1. Buy the Lighthouse. The scenic spot that inspired Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse is for sale.

1. Japanese search parties have found the remains of poet and volcano enthusiast Craig Arnold, who had been running a blog called The Volcano Pilgrim. Jacket Copy's piece on Craig's death is the best of many I've read.

1. Richard Nash, one of the most well-liked indie publishers on the scene, is leaving Soft Skull/Counterpoint. His blog announcement offers few clues, but we can read between the lines and guess that a) he couldn't take any more of the new ownership and b) he's going to start his own publishing firm.

Links. Just links.

1. The Washington Post's Sunday literary supplement Book World is indeed being discontinued. I'll have something to say about this in my weekend write-up of the New York Times Book Review, aka "Last One Standing".

2. Dostoevskaya Station (not in St. Petersburg but in Moscow).

John McCain's been taking a beating lately for, let's see, his choice of Sarah Palin, his impulsive behavior, his lack of a finely-tuned economic plan. I'm glad Obama's message is finally breaking through to a critical mass of voters, and I just pray the momentum continues until November 4, when we can rest easy in our choice of a stabilizing leader.

I like Joyce Carol Oates, who lists novelists who've written about one "The American" or another from Henry James and Theodore Drieser to Bret Easton Ellis and Philip Roth before diving into Curtis Sittenfeld's The American Wife on the cover of the current New York Times Book Review. Sittenfeld's novel is about the secret inner life of first lady Laura Bush, a topic Joyce Carol Oates would have gotten around to sooner or later herself if Sittenfeld hadn't first.

As long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we have to lead an everyday life. There is a disaster, however, which has already been under way for quite some time. I am referring to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.

HBO's new feature movie PU-239 is based on a short story by Ken Kalfus, whose dark comedy A Disorder Peculiar to our Country was one of my favorite novels of 2006.