Our ruined and dishonoured and beloved world

This has really been a good weekend. I hung out with gaudior and rushthatspeaks on Friday for the first time in a ridiculous while, watched three more episodes of Princess Tutu, which continues to make me happy, and witnessed a photo shoot with weirdquark and Thrud as Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney Todd, with the occasional quick pussycat. Saturday, ericmvan and I saw a matinée of the ART's Copenhagen, which I had wanted to see in a general fashion for years and specifically since this summer when I read the play for the first time: and which I found brilliant, fiercely intelligent and far more textured in voice than on the page—John Kuntz as Werner Heisenberg particularly caught at me, tightly mannered and fractured in glimpses between rapid-fire confidence and awkward concession, not innocent; even in the shadowy afterworld in which the play takes place, still passionate and still in pain. I had an unexpected bonus in the form of a comp ticket to the Lydian String Quartet at Brandeis, where I had my mind blown by Reza Vali's "Quartet #3." And tonight I watched the Super Bowl, which was a rather less jubilant occasion than the World Series.* Fortunately, I am even more indifferent to football than to baseball. I still care about archery, though.

Tomorrow, sorting books. Joy.

*The ad with the giant carrier pigeons was like something out of Narbonic, however, and therefore entirely worth seeing.

Or a cataclysmic earthquake, I'd accept with some despair

In which I shoot fish in a barrel.

As someone whose subway rides tend to resemble scenes from an "Evil Dead" movie, in which I am Bruce Campbell dodging zombies who have had all traces of their humanity sucked out of them by a sinister book—not the "Necronomicon," but "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows"—I sometimes wonder how any self-respecting author of speculative fiction can find fulfillment in writing novels for young readers. I suppose J. K. Rowling could give me 1.12 billion reasons in favor of it: get your formula just right and you can enjoy worldwide sales, film and television options, vibrating-toy-broom licensing fees, Chinese-language bootlegs of your work, a kind of limited immortality (L. Frank Baum who?) and—finally—genuine grown-up readers. But where's the artistic satisfaction? Where's the dignity?

Let that steep for a moment.

To its credit, "InterWorld" isn't sugarcoated for its readership; it wastes no time in putting its young heroes in mortal peril and pitting them against at least one brutal adversary who threatens to floss with their innards. But its prose is often only functional, and it has a slight problem of verisimilitude: are there really any high-school-age iconoclasts out there who have heard of synesthesia, Benoit Mandelbrot and the Midgard serpent, but not of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen?

Yes. In high school? Me.

May Dave Itzkoff be haunted by the shades of all the children's authors who died in this last year, except that he would not appreciate it.