This is why I love the blogosphere: an if:book essay that starts with R. Kelly's "Trapped in the Closet" saga and moves on to "the publishing industry's latest bad idea, making books out of blogs." Dan Visel's main example of this phenomenon is Julie Powell's Julie & Julia, and though he freely concedes that Powell did more than just string her old blog entries together, he's not entirely sold on the concept. "What makes a blog readable isn't the same thing that makes a book readable," he warns, and "it's a difficult job to make a coherent work out of unified pieces."

Meanwhile, over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, there's some more old-school rumination on literary theory going on. Jennifer Howard looks in on what the kids are learning on campus, and discovers that "theoretical naïveté is a luxury that few aspiring professors can afford." (I'm not surprised—ten years ago, my own total indifference to Lacan led to a firm but polite showing of the door leading out of the academy.) And yet there's no One True School of thought, either. Lindsay Waters, the executive editor at Harvard University Press, takes an even grimmer outlook, claiming theory has lost its very connection to literature.