Interview Roundup: Where It Will All End, Knows God!

• Nerve chats with Francesca Lia Block about the magical realism of her YA Weetzie Bat universe is dragged into the darker world of her adult fiction in Necklace of Kisses. "I don't think of any of my books as YA. I find the label limiting," she clarifies. "However, I was just at ALA, and I won that Margaret Edwards Award and because of that, I was around these really brilliant and interesting people who are in the field and I learned it's hard to get a YA book published now without controversy, whereas in the past, when I was published, it was the opposite. I think now you have to have the blowjobs or you're not going to get the contract."

• When Beth Dugan of Bookslut chats with Lisa Glatt, the author's husband, poet David Hernandez, pops in with the occasional additional insight into the difference between writing short- and long-form fiction and which of Glatt's stories people think are really about her, including "Waste," a.k.a "the pee story."

• Robert Birnbaum's latest long, long talk is with Camille Paglia, mostly about poetry, but he also gets her started on her crusade to save art from the avant-garde and the academics...and don't forget the Internet:

  "We are getting worse writing, worse art. Part of the reason for the much worse writing is that young people have so many other distractions in terms of their time--so many things to do, that reading books has just shriveled. They are assigned books, but few kids read books for pleasure. Too much else is going on. Now I'm a champion of the web... [b]ut the style of the web, not only the surfing skimming style that you learn--dash, dash--you absorb information not by reading whole sentences. It’s flash, flash, flash. Email, blog, everything is going fast, fast, fast. So the quality of language has obviously degenerated. It’s obvious."

  As proof of the declining standards in prose, Paglia suggests that Time today stinks in comparison to its early years, when it had "a kind of snarky, famous style that was created in the '20s and '30s, a smart style. But oh my God, it was beautifully written." Yes, that's right, it's nostalgia for the days when backwards ran sentences until reeled the mind.