From the San Francisco Chronicle:

At a Litquake tribute to Tobias Wolff, writer Stephen Elliott described a link between fiction writing and political bent: “Literary fiction is character driven, and to write good characters you have to have empathy, and if you have empathy, you’re a liberal.”

What utter horseshit.

A brilliant article by the Times’ Martin Samuels, “Sepp Blatter finds no refuge in Foreign Legion.”

Indeed, there was no golden age of club ownership in which pure and generous benefactors with unimpeachable business ethics and a world view taken straight from the films of Frank Capra moved through the marketplace dispensing joy and a generous bounty. All that has changed is that as the economic power of the Premier League has spread worldwide, so the identity of those who are interested in harnessing that power as a means to an end has spread, too. Some will be better for their clubs than others; it was ever thus.

You honestly think Blatter, et al, would be raising this stink if the money were flowing into Spain or Italy?

Unwilling to let UEFA president Michel Platini and Football Association chairman Lord Triesman take all the sports press ink for trying to kill the beautiful game, Bernie Ecclestone, F1’s commercial rights holder, and Max Mosley, the president of the FIA, offer their plan to destroy Formula One:

The landscape of Formula One is to change dramatically with the introduction of a standard engine for all cars in a move designed to make the sport cheaper for aspiring new teams.

The proposals represent a huge cultural and philosophical shift for an elitist sport that has always been seen as not only a competition between the best drivers in the world but a battle between some of the best engine and car manufacturers, most of whom have long and proud traditions in motor sport.

Levelling the playing field is just the type of idealistic claptrap this world could do without.

UEFA president Michel Platini’s beginning to sound like FIFA president Sepp Blatter, a man who doesn’t know to keep his mouth closed:

Do you want in Liverpool an Arab sheikh as president with one Brazilian coach and nine or 11 African players?

Where is Liverpool in that? We have to make some rules.

I guess Frenchman Platini forgets his spell at Italian club Juventus from 1982 – 1987.

From Sky Sports:

Football Association chairman Lord Triesman has warned a salary cap may need to be enforced in English football.

No! I’d rather football go bankrupt and die than enforce such punitive measures. Who needs or wants parity when Hull is third in the table? I truly despise socialism of any kind.

Madeleines? Not in California, dude! À la Recherche du Taco Bell:

But if my never-ending search for the One True Taco is just another manifestation of the Anglo obsession with Mexico the exotic, the earthy, the primitive, the unimpeachably Authentic (think of the gabacha feminist sanctification of Frida Kahlo as Our Lady of the Unibrow), it may mask a gnawing anxiety: the pervasive fear that reality is morphing into virtual reality—that Authenticity is just a philosophical mirage in the Desert of the Real, to use the philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s term for the media-warped, culturally remixed world we live in. It’s a world where tortilla consumption is up in the States but down in Mexico, and where, as the gabacho popularizer of Mexican cuisine Rick Bayless told a reporter for the Associated Press, “they’ve started opening Taco Bells in Mexico now and people consider it American food.” He added, “A friend of mine in a Mexican city said to me, ‘You’ve got to taste this dish, this American dish. We’ve got it all over the place in Mexico now. It’s nachos.’ ”

Perhaps it’s because I spent the first sixteen years of my life moving that I have no Proustian dish attached to memory. I’m grateful for that.

The Wife’s out of town on business all week so don’t expect much noise emanating from here. My goal’s to spend every waking moment (and even some non-waking ones) either focusing on the new manuscript or reading.

One quick note, however, with which to leave you . . . As I was making the bed this morning, the television on, I realised I couldn’t imagine a more horrific torture than being forced to watch morning news talk shows . . . oh, the banality! . . . I’d snap like a brittle rubber band within the hour.

Needless to say, the TV in the bedroom will remain off in the morning unless the beautiful game’s on. Oh, how I love FSC and Setanta.

So soon? Jacket Copy says rumours of a new Thomas Pynchon novel have been confirmed by Penguin Press.

From Steven Moore:

. . . [I]t’s around 400 pages, and is a kind of noir detective story set in the 1960s, with lots of psychedelia as background.

A detective story? Perhaps The Wife will finally read Pynchon.

It struck me, as I was reading Time’s article, “Did God Want You to Get That Mortgage?”, that yesterday’s liberation theology is today’s prosperity theology.

What is about 2 Timothy 2:15 that people don’t understand?

Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.

“Rightly dividing the word of truth.” Let’s try that for a while.

The death of the Famous Five, as reported by The Age of Uncertainty:

It is rather sad that the rights to some of our best-loved children’s books, including The Snowman, Paddington Bear and Beatrix Potter are in the possession of people who, in addition to making dull, self-important statements like [‘Already-robust brand portfolio’] . . . are able to allow a much-loved series of adventure stories to be transformed into a commodity.

I’m so glad I’m not a kid.