1. When a friend pointed me to The Mysterious Stranger, I could make no sense of what appeared to be an odd piece of animated YouTube weirdness involving Mark Twain and Satan in a “Davey and Goliath” version of “The Devil Went Down To Hannibal” … until a trip to Wikipedia cleared things up. The Mysterious Stranger is based on a unfinished story Mark Twain worked on for twenty years, and the story catches Twain in an uncharacteristically stark, allegorical (and perhaps even Kafkaesque) mode. Now that I understand the background to this animated short film, I’m rather impressed by it.

2. I just attended the New York City reading debut of Mark Sarvas’s upcoming novel Harry, Revised at Jami Attenberg’s Boxcar Reading with Michael Dahlie, Lynn Lurie and Ceridwen Dovey. Harry, Revised is about a young widower embarking on an apparent search for self, and I cannot help imagining that there must be a lot of Mark Sarvas in the character of Harry, who (in the chapter Mark read last night) attempts to anchor his self-image by purchasing a French literary classic.

One special thing about Harry, Revised is that readers of Mark’s Elegant Variation blog have been able to watch and enjoy its process of creation, and this is certainly a unique and effective way to build up anticipation for an upcoming book release. Harry, Revised hits the stores in April.

3. Earlier in the evening, before the Boxcar reading, Ed Champion and I formed an electronic mob to crash Against the Machine author Lee Siegel’s conversation with John Freeman at the McNally Robinson bookstore in Soho (though we were well-behaved and unfortunately had to leave after only 20 minutes to get to the Boxcar in time). Lee Siegel’s new book aims to be a rabble-rousing cry of protest against the looming evils of internet culture, though many of us who dwell happily online won’t let Lee forget that he only began to develop this hatred of the internet after getting caught in a buffoonish attempt at dominating it.

Lee Siegel has had an acclaimed career as a pugnacious cultural critic (though the above-mentioned “sprezzatura” incident didn’t help his reputation), but my encounters with his writing in the New York Times Book Review have revealed an ambitious but intellectually careless writer. He reinforced this impression last night with wild statements like “the internet is 80% porn”. Siegel seems to lack the restraint and sense of balance that any cultural critic ought to have. He’ll probably sell a lot of copies of Against the Machine — blunt rhetoric does sell — but I feel sorry for anyone who wastes their time reading it.

4. “A New Cultural Revolution” may not be the best title for this encouraging survey of the state of popular literature in China, since the actual phrase “Cultural Revolution” was used as a guise for Mao Zedong’s brutal crackdown on personal, social and artistic freedom in the 1960s and 70s. But this is an important article, and I’d love to learn more about China’s vast book industry.

5. I don’t love being greeted with a plea for my email address, but I like everything else about PublicIntegrity.org, a public repository of government documents relevant to current political issues. The new exhibit “Iraq: The War Card” offers a simple and effective search engine documenting the Bush administration’s justification for the war in Iraq.

6. Action Poets — thanks for your patience with the new software, which is (obviously) still in beta. Coming soon: monthly archives, a better response system, other stuff. It’s also a little slow, and I can fix that too (my MO as a software developer, as you may have noticed, has always been “launch first, fix later”). Hang in there, everybody … and it’s good to see old friends popping back in.