Will Ferrell in Blades of Glory used his tattoos as mnemonics for all the hot figure skating trim he'd gotten over the years. Emily Gould's using hers as nut graphs or something for her forthcoming essay collection. And now there's a whole website that lets you signpost your erudition through skin ink. Some readers are strict formalists: one guy's got an ellipsis on his wrist, I guess because a semicolon would have been pretentious. Others are fond of Vonnegut and Thomas. But if there's a discernible trend here, it's in the damaged goods department. Meet the smarter version of the tramp stamp: call it the borderline blazon. Sylvia Plath on either arm? Naturally. A lengthy disquisition about love and hate and learning to control the masterful tyrant in you, courtesy of psychiatrist Theodore Isaac Rubin? Well, boys, you can't say the girl didn't warn you. A photo montage after the jump.

Ladies and gentlemen, the proud new owner of the FSU Middlebrow Remix Version of Keith Gessen's All The Sad Young Literary Men is Andrew Krucoff-the former "Gawker Mascot" once fired by Conde Nast for leaking to this website. He was also recently called a "pussy" by the author in question, Keith Gessen! You can see the circle of life turning, turning. So what will become of this coveted and (we daresay) historic volume? All can now be revealed:

As a savvy media person, writer Rob Kutner knows that you can't sell books anymore without making some funny YouTube vids to promote it. Lucky for Kutner, he writes for The Daily Show, so he was able to get the program's Aasif Mandi and Kristen Schaal (who is lovely!) to work on it for him. Oh yeah, the book is called Apocalypse How, and the apocalyptic video is after the jump.

[Jim Behrle and his kartoon kats are never afraid to be servicey. Today, they explain how you can write a book and change the world! Step one: charm a monkey. Animated fun, below.]

"Red Rape is that rare sleazy pulp novel that actually lives up to its lurid cover illustration and alarmist subtitle (IT CAN HAPPEN HERE!) within the first two pages. It was a canny choice on the part of the publisher to use the popular - and in this case suggestive - civil defense rallying cry for the book's jacket slogan because it no doubt appealed to the patriotic and prurient interests of the anti-Communist pervs who purchased the book back in 1960. Indeed, the prolific author Connie Sellers* (who is a man) seems to have taken the subtitle as something of an editorial mandate and produced an 'anything goes' Soviet invasion fantasy that eclipses anything in John Milius's wildest RED DAWN wet dreams."

This week's award for most amusing disclosure goes to former Village Voice music critic and section editor (and DEAN OF AMERICAN ROCK CRITICS) Robert Christgau, reviewing a novel by former Ed Park. "I VOLUNTEERED TO REVIEW THIS novel by my former Village Voice co-worker Ed Park because I assumed the conflicts of interest would be so blatant they'd implode—a roman à clef, in which I myself might play a minor role, about the alt-weekly where I got fired the same day young Ed did." Sadly, everything is very fictionalized. Doesn't Ed get the point of these books? Score-settling, not literature! [NYO]

John McCain would love to see NASA adopt a "better set of priorities," by which he doesn't mean science and stuff, but rather just sending a dude to Mars. Hooray Mars! McCain says he was inspired as a child by reading The Martian Chronicles, a book that tells the story of how humans exterminate native Martians and colonize their planet until Earth descends into nuclear war and everyone goes back to die. He probably doesn't remember any of those details, as he read the book 58 years ago. [AFP]

Vladimir Nabokov's son, Dmitri, caused a big ol' sensation when he decided to publish his father's unfinished final novel, The Original of Laura, rather than burn the manuscript, like his dad had asked him to on his deathbed. But Dmitri now says that Nabokov's dying wish was mostly just a lot of huffing and puffing from a sick old man.

Reclusive cult novelist J.D. Salinger hated fun. In a 1981 letter to his then-ladyfriend, he wrote: "I got hooked into seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark, which might be excused for its unwitty, unfunny awful socko-ness if it had been put together by Harvard Lampoon seniors." Jeez, J.D.. Not since Pynchon trashed Return of the Jedi in Vineland have we been so shocked by a reclusive novelist's distaste for classic '80s blockbusters. [Sly Oyster]

Book publicist/author Sloane Crosley is so magically delicious that she even brightened the painful Sunday Styles feature on N+1 editor and Emily Gould-dater Keith Gessen in today's Times. "At the football game, he admitted to monitoring his novel's Amazon.com sales obsessively. And he lamented the fact that more visitors to his novel's Amazon page chose to buy Sloane Crosley's essay collection, 'I Was Told There'd Be Cake,' than his book." But to get to that, I had to come face-to-face with one particularly offensive nugget.

