Jesse Eisenberg, yurt-dweller (90days90reasons.com)

As we have previously noted, The Social Network star Jesse Eisenberg is now a full-fledged member of McSweeney's disciples, worshiping at the feet of Dave Eggers at 826Valencia. So it's not that surprising to find the actor stumping for President Obama over at 90 Days, 90 Reasons, the McSweeney's offshoot nonprofit which serves to "re-inspire the grassroots army that got Obama elected in the first place."

So why does Mr. Eisenberg think you should vote? Because he's currently living in a yurt in Mongolia, that's why.

It's a short essay, but it reads like a college application, making it just shy of impossibly unbearable. Here is most of it:

I'm traveling through Mongolia and currently staying in a yurt. This was not by choice; I'm with persuasive friends. If it were up to me I'd never leave my apartment and, more specifically, the bedroom area. But my comforts have given me a nagging sense of discomfort. I think traveling and seeing how other people live, even if I’m not totally immersing myself, assuages some of my unease because it re-sensitizes me to the difficulties and existential inconveniences that most other people face. In this way, I think Barack Obama is a good leader for our diverse country because he's seen how the world lives.

This essay raises several questions, not the least being, "How did Jesse Eisenberg get to Mongolia so quickly when he was just spotted and identified as Mark Zuckerberg at the London Olympics on Sunday?"

Also: Who has wifi in a yurt?

Also: What qualifies as an "existential inconvenience" in Mongolia, as opposed to an actual inconvenience, like steep drops in fertility, a straining economy and lowered life expectancy?

Also: Who is going to vote for President Obama again just because a jet-setting actor is currently yurt-sitting?

The most recent arrest occurred on July 25, when Mr. Zeitoun allegedly struck Kathy Zeitoun with his fists and a tire iron and attempted to choke her outside of a lawyer’s office in Uptown New Orleans. At the time he was on probation for attacking Ms. Zeitoun in front of their children in March 2011, a charge to which he pleaded guilty last summer and was subsequently sentences to anger-management classes.

Magistrate Judge Gerard Hansen decided yesterday not to revoke Mr. Zeitoun’s probation in light of the new arrest. Mr. Zeitoun is currently being held on $150,000 bail. After the hearing, Ms. Zeitoun showed reporters photographs of bruises and scrapes, claiming that her ex-husband “tried to kill her,” and asserting that she believes he should be held without bail.

“I’m not going to be quiet about it anymore because being quiet puts him in a position to do it again,” Ms. Zeitoun told Greater New Orleans of her ex-husband’s violence. The couple was divorced earlier this year.

Mr. Eggers’s book chronicles Mr. Zeitoun’s wrongful arrest following Hurricane Katrina, when he was allegedly mistaken for a terrorist and detained at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center for over 20 days without ever standing trial.

We have reached out to McSweeney’s, the publisher of Zeitoun, for comment and as of writing this have not heard back.

Marvis toothpaste.

Last week, speaking at an event at the Center for Fiction, the writer David Lipsky recalled his first impressions of a visit to David Foster Wallace’s home. Mr. Lipsky expected the usual decorative trappings of the self-conscious intellectual: a shelf full of impressive books, yes, but also some signature of the writer’s great erudition as translated into home decor. Instead what he found was a Barney towel hung up as a curtain, an Alanis Morissette poster and a couple copies of Cosmopolitan on the counter.

Mr. Lipsky’s recollection of Wallace’s house in Illinois concords with a theory recently proposed by a friend of mine: there are people who define themselves by the things they produce and people who define themselves by the things they consume. It’s a false binary, sure, but one suspects Wallace was the former, and that the latter, I-am-what-I-consume, is ascendant, even among circles that traditionally define themselves in part by their disinterest in material acquisition.

Blame online social networks, which are little more than showrooms for competitive connoisseurs, but there’s a near-tyrannical rise in the need to show “good taste,” heightened further by the sheer saturation of products made available by the global economy: why use Morton’s when there’s pink sea salt from the Himalayas? Colgate with whitening when there’s jasmine-flavored Marvis?

