Literary feud! Yippee!

I've seen links all over the place -- here, here and here, for example -- to a literary feud that's taking place between a writer named Steve Almond and a writer named Mark Sarvas. At first glance, I didn't think I'd heard of either of these guys, but it turns out that I've actually had Mark Sarvas's blog, The Elegant Variation, on my blogroll and didn't realize it (he signs his posts "TEV", so I didn't realize who he was), and that I reviewed one of Almond's books, Candy Freak, in this space a year ago. (I liked the book.)

Anyway, for those who haven't discovered this whole business yet, it seems that Sarvas has long maintained on his blog a hatred of Almond's writing; then, it turned out that both were to be in attendance at the same LA literary event, and Almond wrote a piece at Salon describing the encounter, to which Sarvas pithily responded on his blog. It spun out into Literary Blogistan from there. Some folks are taking sides in the whole thing, but I just find it kind of funny -- a feud between a blogger and a guy who admits, in the book of his that I read, to having a case of Kit Kat Dark's hidden somewhere. It kind of reminds me of those episodes of Star Trek when the Enterprise would happen upon a planet where two parts of the population were clutched in a long, epic, mortal war with each other, and both sides acted as though the war were the Grand Struggle Of Good Versus Evil For All Time, and Kirk/Picard/Sisko/Janeway were always like, "Yeah, and you guys are who, again?"

(Addendum for Sara Donati: a while back I found some Kit Kat Dark's packaged as miniatures, in a bag of miniature Kit Kat's. There were regular Kit Kats and white chocolate Kit Kats along with the dark ones, and I swear the dark ones were the lease numerous of the three. Not an ideal situation -- "ideal" would be, putting the full-size Kit Kat Darks right back on the damn market -- but OK in a pinch. Also, miniature Kit Kat Mint's were available last year around Christmastime, so hopefully this year will see a repeat of this.)