We here at blogosaurusstampede are eager to share the Eat Pray Love movie times, so you can learn how best to identify them in your area, and thereby, avoid them easily. We do this for duty… and humanity! Also, for the thrill of being able to make Three Stooges references. That’s a win-win, that is.

Eat Pray Love is of course you heard by now, the newest movie starring Julia Roberts, based on the book by Elizabeth Gilbert. Now you know the two people most to blame for all this.

The book, as ardent fans already know, involves a woman who crashes after a divorce, convinces a magazine to pay her to travel to Italy, where she spends her time eating and complaining about her empty life, and then on to Bali, where she finds the truth of it all in a monastery where, honestly, it sounds like she just annoyed the monks a lot. Meanwhile, she did all this grueling, self-examining pilgrimage under-written by the expense account the magazine provided.

I say again

Hey, the American Novel is dead, and wow, do I feel bad. I didn’t even know it was sick. I could’ve visited it in the hospital and brought it some flowers, but now it’s too late. The cover is closed, the words are dead, and the American Novel is all over, but for the digging of its grave.

Or so maintains controversial Lee Siegel of the New York Observer, who says that the age of Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway is long gone and passed. Sidenote: someone has told him that both those guys died some time ago, right? Ok, just checking…

Siegel struck out in his piece against the dearth of good writers, a public that doesn’t read anymore, and probably TV and the interweb as well. I don’t know for sure, I didn’t read it, but my guess is that generally when stuffy people decry modern culture they hit all the easy, usual suspects first.

Apparently, Siegel writes, the only good story-tellers today are doing non-fiction. his tirade was prompted by the publication of the “20 Under 40″ list of new writers that appears annually in the New Yorker. Siegel has a lot of words for that list, and all of them were unpleasant. he claims the list is merely advertising for the New Yorker’s own benefit and glory. He is also pretty miffed that British critic James Wood is having a good year. Apparently, the very fact that his former colleague (the two used to work together at the New Republic. Maybe Wood took his stapler or something…) is reviewing books is the nature of the problem: the critique is given more weight than what is being critiqued, maintains Siegel.

Other maintain that it isn’t that the American Novel is dead, it’s that the literary scene is over-stuffed with ivory-tower critics like Siegel that use their positions to take grudge-born pot-shots at anyone they don’t like, which is to say, anyone who isn’t already them. I bet he hates Stephen King too. Again