Ketchup, Ketchup*

--Porn is good, says Rushdie. Maybe he should find out what happens when "the A list meets the D cup". Oops, didn't he do that already?
--Norma Khouri's time is running out; the author accused of making up her "true-life" honour killing tale disappeared after the news reports came out. We ain't seen nothing yet, though she has turned some documentary evidence over to her publishers. Malcolm Knox, who broke the story, says he isn't worried: "I don't think Norma Khouri has enough evidence to get up in court and make statements about defamation. I think if she does get up and make statements, she might get herself into even deeper trouble than she is already."
--"The best love story ever told, next to Romeo and Juliet" is coming to a theatre next to you. I don't know whether to applaud or duck; Gabriel Garcia Marquez has finally given in and sold the film rights to Love in the Time of Cholera for between one to three million dollars.
--This BBC story on the Library of Unwritten Books has been doing the rounds for a while. "You will not find these titles on bookshelves or bestseller lists - One-Eyed Olaf, The Man Who Was Addicted to Seeing, Poke the Pig and Scrumping in Persia.
These books, along with many others, have not been written - so they are only to be found in the Library of Unwritten Books.
An art project travelling the UK, this library is collecting stories and ideas for books people would like to write - but never have, and probably never will." (Link via The Literary Saloon.)
--Neat concept, but I prefer the Invisible Library. More Borgesian to my mind, it's "a collection of books that only appear in other books. Within the library's catalog you will find imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound".
--Elsewhere, the blogosphere's all worked up over Nicholson Baker, who isn't what you might call a household name in India. As usual, the Literary Saloon has the most comprehensive roundup of what the whole thing is about. There's more over at Rake's Progress.
--But sitting here in Delhi, the Baker brouhaha makes me think, not for the first time, that not all of the literary sphere can be successfully globalised. Baker doesn't "transfer" especially successfully into the Indian reader's scheme of things; I'm relatively incurious about the controversy over Checkpoint. David Foster Wallace, on the other hand, has written a long, long article about the Maine Lobster Festival, which might be considered a far more arcane subject than the potential offing of George Bush--but his essay is something I'd try and get my hands on. Oh well. Maybe it's just me.

* As in, "what did one tomato say to the other during the annual Great Tomato Race" etc.