as the Big What's Wrong. Far more reviews, after all, suffer from the fact that they generate naught but fulsome praise, a phenomenon she discusses but oddly sidelines behind the supposedly larger threat of mad-dog reviewers looking for raw meat in the form of hapless, fleshy-legged novelist strollers. Even more of an issue -- one Julavits doesn't touch upon, is the preponderance, particularly in the Times, of reviews which resist any kind of engagement in favor of summary, a few tentative thoughts, and a safe retreat.

Moreover, her biggest concern is that experimentation is ruthlessly punished -- though in point of fact the savage reviews she cites (including Dale Peck's famed takedown of Rick Moody's The Black Veil) have all critized the predictability and conventionality of the works in question. The Autograph Man and its readers may have deserved better than Wood gave that book -- but it was not an experiment.

Julavits writes "I am not espousing a feel-good, criticism-free climate, where all ambitious literary books recieve special treatment...I'm simply asking that we read between the lines and see what value systems these reviews [the snarky kind] are really espousing." I think she means that conservative anti-intellectuals of the type who currently own the country's political discourse are the ones leading the charge into dismissive, bitter contempt for all things experimental. It's an interesting idea -- certainly the NY Press and the NY Observer, two big organs of institutional sarcasm, also carry water for conservatives in New York. But as her article lays the blame earlier for sarcasm on a culture of gotta-show-off-my-cleverness among book reviewers, it looks like we have to lay the closet-ideological charge aside. In which case, I don't know what she means there.

What I do know is that while I'm sympathetic to anyone's call for meaning, engagement, and just plain better quality control from our book reviewing establishment, the Believer's call to arms didn't in the end resonate with me. And here's the thing: within this knowledgeable and passionate essay about reviews in our time Julavits evidences awareness that part of the problem is the fear of reviewers (who are to a person trying to get published/reviewed/read with books of their own) that they will piss someone off and lose their shot at what they've been working toward. And another part is the hegemony of a few well-established organs of cultural, um, containment -- we're so relentlessly consolidating our channels of information that it's impossible to really sustain a critical dialogue. In the end, she doesn't seem to think these are important, but that doesn't mean her project won't wind up helping in these departments. For me, the biggest reasons to cheer for The Believer's arrival are two: another voice is another chance to see some mulitiplicity of viewpoints abut books and ideas. And one can hope that Julavits and her fellow editors will involve some regular contributors who don't need to worry so much about who they offend with a (thoughtful) pan, or even an extremely mixed review. That's a tall order, but it's what I'm waiting for.

I was going to connect this all to the Matthew Barney show at the Guggenheim, which I saw this weekend, and to William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, which I just finished. But it's one AM, and if you've read to the end of this, well, you've had enough out of me for today, haven't you?

Sorry for the late start, but here's today's quiz. And the promised follow-up to our last post (on reviewing, Zadie Smith, and The Believer) will appear shortly.

At one point a Wall Street merchant, and at another the leader of venture whose investors included the King of England, this man was hanged in May of 1701, supposedly three times (the rope kept breaking). The broadsheet song by Lesley Nelson-Burns that circulated not long after his execution had lyrics in the form of his supposed last words, and concluded:

To execution dock I must go, I must go
To execution dock I must go
To execution dock, while many thousands flock
But I must bear the shock and must die, and must die,

Take a warning now by me, for I must die, for I must die,
Take a warning now by me for I must die
Take a warning now by me and shun bad company,
Lest you come to hell with me, for I must die, I must die

Who was he?

First correct answer posted to comments wins a non-functional Pentax digital camera, which makes an excellent paperweight. No Googling or consulting your copy of Broadsheet Popular Tunes of the 18th Century. One guess per comment, but comment as often as you like.

