Our readers aren’t selected for their timidity; they can be brutal in their assessments of submissions. When they decline a work, they’re able to put it into a category that describes why they’re recommending that it be declined. In addition to the already-described “Inappropriate for VQR” category, there are others, including “Bad” and “Terrible.” Since I often get a laugh out of reading through some of the notes that our beleaguered readers provide for these particularly unfortunate submissions, it seems worthwhile to share them. Here are some of my favorites:

Of course, our readers have written thousands of reviews that are in-depth, reasoned, considerate, and polite. But they aren’t funny, so you won’t read them here.

05/02 Update: Read our followup, a combination mea culpa and collection of glowing reviews by readers.

05/05 Update: Ted Genoways, our editor, offers his thoughts and an apology.

* Identifying details have been changed to protect the innocent. Except for Faulkner. He can handle it.

I may be more gourmand than gourmet, and more wino than wine connoisseur, but I can’t resist the sumptuous language of foodies. Tom Sietsema of the Washington Post writes of “teasing vinaigrettes,” “wine-sotted pears” (aka “boozy fruit”), “noble sauces,” and “molten cores of fontina cheese.” Great restaurant reviews take me for a ride on an emotional rollercoaster:

The cod and damp pastry were a little wimpy; their frame was fantastic, though, and the entree got a nice kick from lashings of lemony aioli.

The language of wine is not as sexy, but I still get a little thrill when I read about the “full, generous flavor of ripe berry fruits and aromatic herbs that is excellent with meat cooked over the flame.” Can I get that in a box? Or perhaps in my wine bra?

But forget the grandiose language of food. Thanks to my contacts in the design world, I have recently been introduced to the rich, poetic language of fonts. Mercury Display, a font made by Hoefler & Frere-Jones, is “smart, quick, and articulate.” It creates an “excited calm” on the page. Mercury Display is “spirited, subtle, and ferocious.” And it costs $199.

Which leads me to conclude that expense informs vocabulary. If your restaurant’s dinner entrees cost $60 each or your 1974 Cabernet Sauvignon sells for $500 or your average customer’s font shopping cart (yes, there is such a thing) is worth thousands of dollars, then your prose better keep up with your highfalutin prices. Please take note, writers of the 3-trillion-dollar federal budget. Adjectives like “reform-minded,” “trade-impacted,” and “countercyclical” don’t make me want to pay my taxes as much as “succulent,” “pillowy,” and “wine-sotted.”

After reading Scott Snyder’s “The 13th Egg” (subscription required), I found myself in a particularly good position to appreciate the U.S. Navy’s paintings of the Bikini Atoll atomic bomb tests, as described by Snyder. “Operations Crossroads” was staged in 1946 to determine the effects of a nuclear explosion on warships, and the military had Gunnery Sergeant Grant Powers, USMC, on hand to render his observations. (Two other soldiers contributed paintings, too, presumably on their own time.)

Over ninety surplus, captured, or damaged vessels were brought to the island’s lagoon to be subjected to a pair of nuclear detonations. Two 21 kiloton bombs were tested: Able, a low-altitude explosion, and Baker, a shallow-water explosion. With the men safely 11.5 miles away, a B-29 dropped Able. Five ships were sunk by the blast. Twenty four days later, Baker was detonated. Eight ships were sunk, and many were damaged. Though the radiation from Able dispersed safely within a day, Baker’s most serious effects lasted weeks. The process of cleaning or disposing of the radioactive ships lasted nearly a year.

Check out the dozens of beautiful paintings that captured this event. Especially nice is the view through protective goggles, the comic-style rendering of sailors watching the explosion, the destroyed USS Independence, and the USS Arkansas being tossed into the air by Baker. If we’re going to blow things up, we may as well be left with some nice paintings.

