"Top Secret" - new short fiction at Granta

I have a new short story up at Granta: "Top Secret."

Brief liner notes:

- It was written for "Writers in Drag," an offshoot of the Writers With Drinks series. The theme is, you write a piece in a genre outside your usual mode. After trying heroic fantasy and post-apocalyptic, I went to espionage.

- The title is indeed a reference to the mostly defunct, early 1980's spy-themed T SR role-playing system. I think it's pretty arguable that a literary genre doesn't really exist unless it was instantiated as an RPG at some point in the 1980's.

the epigraph that could have been

"But now at thirty years my hair is grey--
(I wonder what it will be like at forty?
I thought of a peruke the other day--)
My heart is not much greener; and, in short, I
Have squandered my whole summer while 'twas May,
And feel no more the spirit to retort; I
Have spent my life, both interest and principal,
And deem not, what I deemed, my soul invincible."

--- Byron, Don Juan

(with thanks to Professor Ford)

Jon Hamm as Lex Luthor: a personal message to the president

I'm not ordinarily a sucker for the funny internet video, but Jon Hamm delivers possibly the most pitch-perfect supervillain performance I've ever run across, riding the edge of grand purpose, malign hypercognition, and irritability. Hollywood take note.

"Lex Luthor Bailout" with Jon Hamm - watch more funny videos

via my crew at io9

In Germany, Doctor Impossible Strikes Back

Regard the German edition of Soon I Will Be Invincible, from Droemer Knaur. I love it more than I can say. The taped-up mask, the font, the color scheme - it projects unashamed awesomeness. It looks like a sexy spy novel from the 1970's. You really don't know if that mask is on its way to a superpowered encounter or a scene of masked debauchery, and, manifestly, there is no reason it can't be both. My run of luck with book designs holds.

The translation is also really quite satisfying, insofar as I could make it out.

Judaism in Seven Minutes

I'll be at Amnesia in the Mission on Thursday 2/24, trying to explain my experience with Judaism in seven minutes flat.

http://www.heebmagazine.com/events/view/74

In which my father gets his due

http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/2009/02/16/allen-grossman-wins-bollingen-prize-in-american-poetry/