Good taste, in such circles, is frequently defined by a fastidious resistance to popular brands—or to just accepting sameness. Buying Mrs. Meyers dish soap or a cross-stitched iPhone case, naming a firstborn child Pilot Inspektor, all this passes for individuality in a world where our sense of personhood is defined more by the things we accumulate and adorn ourselves with than by the things we make. It’s especially true for New Yorkers, who, with limited cultural output to justify their sense of intellectual superiority, must rely instead on their refusal of the trifecta of passive consumption that epitomizes so-called real America: the gas pump, television and corporate fast food.

Frechette.

The sorry truth is that New York does not produce greatness by its own existence. Greatness is just frequently drawn here, to have better access to Sardinian cheeses and fine chocolates. In our city, foodies and fashionistas armed with cameras compete with one another not to produce great food writing or beautiful clothes but to post shopping discoveries and restaurants on blogs. We have come to equate this kind of expertise with intellect—until we realize this is just a local version of the suburban contest over who has the greenest lawn. On one end of the financial spectrum a Brooklynite carefully posts a link to a pair of antique silver knife cuff links on the shopping site Svpply; on the other Steven A. Cohen assembles an art collection.

In 2009, The New York Times wrote an article about the rise of the word “curation”—used not in its traditional, museum-based Oxford definition as “to select, organize and look after” but instead to imply expertise in the art of good taste, particularly in the selection of retail merchandise. To curate is to assemble a bunch of stuff smart people really want to buy, instead of the stuff in the Sharper Image catalog or Bloomingdale’s.

The trend gave rise to pop-up stores whose wares were assembled by celebrities and, in recent months, a new way of shopping online. Once a store tried to offer as wide a selection as possible, to be narrowed down for the consumer by a personal shopper; now the consumer goes in search of a person they want to be. We buy what our idols buy and their genius becomes our own: personality shopping.

The Chelsea-based online retailer Open Sky launched last April with 20 food personalities, whom the company refers to variously as “talent,” “curators” or “masters.” Shoppers sign up and peruse a mall of online stores curated by celebrities, most of them known from television shows and advice/self-help books. Since last spring the store has garnered almost one million subscribers and added another 60 celebrities in the areas of health, style and design, everything from Alicia Silverstone selling vegan lip balm and organic kimonos to the Judds hawking candy-cane napkins and woolly slippers.

“The idea that we had was that today, with everybody on Twitter and Facebook, you personalize your discovery of media but that it hasn’t yet happened with shopping,” said Open Sky’s CEO John Caplan, who previously worked as CEO of Ford Modeling Agency.

“You join for free and you connect to people who are masters,” he explained. Mr. Caplan said that the model differs from the traditional celebrity endorsement because the talent is not paid to put a stamp of approval on items. Instead, profits are split 50/50 between Open Sky and the celebrity. He claims the model is particularly attractive to women, citing research that says females are more likely to buy things based on a recommendation.

Chemex coffee maker.

For the kind of shopper referred to here, however, the one whose erudition in all matters strives toward the heights of a record clerk’s in High Fidelity, Bobby Flay does not cut it: our shopper can smell the corporate superstructure in a celebrity chef’s “Mesa Grill” spice rub from a mile away, and a cameo on Entourage only makes things worse.

For this kind of shopper, other options exist. The masters at another start-up, Quarterly.co, have a shared sense of purpose: the world is full of cheaply made products, restrictive corporate structures, disorganization and toxins. Someone must promote a better life through blogging.

“Tina Roth Eisenberg is a Swiss designer gone NYC with a love of clean and functional design,” reads one bio.

“Scott Belsky is obsessed with organization and the clash between creativity and structure,” reads another.

“Maria Popova spends far too much time curating the web’s interestingness from many disciplines,” reads a third.

