I'm surprised by how defensive the first few -- presumably young, close to college age? -- posters were on this article. I found myself nodding along with most of what Jacoby had to say, and thought even Miller got a bit too defensive in the second half of her review. As someone who teaches freshman comp at a public university in the south, I can testify that there IS a lot of fundamental dogma masquerading as thought, and a great many students who would rather shut down discussion altogether than confront any issue in a light that doesn't conform to their beliefs. I've also encountered all of the attention-span difficulties that Jacoby notes, especially when it comes to getting a student to sit down with a text and do some good, old-fashioned critical reading.

And as for the person who mentioned linguistics and grammar norms -- granted that these things are ultimately quite fluid, but a basic grasp of sentence structure does not seem like too much to ask of college writers. You have to learn the rules before you can break them.

So, is the problem with our famously broken public school system, the lack of support we give to it in terms of tax dollars, or, as Jacoby implies, some kind of underlying attitude about education that keeps it trending downwards? I don't doubt that kids today are no less intelligent than their parents or parents' parents, but I do believe that our education system is failing them from top to bottom.

Funny you should mention Brautigan -- my favorite novel of his is In Watermelon Sugar, but The Abortion is also fine -- because as I was reading this essay I was thinking how much more fractured and messed up the contemporary poetry scene is. Would that poets only had to contend with a straw devil like Robbe-Grillet! I was supposed to read one of his brief novels in college, but couldn't get through it. Not because it was difficult -- it was boring.

Brautigan was also a poet and prize student of Jack Spicer, a really fine "poet's poet" that not even many poets read or appreciate. Brautigan's novels are wonderful because they're not really novels, they're wild and funny and definitely not boring. Experimental in the best sense of the word -- without paradigmatic rules or stacks of theory more interesting than they are. As someone who enjoys both forms (prose and poetry), I hope that more readers pick up on writers like this who actively blend genres and blur boundaries. Mitchell is good -- though Cloud Atlas is by far his best -- and another, not mentioned here, is recent Nat. Book Award winner Nathaniel Mackey.

Obama has to appeal to my parents. They're ready to vote for him. They're from a middle-class, suburban town in the midwest, they're newly retired, fed up with the war and worried about their health care and retirement. They also voted for you-know-who 2x.

In the end, I don't think they will vote for Obama. The fear factor (of a person of color, of a -- gulp! -- liberal, of someone the right is going to paint as threatening their income by raising taxes) is just going to be too great. I think that they're perfectly capable of parsing all the bullshit that this latest flap represents, but it's troubling that Obama, or the people around him, aren't more sensitive to how dangerous it is.

As soon as the nomination is secured, he has to begin to walk a very fine line to solidify his base while reassuring folks like my folks that it's safe to vote for him. They won't vote for Hillary, and GWB has done most of the work of scaring them away from McCain.

I realize some folks have invested quite heavily -- financially, emotionally, otherwise -- in this race. But it's about time to start looking towards fall and healing the divisiveness engendered by the nomination campaign. Both Hillary and Obama seem to be doing this; Hillary has taken pains to avoid attacking Obama directly in recent weeks.

It's time for the rabid supporters on both sides to do the same. There's bigger fish to fry, and it's always been puzzling and more than a little disturbing to me the number of people who've seemed willing to bite off their nose to spite their face.

--is that it's impossible to really know anything yet. One minute I'm reading something like this, and feeling like the opposing team's shut-down cornerback just got caught in a motel with a stripper and coke the night before the Superbowl, the next I'm reading about how McCain leads Obama in key swing states.

The McCain campaign trouble story is good, it's juicy, it makes me tingle in all the right places, but get back to me in four months.

This is the kind of hitting back Democrats need to do early and often, especially when it comes to reckless war rhetoric like Lieberman's (which is really, as Biden points out, that of Bush, Cheney, McCain, and the neo-cons who still whisper to them. It's really quite a bit more important than scoring points politically, but it is about that, too.

To me, it's also the turd in the punchbowl of adding HRC to the Veep ticket -- she voted for war. It's going to be hard to keep hitting them on this with war-enablers on the bill.

King--

You haven't written a column in over a week, during which time the NBA conference finals just wrapped up, the Stanley Cup is over halfway finished, the Cubs have emerged as the best team in baseball... and you write about mixed martial arts?

I expect a full report next week on the upcoming tiddly-winks tournament in Hoboken, NJ.