My grandmother’s recommendations — call more often; don’t swear so much; ditch the redhead and marry a nice, Italian girl.

Yes, it’s the return of the Linklord, The Duke of Diversion, The Tangentmaster.

Apparently, the blog transformed into a Sweet Valley High fan site when I disappeared. Permit me to reintroduce a sense of equity by writing about everything but Sweet Valley High.

1. Yesterday was Bad Poetry Day. Celebrate belatedly with the Frisky’s worst adolescent poetry.

On example from a poem entitled “Boy in a Band:”

Never thought a guitar
Could make you look cuter than you are
Guess this proves how wrong I can be
When it comes to you
Falling for you
All that you do
Boy in a Band.

This might be bad poetry, but at least it’s honest.

2. Novelist Rick Moody says the recession has impacted how writers are writing.

I think the economy is changing the way people are writing and that writers are more desperate then at any time since I’ve been watching what’s been happening closely. And I worked in publishing in the last big recession in the early 90’s, so I saw some of it at that time. I think people are just really scared that they’re not going to get published at all, and as a result, they’re trying to shoehorn themselves into pretty rigidly formatted kinds of things ...

My former students who are out there now trying to get published are having trouble on those lines. It’s the crazy great ones, the kind of mad ones who are really struggling to find people to publish them. And not because the projects don’t have merit, but just because everybody’s looking at Bookscan and they want certain numbers of units to ship and so on. That is going to affect people going forward, not only because we miss out but because when we miss out we then forget that the opportunity exists for that kind of experimental work.

Moody’s a good writer. I like him. But this is all seems pretty obvious.

Writers changing their style so they can get published? Gasp.

Art being impacted by a recession? Alack.

Here’s a list of other fields impacted by hard times: all of them.

3. Barnes & Noble is for sale. The Wall Street Journal details how it fell so far so fast.

The simple explanation for Barnes & Noble’s decline is the Internet, which spawned Amazon.com, e-readers and digital books. But that didn’t have to be the end for B&N, which had a dominant market position and should have out-Amazoned Amazon, leveraging its brand and innovating when it began marketing and selling books online.

4. Betty White has signed a two-book deal with Putnam. You know you care.

5. Frank Kermode, a critic so influential he was knighted, has died at the age of 90.

6. Want to know what tyromancy is? Take the Guardian’s weird-word quiz.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

I received an e-mail yesterday that said Kirkus Reviews and Editor & Publisher would cease production.

The subject line read, “Can’t imagine anything more symbolic.”

It is Friday. More importantly, it is the Friday after the Browns beat the Steelers. Welcome to the melange.

The LA Times book blog weighed in on Kirkus’s closing.

The most interesting quote comes from Nick Kaufmann’s Live Journal:
One, it was purportedly read by every Hollywood exec--or more likely their underlings--looking for literary properties to option for film (at its height, I’m told Kirkus was used for this purpose even more than PW was). And two, their reviewers were impossible to please. I mean, impossible. If your book got a good review from Kirkus, that really meant something because they pretty much hated everything.

(I’d link directly to Kaufmann’s Live Journal instead of the LA Times; but, then, you’d have to watch an annoying Best Buy commercial before reading.)

Meanwhile, New York Times notes the obvious. Publishers have pushed back their e-book release dates to stick it to Amazon. MobyLives reminds us that they’ve been talking about publishing and Amazon’s cold war for weeks.

Finally, there has been a lot of criticism for Rick Moody’s tweeted tale, “Some Contemporary Characters.”

Most of the detractors hit on the same themes I did. The plot is too familiar and Moody misuses his medium. However, I would stop short of calling it a failure, though other critics did not. (In Moody’s defense, his story included all the right themes for the digital age — romance, voyeurism and masturbatory self-promotion.)

Peter Ginna says if Moody failed, we need more failure.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm, is telling a story on Twitter right now.

He’s releasing his short story, “Some Contemporary Characters,” as a series of posts on ElectricLit’s feed. The story is being updated every 10 minutes and is supposed to be completed Wednesday.

Thus far, the story seems to be a romance between an older, erudite man and young, attractive bartender. (If I complained about Twilight being wish fulfillment, I can’t let this plot slide. I am so sick of older-writer-gets-worldly-younger-woman stories. I don’t blame Moody. I blame Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Memories of my Melancholy Whores and Philip Roth’s The Humbling.)

Moody’s tweets alternate between the man and woman’s perspective as they talk about their relationship from the anonymity of cyberspace. (Does anybody still call it cyberspace? I wish they would.)

Moody incorporates themes of technology and online confession in his tale. After their first kiss, the woman notes, “That was it, nothing else, and people kiss every day, and the only difference nowadays is that people try to text while kissing.”

Moody’s writing is clever and the story is cute. My only knock is the subject has been overdone and Moody doesn’t use Twitter to its full potential.

His story is co-narrated by the man and woman, yet the tweets all come from a single feed. It seems like a missed opportunity that is unique to his chosen medium.

In other news, Catherine and Heathcliff audition for Twilight.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com