Jennifer Egan thinks about how a person's appearance has no bearing on her success as an author.

For months now I have been trying to explain to people the singular idiocy of A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan’s collection of mawkish, overwritten stories that manage to feel slight despite their relentless self-regard. That shit won the Pulitzer Prize. It must be important, if only as a motionless canary in the dark shaft of contemporary American fiction. I have commiserated with strangers in bookstores over A Visit From the Goon Squad, but I have never been able to explain what’s so infuriating about it to people who haven’t read it. Fortunately, the good people at Slate have released a long video interview with the author. Finally, people who do not want to read ironically can experience the utterly vapid thought process of the woman who wrote, “My eyes were open, but only the ones on my face. My other thousand eyes were squeezed shut.” First installment after the jump.

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Don't let him touch you. Have you not seen The Golden Child?

If you break into Mitt Romney’s house and he catches you, you’re probably still okay until he starts laughing. Once he starts laughing, don’t turn your back to him, because it means he’s about to brain you with a bookend. The bookend depicts a child feeding a horse, but that’s not important right now. What is important is that Romney got into a spat with fellow lifelike simulacrum Rick Perry last night, and by all accounts it was great for him. He passed through the first few Romney responses to conflict—smiling, nonplussed smiling, chagrined smiling—and then he introduced an entirely new stage: indignant chuckling. Then he scolded the hell out of Rick Perry, and everyone cheered. Romney was visibly pleased, like the moment when your stepfather first tells you you’re pretty. Video after the jump and an advertisement for exploding vodka.

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bnKGhJDjOk

When I was a kid (1988–Sex & the City 2) I loved PJ O’Rourke. He wrote about politics in a way that made his Reagan-style conservatism make sense, and he was very, very funny. He wrote essays like “Ferrari Refutes Decline of the West”—in which he drives the Ferrari used in the pilot episode of Magnum P.I. across the country—and “How to Drive Fast On Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink,” and he was the first person to warn me away from women who wear either white or black lipstick. Now he sucks. In the video above, Alan Grayson explains what the Occupy Wall Street protestors are so upset about while O’Rourke whinges out a bunch of hippie jokes that would have seemed tired on Laugh-In. I’m not saying that I agree with OWS or even with the proposition that they consciously convey a coherent message, but I am saying that the things you once thought were great can change. More terrifying still, they can stay the same and you can start thinking about them differently. On Columbus Day, the holiday that is so almost not a holiday that every year I can’t decide whether to do a Combat! blog post, that sentiment seemed appropriate.