Personally, I think the whole "I'm [YOUR NAME HERE] and I approve this" YouTube joke has run its course, but this fake campaign ad for the paperback release of Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict is still moderately amusing.

My favorite is still the attack ad against Immanuel Kant, though. Well, maybe the one attacking Thomas Jefferson.

Keith Josef Adkins wants to tell you about his stint as "a disgruntled assistant to a top notch writer," who he'll only describe as "a woman, African-American, lived in California and the musical predecessor to Rock-n-Roll was the muse that made her pen go buck-wild and win a few top-notch awards."

Oh, come on, Keith. That's not even trying to obscure this beloved author's identity. Anyway, here's the story:

"The real doozy was the time she reprimanded me in front of a group of grad students for sabotaging her career. I was given the responsibility of removing an overabundance of praise from a story by a student of color. Her rationale: she didn't want the other students to think she was playing favorites based on ethnicity. Well, apparently I screwed up. During a group reading, another student noticed an area on the story where things looked smudged. My employer was livid. In front of everyone, I was accused of setting her up to fail. For trying to destroy the career of an African-American writer."

There's also an anecdote about how he started a fire in her kitchen, but that's not nearly as dramatic.

UPDATE: I've been informed that I fell for an obvious (though perhaps not fully intentional) misdirect, and that it's probably not who I thought it was. On the other hand, the answer is still up for grabs...

My iPod may have room for several thousand songs on it, but I usually wind up obsessing over three or four over the course of a given week. These last few days, it's been The Mountain Goats' "Lovecraft in Brooklyn." This live version doesn't quite replicate the particular intensity of the one on the Heretic Pride album, where John Darnielle's vocal anxiety builds up on the final verse to a pitch worthy of The Call's Modern Romans (which I'm reasonably certain is the most prophetic album of all time, let alone the best rock album of the '80s), but it'll give you a basic idea of what has me hitting the repeat button over and over.

What's your favorite song with a literary bent? Tell us about it in the comments—but no fair using One Ring Zero; that would be too easy.

After yesterday's NY Times story about the New York Public Library's official embrace of Stephen Schwarzman, the Wall Street tycoon who's donating $100 million to the institution and getting the main building renamed in his honor—carved on each side of the major entrances, in tasteful lettering less than 12 inches high—we were reminded of Michael Gross, who wrote about Schwarzman in his role as the unauthorized historian of 740 Park Avenue ("the world's richest apartment building," as the book's subtitle puts it). Well, "wrote about" is a bit of an understatement; Gross has publicly challenged Schwarzman's philanthropy, in the book and in subsequent articles, for not being as generous as it could be (PDF file). This time around, he has a bit of snark to share: "I wasn't entirely surprised to learn that he’d filled the bookshelves in his trophy apartment with books by the yard, bought at the Strand Bookstore," Gross writes on his blog. "But hey, better books he hasn't read than no books at all!"

(In Schwarzman's defense, not that he needs it from the likes of me, I haven't read most of the books on my bookshelves, or stacked on the floor all over my foyer, either. That's why they're there: for me to get around to in my copious free time. And it's not like we know whether he went with the subject-specific assortment or the antique leather bindings.)

Our pal Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City came up with this online quiz: "Art Fair or Comic Con?" See how accurately you can assess high and low cultural fanatics at a glance!

(How'd you do? I only managed 6 out of 12...)

⇒Turns out there was a really good reason that last Thursday's tribute to Stan Lee took place at the Virgin Megastore: he's just been hired as an editor at Virgin Comics, where he'll be overseeing a line of superhero books including one focused on a team that he'll be writing himself. "I'm going to get started working on it right away and I'm very excited about doing something that will be fresh and breaking new ground," Lee told the Los Angeles Times. "I can't give away the details or the names yet, but I have some exciting things in mind. (Dig the Mukesh Singh artwork created to promote the deal!)

⇒In another comics-related story, New York Comic Con attendees found out Friday evening that >prosecutors in Georgia have given up on their bumbling attempts to convict comics shop owner Gordon Lee of distributing obscene material to a minor. "All charges are dismissed," Comic Book Legal Defense Fund director Charles Brownstein confirmed to Newsarama. "Gordon's nightmarish ordeal is finally over."

⇒Remember when Theodora Keogh died earlier this year, and there was much frustration over how none of the awesome-sounding novels she'd written were in print? Maud Newton tells us several of her novels are now available in e-book editions.

⇒The fanboy (and fangirl!) crushes that GalleyCat and UnBeige have on Chip Kidd are exceedingly well-documented, so it shouldn't surprise you to know that Stephanie Murg is already on top of tonight's "The World According to Chip Kidd lecture at the Fashion Institute of Technology. We expect a full report later this week!

At the end of a very long Q&A session at a reading I went to last night, someone asked the debut novelist at the podium whether he'd accept a profit-sharing, no-advance deal from a publisher like Bob Miller's nascent HarperCollins unit or any of the indie publishers who have been experimenting with that sort of thing. The author was like, "Yes." But then he qualified this initial response by explaining that if he did this he would want everyone to know that he hadn't received an advance, so that he wouldn't be expected to, for example, pick up the check in a restaurant. Ha.

After reading Jane Smiley's swipe at Jennifer Weiner yesterday, Maryann McFadden says she's willing to send Smiley an ARC of her debut novel, The Richest Season, so she can "decide for herself if pink can't be both feminine and serious." McFadden reports that it took four tries for Hyperion—who scooped up the hardcover rights to the novel after an auction spurred by the success of a self-published trade paperback edition—to come up with a cover that was "evocative, and symbolic, and actually, quite beautiful." Why not use McFadden's original cover, you ask? Well, apart from wanting to make the new edition stand out, it was in some ways really more of a movie poster than a book cover (which may well have been an advantage in connecting with the first audience, now that I think of it). Also, it didn't have any pink in it.

Speaking of that Jane Smiley review, though, I wonder how many authors in the '60s opined in newspaper reviews about whether Philip Roth had "the intelligence and the ambition to address larger questions than the psychological ups and downs of [his] nice Jewish characters," whether they really liked Our Gang and The Great American Novel better than Portnoy's Complaint, and whether anybody remembers them or their books forty years later.

First NPR reprints Adrian Tomine's "The Donger and Me", a strip about the cartoonist's resentment of the gross stereotypes perpetuated by the character of Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles and now, in a promotional video for her new novel, She Went All the Way, Meg Cabot breaks out her doll collection to re-enact a favorite scene from Pretty in Pink. Maybe I need to reconsider whether it's too early to do that coffee table book on '80s Hollywood...

(panels rearranged and made safe for work from Tomine's strip)