How do you get that reading of the omnipresent Dawkins? In fact, while he may very well be speaking about the snobbishness of "ladies sipping tea," Dawkins, despite his literalist's inability to see into the imaginative realms, has a good enough education to understand that "culture" = the products of human endeavor, including those that are now considered "snobbish"--i.e., "high cultural products like poetry, music, etc.

Tell me how I committed a "lying smear" against Dr. Dawkins.

I do not like "arguing," walter, since, as Deborah Tannen demonstrated several years back, "arguing" today (and "debate" as well) has nothing to do with proofs and everything to do with name-calling.

Your participation on this thread has been tiresome and obnoxiously repetitive.

Of course there are. Don't you remember how they were all spit on by the hippies when they came back from the Atheist Wars?

Here are two ideas for the Yee-Hah-Let's-Fight-About-Sumpin crowd who turn every goddam thread into a meta-conversation (e.g., the ragingly non-ironic "Already reverting to ad hominem attacks, eh, asswipe?"):

1. Sit down with a copy of The Argument Culture and a Hi-Liter. Read carefully.

2. Go into a biker bar with the same mindset. Let us know how things work out when you "debate" against people instead of electrons.

And hang up and drive.

Playing nice while the Rovepublicans "bring it on" loses elections.

I have recently begun seeing commercials for this anti-union group. Is it funded by Wal-Mart?

Next thing you know, somebody will be telling us that Star Trek was g/a/y.

How'd that work out for you, sweetums?

Top search result on Google.

I just watched the YouTube of this person breaking her leg.

I have never had gymnastics training, but I can pretty safely say that I too could have fallen off that bar and broken by leg.

Does that make me elite?

And does anyone think that, e.g., Nadia Comaneci would be graceless enough to look down on this B- "elite" if they ever happened to be stuck on a plane together?

Is there anyone else who has noticed that she is no longer on the front page--gone well before she should have cycled off?

I am just asking--again.

I don't see that rather essential piece of information in the piece, an especially confusing lack once the staggering amounts of Obama's fundraising are offered.

Does "record cash" mean "the most he has ever raised"? If so, I set a record in the 100-meter freestyle yesterday--Michael Phelps and Jennifer Sey and Good Sense forgive me.

Isn't this the same former empire that offered the little girls' Lolita bed a couple of years ago?

My suggestion: Don't market panties with ambiguous wordage. Be straightforward. If you really want your eight-year-old to have sex, replace "Dive In!" with "Please perform cunnilingus on me."

Maybe the term "Breck girl" was already is use elsewhere.

Translate: Goddam, you too-cool-for-school snarky Republican meme-monger.

And: "In 'Story of My Life,' Poole is exactly how McInerney describes her."

Holy cats, Justin. Do you mean that McInerney exactly described a character that he himself invented? He's one smart eighties writer, isn't he?

I hope you aren't doing something really spooky-subtle here--writing about a character based on a person and hoping that we'll think that you'r writing about the person herself.

That's not how fiction works and, I hope you'll realize, Justin, how honest journalism works.

The distinguishing characteristic of fiction--even historical fiction, even romans à clef--is its fictivity. Using fiction to make historical or journalistic points dishonors fiction, history, and journalism. The latter two are about facts, while the first is about truth. (See Aristotle's Poetics re: "poetry is a higher and more philosophical thing than history" because poets, and other artists, have the right and responsibility to make art, i.e. lie.)

Thus, while it is interesting to bring up McInerney, doing so is not the same as journalism. Literary biographers know that they can go just so far with fiction and then have to stop. (This is, once more, to the credit of fiction, although many of us have found it nigh impossible to make the case with freshmen.)

Let us take, for example, the novel Slaughterhouse-Five by the recently deceased novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., son of Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. You may have heard of him, Bill E.

It is a work of fiction and yet--startlingly enough!!--includes a character named "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." who visits with friends in the "Introduction" and appears, shitting his brains out, about halfway through. "That was I," he says, and the naive reader thinks Hey, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was there!.

Here's the thing: the actions ascribed to that character are not necessarily those that the author himself undertook. (You may also want to see the next novel by that same novelist, Breakfast of Champions, in which the novelist interacts with one of his clearly fictional characters.) I am not saying that Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was not in Dresden (and check me here--my copy of the novel is not in the office, where I am drawing up syllabi--doesn't "Vonnegut" say that he shits his brains out not in Dresden but in the British POW camp? whoa) during its firebombing, only that it would be foolish to write about him biographically as doing such without documentary evidence confirming that that particular fictive event has roots in fact.

So, yeah: Justin took a grad-studentish shortcut that, as a grad student, he ought to avoid if he intends to write for careful readers.

http://www.geocities.com/c-leaper/frodo/Frodo071604.jpg

Ummmm. . . .

We know what freakin' Frodo looks like. The problem is that the article lacks a picture of Laura Wilkinson to confirm with that awww-snoogums cootsie-poo analogy.