This post is a day late, but we had a bit of a server crash recently (I wrote a poem about it), so our schedule is all screwed up. And it’s good that we got held up, so I can deliver this exciting news:

1. Bat Segundo interviews David Lynch. Wow. This is Segundo’s 100th interview, and the roving interlocutor clearly saved the significant number for this brilliant filmmaker. I consider David Lynch to be one of the very few giants of our time, and since he keeps a low profile I was very eager to hear what he’d have to say. The interview is suitably quirky, in that Lynch and Segundo spend a significant portion of the half hour talking about Transcendental Meditation, the modern practice that Lynch urges everybody to try.

It happens that I know a lot about TM, since my grandmother Jeannette Schwartz was very involved with it and taught all of us in the family how to do it. I’ve had my mantra since I was ten years old, so the fresh enthusiasm David Lynch expresses for meditation in this interview is happily familiar to me (in fact, this interview is reminding me that I better get back to my twenty minutes twice a day).

Lynch gushes warmly about the importance of a good workout routine for your brain, and takes cheerful wiffle-bat swings at questions about whether or not stress can help creativity (Lynch doesn’t think so, though Segundo cites Dostoevsky as an example). Strangely, as Lynch speaks in his patient, earnest voice about calmness and inner harmonics, I find I can’t help wondering how sincerely I should take any words spoken by this master of psychological masquerade. After all, this is the guy who told Agent Dale Cooper to marvel at the douglas firs, the guy who put the robin with the bug in its mouth in Laura Dern’s kitchen, the filmmaker who’s done more for erasers than Eberhard Faber. I can’t hear him speak without wondering if a kid’s going to pop up next to him with creamed corn in his hands. He’s got to be pulling our leg somewhere. Is this David Lynch at all, or one of his characters?

Oh also, speaking of characters, why does David keep calling Bat Segundo “Ed”?

2. Nice write-ups of the NBCC Critics Choice Awards by Sarah Weinman and Ron Hogan, who clearly doesn’t know what they’re talking about. This is another must-read GalleyCat article that I may write more about in coming days.

3. I’m not happy that we’re getting a new novel by milquetoast postmodernist Jonathan Lethem, and I think it’s lame that the author is going around mumbling self-deprecations about the book, as if we’re supposed to care about it even though he doesn’t. I also don’t like the dorky guitar-boy photo on the book’s cover — how far can Lethem take “nerd appeal”?

And, finally, if actor Ed Norton is really going to make a film version of Motherless Brooklyn, he should also have to find an actor named Ralph Kramden to be in it.