One problem with being a curious, literate human being is time allotment.  Should you read that novel, the latest issue of your favorite magazine?  God forbid you subscribe to a newspaper.  Maybe you should just throw your time away watching grainy videos of baby foxes playing on a trampoline.  It certainly couldn’t be any less worthwhile than the thousands of other diversions out there, right?  I pull out some things of interest from the internet for you and put them on our front page, but I know better than anyone that they just add to your burden, so I’m sorry.  And here ya go.

~ Maira Kalman paints, revels in, the inauguration.

~ The Cosmonaut of the Erotic Future, in which are discussed Gagarin, Levinas, Heidegger, James Bond, St. Joseph, quivering flesh in a can, and the single best reason you’ll ever find for subscribing to the Journal of Hand Surgery.

~ The world of Rae Armantrout’s poetry is "someting we recognize intimately - and at the same instant montrous," writes Ron Silliman.

~ Trees into books into trees once again.

~ Wait, you mean Bolaño may not have taken heroin or been imprisoned by Pinochet? Disgusting. I’m going to take his worthless and utterly unreadable books to the curb right now.

~ John Updike died today.  He was 76.  Who is fit to eulogize a writer of his voice and stature?

~ What do women want? Daniel Bergner discusses the complex science of female desire in the Times and, on February 2nd, in our store.

~ Adam Kirsch is a bit relieved that Elizabeth Alexander’s inauguration poem was not soaring, or even memorable.  It was, he writes, "not public but bureaucratic."

~ "spent my hours in town in cough on pillow  sigh sigh  but back now". All interviews should be conducted by email, with no caps, and their subject should always be poet Abraham Smith.

~ Charles Bock, author of Beautiful Children, discusses his next novel. He’s going to be a wealthy wealthy man.  See him talk with editor David Ebershoff in our store this Monday.

~ W. D. Snodgrass is dead.  Maybe now is a good time to hear what he has to say.

~ And yes, of course, baby foxes on a trampoline.  Glee.