Rather than the language of the film set or the art museum, Quarterly uses the language of a magazine. One subscribes “to your favorite cultural icons”—who are referred to as contributors. Every three months, the cultural icon mails his or her subscribers a surprise object, frequently accompanied by an essay or some other piece of writing. The magazine-based language comes from Zach Frechette, the company’s founder, who previously worked as an editor at Good magazine. The idea for Quarterly came from a phenomenon he noticed while working there.

“At Good we would hear back from our friends and family, ‘Oh yeah, we got the issue, it’s so exciting,’ and then I would ask what their favorite article was and they would say, ‘We didn’t actually read it,’” said Mr. Frechette by phone from Los Angeles. He said that they liked the experience of getting something in the mail and having it represent a community they were a part of.

“Getting something that’s not a bill or junk mail in your mailbox is exciting,” said Mr. Frechette. “We put much more emphasis on the actual contributors than their products; not just what they’re picking but why they’re picking it. We feel like putting the emphasis on the contributor takes it out of the commerce space in a way.” He noted that subscribers often refer to having received their “gift”—“which is hilarious, because they paid for it.”

As with Open Sky, Quarterly’s contributors get a cut of subscriber revenue. Their selections are organized around a theme. For her first package, contributor Liz Danzico, whose theme is “time,” mailed her subscribers a print by an artist named Paul Octavious from his series of photographs “Same Hill, Different Day.” In addition to an object, Ms. Danzico includes with each mailing “an experiment” for subscribers to undertake that will help them notice the passage of time. She called the process “non-intentional product seeking,” where shoppers “trust in a person rather than an object.”

Mr. Frechette said that in one case the object was a book, where the book’s author might have overshadowed the contributor, Maria Popova. To remedy the situation, Ms. Popova annotated the book with post-it notes and doodles, which were also shared with subscribers.

Quarterly, which is still in a soft-launch mode, is already experiencing far more success than Mr. Frechette had hoped, success that might be attributed to what Mr. Frechette calls “the golden age of curation.”

“It’s not that there’s a lot of bad stuff out there. It’s that there is so much awesome stuff out there,” he said .

Ms. Danzico said Mr. Frechette had done a beta version with contributors before Quarterly officially launched, around the theme of appreciation of everyday objects like “this very simple, perfect coffee press with just phenomenal coffee, instructions for how to make the very perfect cup of coffee, and a thermometer.”

I asked what the brand was.

“You want to know, don’t you?” said Ms. Danzico. I did want to know, alas. It was an Aeropress and Ms. Danzico said she’s “used it ever since.” She said she hoped they would start selling the objects on the site soon.

Quarterly was preceded by another subscription-based service called the Thing Quarterly, which sends subscribers an object designed by a rotating cast of writers and artists in the mail four times a year. The first contributor, Miranda July, sent out two versions of a vinyl pull-down window shade with the words “If this shade is down I’m begging your forgiveness on bended knee” or “If this shade is down I’m not who you think I am.” The most recent issue is a shower curtain with text written by Dave Eggers.

In all the above cases, the store is only as good as the good taste of the people involved—and it turns out that credibility is easily lost by the appearance of having sold out. The fear of losing credibility is something even a more mainstream service like Open Sky faces, and it’s the reason, says Mr. Caplan, that he would be unlikely to let the site be used for promotional opportunities—say, a guest celebrity who puts together a store to tie in with a forthcoming movie. “It isn’t about the most amount of products. It’s the best products,” he said.

And for average mortals of the world, whom nobody will ever ask to curate anything but who still pride themselves on good taste, the Internet offers other opportunities to show off: sites like Svpply and Polyvore, where amateur merchandisers can link to their own collection of Etsy crafts and excellent coffee makers and beautiful clothes. It’s fun—so much nice stuff to buy! But the golden age of curation might result in a backlash. Think of William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition, where the main character is a cool hunter with a pathological aversion to brands so severe that she wears only black, rips all the labels from her clothes and has nightmares about the Michelin Man. She soothes her panic about the eventual co-optation of everything she cares about through another one of the blessings of globalization: the presence of a Pilates studio in every city in the world.

ewitt@observer.com

ESPN and Grantland have contracted McSweeney's to handle the production and distribution (which, in retrospect, explains why Dave Eggers is a Grantland contributing editor).

