His Bathrobe Pockets Stuffed With Notes

Recent reviews at Powells.com: Arthur Phillips's The Egyptologist ("Phillips offers another meandering book stocked with anachronistic charms, this one a slow and intricately built whodunit for the King Tut lover in all of us") and the v. necessary Miss Lonelyhearts/The Day of the Locust (Fun Fact: "Nathanael West...had his name legally changed to 'West,' after Horace Greeley's famous line 'Go west, young man'"). The latter is a tad chatty for YPTR's taste, but it does offer an appropriately bleak quotation from The Day of the Locust:

"It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous."

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From a review of Status Anxiety: "If 'Middlebrow' were an actual brand name, Alain de Botton would be its official spokesman. Cheeky and endlessly simplifying, this gadfly has mastered the rare task of extolling to the provinces the virtues of a soft cosmopolitanism." Ouch. Perhaps Mr. de Botton would like to huddle with Terry Gross and heal their collective wounds over a six-pack of moderately priced microbrew.

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New Hugh Hefner book details "Hef's Requisite Postcoital Meal": "an inviting mix of buttered toast, hash brown potatoes, and 'eggs sunny side up, with bacon, crisp.'"

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From a Washington Times review: "Could there be a second Holocaust? Even asking the question outrages some people; others are relieved that someone is bold enough, in a worldwide climate of growing anti-Semitism, to pose the outrageous question. Ron Rosenbaum raises the possibility in this extraordinary collection of 50 essays, Those Who Forget the Past: The Question of Anti-Semitism." Sounds educational. Know anyone who could use a copy?

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Mystery of the Abbey: A boardgame loosely inspired by Eco’s The Name of the Rose.

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Albeit late to the game by a few months, this is probably the best review of the Mountain Goats' We Shall All Be Healed RP has seen so far:

Mountain Goats have just added a further chapter in an ongoing saga of (micro) relationships examined against a backdrop of (macro) global concern, We Shall All Be Healed being the most explicit yet. Much of this is very difficult to express, whatever the medium, although perhaps music is best suited, after all (music that's ostensibly folk, but folk as played by a man who loves death metal and '80s post punk, which may partly explain the curious-yet-compelling juxtaposition of furiously strummed acoustic guitars alongside deep and euphonic basslines): simply, John Darnielle is very worried, very worried indeed. But he's also entranced. And within that hairline clash nestles the barest hint of a direction along which we might plan our escape from this truly frightening mess we've gotten ourselves in.

We shall all be healed? We should all be so lucky.

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Last month's "And Now, a Less Informed Opinion" (a/k/a Dave Eggers' monthly column for Spin) is now online. It's an appreciation of Big Country (the band), which is all well and good. Mr. Eggers does go off the track a bit when he suggests: "Support your local Epic Album makers. Let the Walkmen and Interpol and Grandaddy know they’re necessary to the mix, lest they take the easy way out." Trust me, Dave. I've seen pictures of Interpol and read a few interviews. Nothing I say or do is going to budge them one way or the other on the question of suicide.

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As first(?) reported at The Howling Fantods, David Foster Wallace has contributed a column entitled "Consider the Lobster" to the current issue of Gourmet ("More than 80,000 people attended the Maine Lobster Festival last year. But what was being celebrated is open to debate."). Unfortunately, the article is not online, but THF hears it employs footnotes. If RP can dig up a copy at the local coffeehaus, we'll report back tomorrow.