Fun with referrals express: Searches from the ol' list and respective comments.

• w bush fool me once audio sept 2002

They must have been looking for the following "bushism" delivered at Nashville, Tenn., yesterday:

There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again.

Couldn't find an audio file, though.

• reactions to Securing Freedom's Triumph

There's mine, of course, but you can also read other opinions on Bush's September 11 NY Time's op-ed from Cannabis News, Around the Cragged Hill, PatrickRuffini.com and Metafilter.

• robot jones costumes

Shopping for Halloween already?

Society Page
by Lauren Sandler
September 23, 2002

The New York Times admits gay marriage—but changes little.

Yet another essay opining on the Time's decision to include gay couples in its "Weddings" pages, and one that agrees with Timothy Noah's assesment on their aristocratic nature.

To be listed in what some readers snidely call the "Mergers and Acquisitions" pages, a couple needs to pass through a screening process that functions as a class sieve. A written application requires the following information about the couple: "addresses, schooling, and occupations. Also any noteworthy awards that the couple may have received, as well as charitable activities and/or special achievements... We also require information on the residences and occupations of the couple's parents." According to Dalton Conley, a New York University sociologist, the application nearly mirrors a three-pronged test that academics use to determine class: education (not just how much you've had but where you got it), occupation, and... wealth. This, he explains, is measured by the inclusion of "charitable activities" in the Times' required fields. "Charitable activity is just... a polite way of seeing if you have enough accumulated assets, to see if you can give them away," he says. "It's not like they're asking if you do community service." And to Conley, the inclusion of information about the couple's parents' class is the icing on the cake. "We [sociologists] think of class as an intergenerational thing," he says.

But unlike Mr. Noah, Ms. Sandler doesn't call for the abolition of the nuptial pages. Instead, she'd like to keep them and see couples of diverse social extraction listed.

...No publication is ever comprehensive. Nor should it be. It's the job of editors and reporters to find good stories. Just as Times staffers hunt for interesting features across classes in the far more representative City section, they should be sniffing out great narratives, world-shrinking coincidences, tales of struggle and heartbreak and reconciliation, and epiphanies of connection and romance for Styles [the section carrying "Weddings"]. Like everywhere else in the paper, the emphasis should be on story, not Society, as the desk that crunches the weddings blurbs is named.

Last month, it was maximalist fiction, "fiction that sprawls, with narratives as complex as the page can bear, its story lines branching out across whole continents or eons (preferably both)," that was getting the boot from the NY Times. This month, it's a different kind of fiction:

...It's tough to gauge how much influence Tom Wolfe's famous philippic on the state of American fiction -- that it has become static and recondite, and is fatally disengaged with the real world -- has had on young writers. Wolfe has extolled the virtues of Dreiser and Zola and wondered why more of our languid, self-indulgent novelists don't whip out their notebooks and report on the carnival that surrounds them.

One novelist that has responded to Wolfe's call to arms is Tom Barbash with his The Last Good Chance, "an ambitious piece of work, a brash, big-strokes book that strenuously avoids all the dreaded pitfalls of the typical first novel." According to Jennifer Reese's review, "Barbash's book would, on the surface, seem to answer, almost point by point, Wolfe's prescription. It is outward-looking, large, naturalistic and stuffed to the gills with rococo American types."

And yet...

...From its people to its plot, this novel seems underdone. Barbash often summarizes when he should dramatize, as if he intended to go back and write in the juicy scenes later, to put flesh on his characters once he had the book's gargantuan structure hammered into place -- but then never got around to it. "The Last Good Chance" is like a set of preliminary sketches for a big, plummy novel.

Given this obsession with plot, either maximalist or reportorial, perhaps today's novelists need a refresher on those two other tenets of fiction, "mood" and "character."