As such, the basketball leather-bound books will harbor twee custom moving parts, like posters, a pull-out section, "old-school baseball cards" and mini-booklets. The first volume is available through the McSweeney's store; individual issues cost $19.95 and a year-long subscription (four issues) is $48.

In addition to some of the more memorable Grantland features (Malcolm Gladwell on the NBA lockout and Colson Whitehead on the World Series of Poker, for example), the first volume includes an original column by Mr. Simmons and new fiction from Jess Walter, author of The Financial Lives of Poets.

Grantland Quarterly has always been a part of the ESPN-sponsored website's business plan, according to Mr. Fierman.

"If our site has a problem it's that we move so fast that readers miss stuff," he said. The print journal serves up the site's greatest hits in a medium better suited to long-form journalism. Plus, nostalgia runs rampant among Grantland's roster of magazine writers.

"I miss the feel of print," the former GQ editor told The Observer. "It’s good to be back in it."

More than a decade after the magnum opus was published, Wallace devotees voiced worries that their hero's reputation was on the wane. They noted that for the 10th-anniversary of Infinite Jest, the publishers chose Dave Eggers to write a new introduction--a sign, they feared, that Wallace needed the imprimatur of a broadly popular figure (though Mr. Eggers had called the novel "extravagantly self-indulgent" upon its first appearance) in order to make him palatable to the next generation of readers.

The death of the author, it would seem, has changed all that. Next month will see the publication of The Pale King, the unfinished novel Wallace left stacked in a pile in his garage. This comes on the heels of two other posthumous books in the 30 months since his passing: This Is Water, a 4,000-word commencement address he delivered at Kenyon College in 2005, which was stretched to book length by the neat trick (one critic termed it "un-Wallace-like") of printing only one sentence per page; and Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, Wallace's undergraduate philosophy thesis, padded with a number of essays by distinguished philosophers.

We have not heard the last of him. Indeed, the 34 document boxes and eight oversize folders of Wallace's drafts, letters and juvenilia deposited at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, along with 300 books from his personal library, promise a posthumous flow that will be, if not infinite, then certainly robust. There may be another book of unpublished fiction soon in the offing, and one of uncollected nonfiction, as well as potentially two books of Wallace's letters, one of which is said to be devoted almost entirely to his correspondence about the art of writing.

Then there are Wallace's Boswells. David Lipsky, who was commissioned by Rolling Stone to shadow the author on the Infinite Jest book tour (the piece was killed), last year re-purposed his transcripts of their road trip into a 300-page book, And of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. D.T. Max, who wrote a feature-length obituary of Wallace for The New Yorker framing Wallace's suicide as the end of a long struggle against both depression and avant-garde tendencies, is expanding his efforts into a full-blown literary biography slated to appear later this year.

The critics, too, must have their say. One volume of critical essays, Consider David Foster Wallace, came out on a small press last year, and another, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, including appraisals by icons like Don DeLillo and contemporaries like Jonathan Franzen, has been promised by the University of Iowa Press.

"I think what we are looking at is something like the beginnings of the David Foster Wallace industry," said Matt Bucher, a  Project Manager at Pearson, an independent Wallace scholar and the administrator of Wallace-L, a 1,000-subscriber strong Wallace listserv. "I think it will be big, on par with James Joyce or Walt Whitman. Look at all the stuff there is out there about them. People gobble that stuff up. Look how many books there are on Kennedy."

So far no conspiracy theories have emerged around Wallace's life or death, but since 2008 there have been at least a dozen Ph.D. dissertations entirely or partly devoted to Wallace's work. And where there are academics, there are soon enough academic conferences. A panel about Wallace's legacy was staged at the Modern Language Association conference in 2009, a year that also saw entire conferences about his work at the University of Liverpool and at the City University of New York. A conference on The Pale King is scheduled for September at the University of Antwerp, in Belgium, and next week the urge to discuss him in public leaks out of the academic world and into the South by Southwest festival, where a panel next week will consider "David Foster Wallace and the Internet."

