Indeed, you don't get them handed to you like that every day. (A "buzz"!) The last time was a year or two ago when my friend Doug and I were working in the garden, scooping soil from a wheelbarrow with an old mug. "Is there any coffee left?" Doug asked. "Here," I said, handing him the mug full of dirt. "It's fresh ground." He made a perfect "boing!" face like a cartoon character. You treasure each moment like that because in old age, those memories become your consolation for the fool you still are.

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"Bush seemed to have a wire, or an odd protrusion of some sort, running down his back," Cannon wrote on Oct. 2. Naturally, he searched around the Web for clues as to what the bulge could be, and, as often happens online, the evidence he found seemed to converge upon a conspiratorial, yet not-implausible hypothesis -- in this case, an old suspicion that the president receives help during speaking engagements by using an in-ear prompting device, a direct wire to advisors concealed behind the Oz curtain.

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Then you're in the bookstore and there's this other book on display called "Bagels: The Story of Human Civilization." And it's really interesting. It starts with the cultivation of the sesame seed (circa 4000 B.C.), skimming cursorily over the oft-told tale of wheat farming. You learn of the codification of kosher dietary laws, and of the early trade routes of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), from whose pods come the edible poppy seed. The recurring clashes between lactose-tolerant and lactose-intolerant peoples. The toroid: According to some scientists, the shape of the bagel is the shape of the very universe itself. The very universe. Well, gosh. Bagels -- who knew?

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Otherwise, the prize for literature has, over the past decade, given us such names to puzzle over as Gao Xingjian (2000) and Wislawa Szymborska (1996), names that an ordinary educated Anglophone couldn't have been expected to know prior to their association with the Nobel. In fact, they might've seemed, on first encounter, to be mere ciphers for the prize itself -- for the ideal of democratic internationalism it represents and for its slow gyre from country to country, from literature to literature. Yes; Gao Xingjian, one might've thought. It's just about time for a Chinese author to win. What a hard struggle he must have had with the authorities there, getting his ... er, plays or poems or things published. With V.S. Naipaul, there's no hint of that. In choosing him as this year's laureate for literature, the Nobel committee has allowed the controversial Naipaul's influence -- his aura -- to accrue to the prize as much as the other way around.

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Bigge, 28, is an established freelance writer on the Canadian circuit (Chatelaine, Toronto Life, the National Post), and a former managing editor at the anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters. But most signally, he's a nerdy, post-collegiate indie-rocker; and of all the thousands of guys like that, both in the habitable world and Canada, he's the most exemplary you're ever likely to run across. Bigge seems nice, and rather smart, and a lot of his short freelance pieces are pretty good. His book, though, presents him as something of a cultural bonsai specimen, stunted as a writer by his ironic tics and defensive jokiness, unable to engage the world and its history save through hackneyed pop-culture references, ad-copy locutions and baseless put-ons.

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"I can see right through your pants!" the voice boomed.

It came as though from everywhere at once -- from the very air itself. The spoon clattered to the floor. I looked down at my pants. They were fastened. It was dark. Seconds passed. There seemed nothing to say.

"Do you know who I am?" the voice boomed.

A point of purplish light winked into existence in the center of the room, and grew into a small, rotating cube. Vertiginous, flashbulb purple -- retinal purple, spinning like mad. I swallowed dryly. I was suddenly glad I hadn't eaten anything. The cube grew to the size of a hatbox, and then to the size of a stack of LPs.

"No," I said. "I don't have the vaguest ... What do you mean, you can see through my pants?"

"I can see through everyone's pants," the cube said. "I can see inside every locked door, every box and safe ... I can see the fast-food wrappers stuffed under your car seat, and read the expiration date on the milk in the fridge. Your milk," the voice settled into an imperious cadence, "is nearly expired."

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Foster made his name by helping to bulk up Shakespeare's C.V. with one more entry: As a doctoral candidate in the mid-'80s, he flagged a neglected Elizabethan funeral elegy as a lost work of Shakespeare's, and gradually invented a computer-assisted method of textual analysis to help prove his case. He's also the guy who fingered Joe Klein as the anonymous author of "Primary Colors." He's since worked on the Unabomber and JonBenet Ramsey cases, the Monica Lewinsky fiasco and numerous other high- and low-profile disputes of the who-wrote-what variety.

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A good nest of laurels? Not exactly. A lot of silly stuff came out of the whole cyberpunk trend. Beforehand, when you were on the Internet you were merely slouched out in a chair, typing onto a Compuserve message board or something. Afterwards, you were flying bodilessly through cyberspace, a creature of pure data, communing with other cyberbeings through virtual reality. It's taken years to get people to stop talking that way, not to mention believing some of that bunkum. Also, the books mostly haven't held up well. In just over a decade, early renderings of the Internet have come to seem quaint and self-astonished in the same way as Jules Verne's "A Trip to the Moon" must've seemed during the height of the space age. Less so, but in that way, Sterling's 1988 novel "Islands in the Net" flourishes that sexy new com-tech apparatus, the fax machine. All the same, when the day comes, they'll use that "cyber" word way up top in Sterling's obituary -- there's no avoiding it.

