The self-reflexive stuck-in-the-mud soap opera of our time.

• Chase the blues away: Scott Stereogum has David Byrne (plus string section) performing Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance (With Somebody Who Loves Me)." Dig.
  
  
• Archives are a bitch. Josh now: "I have no patience for children, children's books, children's movies or people who try to pretend children's books and movies are 'real art.'"
  Josh then: "Last night I saw the new Harry Potter movie... I haven't seen the first two, nor read the books. I find it a little embarrassing in my admittedly elitist way that serious adults are reading these books. But hey, whatever. I went anyway... I won't review it, because I have no idea how it fits into a greater scheme of the literary-cinematic complex of Harry Potter. I will say that I was impressed by the emotional level of it, many of the themes presented. It worked for me as a coming of age story of a boy figuring out his place in a dangerous world, plus some fun waving knitting needles around and trying not to look ridiculous doing it. I loved the look of it too (minus that crappy werewolf.) A lot of great little performances scattered throughout. I wasn't blown away or anything, and nor does this make me at all interested in any other Potter related nonsense, but that's that. "
  Oooh, look at that. Despite all the fuckwitted qualifiers, it looks like someone had a little more than patience for a "children's movie."
  
  
• The award for Best Arafat Obit Evs goes to The Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby for this piece. An excerpt:
  

  In a better world, George Bush would not have said, on hearing the first reports that Arafat had died, "God bless his soul."
  
  God bless his soul? What a grotesque idea! Bless the soul of the man who brought modern terrorism to the world? Who sent his agents to slaughter athletes at the Olympics, blow airliners out of the sky, bomb schools and pizzerias, machine-gun passengers in airline terminals? Who lied, cheated, and stole without compunction? Who inculcated the vilest culture of Jew-hatred since the Third Reich? Human beings might stoop to bless a creature so evil -- as indeed Arafat was blessed, with money, deference, even a Nobel Prize -- but God, I am quite sure, will damn him for eternity.

  
  Yowzer. Take that.
  
  
• The Paris Review presents The DNA of Literature.
  
  
• Does that mean you don't like it? Stylus on the new Eminem album: "Only now his beefs have become so infinitesimal that he’s started to unconsciously parody our LiveJournal culture, a minor event or misunderstanding generating reams of dialogue, running commentary and painstaking minutiae. In short, he’s no more compelling than one of those non-famous drama queens in your life you already find insufferable, just another loser who blows up non-events, and it’s transformed the long-running Eminem Show into the most myopic, hand-wringing, self-reflexive stuck-in-the-mud soap opera of our time."