At the reverse cowgirl's blog, Susannah displays her wicked prose on a post on MoSex, NYC's Museum of Sex.

...maybe the big boners sported by the attendees waiting in line on opening day will spiritually counter the city's phallic-lack at Ground Zero.

I bow before thee, o mighty sex imagery bard.

PS: Thanks for the reverse cowblog.

No, I haven't begun reading yet B. R. Myer's "A Reader's Manifesto," but my call for comments from those who have generated very interesting responses which deserve to be shared here.

I've tried reading DeLillo and Pynchon and I find their books make excellent fireplace kindling. On the other hand, I very much like John Barth and he occasionally gets tossed in with the "literary boys" under discussion. While I allow that different readers have different tastes, it is refreshing to hear a general demand for a return to the kind of literature that can take its place in the Western canon.

I've read the earlier Atlantic piece and most of the commentary on it, as this story interests me greatly, but I'm not certain whether more can be (or need be) said. Postmodern writing collapses under its own weight and the only plausible rationale for engaging it is the bragging rights one obtains in being able to say one has managed to slog through a 900-page hodge-podge of allusions, aliterations, and anfractuous turns of phrase. But there is a lot of good writing out there, as a day spent in a book store will attest.

The Raven • 8/26/02; 11:08:28 PM

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DeLillo can actually be pretty readable. White Noise was reasonably accessible, though I never could quite figure out where Mao II was going. Pynchon...I love him. He's brilliant. And he's absolutely unreadable. It's a shame. The same bug infested quality science fiction in the '70s (see Delaney's brilliant but obfuscated Dhalgren, or damn near anything Norman Spinrad wrote in that decade) but lately there's been a middle ground. Postmodern science fiction novels that actually read well - see Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.

Andrew Bayer • 8/29/02; 6:43:24 AM

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The only postmodern novels I've read are D. F. Wallace's "The Broom of the System" and Barth's "Chimera." Both gave me a headache trying to finish them, but two completely different things happened once I dragged myself through the last page: I loved Barth's book. Wallace's left me cold. Barth actually tells a story (well, three actually). Wallace's story shines for its abscence.

As far as I understand postmodernism (either experimenting with traditional structure, taking genre literature to task in an ironic manner or meta-fiction), I love the idea of it. But from the current critical backlash (see also Peck's review of Moody's The Black Veil and most of James Wood's reviews) I get the feeling that idea has been abused by its current practitioners.

Charly Z • 8/29/02; 7:43:16 AM

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I thought Stephenson's Cryptonomicon was an unwieldy mess. The book was over a thousand pages but should have been pared down to about 500. When Stephenson devoted many pages to his furniture allocating algorithm I knew he had lost it. I followed the debate in The Atlantic and it seemed to boil down to personal preference, one style not "better" than the other. I don't "get" certain authors like DeLillo, especially his piece in the New Yorker about 9/11, which seemed to say nothing. The editors of the New Yorker obviously thought differently.

Cheers, Michael

Michael Watson • 9/1/02; 9:53:21 PM

And since I'm a shameless self promoter, I've also uploaded my review of DFW's The Broom of the System as it appeared in Amazon: raw and even more incomprehensible than the book reviewed. What can I say, I couldn't shake its rhythms off.

Xian explained some days ago how Scott Rosenberg has become blog #1 at Salon. I'm currently struggling on pole position #22, but taking a look at my referral list today, I've learned some lessons on how to keep traffic coming my way:

1. Update early
   Today I did my previous update around 5:00AM (server time), and received 11 hits from Salon blogs' main page. And I hadn't posted again until now. I estimate the sweet spot to get the earliest update in (unless I could keep updating during the day) must be sometime between when the short hand points at 5 and when it points at 7.

2. Link to your log from a hot thread
   Actually, two threads this time. If what you can put as a comment to someone else's log entry can become a post in your own, then don't simply make the entry to your log: go back to that other log and add a link to your new entry as a comment. If my explanation was too convoluted, just take a look at the comments to el Señor Farr's syndication jones (9 hits) and Scott Rosenberg's post to the same issue (7 hits).

And that's about it, unless you want to cram your blog with words frenquently used on Google searches. How many posts can you stomach to upload with the word "fuck?"

The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.
- P. J. O'Rourke