>Toni Schlesinger is a literary version of Henry Rousseau: self-taught and persistently innocent... the vague, rambling style of the story is done in unselfconscious spoken word with lack of polish: a comic composed by instant messaging.<

Oh, no--it's the dread "It's art--therefore it can be incompetent as crap and that's cool" excuse. Um..._real_ art is when a creator knows the rules enough to break them in interesting ways. Anything else is pretentious wanking...and a waste of time and space.

>Think of KOF as something written by a teenager.. and enjoy the splash of it.<

Given that at any given time online there are at least five teenagers doing stuff better than this, you've got a lot of nerve saying this.

>How did KOF get published? Salon co-founder Laura Miller probably helped create her and bring her in. Laura's a promoter of contemporary authors; Toni writes a quirky column for the Voice. Last few years have seen some mingling: Toni and Tom Bachtell collaborated on a play in 2002; Toni and Laura published articles in the NYT in Sept 2003 (Toni's was a wide-eyed account of a cruise her aunt treated her to).<

Well, we've got the "who, what, where," and "how." Now, we need the "why." Schlesinger has no feel for this material and only seems to care about the genre to the extent that she can steal from it. If she's doing this as a satire, she's missing the abovementioned components. And the stuff isn't funny. If she's doing this as a straight story, she's really missed the mark. So, what's her purpose? The only thing this is good for is to give some 21st-century Mark Twain ample material to do an updated "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses."

http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_fenimore.html

And, as Twain so aptly noted:

"A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are–oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.

Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that."

>Women and society control my body. If I have a penis, I am forced to go to war in foreign lands to protect the wimmin.<

Um, are you posting from Iraq? Did you just get your draft notice? Can you not just simply dodge the draft? And you _do_ know that the reason women are not subject to the draft is because of conservative--and mostly-male--opposition, right?

>If I have a penis and want sex and god forbid the condom breaks women get to decide if I suffer for 18 years.<

There's always a vasectomy, dude. A previous poster was correct: you and guys like you are pissed that you don't call all the shots anymore. You can't emotionally browbeat or physically force women to bear your kids, have sex with you--or put up with your crap. You have to be a sane, mature person who takes responsibility to have a productive relationship, and there's no way in hell you think you should have to do that. Tough noodles, pal. :)

...yours has to be one of the nastier letters expressing "concern" I've ever read. You all but threaten LW with "dying alone and being eaten by dust mice," and you barely stop short of calling her a "cold bitch" (though calling her "selfish" is pretty darn close.) And you seem to be taking her lack of interest in intimacy awful damm personally. WTF difference does it make to you if she doesn't want sex right now--or may never want it again? Why does it burn you so bad that she may not have relationships again? What happened--did some woman have the gall to turn your wonderful self down...and instead of getting over it, you do like all women-hating trolls and try to scare women with the old "you'll be all alone if you don't do what guys like me want" crap? Would guys like you and Brightstar have any lives at all if you weren't fueled by hating women?

...who's got major "Big Daddy" problems like far too many Beltway pundits. Years of calling the DC society shots and playing Mean Girl to those presidents who weren't sufficiently "elite" for her has made her even more useless.

...the last LAW AND ORDER ep. had an amusing moment when the new assistant DA entered the office McCoy inherited from Branch and noted that the place looked different without all the former DA's knicknacks around. McCoy acerbically replied, "That's because it's a working office again." Sounds like someone at L&O wasn't unhappy to see Fred go...:).