Ernest Hemingway was a great writer, maybe the greatest writer of the last century-well who the hell did you think it was?-and he was an enormous bitch. And he was at his bitchiest best after he blew his brains out. First there was his posthumously published A Moveable Feast, in which he made famously made fun of Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's penis. Ever since, his biographers have churned out volumes about his life, his technique, and his mean streak. Now, A.E. Hotchner, who's been dining out on Hemingway for a lifetime, is coming out with The Good Life According to Hemingway, in which he recalls how much the Old Man hated Hollywood.

How I Met Your Mother nice guy Josh Radnor: "Her head was thrown back, the arms were raised above the body as if in the last moments of her life the girl was desperately defending herself. A deep gash four inches long was in her right cheek. Her neck was cut from the lobe of the left ear to the center of the throat and there was another gaping wound in the right side of the neck."

Legendary literature magazine The Paris Review is still publishing, you know, despite the death of founding editor George Plimpton and the requisite identity crisis that followed changes introduced by new editor Philip Gourevitch (color photos! shorter poems!). One thus far unmentioned change: while the magazine used to be put together entirely by a small crew of Plimpton friends, protégés, and well-groomed young acolytes (Yale-graduate interns and "editorial assistants" who'd use the magazine's famous parties to establish themselves in the literary scene, such as it was), now their staff is branching out a bit from that rarefied Ivy League lit-mag milieu. At least in the case of the notorious American Apparel Model Paris Review intern.

Writing is hard, lonely work. At least that's what all the great writers say, so that's the line to stick to at dinner parties. But when your Great American Novel is complete, there's loads of self-congratulations. And after that, praise from friends and family. But then strangers who went to better colleges than you, the critics, come in to eviscerate you in 600 words. How is a writer to a respond? Violence? Sex? Passive-aggressive letters?

Here's a video clip in which the interviewer had two very simple and specific question for Corrections author Jonathan Franzen, who famously got himself disinvited from the Oprah Book Club for being too ungrateful: Do you regret your run-in with Oprah? And would you be part of the book club if you could do it over again? To these simple questions, Franzen stares at the floor and says things like "What does regret mean?" and then remarks on the magnitude of dividing the world's opinion in two. Maybe this is the nuance necessary to be a literary titan; check out this quote of his at the time of the dispute: "To find myself being in the position of giving offense to someone who's a hero — not a hero of mine per se, but a hero in general — I feel bad in a public-spirited way." No, that's just mealy-mouthed. Yes or no question, Jonathan Franzen. The full clip, after the jump.

"All the Sad, Young Literary Men has too many men, none of whom is particularly sad, literary or, for that matter, interesting." That's The L Magazine's Jonny Diamond on N+1 editor Keith Gessen's first novel. The interesting bit is how Gawker, you dear commenters, and the scribblers of Magical Brooklynism fit into the equation. "Gessen has rightly and eloquently lamented the impoverishment of intellectual discourse in 21st-century America, particularly in a New York literary scene that prefers whimsy to gravitas, adolescence to adulthood and typography to teleology." (Yeah, Gessen and his privileged band of bores are the answer. Okay, I'll stop.) "And if lit journal-cum-publishing house McSweeney's has come to stand (albeit unfairly so) as shorthand for this particular style of whimsy-sotted, Brooklyn-born preciousness, then online media gossip Gawker has served as its natural enemy, employing snark and irony to interrupt the daydreams of thousands of Michel Gondrys and Miranda Julys." Sounds good. But it isn't!

Highbrow pink newspaper the New York Observer—home to Gawker employees past, and probably future—launched their fancy new book review section, "O.R.B." (guess what it stands for) with a review of Keith Gessen's book, a profile by Leon Neyfakh, and a Joshua David Stein review. Which means that nearly all the names on the front page of the section belong to people who have, at one time or another, dated former Gawker editor Emily Gould. There are only like ten people who write things in New York, you see. This is like a nightmare we used to have! Click to enlarge the section, with names helpfully circled by a stalky anonymous tipster.

From Publishers Marketplace: "Mother of pop-star Britney Spears and television actress Jamie-Lynn Spears's personal story of raising high-profile children while coming from a low-profile Louisiana community, to David Dunham and Joel Miller at Thomas Nelson, for publication in Spring 2008, by Chip MacGregor at MacGregor Literary." Thomas Nelson is a publisher of Bibles, inspirational (Christian) books, and occasionally books by pontificating celebrities like Bill Cosby, so Lynne Spears is a natural fit for their list.

Remember That Extra Half An Inch, Victoria Beckham's guide to making the most of your looks, which we celebrated book club style a few months ago? Back then, we bemoaned the fact that, like Top Shop jeans and meat pies, the book was only available in the UK. Luckily for people who feel the need to own a little piece of Vicky Beckham, though, Harper Entertainment has announced today that it will be publishing the book Stateside. Whee! A minor mystery, though: why didn't Penguin's U.S. arm publish the book, since it's a Penguin book in the U.K.? We asked a Penguin employee, who told us, "As fabulous as it was it was going to be, WAY too expensive to produce. Also, no one's going to buy it." And they say publishers never make good decisions!