With the lumbering forth of National Poetry Month (the cruelest, Eliot noted), it’s probably inevitable that the question be resurrected: “Why don’t poems rhyme anymore“? John Lundberg, a VQR contributor, wrestles with this question anew, because George Gibson, president of the Queen’s English Society, recently told The Guardian, “For centuries word-things, called poems, have been made according to primary and defining craft principles of, first, measure, and second, alliteration and rhyme. Word-things not made according to those principles are not poems.”

So we’re going to need a new term to describe the “word-things”:

Beowulf
William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament
Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus
William Shakespeare’s The Tempest
Ben Jonson’s Volpone
John Milton’s Paradise Lost
Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno
William Wordsworth’s Prelude
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s best poems (“Frost at Midnight,” “The Lime-Tree Bower my Prison”)
William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses”

Up until now, I’d been under the apparently-mistaken impression that these were among the most important poems of the English language.

So, here it is: Pat Robertson’s reply to Bill Sizemore. Okay, not Pat Robertson—but Regent University Vice President and General Counsel Louis A. Isakoff, whose self-described job is “to provide a high quality legal product that helps create an atmosphere at Regent that enables students, faculty and staff to achieve all that God has planned for them.” Bill Sizemore reviewed the response and declined to engage in a back and forth.

So for those of you too busy (read: lazy—I’m lookin’ at you, bloggers!) to wade through the whole thing, I personally wanted to offer a couple of highlights to consider and some brief responses (my own, not Sizemore’s—and not composed with any input from him). I would provide a point-by-point analysis, but bloggers aren’t the only ones who are lazy. So…

First, Isakoff writes:

The first myth that must be dispelled is this notion about the “prosperity gospel.” The Bible clearly teaches giving and receiving. It says in Luke 6:38: “give and it shall be given to you, a good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over.” That is not Pat Robertson speaking. That is the Bible. And Pat does encourage giving, most importantly tithing to one’s local church. Yet to do all the humanitarian and ministry activities that CBN does throughout the world takes money, and CBN, like every charity, solicits funds. It takes a mere $20 per month to become a member of The 700 Club. But Mr. Sizemore neglects to say that Dr. Robertson has not taken a salary from CBN or Regent University for 20 years. In fact, Dr. Robertson is the largest single contributor to CBN. Why doesn’t Mr. Sizemore let his readers know that Dr. Robertson practices what he preaches? And by the way, I don’t know if Dr. Robertson is partial to Corvettes, as Mr. Sizemore writes, but Pat drives a Chevy Tahoe (and his other car is a Chrysler).

I wanted to address this, because it seems so fundamental to understanding Robertson. The suggestion that he doesn’t espouse the prosperity gospel just doesn’t make sense to me. On Robertson’s own website, you can read him explaining: “If you just, number one, have a budget where you don’t overspend. Number two, you begin to give unto the Lord substantially. And number three, you begin a certain saving program where money works for you and just let it grow and do its thing. You will be astounded at what will happen in 10, 15 to 20 years. People will say, ‘How did you get so much money?’ ‘Well, it was easy because I followed the laws of God.’” That’s not me talking; that’s Pat Robertson. I do have to concede, however: staying within your budget and investing wisely sounds like a good way to make money, no matter what else you do.

Oh, and about the Corvette. Multiple news reports describe Robertson behind the wheel of a black Corvette—and one even quotes a CBN employee joking that Robertson drives the car so fast that he takes corners “almost on two wheels.” If he’s driving a Tahoe now, I would recommend taking it easy on the curves. Those things have rollover problems.

Second, while we’re speaking of road hazards, Mr. Isakoff goes on to invoke the name of the company that gave you the largest tire recall in history. Isakoff says:

Mr. Sizemore talks about Freedom Gold’s activities in Liberia. He does not tell the reader that Freedom Gold was represented in Liberia by a Harvard-educated Liberian attorney, an attorney who also represented Firestone Tire and Rubber. He doesn’t tell the readers that a variety of US companies like Firestone operated in Liberia during the same time frame for which he criticizes Dr. Robertson. Why does Mr. Sizemore link Dr. Robertson to the brutal regime of Charles Taylor and why doesn’t he make the same link for companies like Firestone?

