(If you watch carefully on some TV shows and movies, when they show a character lighting a menorah or something, if the character is played by a Jewish actor, he or she will frequently substitute "Hashem" for the other words for G-d in the blessings.)

Sports Night! Jeremy!

I haven't been a fan of the man's books since I was a teenager, but they meant a lot to me then. RIP, Robert Anton Wilson.

Time to break out my copy of Illuminatus! and play with my brain again.

Hashem! Yes! I knew that word, but I had forgotten it. My Jewish studies were intensive but brief. Now that I'm finally getting over Gershwin Girl really, I should go back to those books and read them again, since I still think I might make a good Jew. It'll be interesting to read them again without the "I'm in love with an Orthodox girl" slant...

Interesting piece in the Guardian Unlimited by Zadie Smith on the literary tradition of honourable failure: Fail Better.

They understood style precisely as an expression of personality, in its widest sense. A writer's personality is his manner of being in the world: his writing style is the unavoidable trace of that manner. When you understand style in these terms, you don't think of it as merely a matter of fanciful syntax, or as the flamboyant icing atop a plain literary cake, nor as the uncontrollable result of some mysterious velocity coiled within language itself. Rather, you see style as a personal necessity, as the only possible expression of a particular human consciousness. Style is a writer's way of telling the truth. Literary success or failure, by this measure, depends not only on the refinement of words on a page, but in the refinement of a consciousness, what Aristotle called the education of the emotions.

Zadie on what's wrong with cliches:

That sounds very grand: maybe it's better to start at the simplest denomination of literary betrayal, the critic's favourite, the cliche. What is a cliche except language passed down by Das Mann, used and shop-soiled by so many before you, and in no way the correct jumble of language for the intimate part of your vision you meant to express? With a cliche you have pandered to a shared understanding, you have taken a short-cut, you have re-presented what was pleasing and familiar rather than risked what was true and strange. It is an aesthetic and an ethical failure: to put it very simply, you have not told the truth. When writers admit to failures they like to admit to the smallest ones - for example, in each of my novels somebody "rummages in their purse" for something because I was too lazy and thoughtless and unawake to separate "purse" from its old, persistent friend "rummage". To rummage through a purse is to sleepwalk through a sentence - a small enough betrayal of self, but a betrayal all the same.

I love this experience she describes, even though sometimes it's unnerving:

Bad writing does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry - we close its covers with the same metaphysical confidence in the universality of our own interface as we did when we opened it. But great writing - great writing forces you to submit to its vision. You spend the morning reading Chekhov and in the afternoon, walking through your neighbourhood, the world has turned Chekhovian; the waitress in the cafe offers a non- sequitur, a dog dances in the street.

That particular experience hasn't happened to me in a long time. I used to get quite disturbed by it; it feels like your brain has been reprogrammed (and I guess it has - the writing has transmitted some sort of viral code into your software). I wonder if my mind has become immune to it? Or I just haven't read anything really good lately.

Ooh, that's accurate. I definitely remember having that experience with writers, especially in my twenties. I don't know if it's because I had more things to be exposed to in my twenties, or if I was more open...but I do remember many a 4 am, after having read something, being wide-awake to the world, feeling like my brain was steaming in the cool dawn air from the weight of ideas and visions brought to life by a writer.

I still get it, sometimes. But I have a lot less of them than I used to.

The Wire did that for me last. Specifically, "I got the gun. You got the briefcase."

You know how sometimes you read reviews and it seems like the reviewer read an entirely different book than you did? [link]

He told Svensk Bokhandel magazine that he had "got worked up in advance about Britt-Marie Mattsson because I detest her so very greatly. But let's hope the book is published so I get the chance to say it for real."

Ha ha ha ha. Oh my God. That's ridiculous.