At Tingle Alley we are desperately typing on a top-secret project that will be revealed later this week. Actually, I can’t remember if this particular project is top-secret but I’m erring on the side of caution. (My poker face is legend at the Kremlin.)

But I had to break in with this hilarious rant from Jonathan Yardley. Hilarious, that is, as I’m not the one being eviscerated — Bret Lott is, for his writing memoir Before We Get Started.

Here is just a piece — a piece! — of the rant:

[Lott] makes the obligatory gestures to modesty (“my motto,” he says, is “I know nothing,” which he repeats so often you know he doesn’t mean a syllable of it) and to the obvious truth that “inspiration” is “unteachable,” but at core this “writer’s life” is the testament of one who has lockstepped his way through the academy and is nothing more than a die-stamped product of its assembly line. He mentions in what clearly is intended to be a mocking way the “rarified, even incestuous, world of a college campus,” yet that world is precisely where he has spent almost all his days since he forsook the fizz of RC Cola for the elixir of literature. He hangs around with all the other campus writers — the pages of Before We Get Started are littered with their names: Jayne Ann Phillips, Tobias Wolff, Charles Baxter et al. — and worships at the shrine of the late Raymond Carver, though he tells us in all smarmy modesty that “I was never a member of that hallowed group of people who knew him closely enough to call him Ray.”

Any claims Lott makes of being a serious, “literary” writer are thoroughly exploded by his penultimate chapter, “The Most Fragile Book,” in which he tells how his writing teacher at the community college, “a wild-haired, Harley-riding poet/professor from Cal State,” told his students to read “a book I’d never heard of,” The Catcher in the Rye. Talk about epiphanies! The blinding light that greeted Saint Paul on the road to Damascus was a dim bulb compared to the firestorm that J.D. Salinger’s stupendously overrated little novel ignited in the fluttering heart of young Bret Lott. It was “this amazing book, this totally true book, this genuinely real book,” the book “was about me, the me that’d been drifting what felt so many years,” and he reread it “four or five more times during the next several years, holding it dearer each time, admiring it more the deeper I went into my own life as a writer.”

Yardley followers will recall that the critic was similarly subdued and measured on the topic of Catcher in the Rye last fall. Citing Catcher in front of Yardley? Like waving a red flag in front of a bull.