Part of the newfound fascination with Wallace has to do with the urgency of his subject matter and the kind of readers it attracts. Wallace's early fiction arrived just as Internet culture was forming, and his work anticipated a world where people think it worthwhile to broadcast in 140 characters the contents of their sushi lunches.

"He connects very strongly with men, especially young men, and especially IT men, the kind of guys who would be into sci-fi and that kind of thing," said Mr. Max. "These guys need writers, they need cultural figures and they need guys who help them understand their role in the culture." 

Publishers and scholars say that the Internet fans who flocked to Wallace were able to create an instant online archive in the wake of his death. Instead of uncovering a slow trickle of uncollected or lost pieces, fans tracked down, for example, Wallace's undergraduate thesis (now a book) and the story "The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing," which Wallace published as an undergraduate in a 1984 issue of Amherst Review (and which would appear after its rediscovery in the journal Tin House), and posted these writings online for immediate inspection and debate. It is like the long tail, only in reverse, where a small coterie of fans keep the work alive online long enough for the rest of the culture to discover it. A clearinghouse for this phenomenon was The Howling Fantods!, a Web site that has obsessively chronicled Wallace's career since 1997. It has reported receiving nearly 280,000 hits per month in 2011, up from 110,000 in the months leading up to Wallace's death.

In his recent essay "David Foster Wallace: The Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline," the Irish scholar Adam Kelly wrote that Wallace criticism has begun in a "democratic vein. The ease of publication which the internet allows has meant that the detailed close reading of Wallace's texts, traditionally the preserve of academic engagement, has in great part been carried out by skillful and committed non-professional readers, who publish their findings in the public domain of the web."

"It's all sped up now," said Maureen Eckert, a professor at UMASS-Dartmouth who edited Fate, Time, and Language and describes herself as a "head-over-heels fan" of Wallace. "You think about people finding a lost manuscript of Hemingway or a Sylvia Plath poem; it's a moment of celebration. In the case of Wallace, we have the technology, and so there are a lot of PDFs just floating around online."

Last week a blogger at lazenby.tumblr.com posted a document comparing word by word the excerpt of The Pale King that appeared in The New Yorker and a transcription of the same passage that Wallace read at the Lannan Foundation in New Mexico in 2000.

Scott Esposito, writing on his blog Conversational Reading, posted a quick reaction: "What we see," he wrote, "is a vision of what The Pale King might have looked like, if its editors had chosen to leave it in the disarrayed state it was discovered in. Surely this would have been a book with less mass appeal than the 'completed' Pale King that will be published on April 15, but would it have been truer to Wallace the writer?"

Asked about the editing process that has brought The Pale King to the public, Michael Pietsch, Wallace's longtime editor at Little, Brown, told The Observer, "I am going to save that for another time. I am not sure how much I want to talk about that at this time."

Bonnie Nadell, the Los An
geles-based literary agent who discovered Wallace when he sent her a chapter of his first novel, The Broom of the System, told The Observer that at least once a week she receives a query from someone writing a thesis about Wallace or hoping to appropriate some portion of his work for their own project. So long as the petitioners seek to violate neither good taste nor copyright, the Wallace estate has been open, Ms. Nadell said, and added that she has been pleasantly surprised at the demand.

"I am not doing anything [to promote Wallace]," said Ms. Nadell. "If anything, they are coming to me. We have other authors we represent who have died, and we deal with their estates, but David's work continues to touch people. It's like nothing I've seen."

