Q: Why does everybody say you had a part in it?

A: Because he once helped me out of a taxi in London and he hit his head on the door. And I didn't kill him! He died soon, and I don't know if it was the head bump. But it wasn't because of me!

Then Grene bursts out laughing. It's a classic Believer moment -- highbrow but delightfully bizarre.

Another great Believer moment comes in a letter to the editor from novelist Susan Straight, who was a judge of last year's National Book Awards. Straight is irked, peeved, practicallylividthat critics of the award for fiction have insinuated that she was intimidated by the other judges. "My ex-husband is six-four, 304 pounds and looks like Shaquille O'Neal, but with hair. He's a correctional officer with eleven guns. He doesn't intimidate me in the slightest."

I don't know about you but I feel better about contemporary American literature knowing that at least one working novelist is married to a 304-pound prison guard with 11 guns. I doubt the French have anything that can compare.

The March Believer has long, earnest essays on the Abu Ghraib photos and the recent spate of novels, memoirs and films dealing with the Weathermen and other 1970s American terrorists. They are fine pieces but I've read more than enough on those subjects. I preferred the shorter, less serious pieces -- like this month's animal profile, which is about the auk, a small seabird considered a delicacy in Greenland:

"They stuff the birds into a seal's stomach and then bury the stomach for a year. The little auks turn the consistency of cottage cheese. The Greenlanders eat this spongiform delicacy -- known askiviak -- with great gusto, spitting out the feathers."

This is the kind of info you don't get from most literary mags, and it has turned me into a Believer believer.

Every sport needs its own bad boy and finally, at long last, competitive bass fishing has one. His name is Mike Iaconelli, winner of the 2003 Bassmaster Classic and many other tournaments, and he's the subject of an enlightening Field & Stream profile called "The Bass Punk."

Tattooed, loud and obnoxious, Iaconelli violates the unwritten code of bass-fishing chivalry, according to Bill Heavey, F&S's resident humorist, who writes:

"You thank Jesus, Momma and the Mann's Bait Co. when you win. You say that any one of the anglers out there today could be standing where you're standing but you just happened to get lucky today. If you're not truly embarrassed by all the attention, you should at least pretend you are.

"You also should be from the South, preferably the rural South. It doesn't hurt if you like country music and chewing tobacco. If you're a little overweight, well, that's okay, too. But the humility, that's the key thing."

Iaconelli not only violates all these rules, but he does it with brio. He's a buff rap fan from South Philadelphia and when he wins tournaments, which he does frequently, he starts break-dancing and hollering and motioning to the crowd that they're not cheering loud enough to suit him.

This behavior irks the hell out of bass purists, but Iaconelli has studied the recent history of American sports and he knows that the bad-boy routine leads to controversy, which leads to media coverage, which leads to money.

"Iaconelli is not like the kid in your seventh-grade class who just didn't get it that he had B.O. and kept pestering the girls anyway," Heavey concludes. "Rest assured, he knows exactly what he's doing."