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Yesterday, by the time young Jennifer returned from her shopping trip with Miss Givens, the light in my study was already murky. This tall, narrow house, bought with my inheritance following my aunt's death, overlooks a square which, while moderately prestigious, catches less sun than any of its neighbours.

But Ishiguro's latest novel isn't as good as his 1989 masterwork, "Remains of the Day." In that book, he used the slenderest filament of a plot (the consummate butler takes a solitary drive through the local provinces) to create a gorgeously nuanced monologue on prewar English society. It was a masterpiece of tone and understatement, an heirloom novel -- a living example of a literary strain that fell out of fashion a half-century ago, to be replaced by hardier, often less flavorful varieties. And more subtly, as a novel of manners by a Japanese-born writer, it was an exploration of those places where the Japanese and the English psyches intersect: the comforts and the tyranny of station; the refuge of historical memory vs. the reality of the encroaching present; that guarded borderland between thought and speech that the civilized soul inhabits, trapped and stultified but recused from the smaller forms of human despair.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/09/19/ishiguro/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/08/17/nettles_romaine/ http://www.salon.com/2000/08/17/nettles_romaine/#comments Thu, 17 Aug 2000 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/08/17/nettles_romaine There's a reference in "Vanishing Voices" to a magazine ad that promises instruction in "most of the world's languages" -- a total of 76. That might seem pretty impressive, except that even the lowest estimates put the number of languages in the world at roughly 5,000. That doesn't include dialects or regional variations; it represents the number of bona fide languages spoken in the world, each as complex and distinct as English, Mandarin Chinese and Hindi.

If that seems hard to imagine, it's because the great majority are local tongues such as Rotokas, Sim'algax and Kurux, used by only a handful of people. (There are, for example, fewer than 500 native speakers of Kurux.) These languages are, "Vanishing Voices" explains, disappearing from the world at an astounding rate -- as many as half might become extinct in the next century.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/08/17/nettles_romaine/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/07/05/goldberg_4/ http://www.salon.com/2000/07/05/goldberg_4/#comments Wed, 05 Jul 2000 19:04:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/07/05/goldberg There's a locution that keeps turning up in the first half of Myla Goldberg's heralded first novel, "Bee Season." It joins two phrases with a comma, looks like this. The first few times aren't so bad, pass unremarkably. But then it turns up more often, seems clunky. You start to think there must be a better way to phrase things, connect two thoughts. Makes the book seem affected, elicit invective; become a projectile, collide with wall. But then, somewhere around the novel's halfway point, it tapers off and disappears as the sentences smooth out and grow more sure of themselves. It's also right around there that the story begins to find itself and the characters begin to pop out into three-space, becoming more than a collection of attributes. "Bee Season" spends an awful lot of time trying to get out of its own way, but it is, in the last half, an affecting, sometimes powerful and lyrical novel of a family pulled apart by mysticism and insanity.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/07/05/goldberg_4/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/06/21/schell_hilton/ http://www.salon.com/2000/06/21/schell_hilton/#comments Wed, 21 Jun 2000 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/06/21/schell_hilton Somebody here in the Occident will eventually have to take a stiff belt of something, splash some cold water on his face, and get down to writing a book that will disclose the banality of Tibet and everything Tibetan. Not "banality" in the pejorative sense, meaning depthless and trite -- for Tibet and its situation are neither of those things -- but in the sense of the everyday, the unsentimental, the familiar. Clearly, we're wacky about Tibet as about no other country in the world.

Sinologist Orville Schell's "Virtual Tibet" looks at the changing ways in which the West has understood that country over the past few centuries. Despite the cyber-title (which seems to carry the scent of a book editor, subspecies: praecox), the "virtual" part simply refers to the practice, borrowed from the last few decades of lit crit, of examining the way we look at things, rather than looking at the things themselves. The book traces our shifting, always partially imaginary relationship with the mystic Land of the Snows through some fascinating early travelers' accounts and popular books, to its adoption as the cause cilhbre of soul-hungry Hollywood. Our virtual Tibet has been a mysterious half-realm of demons and sorcery, the earthly paradise of Shangri-La, and a spiritual beacon to the world -- but it's always a territory in which the usual rules that govern the world somehow don't apply. We've never quite been able to accept Tibet as just an ordinary place in the world where actual, real people live: a place like, say, Belgium or Missouri -- only with high mountains and yaks, instead of waffles and whatever's in Missouri.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/06/21/schell_hilton/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/03/17/gladwell/ http://www.salon.com/2000/03/17/gladwell/#comments Fri, 17 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2000/03/17/gladwell A million dollars. What sort of book
would justify an advance that large? It
would have to be a big book -- a really,
really big book, probably a book that
could suck in America's great throngs of
airport and poolside readers through
name recognition alone. Edmund Morris'
quixotic href="/books/feature/1999/10/07/morris/index.html">Reagan biography, for
example, pulled in a $1 million advance on
the strength of its subject's having
appeared on a lot of TV in the '80s.
Joan Collins got $1.2 million for her
infamously unpublishable novel, "A
Ruling Passion," for a similar reason.
And whatever figure href="/people/rogue/1999/05/13/rodman/index.html">Dennis Rodman got for his
autobiography, it probably had a couple
of commas in it, too.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/03/17/gladwell/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/03/13/wackytv/ http://www.salon.com/2000/03/13/wackytv/#comments Mon, 13 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/feature/2000/03/13/wackytv The winner was naked, unshaven and half-mad -- sprung from 18 months of imprisonment in a locked studio apartment. He was a star, lofted into celebrity by "Susunu! Denpa Sho-nen," a perverse Japanese TV show that makes "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" look like 32 cents without even trying. The contestant's only prize for surviving a year and a half of solitary confinement: fame itself.

