My tux was all musty and I had some good episodes of Will and Grace on FauxVo waiting for me at home, so I didn't attend the National Book Awards last night. But all my spies were there, and here's our official report:

8:00 p.m. Wow, an actual red carpet at the Marriot Marquis. They must have borrowed it from another hotel.
8:20 p.m. Steve Martin, host for the last three years, is too busy peddling his new book to peddle his new book here. Dozens of people stream out "just for a cigarette" and never return.
8:35 p.m. The secret is out: the publishing industry is full of some truly misshapen people.
8:49 p.m. They're giving out the technical achievement awards. Some Swedish guy wins for Best Innovation in Fontography. A groan of angst rides over the crowd like a beach ball.
9:20 p.m. Stephen King is awarded a Lifetime Achievement award. Grim faces everywhere. Susan Sontag makes "gag me" gesture at Jonathan Safran Foer.
9:21 p.m. I'm totally kidding: Foer would never come to one of these things.
9:55 p.m. Jacqueline Woodson, finalist in young people's literature, is getting cranky, carving initials on the table with her buck knife.
10:10 p.m. The press, packed into the balcony, is drunk on the contents of their book flasks. Joe Hagan spies Michiko Kakutani down on the main floor, begins manufacturing spit balls. The first shot pegs Roger Straus's omnipresent secretary in the neck. Hagan evicted.
10:24 p.m. Is Christopher Caldwell's date an actual hooker?
10:51 p.m. I totally saw Martin Peretz pick his nose and flick it at the Boston Globe's David Mehegan. Oh Christ. Shirley "Dukes of" Hazzard wins the big award.
11:34 p.m. Outside the hotel, fatcat publishing executives are lighting up... big manly pipes with cherry-scented tobacco. It's like a puffy-faced liberal version of an NRA convention out here. Across the street, the ULA mans (and I use the gendered verb intentionally) their picket line in the crazy downpour. They shout: "1, 2, 3, 4: Book Lovers Are Not Whores!" and "5, 6, 7, 8: We Think Noncommercial Books Are Great!" Everyone points and laughs.