described in baroque terms that didn't work right to the modern mind.

Are you implying that a nine-year old Jamaican who couldn't even make sense of the pictures in Emmanuelle (it was the novelisation of the movie) might not get it?

Yeah, such was my conceit. I even started the Happy Hooker and got bored. Anything more subtle than Hustler was lost on me.

I can't stand DHL, but I don't know if "dated" is the word I'd use...that would apply that there was a time when his pseudo-profundities weren't completely ridiculous.

I can't stand DHL, but I don't know if "dated" is the word I'd use...that would apply that there was a time when his pseudo-profundities weren't completely ridiculous.

See, you just need to read him with bon bons in a bubble bath.

And then laugh and laugh and laugh and pat him on the head.

I'll remember that, Plei!

(And obviously I meant "imply", not "apply".)

I didn't read literature for porn. I read porn!

Speaking of The Happy Hooker, I shoplifted The Happy Hooker Goes Around the World In A Daze when I was 12, which was about her hitting sex clubs worldwide. I had that damn thang memorized, and remember staying up late to catch her on The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder.

I can never read DHL again after a memorable seminar in which we noticed his total obsession with the physical sensations of wearing women's clothes. Ever since I read his books and all I see is garter garter garter.

I pulled Anais Nin off my mother's bookshelves when I was a teenager, having vaguely heard of the name but I didn't know where. I remember reading her stories and in many cases being like, "I bet that isn't physically possible."

I am reading I Married a Dead Man by Cornell Woolrich right now. It's the exact same plot as teh Ricki Lake movie Mrs. Winterbourne, except not nice at all! It's hilarious in its hysteria!

I'm not much of a DHL fan, either. He seems kinda like Hesse to me, all full of (as Angus said) self-seriousness and revelations that aren't.

Here's Charles Taylor's response in Salon to that NYT Andrew Solomon article about the death of literacy.

Here's Charles Taylor's response in Salon to that NYT Andrew Solomon article about the death of literacy.

Interesting. I liked these points he makes:

"To hear him [Solomon] tell it, no one ever picks up a trashy book to kill time, no one ever gets around to that classic he always meant to read and finds that it bores him silly."

"Does Solomon even realize how exhausting a life of 'nothing but the highest' moments sounds?"

I like DH Lawrence.

Singularity Sky wasn't quite as good as I was hoping, but by the end, I was engaged enough to be wanting the next book in paperback. There's kind of two novels going on at once -- a very clunky war story, and a really fun interplanetary spy novel. The worldbuilding isn't paced terribly well, but by the time it's finished, it's not a bad world. The Festival is a terrifically neat idea, enough so that I'm willing to forgive the less than stellar writing. (And it's a first novel, so I'm expecting him to get better.) The political structure of the universe reminded me a bit of James Alan Gardner's League of Peoplesverse.