fool's gold

what a wheeze. best selling authoress, katie price, has casually disclosed she doesn't actually bother to write her hugely popular entertainments. instead she farms the actual writing aspect out to a thankless factotum or amanuensis. quite enterprising, that. price "merely thinks up the plot - leaving the complex task of conjuring up the golden prose to an assistant," is how one "daily mail" journalist tremulously put it. gold indeed. i wonder if any of her hundreds of thousands of readers feels a little swindled?

well said, old man

christopher hitchens in the "atlantic monthly":

"anyone who has ever tried to digest "the da vinci code" will know that bad writing, aimed at a subliterate audience, is actually much more difficult to read than anything by borges or kundera".