This struck me as an especially strange line of defense, because, in point of fact, Firestone has been the subject of lawsuits and ongoing criticism from human rights groups for the use of child labor and “modern-day slavery” on their rubber plantations in Liberia. For a heartbreakingly intimate portrait of this, read Zadie Smith’s two-part report from Liberia (here and here), published in The Observer last year. Our article, of course, was about Robertson, not Firestone—and that’s why we didn’t discuss Firestone—but I sure wouldn’t use Firestone’s track record in Liberia to defend my own.

And, lest I forget, Chris Roslan, Robertson’s spokesman, has asked me to correct my earlier statement that “Dera, Roslan, & Campion also represents Alice Cooper and the Institute for Human Origins, the group that discovered the remains of the early human ‘Lucy.’” He says that “is no longer correct. It has probably been at least a decade since we worked with those folks.” We regret the error and look forward to the launch of DRC’s new website—when, presumably, they will post a new client list.

Students leave the convocation at Cassell Coliseum.

One year ago now came the news that two students had been shot at Virginia Tech, the school from which I’d graduated two years previous. The news was bad, but it was within the scope of comprehension — William Morva had committed a similar act prior August. A couple of hours later, the bright red “Breaking News” banner at the top of CNN’s website reported the number as 20. This was a gaffe they’ll regret, I thought, adding a zero like that. Then ABC reported 22. Pictures of students escaping from Norris Hall began to appear. The death toll climbed, seemingly without potential limit. Reporters started to call me. It’s real.

Facebook was the only reasonable means of communication. My friends took a head count of friends, who in turn gathered head counts from their friends, the missing chased down in a flurry of phone calls and text messages. Not all of the missing were found. Graduation had flung us to the four corners of the earth, and we mourned by updating our profile pictures, grieved via 60-character status updates and came together by joining groups like “VT United” and “Always Remember Virginia Tech.” But I needed something more real.

Ted Genoways and I left for Blacksburg first thing in the morning, the 158 mile drive soothing in its familiarity. Camera in hand, I was frustrated at the photos that I was getting of the press-weary students. These people don’t look particularly sad. They’re not crying. Some are even smiling. They’re just people walking. If these people won’t look sad, then they’re not useful to me. We watched the convocation on TV, while sitting in the student center. Others in attendance busy themselves by snipping off short lengths of black ribbon from a spool, twisting them, and fastening them at their intersection. Each completed ribbon was tossed into a cardboard box, awaiting distribution. Candlelight vigils and ribbon campaigns don’t happen on their own — somebody has to buy the candles and make the ribbons. Grief finds its form.

The current issue of VQR includes a poem that’s fitting to highlight on this day. Among the 32 people killed was Jamie Bishop. A teacher of German, photographer, designer and husband, Bishop died while leading his Elementary German class. His father, two-time Nebula Award-winning author Michael Bishop, contributed “Jamie’s Hair” to VQR:

In my quest to reach Literary Blogging Greatness (i.e. over 300 page views per day), I have recently become frustrated by the effort involved. Specifically, I am forced to stay on top of the news. This means surfing the internet over my breakfast cereal, which requires a lot of focus and coordination. But it seems we literary bloggers all visit the same websites. So how do I keep my content fresh? How do I avoid duplicating the wit and wisdom of Maud Newton and Bookslut? How do I blog the latest literary news before they do? (I’m certainly not going to wake up before 9 AM.) How do I keep myself from stealing hot content from other sites and pawning it off as my own? On a daily basis I read everything from the big boys (the New York Times) to the grasshoppers, and I still don’t land exclusives. I’m always a few nanoseconds (or months) behind with the lit news.

That’s why I’ve decided to blog only about books and authors of the future. Now no one can scoop me. Just try to keep up, lit bloggers of the present, while I tell you about the noir thriller that Philip Roth’s brain will write telepathically from a cryogenic chamber in 2080. Seethe with jealousy when I quote the first chapter of Zerba von Zerba’s turn of the third millenium opus, Mars According to Gorp. Rage when I review the Summer 2008 movie version of my debut novel (I, coincidentally, am the star).

