The weekend round-up--this time with less lasso. Gimme back my bullets!

• Seattle's Only Newspaper gives you a few good reasons to check out the mysteries of Fred Vargas.
• Senator John McCain endorses Senator Barack Obama.
• I'm not John Cheever, and I'm an alcoholic.
• Have you ever wondered what the French literary scene was like circa 1940? Me neither, but I imagined someone reading this to me in a snobby French accent. That, coupled with the idea of actually reading the entire survey, made me very tired: "Leiris's book shows how little the Surrealists are beholden to workaday Freudian orthodoxy. It goes without saying that it is the positivist rudiments of the doctrine that trigger their protests; but since any serious critical effort is foreign to them, they end up reintroducing metaphysical concepts into Freudian doctrine. This brings them closer to Jung. It is Jung to whom Bachelard appeals in his most recent book, devoted to the forefather of Surrealism, Lautréamont. This book is instructive for many reasons. Before outlining the three main aspects, I will conjure up the figure of the psychoanalytic sniper, as embodied in Adrien Turel. I do not know if you are familiar with the famous explanation of the Divine Comedy, or more specifically of the Inferno, whose nine circles, according to Turel, represent the nine months that the embryo spends in the mother's womb. That will give you a basic idea of the atmosphere of Bachelard's studies. For all that, the argument from which the book begins is solidly established."