Beyond academia and the Internet, a legion of artists, filmmakers and playwrights have been moved to re-interpret or pay homage to Wallace. A video-art exhibition, "A Failed Entertainment: Selections from the Filmography of James O. Incandenza," inspired by a footnote from Infinite Jest, has gone up at Columbia and Virginia Commonwealth universities. Wallace's story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which was made into a film with his blessing, has now also been adapted for the stage. The Mountain Goats, of indie rock fame, honored the author with a song on a recent album.

Some grumbling about exploitation has been heard from the Fantods, especially when the work is widely available on the Internet, like when the Kenyon speech that became This Is Water becomes copyrighted and available for $14.99 by the checkout desk of the local bookstore.

"Clearly, some people believe that anything else published under his name will be just scraping money out of his coffin," Mr. Bucher said.

But mostly the faithful are pleased that after poring over footnote placements in Infinite Jest among themselves for 10 years, they have now been joined by a culture at large that suddenly seems extremely interested in the life and work of a self-deprecating writer who once described himself as being about as famous as the local weatherman.

Scholars and Fantods have a few theories about the surge of interest. Part of it is simply that, like James Dean, John Lennon or Kurt Cobain, Wallace died young, 46 years old and still in his prime. With no more new work to look forward to, readers are left to fill in the gaps and pounce on any shred of lost writing that surfaces. In 2007, few would have thought that Wallace would stand to be mentioned in the same breath as literary giants like Norman Mailer and John Updike, whose "senescence" Wallace announced in a 1997 critical essay in The Observer. Mailer died 10 months before Wallace, and Updike five months after. Beyond the requisite appreciations in newspapers and literary journals, their afterlife has acquired nothing like the interest that has surrounded Wallace.

The tragedy of Wallace's suicide and depression has played a part in heightening attention to his work and changed the way readers think about him. During his lifetime, Wallace was perceived as a difficult high postmodernist who challenged readers' attention spans with sentences that branched off in several directions, abounded in neologisms and might spawn several discursive footnotes. In one of his earliest and most famous experimental gestures, the 467-page Broom of the System ends in mid-sentence. But all that perplexity was really a way for Wallace to depict what a mind is like in the process of thinking. The knowledge that he endured an epic struggle with depression allows readers another window to see the human-ness in his prose.

"There are some readers who approach him now as almost like a secular saint, as someone who was too good for this world," said James Ryerson, an editor at The New York Times Magazine who wrote the introduction to Fate, Time, and Language. "By all accounts he was someone who struggled intensely and openly in his writing with his attempt to live a life of moral integrity. There seems to be some kind of truth to him."

"I couldn't even take it when he died," said Ms. Eckert. "It was like our reality failed him."

All of this activity has helped move Wallace from the eccentric periphery of American letters to the center. In their recent book All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly casually refer to Wallace as "the greatest writer of his generation"--a reckoning many would have thought incomplete, like declaring the winner of a tennis match after one set. 

Mr. Lipsky, who won a National Magazine Award for his postmortem feature on Wallace in Rolling Stone, believes Wallace altered the landscape of the American literary vernacular toward a maximalist aesthetic--though one that still accommodated emotional depth--in much the same way that after Hemingway, most American writers wrote minimalist prose; and Salinger begot a generation of chatty adolescent narrators; and after Carver the literary journals were filled with Kmart realism.

"Let me put it this way," Mr. Lipsky told The Observer, "I don't think a week goes by that the editor of Rolling Stone doesn't get a pitch from a writer who says, 'I would like to do a David Foster Wallace kind of take on X.' He is the young writer who did the most change to how young writers write."

"It's kind of amazing when you think about it that The Corrections won the National Book Award when it came out and Infinite Jest wasn't even nominated," said Mr. Bucher, the administrator of the Wallace-L listserv. "But you are calling me. How many other writers out there writing now have fan sites devoted to them? How many are getting the kind of critical reception that Wallace is getting?"