It's been hard to find the time to post anything other than the merest squibs of late. But I would like to gesture in the direction of thought concerning a couple of recent events in Reviewland -- one teensy, one more resonant. As usual, I bring to the subject little except the underappreciated virtue of belatedness: the buzz-bloom is nowhere to be found on these topics. My johnny-come-lateliness should, I hope, allow me not just the wisdom of perspective, but the satisfaction of having the last word, if only because the rest of the panel and the entire audience have adjourned for cocktails and serious flirting.

The small matter is what led me into this: reading Virginia Heffernan's slam of the recent Masterpiece Theatre adaptation of Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth. I had seen the first installment, and liked it well enough, and, stumbling upon the review, was curious to know what Heffernan made of it. (Caveat here: I've read other reviews by this writer and thought them insightful and well-written. I'm dealing only with this particular short essay).

Heffernan resoundingly booed MT's version of White Teeth; however, her beef wasn't just with the adaptation, but with the source material. Here's her opener:

"This is good, this is good, I don't like it, this is good. If I remember right, those were my thoughts as I turned the pages of Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth a few years ago."

Heffernan spends the rest of her first paragraph delineating Smith's accomplishments, but her first sentence has telegraphed the punch coming in paragraph 2: "But I didn't like it. It was not absorbing. The characters kept flitting around, and I never got a chance to see the world their way. I never felt the relaxed, half-drowned sensation of helpless submission that a novel can produce."

This is pretty unsatisfying in a review -- especially of a filmed adaptation of the book thus dismissed, since it raises the question "why did you care about the adaptation?" -- but things get worse, and in an instructive way. Heffernan concludes her dismissal of White Teeth: "Good, bright, inventive, but I didn't like it. Too much homework. But I pushed through the book's nearly 500 pages—and until now all I've ever said or even thought about White Teeth is, 'It's good!' "

Shooting, apparently, for a breezy honesty about her dislike of White Teeth, she winds up conceding both that her negative judgement is hard to articulate except in the most general and subjective of ways, and that for reasons unspecified, she pretended to herself and others that she liked the book, even though she did not. Both of these concessions might have made good fodder for an essay -- what do we do as essayists when we can't analyze our response to a work of art? -- what crimes of self-deception do we routinely commit in order to stay with the crowd in terms of our literary opinions?

But Heffernan doesn't seem to be interested in talking about either of these things. Rather, she wants to dismiss the book without explaining why, and to obliquely suggest that praise of White Teeth has been dutiful and required, like homework.

The negative review of the film itself seems an afterthought: Heffernan wraps up with a stunningly bitchy diss of the book via the film: "White Teeth, which represents a nice risk for Masterpiece Theatre and perhaps the final canonization of Zadie Smith, is ultimately a smart, good-looking, and dull movie. It captures the spirit of the novel woefully well." The final canonization of Zadie Smith? Who has written precisely two novels, the second of which didn't get great reviews? There's a lot of bile packed into that little fig-bar of sarcasm, all of which has to do with the politics of literary stardom (and nothing to do with the book). Her closing line makes all too plain the finality of the reviewer's judgement about the source material -- leading one once again to the question, why the review? What did Heffernan bring to viewing the adaptation that she hadn't already decided in advance?

I'll end this segment of a multi-part post by noting that this review was no big event, and won't, I suspect, cause Zadie Smith any sleepless nights. But it made me think about an essay that I'd heard much about back in March and read the first bit of before getting distracted, probably by something shiny. When a friend sent me a link to a recent Q & A with the author/editor, I decided it was time to catch up with the recent manifesto against the very kind of review I was fuming over.

Tomorrow: Crisis of Belief

While we had planned for a quiz to be carried out last week in our absence, our scheme was dashed to ruin by the techno-goofs at AOL-Time Warner. Please direct all complaints to the big, ugly building they're putting up on Columbus Circle.

This week, we forge on with another invigorating sip from the whiskey-bottle of nineteenth-century history. Excuse, please, the tortured diction in the following.

