There's a great roundup here of the big literary gossip of the weekend.

In brief: A Boston Globe book reviewer named Roberta Silman said that Alice Hoffman's new novel wasn't as good as her previous books. Hoffman then went ballistic on Twitter, calling Silman an "idiot." She further says Silman isn't a writer, and back in the good old days, writers used to review writers. Then Hoffman suggested that her complaining about this review was proud feminism, because she's not just sitting down and taking it. Then she suggests that Boston is a second-rate city.

And then she publishes Silman's e-mail and phone number online.

In conclusion, Alice Hoffman is a dolt. Her Twitter account no longer exists.

Want to be a writer, like this 24 year-old who wrote to The Reverse Cowgirl? Her advice is simple: Give up the dream.

If you think I make money off blogging, you are misguided. Once, I made some money off this blog by running some American Apparel ads featuring porn star Sasha Grey wearing some thigh-high socks and a thick genital shrug of pubic hair. Welcome to journalism 2009. It's an ugly world.

Sometimes, I like to torture myself by thinking back to 2000, or whenever it was, before the dot-com bubble burst and we all died. It was an amazing, heady time. I used $20 as toilet paper and ate Chicken Kiev flown in from the Russian Tea Room for breakfast. Truly, I wrote for a website called Beer.com that paid me, like, a $1,000 for, I can't remember, a monthly 500-word column or something. That was a good time. Until it wasn't. And then it wasn't.

Thanks to Slog tipper Caroline.

TechCrunch (by way of The Proverbial Lone Wolf Librarian's Weblog) reports that Google Books has added a whole bunch of features. Some of the new changes include the ability to turn a book into plain text (if the font the book was published in is especially awful, which happens a lot with older editions), the ability to clip and publish certain portions of books on a website or blog, or the ability to embed a whole book, YouTube-style, into a website or blog:

I think this embedding function could be a very useful thing, especially if you want to quote from copyright-free works.

This is one of those websites that I can't believe I didn't think of first: Wordnik is a website on which you can look up words. But it's not just a dictionary:

At Wordnik, you get:

* real example sentences to show words in context

* meaningful information about your word's frequency and use patterns

* related words—not just synonyms and antonyms, but words that behave in similar ways

* the chance to contribute to our knowledge of English through recording pronunciations, pointing us towards new words, adding tags and related words, and leaving your notes.

It's part dictionary, part web-tymology, and part wiki: I especially like the feature that shows real-time Twitter usages of the word and the graph that shows how often the word has been used in the last two hundred years. I chose the word "oblong" out of the blue and here's the graph and frequency for "oblong":

I want to type in every word I know*.

(Via.)

* Dear commenters who hate me: Allow me to write this comment for you: "That oughta take about twenty minutes or so." Haw!

In a post titled "Exposing an Irresponsible Anonymous Blogger," Ed Whelan, a legal conservablogger for National Review, outed a pseudonymous liberal blogger over the weekend.

Well, I’m amused to learn that I was wrong about publius’s lack of legal education. I’ve been reliably informed that publius is in fact the pseudonym of law professor John F. Blevins of the South Texas College of Law. I e-mailed Blevins to ask him to confirm or deny that he is publius, and I copied the e-mail to the separate e-mail address, under the pseudonym “Edward Winkleman,” that publius used to respond to my initial private complaints about his reckless blogging. In response, I received from “Edward Winkleman” an e-mail stating that he is “not commenting on [his] identity” and that he writes under a pseudonym “[f]or a variety of private, family, and professional reasons.”

The two writers had gone head-to-pseudonymous-head for years. Whelan's actions have set off a little storm of discussions about internet pseudonyms, and he responded to those criticisms here:

A blogger may choose to blog under a pseudonym for any of various self-serving reasons, from the compelling (e.g., genuine concerns about personal safety) to the respectable to the base. But setting aside the extraordinary circumstances in which the reason to use a pseudonym would be compelling, I don’t see why anyone else has any obligation to respect the blogger’s self-serving decision.

And here's the thing: I don't agree with Whelan's actions, but I do agree with what he has to say about obligation. It's morally sketchy to out someone like that, but you shouldn't operate under a pseudonym without being able to deal with the consequences of your actions. Blevins's fellow law bloggers are discussing the issue further here and here.

This sort of thing is something that the Seattle blogging community dealt with a while ago, of course, when right-wing blogger Stefan Sharkansky outed his waiter when she revealed that he was a bad tipper on a blog, but this sort of thing is an important discussion to reconsider from time to time.