I don’t know whether Emily Nussbaum’s overlords at New York have forced her to start blogging, or if, months after launching Surf, she’s finally decided she’s comfortable with the medium, but whatever the proximate cause, I am exceedingly happy that the lady is now gracing us with what appear to be semi-regular posts.  Especially when they’re as good as this one, laying out rules for musical numbers in sitcoms and ultimately concluding that maybe what we all need is a break.  She writes:

Just because Glee is a phenomenon and High School Musical made money doesn’t mean perfectly clever non-musical sitcoms can go throwing terrible production numbers into the mix. It isn’t genre experimentation, it’s just annoying. Also, High School Musical was terrible, so no one should use those songs as a role model.

You know how I got grumpy about the possibility of John Krasinski as Captain America?  Well, it looks like it’s gone from rumor to truth.  Ta-Nehisi’s commenters have convinced me he’d be decent pre-transformation.  But I am not sold on him wearing the mask and the shield.  He’d have to bulk up like woah.  Which might be totally improbable on The Office.  Which might actually mean The Office might have to come to a long, long-overdue conclusion.  Which might actually be a real thing.  But I’m not sure it outweighs the evils of miscasting Captain America.  These are the Big Questions for Our Time, people.

It’s not Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of Biggie:

But I do really like this Kyle Pellet illustration–and reinterpretation of–”Juicy”:

It had never occurred to me before looking at these two portraits side to side how integral Biggie’s lips are to his look.  It’s a great, epic mouth, with the potential for petulance, seduction, and toughness.  And of course, great, great rhymes.

Amber and I agree on many things, but I’m not sure I agree with her call to integrate genre fiction in with the general literature population in libraries.  It’s entirely possible that I’m wrong, but I don’t think of it as ghettoization.  Rather, when it comes to genre fiction, I’m a separatist.  I tend to think the genres are so awesome that they can stand on their own.  Foundation doesn’t have to be in the literature “A”s along with Austen to awesome.  Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and Sherlock Holmes had plenty of customers even though they stuck to their offices and lodgings on the page: they don’t need to go out and rub shoulders with novels who think they’re gumshoes’ betters today.  I realize I’m being particular and contrary.  I just remember many very happy hours curled up on the floor between the shelves at my local library, narcotized by Asimov and Robinson.  Those separate shelves were a refuge, a place where i could be alone and as greedy with the books as I wanted.

In reality, it’s probably better to integrate the shelves, if only to increase the chances that less-directed/obsessive kids than me will find their way to science fiction, and mystery, and fantasy.  The pleasure of stumbling into something that will upset your conceptions of what literature and art can be is immeasurably great.  And it doesn’t really matter how that happens, whether you stumble into the section as a whole, or happen to pluck an individual volume off a shelf.