According to the U.S. Library of Congress, in Massachusetts in 1860, the first English-language example of a certain kind of institution was opened. Its founder eventually testified to Congress in 1897 about the social benefits of such places. Although these institutions are now nearly universal in the United States, the original, non-English name is still most frequently used.

What is the non-English name of this particular sort of institution?

First correct answer posted to comments wins a hand-made statue of the Mayan god Chac made from hardened guacamole. Refrain from Googling or jumping in a cab and heading for the microfiche room. One guess per comment, but comment as often as you like.

With apologies for the less-than-professional layout, an incomplete visual record of our recent visit to the Yucatán.

Note: our jaded big-city eyes were so overwhelmed by the actual presence of lush greens and iridescent blues we had assumed were only the product of art departments at ad agencies, that we kept taking photo after photo of plants and water. Almost no human beings (or buildings younger than a half-millenium) made it into our visual record.

And most of our iguana shots (save this one, of our cute little neighbor Carmelita) failed miserably, though we saw quite a few big specimens. There must be some proverb about the impossibility of photographing an iguana. It strikes me as a fundamentally proverbial concept.

Australians -- the crazy people on the snorkeling boat who go off on their own and give Jorge the guide fits
Bebidas --mostly agua mineral con gas, por favor
Chichen Itza -- contains the most beautiful carvings of jaguars eating human hearts that you will ever see
Dengue es Mortal! -- slogan on a sign in a village south of Coba, urging residents to eradicate mosquitoes
East Wind -- blowing off the ocean at Tulum, straight through every crack and crevice of the cabana
Farmacia -- Hay Tylenol?
Gran Cenote -- looking down through your mask, past the fish, rock formations rise from blackness in the crystalline water. Bats wheel and squeak just above your head.
Hola -- a good start, but can fool one into forgetting one's vocabularic limitations
Iguana -- Hey, that rock just moved.
Jugo de Naranja -- the unsafe breakfast temptation
Kukulkan, Pyramid of -- what you force yourself to climb at Chichen Itza, after having shamefully wussed out 2/3 of the way up Nohuch Mul at Coba (vertigo)
Legumes -- with breakfast, lunch, and dinner
Mayan Healing Ceremony -- offered for an unspecified sum by the management of the cabañas
Nohuch Mul -- the great pyramid at Coba, a god-child's abandoned project in the jungle, which you climb MOST of the way up
Obedezca las señales -- signs every few kilometers along Hwy 307
Palapa -- the palm-leaf thatching that's usually overhead
Quintana Roo -- the name of the state on the Yucatan's Carribbean coast, which sounds like a character in the first draft of The House at Pooh Corner
Reef -- where you go to bother the fish while they mind their own business, hovering over them with your horrible Darth-Vader snorkel breathing
Stench -- produced by the mastiff owned by cabaña management. He likes to roll, we think, in cosas which are muertos
T-shirt -- how can they all be filthy if it's only Monday?
Unwell -- the general state of one's stomach
Villadolid -- avoiding the toll road coming back from Chichen Itza takes you through here. You'll get lost, but it's interesting.
Water -- what you can't believe you are actually running out of, again
Xel Ha -- massive water park, tourist-bus magnet, and surprisingly fun
Zama -- "Dawn," the original name of the Mayan settlement at Tulum (which means "The Wall"), and very appropriate

Pictures to come.

The frazzled wombat is in sore need of vacation, and is off with the dawn tomorrow. With a precariously perched pile of torturous tasks left before me here at work before I fly down to sunny Mexico, I'll get right to the point with this week's quiz:

To what kind of activity does the word 'stellionate' refer? And (bonus) what does that have to do with John Roebling?

First correct answer posted to comments wins a bottle of expired suntan lotion purchased in the previous millenium. Those who Google in pursuit of the answer are nothing but big cheater-pantses. One guess per comment, but comment as often as you like.

Next week, while I'm away, a special Guest-hosted Quiz!