Corwood, you were the first person I thought of when I read it.

"Caught some allusions to The Odyssey. Nice."

"Think you accidentally stapled in something from your playwriting workshop for Ch. 15."

"Typo: last word capitalized."

::snerkity::

BWAH:

Remember last week after workshop, when we got trashed on Guinness and came up with the ludicrous idea of a 700-page novel that puns every few words on the name of a river? Maybe there's something to that.

You should also read the one that's about the fiction prompts.

"Snotgreen" = hyphenated.

Man, coffee hurts when it goes up the nose.

You should also read the one that's about the fiction prompts.

Okay, I'm probably hurting myself by trying to stifle my laughter over these:

Write a short scene set at a lake, with trees and shit. Throw some birds in there, too.

Imagine if your favorite character from 19th-century fiction had been born without thumbs. Then write a short story about them winning the lottery.

Write a story that begins with a man throwing handfuls of $100 bills from a speeding car, and ends with a young girl urinating into a tin bucket.

(I think I've read that story....)

A man has a terrifying dream in which he is being sawn in half. He wakes to find himself in the Indian Ocean, naked and clinging to a door; a hotel keycard is clenched in his teeth. Write what happens next.

I can't help myself -- I actually like that last one.

I expect to see it on Lost sometime next season.

It makes me laugh at myself every time I think of Jesse's maxim because in the face of such wisdom I still instinctively rail, "Nuh uh! The shit I like is the BEST!"

I'm telling you -- it's shocking but true.

No love for Little, Big ? Bah. These people do not speak for me. Despite the A Winter's Tale nod. Bah, I say again.

All novelists who are worth anything at all resist a version of life as it has been presented to them. What Flaubert meant by bourgeois life is not what his age meant by bourgeois life, and what Austen meant by the word "woman" was subtly at odds with the usage of that word in her time.

Well, it depends on what she means by 'worth anything at all'. If she means 'good writers of literature', then I think she's right. I've come to think of the literary novelist as being primarily concerned with psychological and social mechanisms that work at right angles to received wisdom, which would mean that their novels would, incidentally, 'resist a version of life as it has been presented to them.'

But that implies that writers of entertainments, no matter how well crafted they may be, is not 'worth anything at all'. So, I also think she's wrong.

And that's if I understood her meaning.

Sure. Come back looking for some real people talking about real stuff. If it is all about green snot and Irving, you just need to adjust your definition of "real stuff".