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Borges is rolling over in his grave…now.

Proof that evil bastards like to read good books, too — Karl Rove answers Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire:

Who are your favorite writers?
In alphabetical order: Jorge Luis Borges, Gabor Boritt, Ray Bradbury, G. K. Chesterton, Winston Churchill, David Herbert Donald, T. S. Eliot, Joseph Ellis, Gary Gallagher, F. A. Hayek, Paul Horgan, Paul Johnson, Tom Lea, C. S. Lewis, Abraham Lincoln, John D. MacDonald, David McCullough, Merrill Peterson, Robert Remini, Andrew Roberts, William Shakespeare, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Evelyn Waugh, and Robert Wiebe.

Then again, that list does have a slightly focus-grouped feel to it. As does his answers to the greatest love of his life (“America”) and his heroes in real life (“The men and women who volunteer to go into harm’s way wearing the uniform of our country’s military.”) More interesting, and maybe telling is his answer to the trait he most deplores in others. Rove’s answer? “Not being authentic.”

It is to laugh.

Via William Gibson.

Oh and there will be…

I’m not entirely sure what I think about its ending, but I will say this: There Will Be Blood doesn’t feel like a two-and-a-half-hour movie. There’s not a single moment when it seems to drag, when what’s on screen doesn’t seem absolutely essential — perhaps because Daniel Day Lewis, who is riveting in the film, is on screen nearly all the time. Nathan Rabin called it, “a fascinating anomaly—a rip-roaring two-fisted epic concerned almost exclusively with the tormented psyche and spiritual death of a single man.”

I’m sure if I’d managed to see it a week ago, it would have made my list of the best films of 2007. I can’t imagine how it won’t make my list of the best films I’ve seen in 2008.

Bug? That’s a pun, right?

Am I missing something? On December 26, Goodreads tells me that not one, not two, but five of my friends rated Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. On the day after Christmas, five people, independent of one another, thought, “Hey, you know what I haven’t done lately? Told the world what I think about Franz Kafka. I better get on that pretty quick”?

I’d put this down as some kind of glitch or bug, but then I’d expect all the ratings to be identical, and they’re not. I’ll admit, I haven’t been paying much attention to Goodreads lately, beyond using it to keep track of the books I’m currently reading (which you’ll find in the sidebar, somewhere), but it seems a little weird.

I’m also a little ashamed to say I’ve never read The Metamorphosis myself*. I should probably remedy that one of these days. I do have a complete Kafka collection laying around somewhere…

* “In his novel Changing Places, David Lodge describes a literary parlor game called ‘Humiliations’ in which participants confess, one by one, titles of books they’ve never read. The genius of the game is that each player gains a point for each fellow player who’s read the book—in other words, the more accomplished the reader, the lower his or her score. Lodge’s winner is an American professor who, in a rousing display of one-downmanship, finally announces that he’s never read Hamlet.” – Jodi Kantor, The Literary Critic’s Shelf of Shame

Edited to add: I have read Hamlet. It’s the one with the ghost, right? Joe Public loves the ghost.

“Oh, yeah, and, uh…9/11.”

That Rudy Giuliani, always on message:

BEDFORD, N.H. – He flatlined in Iowa and he’s struggling in New Hampshire, but Rudy Giuliani shook off the early-state blues Thursday as only he can.“None of this worries me – Sept. 11, there were times I was worried,” Giuliani said. [via]

Meanwhile, elsewhere in politics:

The Best Moments in Mike Huckabee’s Extremism [via] and the Republican candidates as Buffy villains [via].