Apparently the reputations of our acclaimed magazines have recently sunk to the depths of ignobility. William Vollmann, reviewing Ted Conover's The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today in the current New York Times Book Review, complains that Conover "occasionally seasons his prose with the flavor of a National Geographic article".

I almost had to skip another weekly Review review (did I mention I'm moving?), but I figure a short one will do. I hope to run more reports from PEN World Voices soon this weekend too.

I went to see a new production of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess at the Lyric Opera in Chicago. I like to go to the opera, but I can only afford to sit in the cheap seats in the second balcony, up in the very stratosphere of the opera house.

I learned about "thick" and "thin" during the years I worked for Time Inc. When an unusually heavy issue of Time came off the presses, executives and others in the know would smile and augur good things for the company (and, by extension, for the American economy). A particularly slender magazine brought scorn, bowed heads and concern for our job security. However, the magazine contained the same amount of editorial content each week. The difference between a thick and thin issue was the amount of ads the sales team was able to sell that week.

Lit-critics and bloggers have been debating whether or not Vladimir Nabokov's never-seen Laura should be published or burned (as Nabokov had instructed it should be). The public's verdict seems to be against incineration, but based on the evidence in today's New York Times Book Review one must guess that Ron Powers votes for the flames.

Five favorites from African-American literature:

1. Native Son by Richard Wright

The writings of Donald Goines, an African-American author from Detroit who was murdered in 1974, were at the center of a heated court case in Brooklyn, New York that ended in a not-guilty verdict last week.