Most of us know that in transportation, health care, social services and gracious living, the United States lags behind the entire civilized world and France. But those are mere trifles. Television! Movies! Consumer brands! It's entertainment that makes the States great. Let the entire world chuckle at the American Comedy, so long as it keeps chuckling at our American comedies. We export not only jobs but dreams. Whom we cannot bomb, we entertain -- and famously. So it's shocking that in the very midst of the biggest domestic game-show boom since the 1950s, America has fallen unaccountably behind the rest of the world. Once proud colossi -- jackpot winners -- our game shows have become third-place contestants on the world stage.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/03/13/wackytv/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/03/03/seife/ http://www.salon.com/2000/03/03/seife/#comments Fri, 03 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/03/03/seife This is it: the book critic's nightmare. A creature of unquiet dreams, wrought of the most tenebrous dregs of the Morphic philter. A chimera of ... well, you get the idea. This is a book about nothing, filled with scary math problems. If you were to find yourself reviewing a book in your underwear, late for a final exam, with wolves chasing you around a pink marble obelisk -- this is that book. As Charles Seife explains: "Consider the expression x/(sin x) when x = 0; x = 0 as does sin x, so the expression is equal to 0/0. Using L'Hopital's rule, we see that the ... " And then you wake up in your chair with that copy of the new Judith Butler still fluttering in your lap -- we all know the drill.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/03/03/seife/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/02/17/new_yorker_2/ http://www.salon.com/2000/02/17/new_yorker_2/#comments Thu, 17 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2000/02/17/new_yorker We're guessing it will happen on Feb. 21. That was the cover date of the very first issue, 75 years ago; and even as far back as last summer, months before the New Yorker's anniversary season had properly begun, there were signs that something odd was brewing on 43rd Street.

Those unaccountable lights burning in the magazine's old, abandoned digs, those strange chills passing through the Algonquin lobby. That hyena laugh echoing through the empty street -- was that Harold Ross' laugh? Was that William Shawn's umbrella resting unclaimed every night in the stand outside the Rose Room? Oysters had been arriving bone empty from surrounding kitchens; liquor bottles were found drained with their seals untouched. That belch -- could it be A.J. Liebling's? Was that E.B. White's mustache fluttering past outside the window?

Nobody knows for sure. And while nobody knows what it might be, some say that at the stroke of midnight on Feb. 21, the New Yorker's offices will slide free from the Condi Nast building and wheel off into the night, captained by the shade of Ross, with Shawn in the first mate's chair and White at the helm -- and crewed by all who dare to sail with them. By the time business hours begin on the morning of the 22nd, the New Yorker will have landed -- and Tina Brown's feet will be sticking out from underneath, curled gruesomely in their striped stockings and ruby slippers.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/02/17/new_yorker_2/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/01/26/short_spence/ http://www.salon.com/2000/01/26/short_spence/#comments Wed, 26 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/01/26/short_spence The leveling of the Berlin Wall may have been the pageant that signaled the end of Soviet-style communism, and the events at Tiananmen Square may have been its greatest drama. But the decline of the Soviets became truly irrevocable at the point when scholars of the former communist bloc countries began to gain access to original sources once again -- and it thus became possible to romp around on Sino-Russian territory researching exposis and unflattering political biographies without engaging the iron boot of the proletariat in sharp dialectic with your ass.

There's never been a shortage of books on the communist bloc and its leaders, but for nearly 75 years following Emma Goldman's bitterly contested 1923 work "My Disillusionment in Russia," it was very difficult to write anything definitive. Lately, Russia has begun to rise to the challenge with its own native strain of post-communist muckraking, through the works of such authors as Stalin biographers Edvard Radzinsky and Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov and former secret policeman Peter Deriabin. But in China's case, since reforms have been slower and more tenuous, and since the current government traces directly back to the party of the revolution, it's taken a bit of Western imperialist-style carpetbagging to get the sluices flowing.

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