The Journals

It was all too easy to make fun of the New York Review of Books' shark-jumpin' articles on email and blogs, so here's Nicholson Baker with a genuinely, amiably insightful look at the Wikipedia phenomenon and its politics. It makes me weirdly happy to imagine Nicholson Baker editing him up some Wiki. Wiki warrior Kyle Gann should definitely read this article, if only for Baker's account of his attempts to save an article on post-Beat Richard Denner:

I tried to make the article less deletable by incorporating a quote from an interview in the Berkeley Daily Planet— Denner told the reporter that in the Sixties he'd tried to be a street poet, "using magic markers to write on napkins at Cafe Med for espressos, on girls' arms and feet."

I sense that it would make Gann happy, too.

Julian Bell's brattily iconoclastic take on Lucian Freud, in a previous NYRB, is mightily entertaining as well, and as long as we're talking about my favorite artists, Joan Rivers is hanging out with Robert Rauschenberg. Can I please have bloody marys with Joan Rivers and Robert Rauschenberg one of these days? Okay, thanks, bye.

More tomorrow.