So in the next 30 or so hours, you should really email me (sparksflyup -at- gmail.com) a playlist, an idea for a prank, or a photograph of Looking for Alaska in an unusual place. You have a particularly good chance of winning if you send a picture or a prank, because I have approximately 11,000 playlists. In a related story, I've spent the last week listening to a lot of Death Cab for Cutie.

I don't want to sound like an ancient, washed-up 28-year-old or anything, but let me just make one observation about what the kids these days listen to: From Coldplay to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, I can't help but feeling like all these bands would benefit from a little more banjo. I have the same problem with Jay-Z. Jay-Z is a genius. And yet, no banjo. I mean, Jay-Z has 99 problems, and too little banjo is approximately 42 of them.

In other news, it's nice to see the Peter Pan guy getting work. (Also, while this is not a political blog, and this is also not a blog the features curse words, the challenges to net neutrality are a bunch of bullshit*.)

Also, the ongoing YA-novel-in-amateur-videos that is the saga of Lonelygirl15 and Danielbeast continues to be the best thing on the Internet. Even the New York Times thinks so.

Furthermore, this thread at Chasing Ray (which is a great lit blog) about Stephanie Klein is great reading.

But life can't be all about the things you hate: There are also adorable animals to look at, courtesy of my friends at mental_floss.

Check out literary crush lists from E. Lockhart, Bookshelves of Doom, Alimum, and Ally Carter. (Pop Quiz: What do all these lists have in common? Why, their melessness, of course. Not that I'm bitter!)

And finally, some last words: I'm reading the posthumously published first novel Pound for Pound, by F. X. Toole (who wrote the short story "Million Dollar Baby"). On his way into surgery, he said to his doctor, "Get me a little more time, Doc. I gotta finish my book." He didn't get to finish the book, but what we've been left with is excellent.





* For the first few months after Looking for Alaska was published, interviewers often asked me about the language in the book, and how I responded to people's concerns about the swearing. And I would go on for several minutes about how books have been stuffed full of obscenity since Chaucer, and yet the world had not yet ended. And I would say that there isn't an American over the age of 12 who hasn't heard every foul word ever invented (well, although before noted upholder of righteousness Mel Gibson came along, I'd never heard the word sugartits).

And then I would go on for a while about the importance of representing life as it is and not life as you think it ought to be, because literature may be inherently political but it should never be obviously, boringly political. And then I would point out that knowing the particulars of sexual intecourse and several euphemisms for it does not help a person actually engage in sexual intercourse any more than knowing the words shotgun and duck helps you hunt ducks.

And then the piece would come out in the newspaper or whatever, and I'd feel misquoted because I always sounded like a corrupter of children. But lately I've developed a new answer to the question, which I'm still asked pretty often. My new policy is to tell the truth in as few words as possible:

Q. How do you respond to the controversy surrounding the language and content of your book?
A. I think it's all a bunch of fucking bullshit.