5 Reasons to Live

1. Elisabeth Hasselbeck, The Terror of The View
(ABC)
Last week, the inarticulate mouse of The View suddenly became the primary reason to watch the show. First, on Aug. 2, she went off on a gibbering tirade about the evil of the morning-after birth-control pill, to the point where Barbara Walters had to tell her to calm down. Two days later, she revealed the harsh mistress beneath her genial thoughtlessness by telling an anecdote about encountering a babysitter whom Hasselbeck felt was neglecting her young charges on a New York City street. She freely admitted to yelling at the young woman and read a description of her (she'd taken notes!) so that the girl would be identified and fired... and so, presumably, would scores of other babysitters who may have fit that description. Woe unto you should you be the luckless waitress, taxi driver, or other service employee who does not behave as Ms. Hasselbeck thinks you should. She seems like one of those people whose TV prominence has made them just arrogant enough to think they wield the power to get someone terminated. Dubious human; great TV.

2. OutKast, ''Idlewild Blue'' video
Watch it on YouTube
Andre — shirtless, strumming an acoustic guitar — plays funky blues at a Southern house party. The song is all gutbucket rhythm, his voice a snake curling around the melody. The house begins to fill up with water; pretty soon, he's holding the guitar above his head before he and the houseguests are submerged underwater. Yet the party goes on. Final image: the words ''Dedicated to all those tryin' to stay afloat.'' Exploitation of the Katrina tragedy? More like triumph of will and artistry over impossible circumstances. You bob your head, snap your fingers, and feel goosebumps on your arms.

3. T.C. Boyle, Talk Talk
(Viking)
Boyle, who comes on like an impious imp when he's out promoting books but really delivers the goods when he actually writes them, has a great commercial hook here — a deaf woman is the victim of identity theft by a guy who's so into his crimes, he barely knows his own identity anymore. Boyle understands why so many readers buy bestseller novels — not for fiction, but to learn facts — and he fills Talk Talk with meticulous details about how easy it is to snatch information from your life and have it turned against you. On that level, the book is genuinely scary, and you feel for Dana Hadler, the schoolteacher who's arrested for scam-crimes she didn't commit. But the literary novelist in Boyle won't permit him to pass off her victimizer as a creep: He's nearly as sympathetic. And like so many of Boyle's terrific short stories and deceptively loose novels, Talk Talk tightens up at the end like a noose around your neck.

4. Joshua Clover, The Totality for Kids
(University of California Press)
A sincere trickster, Clover writes poems with quick bursts of beautiful images (''So I went out into the nervous system of the air...'') and prose-poems that mix different conversational voices (''...Now I like to read magazines called TeleStar and Shock and post to my blog in what Teen People called the latest in mediated indifference. Sometimes I like to compose little poems and imagine you reading them...'') — combining romance, politics, literary theory, and humor. Who else would write a poem called ''What's American About American Poetry?'' and then translate it, across the facing page, into French?

5. The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman
(IFC, Fridays at 11 p.m.)
Comedy writer and former SNL cast member Laura Kightlinger plays the title character, a refreshingly unjaded screenwriter wannabe in L.A. The show traffics in the sort of ''isn't Hollywood hideous?'' humor that Curb Your Enthusiasm has definitively curdled, but Kightlinger's presence lifts the show to a buoyant level: No matter how mean-spirited the jokes (she scorns a director who turns out movies ''the way my cousins make fat kids''), Kightlinger makes you understand through Jackie that very often good people say naughty things, and that brains and good actions redeem a lot of superficial behavior.

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