"Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires." -- James Joyce, "Ulysses"

I'm a 29-year-old white man who likes all forms of female beauty, from willowy sylphs to zaftig goddesses with plump rumps and thick thighs. Regardless of size, I like supple, womanly women. Is this really a "fetish," and am I guilty of forcing women to commit "slow suicide" to please me?

Why are goddesses curvy, and not scrawny-haunched, hard-body harridans? Surely there must be a reason, but maybe the entire anthropological history of humankind is wrong and Debra Dickerson is right.

My wife has proportions identical to Buffy the Body, whose shape is no less healthy than a ripe piece of fruit. That's just the way she is, no matter what she eats or how she exercises. I adore my wife's body -- it makes me happy, and I like to make her happy with my adoration. So, what's unhealthier: feeling adored and finding pleasure in the body you were blessed with, or feeling ashamed and overshadowed by a standard of beauty that is not natural for you (or, perhaps, for any woman)?

Sometimes treating a woman like a goddess elevates a man's basest desires. What could be more positive than that? Why reduce it to a fetish?

As a liberal who detests, despises, *loathes* G. W. Bush and his empire, I have to say that I don't believe the U. of Florida Tasering has anything to do with the admittedly unprecedented suppression of free speech of the Bush Jr. Years.

The student, TheANDREWMEYER, is a loudmouthed frat boy who bullied his way to the microphone, stifling the free speech of another student speaker in the midst of a legitimate question (Meyer's questions sounded like he'd start asking Kerry about Baba Booey and Howard Stern's penis at any second), then incited a bluster of showy physical resistance to the campus police while yelling, "Is anybody watching this?!" He repeatedly ignored the verbal warnings from the campus cops in favor of more attention-grabbing behavior, raising his arms like he was on the losing end of a parking-lot scuffle with the school quarterback, and generally acting like an obnoxious ass. This is a persecuted dissident?

What about a hyper eight-year-old who missed his Ritalin dose, starts misbehaving in a grocery store, then, when his mother tries to take him by the arm and give him a talking-to, bawls, "You're killing me! Child abuse! Call 9-1-1!"? Is he a persecuted dissident whose free speech is being censored by the Bush administration?

Give me a break, please. This is not the Kent State massacre. Real student protesters, real political dissidents with something meaningful to say, are ashamed of this dumbass kid who probably Tasered himself in the crotch as part of his fraternity initiation.

is this correction: It's Froot Loops, not "fruit." In an effort to eat more healthily, myself, I have added more froot and cheez to my diet.

For several years, I've been hoping for Roth to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but this book may be the kink in a chain of major near-masterworks, if you don't count between-novel novellas like "The Dying Animal" and "Everyman."

With this book, I hope that in addition to the end of Zuckerman, it also marks the end of the priapically-preoccupied-but-impotent-aging-writer-loses-all-he-loves-and-fears-losing-himself-in-the-face-of-his-own-mortality-etc. theme that Roth has so exemplarily explored, but which now feels somewhat wearisome -- although I appreciate how Roth's books, over the decades, have been reflective of his own standing as a young literary upstart, through to his current ranking in the venerable boys' club of veteran American literary novelists.

Also wearisome are Roth's recent rebukes of readers who associate his characters with real-life counterparts, including Roth, himself. I understand the notion that, if a writer's autobiographical details are to be manipulated, the selfsame writer should have the foremost prerogative to manipulate that information to his/her own end, as Roth has done to great effect ("Operation Shylock") or resulting in self-absorbed tedium ("Deception"). However, to say that, for example, E. I. Lonoff is "not Bernard Malamud or anybody related to" that writer, as Roth recently complained, is a bit disingenuous. Those fictional characters in Roth's books named Philip Roth are not Philip Roth or anybody related to Philip Roth, and anybody who thinks otherwise is an idiot who is missing the entire point of the books, right?

In spite of his faults, America needs a writer like Philip Roth, especially in the midst of the Bush Empire. Few writers are as able as Roth at expressing outrage (the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal alluded to in "The Human Stain" and even the welcome Bush-bashing in "Exit Ghost" being a couple of recent examples), and I hope he turns his talents to that direction in future books (he might get that Nobel, after all).

Al Gore may have won the Nobel Peace Prize, he may have won an Academy Award, he may have even actually won the presidential election in 2000, but George W. Bush won a wild-hog-catching contest at a county fair when he was nineteen, and he won numerous drinking games in college. Nobel Peace Prize, Shmobel Smeace Shmize.

I remember catching "Fargo" on TMC years ago, and being greatly amused that curse words were all overdubbed with the word fruitful. Love those Coens.