It's only 'cause they say "this could impact your whole life" that you're worried.

I'm more worried because I keep screwing up in the math sections in the practice tests.

I'm headed out. Lizard, you'll do great. Ali, I might be on later, I'll check in to see if you're still about. riani1@yahoo.com if you want to drop me a line.

Um. I still don't, really, but at least I'm consciously not paranoidly making a virtue out of it, like rather many proudintellectuals I know.

I have a whole rant on this (and you'll be a better intellectual than most because you're not doing that), about how the disconnect between lit-culture and pop-culture is such that I've started to finally understand the motivations of the Cultural Revolution, but I'll get to it later.

Alibelle, I'll bet Gregory Maguire would count as fiction rather than genre, and he does fairy tales - sort of. So I think you're on a good track.

Victor, that piece about Worcester made me smile because I'm looking at the same thing from the other side. I miss the past sometimes living out here.

Really, Katie? Cool. Thank you guys so so much.

Yeah, he's the one who did _Wicked_ and _Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister_ and, um, one other that I didn't read because I didn't like _Confessions_ all that much. But I'm pretty sure they aren't shelved in SF.

You mean Lost? Lost bit. Hard.

And thanks, Katie. Don't seem tobe getting much further on it tonight.

Very immediate, very smelly and real, Victor. I'd be interested to read it in it's final--and any intermediate--form.

Okay, point about me. I want and expect to hear, see, taste, smell, and feel textures and pressures of things on my skin when I read. Smelly from me is good. Don't think otherwise.

Maguire also does a variety of kidzbooks that are actually quite good.

Alibelle, after you've written and submitted your story, I want to send you a copy of one that I wrote a bunch of years ago called "Puck in Boots: The True Story" because I think you'd get a real kick out of it. But not before, because I'm thinking we'll have ended up going to some of the same kind of places thematically. :-)

Victor, I loved the excerpt from your essay. I'm not looking at it from the other side, but from further on this side. I'm not in or from an old factory town, but rather Boston-bedroom communities. But I know the oldness and oddness and am suspicious of the new. I understand the old newspaper men, even though that's never been my life or even in it.

In another, a punk band thrashes to the smell of motor oil embedded in the walls.

This was the only sentence that didn't work for me. It pulled me out of your Worcester streets. The "thrashes to the smell" was just too much of a mixed metaphor. I've tried re-working it, but I don't know what to suggest instead. I think it's important to keep both the thrashing and the smell of the motor oil, I just don't know how. Your essay is so rich I'm too intimidated to muck with it.