I really like Mike White, but seriously, what the hell happened with SCHOOL OF ROCK? Did he go Mormon or something? (He did co-write NACHO LIBRE with Mormon director Jared Hess….)

I will buy it today.

Some Nonfiction Suggestions, if it comes to that:

Listen to Swibble R., AVC! This man has some good ideas! This man is going places!

Celebrity deaths
The list of celebrities whose deaths will make me genuinely grieved is relatively short—Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Morrissey, Cormac McCarthy, Norm MacDonald, Charlie Kaufman, and some others—but it does make that era seem that much more distant to me to have its most influential names…

Goddamit, is that title really taken? I've been working on a book with that name….

I'm reading it out loud to my wife every night, and the language seems pretty normal that way, just spelled differently. Good suggestion.

JEALOUSY, by Alain Robbe-Grillet
It's a favorite of mine—a book that changed my thinking forever. From my Amazon review of it:

Cool. I will order this immediately.
I was going to suggest Robbe Grillet's JEALOUSY over in the suggestions thread, but this seems as if it will cover part of that same literary niche of Franco-experimentalism, even with a connection to Alain Resnais, director of Robbe-Grillet's script of LAST SUMMER AT MARIENBAD. …

Caribou — SWIM
MM, I am counting on you to do justice here at the AVC to Caribou's forthcoming SWIM, out April 20th. All of the tracks have been leaked to last.fm and Youtube, and this album is just awesome. It may be the coolest thing Caribou has ever done, and that's really saying something.

I trust both these musicians not to ever disappoint me too badly, and often to surprise and delight. I'm in.

"Courtesy of the Red White and Blue" KILLS.
That is to say, it's part of the horrible, perhaps the all-time WORST, tradition of Songs that Actually Get People Killed.

The dumbest flag-waving modern country song that I think of first, is "Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)," by Alan Jackson, which simultaneously gets me in anthropologist-mode with how grotesquely it fumbles to unbutton the shirt of the 9/11 zeitgest, and makes me want to puke until I dry-heave.

I like the Nashville or Bust series—
—but does it have to focus on so many country singers that are not the best of their genre? There's got to be someone better than this jingoistic hack to listen to and write about. Why deal with the 95% crap singers at all?

Sorry, THE CULT AT THE END OF THE WORLD.

I will. And I did enjoy UNDERGROUND, but I felt that if I hadn't once read another book about Aum, THE CULT AND THE END OF THE WORLD, it would have felt really incomplete. There was no "big picture" given by it, just pieces.

I read the first chapters of it in a bookstore, before buying it, and it seemed pretty awesome to me.

I've heard THE HUNGER is great as well.

VALIS would be a cool choice.

Sure it would!