Are all the AV Club writers white? My impression is that it's not a very racially diverse group, but of course I could be wrong. Also, are there white people who love Tyler Perry movies? They seem to be very narrowly targeted for black women, but of course I could be wrong about that as well.

Roger Zelazny's THE LAST DEFENDER OF CAMELOT. In particular, the piece "For a Breath I Tarry," which may be my favorite science-fiction anything, EVER. One of my favorite stories, period, set millions of years in the future when humanity is extinct but giant sentient machines still maintain the Earth. One machine,…

The dachshund's legs would be a better example of unnatural selection. (See the first chapters of ORIGIN OF SPECIES, etc.) Almost all modern dog breeds are the results of many generations of forced breeding.

Stewartville! That's what I was thinking. Sorry, walked through about 600 towns on that almost year-long hike (from Key West, Florida to Cape Gaspe, Quebec), and they all kind of blur sometime.

SaveRivers, that is awesome. Please do report back on what you find when you go there. I'd love to hear some good news about how progressive Weogufka has become in the last nine years. I highly recommend also going one town north, to Columbus, where the population is mostly black and (in 2001, anyway) had (and…

I'm sure Australia is awesome, and I hope to visit it someday or even live there for a while. I'm just saying that there's enough racism and violence there to justify a negative comment or too. TALL MAN freaked me out. America's no great role model for that stuff, either, of course; any charge you could make about…

Dammit, I was all ready to go for this chat, and then got a phone call five minutes before it started—an important call—that then lasted until five minutes after the chat had ended. Argh! It was interesting to read, though.

Screw 'em all.
This "story" fails to take into account a number of different things.

I am ready for this trend to die.
And not to come back alive again.

4:30 PM ET
3:30 PM CT
2:30 PM MT (New Mexico)
1:30 PM PT

I'll be there.
Swibble, the Todd, Wide Ranger, and all you other active commenters, I hope you make it as well. I want to ask everyone what the hell the title was all about; it still seems ambiguous to me.

Good point, SR. What's more political than dadaism? It rejects everything, even reason, normalcy, and reality. Stop Making Sense, and sense starts to seem more ridiculous than anything.

The commenters who comment in WuiB are generally my favorite commenters on this site. Thanks to all of you for being thought-provoking and cool. I look forward to threads a month from now written entirely in some post-apocalyptic variant of the King's English.

All this discussion really makes me want to re-read this book, forthwith.
It'd be nice if there was an audio version.

Maybe it's like that Vonnegut short story about the two actors with no personalities of their own who only exist to be other fictional beings. In this case, both are relatively blank canvases; one allows herself to be made over, created passively; the other invents himself, actively, although in actuality both are…

The band, I mean. Not actual bare-naked ladies.

Probably quite a bit. The book clicked with my sense-of-humor in a big way, so I was willing to excuse just about anything else.

@Todd
I think Rose is so bland as an inversion of the likable heroine/personality-free prince relationship so common in fairy tales. Here, Marduk has the character, but Rose is the nothing-but-a-pretty-face Princess Charming. Also, her blandness makes her a blank slate for Michael/Marduk to project his ideas of…

"At the end, there he is with Rose or Violet and the red panties. At the start of the book, Dobyns writes that Michael would have been puzzled at the panties, thinking of them as a costume. But now his entire soulmate is a costume, and he's beyond caring."

The English department characters show this book to be maybe the best case for and against postmodernism ever. How very postmodern!