Mr. Franzen, 51, the author of The Corrections and a longtime friend of Wallace's, declined to comment for this article because he is writing his own essay about Wallace for The New Yorker. In his recent interview with The Paris Review, Mr. Franzen compared his own career to Wallace's: "I perceived, rightly or wrongly, that our friendship was haunted by a competition between the writer who was pursuing art for art's sake [Wallace] and the writer who was trying to be out in the world. The art-for-art's-sake writer gets a certain kind of cult credibility, gets books written about his or her work, whereas the writer out in the world gets public attention and money. Like I say, I perceived this as a competition, but I don't know for a fact that Dave perceived it that way."

In other words, Mr. Franzen may be selling books and appearing on television, but the Mountain Goats have yet to write a song for him.

It is hardly worth speculating what would have happened to Wallace's work and reputation had he continued publishing. People who have read parts of The Pale King say that Wallace's fiction was becoming more humane, addressing the moral questions he was laying out in the Kenyon commencement speech. There may have been more novels, more stories, more debate.

And how would Wallace have reacted to his undergraduate thesis being published by a university press, his teenage poems available to the public in an archive in Texas?

"He was deeply, scrotum-tighteningly ambivalent about fame," said Mr. Max. "He left Pale King to be published. But did he want to become a cultural icon? I don't think he would have been so surprised."

"[H]e was a troubled person and was tormented by the possibility of people misperceiving him," Mr. Franzen told The Paris Review. "His instinct was to keep people at a distance and let the work speak for itself, and I do know that he enjoyed the status he'd attained. He might have denied it, but he denied all sorts of obviously true things at different moment
s."

- New York's "no-fault divorce" law has gone into effect.  

- Speaking of divorce, Laura Dern and Ben Harper are splitting up. Wait...what? Ben Harper and Laura Dern were married? That's a couple only David Lynch could love.

- Jack Spade likes shopping at the 826NYC Brooklyn Superhero Supply Store - a Dave Eggers non-profit project. Which is awesome. 

- We are so being this for Halloween. In opposite land. 

"It Is Right to Draw Their Fur" will be hanging at Electric Works in San Francisco from July 16 through August 14. More than 100 of Eggers' drawings will cover "nearly every square inch of wall space" with "an ongoing cast of fur-, feather-, and scale-bearing creatures."

According to the gallery's artist biography:

Dave Eggers studied painting and art history at the University of Illinois before realizing he probably wasn't good enough to live as an artist. After college he worked as an illustrator, cartoonist and designer, before again realizing he wasn't good enough at these things to continue doing them full-time.

We are glad that Eggers and James Franco seem to be in cahoots, because in their multi-faceted splendor, they are spirit brothers.

Author: The editors of McSweeney's
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Page Count: 256
Pages Read: 50ish? We were skipping around.

Does It Work? It's clogged by tepid interviews with the people responsible, who never offer more insight than: "Working at McSweeney's is fun," and, "Dave Eggers is a genius." Of course, coffee-table books are for looking at, not reading, so more criminal is that there are simply too few pretty pictures to glance at. We expect wordiness from McSweeney's, of course, but we also expect meaningful words.

Best Moment So Far: David Byrne! "It was design that lured me into the McSweeney's world. I probably picked up an early issue at St. Mark's Bookshop and found it baffling (the letters section) and seductive.... [I] realized that the journal implied that somewhere possibly close by there existed a whole scene or world that either I didn't know about or that was completely imaginary."

Odds We'll Finish It: 500/1. The list of Coffee Table Books We've Read Straight Through is short. Right now, it stops after one, and this won't be number two.

Read Instead: How about something pretty?

Or at least we hope he does, because he's certainly getting plenty of practice. Today, the Nieman Lab recounts his recent talk at ASNE: "I want a printed newspaper curated and edited by professionals that have been in the trade for decades," Eggers told the crowd.

We bet they were pleased to hear this!

A guy who has published a limited-edition newspaper/art object one time: America's authority on print media.

It seems that one of the contributors to Dave Eggers' Panorama is the Transom's favorite permanent grad student and performance artist, James Franco.

If you can save journalism, James, then your forthcoming appearance in Eat, Pray, Love is forgiven.