The state of the short story is pretty deftly summed up by The Millions

Think about the numbers: 350 fiction programs. 3,000 new graduates per year. Each taking let's say four workshops, each of which requires three submissions. That's 36,000 short stories for each graduating class of writers, who have worked to convince each other that the top 1% of short stories - those that come closest to generating workshop consensus - may be published in a literary magazine. A literary magazine whose readership may largely comprise writers looking for a place to publish their short stories. "Guarded self-consciousness" starts to look like a mathematical inevitability. Perversely, then, the greatest danger to the short story may be the very institution that's sustaining it.

Speaking of endangered art forms, poetry may soon become primarily a web-only art form.

Dave Sim is in the news again because of his forthcoming comics Glamourpuss and Judenhass. If your not familiar with his work, this is a pretty good introduction to both it and the reactions to his new work floating around the net, though it mistakes his misogynist fundamentalism for a "philosophy". To sum up: Dave Sim is brilliant but completely insane.

Why is James Wood coronated as the only thing going in literary criticism?

Everybody's linking to it, so I will too: Nicholson Baker's fun discussion of his time editing Wikipedia.

Also, everybody's linking to Colson Whitehead telling everyone to get over writing in Brooklyn, already.

This sounds like a good book (I'm a sucker for Tesla, the original mad inventor)

Michael Chabon deconstructs superhero tights. (I still prefer Warren Ellis' term for superheroes - "Underwear Perverts")

BoingBoing suggests that all you need to make a living as an artist is "100 true fans"

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day's wages per year in support of what you do. That "one-day-wage" is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that. Let's peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

Of course, this assumes that you put out $100 dollars worth of stuff every year, which seems like a stretch for things other than an actively touring musician. If a novelist, for instance, puts out one book a year, that's usually pretty prolific, and novelists don't generally have t-shirts and other merchandise for fans to lap up. Or conversely, a painter might sell paintings worth thousands of dollars, but have far fewer than 1000 people willing to buy them year after year.

Stephen Page in the Guardian argues that the Internet will save serious literature.

Did Allain Robbe-Grillet cause a backlash of archaism?

And lastly, a brilliant deconstruction of the history of Science Fiction (via Warren Ellis)

SF critics often want to make grand claims for the genre. For Scholes and Rabkin, it "create[s] a modern conscience for the human race" (vii); it fits, indeed supersedes, the great humanistic claims for literature as a whole. At the same time, and on the same page, they are equally aware that SF is constituted out of "trivial, ephemeral works of ‘popular’ fiction which is barely literate, let alone literary." Most of the subsequent work of their text is dedicated to affirming these two contradictory statements by separating them out, divorcing them from each other as distinct and "pure" sites within SF. An internal border is constituted whereby, on the one hand, the "grand claim" is asserted and so entry to Literature can be gained, whilst on the other, SF can, in alliance with the categories of the legitimate, be condemned.