Limited, Inc.

Where was I? At some point this week I want to comment on the Meyer article in the Atlantic Monthly (alas, not on-line at www.theatlantic.com). This article was referenced by the PW booksellers e-mail I get every day, so I went to check out what Meyer had to say in his "passionate" response to pretentious writing. I haven't finished it, but the section on Delillo comes straight out of Bruce Bawer's take on Delillo in the New Criteria ten years ago, and even then it was pretty much crap. At least, however, one can respect Bawer as a reader (for a recent article by Bawer, check out Salon's book section, http://www.salon.com/books, for /2001/06/28/) I suspect that since the Atlantic's editorship was taken over by Michael Kelly, we might be seeing more articles arguing, as Myer's does, for a basically conservative aesthetic. But more on that later, as I say.

Ah, as I wait for my lunch to warm up in the oven, I can do my log for the day. As you'll remember, I signed off last with the promise that I would tell the long saga of my writing career, such as it is - truly, a cinescopic story. But today I am going to diverge from that fascinating subject and address Andrew Sullivan and the Giant PharmaCos. - which is not a children's story by Roald Dahl, but a little conflict of interest snare Mr. Sullivan has entangled himself in. You can go to Poynter.org - Jim Romenesko's Media News and see the links there, as well as my brilliant little letter. To see A.S. defending the drug companies, you can go to Slate - dialogues dated 01-04-09. Now, aside from the conflict of interest question, I've always wanted to have my say about Sullivan's position on this issue, which reflects a contradiction in the conservativism I've seen in many other conservative thinkers. So I'll have it here. Here's the deal. Conservativ

New post. Good. Now the writing deal. I'm thinking a lot about the writing deal. Two things happened today. One, I'm writing reviews for this business site. I'm writing reviews of business books. I used to do that for the Kurson's zine, Greenmagazine - and pause for a moment in memory, please. And I am a regular autodidact when it comes to economics. We are the worst kind of cranks, the Henry Georges, the Hobsons - but hell, it isn't like economics is really a science. I could - in fact I will - post away about the ways in which economics is moved by motives that are more Glasperlenspiel than profit and loss, but that is neither here nor there. I was talking about working for this site that shall be nameless, for this editor who shall be nameless. It looked like a great gig - I got a message while I was down in Mexico, this January, that M. was going to be editing this site. It was for some consulting firm or something, and M. wanted to use a review I'd alre

That was last night's entry. Not exactly portentious - not exactly "stately, plump Buck Mulligan," huh? I'm tempted to change it, but I guess the deal here will be to pour out the spontaneous expression of my heart, and let the devil take the hindmost. Okay, if this is going to work, that is going to have to be a parameter. cool. When I said I was a writer, I meant that is how I make my living. Mainly, I do book reviews. In the last couple weeks, I have done a piece about the new Robert Mitchum bio, for Kamera , a review coming out in this week's New York Observer , and, let's see, I did this interview of Carol Muske-Dukes recently for Publisher's Weekly . But I want to delve more deeply into "being a writer." I'm going to do that in my next entry.

I've wanted to do this logging bit for a while. And so here I am, doing it - although this is just the inane beginning, so that I can post this and see what it looks like. But here is the deal. I'm a freelance writer - a breed of Yahoo known for spitefulness, poverty, and the fits of self-pity unheard of outside the fat ringed minds of D.C. politicians. And so that is what I intend to display, here. My spots.