Careful What You Hunt, Lest You Catch

She Still Had Her Bad Days, No Question, When The Black Dog Of Depression Sniffed Her Out And Settled Its Crushing Weight On Her Chest And Breathed Its Pungent Dog Breath In Her Face. On Those Days She Called In Sick To The It Shop Where, Most Days, She Untangled Tangled Networks For A Song. On Those Days She Pulled Down The Shades And Ran Dark For Twelve Or Twenty-four Or Seventy-two Hours, However Long It Took For The Black Dog To Go On Home To Its Dark Master.

I'm Now Much More Excited About Genre Distinctions. What I Still See Breaking Down Are More The Hierarchical Arrangements Of Genres. That Is, "there Is Literary Fiction, And Then There Are Lesser Genres." I'm Much More Clear On The Idea That Literary Fiction Is Itself A Genre. It Is Not Above Other Genres. It Is Down There In The Muck With All The Other Genres, And It's Doing The Wonderful Things That It Does, But To Give It A Y-axis, To Make It High And Low, Just Seems Absurd. I Stand By That.

It's An Engrossing Look At The Way The Flow Of Information Shapes History-as Well As A Rare Glimpse Into The Soul Of The Hardcore Geek

In Our World No One Ever Knows What To Do, And Everyone's Just As Clueless And Full Of Crap As Everyone Else, And You Have To Figure It All Out By Yourself. And Even After You've Figured It Out And Done It, You'll Never Know Whether You Were Right Or Wrong. You'll Never Know If You Put The Ring In The Right Volcano, Or If Things Might Have Gone Better If You Hadn't.

The Idea Of Some Kind Of Objectively Constant, Universal Literary Value Is Seductive. It Feels Real. It Feels Like A Stone Cold Fact That In Search Of Lost Time, By Marcel Proust, Is Better Than A Shore Thing, By Snooki. And It May Be; Snooki Definitely Has More One-star Reviews On Amazon. But If Literary Value Is Real, No One Seems To Be Able To Locate It Or Define It Very Well. We're Increasingly Adrift In A Grey Void Of Aesthetic Relativism.