Or just read some regurgitated links:

1) Suddenly (six months ago?) Amazon.com has a literary blog, and this week (last week?) it features the first page of Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz’s next novel.

What I see. Usually just the f-ckedup hide of the truck.

2) Oh, and Junot Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

3) Man writes 200,000 books. Somewhere, a robot’s head explodes.

And [preternaturally prolific writer Philip Parker] is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new algorithms. “I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”

Wait, this sounds like one of those New York Times “pretend” stories.

4) Michael Chabon wrote a screenplay for Spider-Man 2? And “Spider-Man” is hyphenated? Is it really possible that I’ve never typed “Spider-Man” before?

5) I’m dying to read The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by journalist Steve Coll, and NOT just because the book describes how Osama’s brother used to show Osama pictures of his butt after hemorrhoid surgery.

6) I’m sorry to hear that Martin Amis’s new book of essays is allegedly preening, pretentious, and narcissistic.

7) Johannes Gutenberg invented a printing press.

8) I love the “Early Coverage of the Web” feature on Mental Floss, in which the editors cull hilariously outdated articles from the New York Times (how far up the New York Times’s a** am I today?). If only the Times had Future Bloggers like myself back in 1980:

What the two well-dressed strangers first noticed about each other was that they were both possessors of the newest status symbol around town: the Walkman, a portable stereo unit (priced in most stores at $200), consisting of an ultra-light headphone set plugged into a cassette player that weighs in at less than 14 ounces, batteries included. “It’s just like Mercedes-Benz owners honking when they pass each other on the road,” explained Mr. Lansing, whose cassette hung from his Gucci belt.

Spraygraphic has an interview with photographer and illustrator Paola de Grenet. Paola’s photographs of the residents of Aicuña have proven to be some of the most popular works ever featured in VQR, if website traffic is any indicator. Dozens of the Italian’s photographs can be found on her website. (”Life as a Transsexual” and “Portraits Gallery” are especially interesting.)

VQR has a Facebook group now, which you can join to make sure your friends know that you’re cooler than them, because you read VQR. (”Me ‘n’ VQR, we’re like this.”) Facebook being Facebook, you can also keep up with every twitch and grunt of VQR. And we will own you in Scrabulous.

We’ve got a newsletter, too. It’s not a daily or a weekly deal (I wouldn’t have time to write it and you wouldn’t have time to read it), but something closer to once a month. It’ll tell you what new features we’ve got on the website, what we’ve got planned for upcoming issues, about events around the country involving our contributors, and general news about the publication. (A couple of samples will give you an idea of what you’re in for: 1, 2.) If you’re interested, you can sign up right here:

If all of this seems like a little much for you, then you could just sign up to hear from us quarterly. Call me crazy, but I think that might just catch on.

Saturday’s Washington Post brought the news of the death of writer, archivist and adventurer Leonard Rapport, who turns out to have been a contributor to VQR back in 1936. The 95-year-old Army veteran was one of the great scholars of 18th century documents about the founding of the United States, an employee of the National Archives, and an author of fiction and nonfiction alike. After his 1984 retirement he set about hiking. He completed the bulk of the southern third of the Appalachian Trail (Tennessee/North Carolina through Virginia) and walked coast to coast across the British Isles. He was 80 years old when he walked across Ireland.

“The Night the Bucket Fell” appeared in the Summer 1936 issue, where it was published alongside work by Robert Penn Warren, Charles A. Beard, economist Broadus Mitchell, Herbert Read, R.P. Blackmur and John Peale Bishop. It was just one year after his graduation from the University of North Carolina.

To mark the occasion of Leonard Rapport’s death, we’ve made public “The Night the Bucket Fell,” his story of a crew working on one of the many enormous concrete dams constructed by the United States Reclamation Service during the Depression. In the mold of Mr. Rapport, this story has only become hardier with time.