Break out the Cristal. Mr. Sean Combs turns 40 today. Perhaps he'll get together later to celebrate with Bethenny Frankel of the Real Housewives of New York: She's turning 39. Others blowing out candles today: Matthew McConaughey is turning 40. Kathy Griffin is turning 49. Laura Bush is 63. Survivor host Jeff Probst turns 47. Author Charles Frazier is turning 59. Playwright Jon Robin Baitz is 48. Literary agent Andrew Wylie is turning 62. Publishing industry honcho Jonathan Galassi is 60. Anne Sweeney, the president of Disney/ABC president, is turning 51. Ralph Macchio of Karate Kid fame is 48. And Trishelle from The Real World is 30.

Book agent fight! Book agent fight! Wily Andrew Wylie has stolen Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul away from his old partner and mentor, Gillon Aitken. The 76-year-old author was likely wooed astray with promises of more monies and better international representation.

Not only does Diddy get to vote or die today, he gets to celebrate his birthday, too. He's 39. There probably won't be much to celebrate in the White House today, but Laura Bush will have one reason to. She's turning 62. Also celebrating: Literary agent Andrew Wylie is 61. Playwright Jon Robin Baitz is turning 47. Book publisher Jonathan Galassi is 59. Matthew McConaughey is celebrating his 39th. Kathy Griffin is 48. Disney/ABC president Anne Sweeney is celebrating the big 5-0. Walter Cronkite is 92. Survivor host Jeff Probst is turning 46. Author Charles Frazier is 58. And the Karate Kid, Ralph Macchio, is 47.

Admired and loathed in equal measure, Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie is one of New York's most powerful-and ruthless-literary agents.

Today's Observer piece about new-minted literary agent Scott Moyers contains a controversial assertion: That Moyers' boss Andrew Wylie's Wylie Agency is "the most powerful and prestigious in town." Some of the publishing types we contacted for comment would beg to differ. And others were like "Well, yeah!"

On Friday at a little after 5 p.m., the New York Observer posted up a 131-page book proposal by Michael Hastings, a Newsweek Baghdad correspondent. The memoir is about his time overseas and the death of his fiance. The Observer post promptly disappeared. Besides the obvious copyright issues with making the whole shebang available, there was another reason mega-lit agent (and poet!) Andrew Wylie wanted the proposal disappeared from the internet: it was going to get people killed in Iraq.

So, just how satanic are Salman Rushdie's agent's verses? Ira Silverberg, who owns the 1972 chapbook of Wylie's stylings that was mentioned here yesterday, was kind enough to share some of them, but first he wanted to make one thing very clear: "I'm a huge fan of Andrew ... Nobody gets that he's one of the least pretentious people in the biz." Well, these poems are certainly unpretentious. They barely pretend to be poems! A selection, including the possibly prophetic "I've (#1)," is after the jump.

British lit agent Andrew Wylie is a very august person, with some very respectable clients: Philip Roth! Salman Rushdie! Nigella Lawson! But we were all young and not-august sometime, and when Wylie was younger, he fancied himself a poet. Another high-powered agent, Ira Silverberg, happens to own a copy of a chapbook that Wylie published in 1972, which he generously shared with Bookforum. "There's a rumor that he has tried to buy up all of the copies," Silverberg told them. But why? "One can only imagine what a Wylie client like, say, Benazir Bhutto would make of such poems as "Hands up Your Skirt," "Warm, Wet Pants," and the determinedly unlyric "I Fuck Your Ass, You Suck My Cock." Oh! Well now. Being fans of dirtiness, we'd love to know more about these poems. Do any of them contain the words "light" or "water?"