Thanks, Eli, you'll definitely be hearing from me. And thanks for setting me straight about Hoban's memory. It's just weird to me that this apparent genius who creates timeless masterpieces seems to have the same modus operandi as Dean Koontz….

This is brilliant. Lanois is typically a great producer, and Neil is needing some direction lately. I mean, a whole album about green car technology is a really great idea, but it would have been even better if it had a really great producer to strangle it in its cradle and replace it with something completely…

I'm not going to argue with you there. I'd happily be the one to cuff the Pope next time he steps on American soil, him or any of his legion of molester freaks. I just don't want to see what the combination of an insane pervert anime freak and this horrific topic looks like.

http://www.youtube.com/watc…

No one else should be brought in to replace Heath Ledger as the Joker. I really don't care what Nolan ultimately decides for the movie, I think he'll do right, but I would really like that character to be left alone. Who's going to even approach that performance? No one. Whoever it is would be bound to look…

I don't care who's in this movie
I just don't want to hear about it.

Chuck Bass, I thought that was funny as well. Except by "funny" I mean "funny and kind of baffling," because I think postmodernism's limits become so painfully apparent as you approach them. I enjoy its influence to a degree, particularly is literary ones, but I side with skeptic Alan Sokal in the debate between…

I wish that seemed the case online. Every time SLATE runs a story about it, the comments are almost nothing but Catholic apologetics.

Let's just hope
that Biastok guy doesn't find this article.

You could hang around Big Star Books & Music in Santa Fe—I know he goes in there pretty often. Or, you could try the ROLLING STONE method and interview him not about his work but about his involvement with the Santa Fe Institute and their studies of chaos theory.

Thanks, THf Todd. I think our earlier writing is always bound to be embarrassing to ourselves, because quite often our entire earlier selves were embarrassing, and our writing captures those people—our immature world views, our likes and dislikes, our naivety, our failed experiments. I know that's the case for me,…

He's also probably forgotten a lot of what went into his own book. It has been 30 years since he wrote it, and he's written quite a few other books since then.

Babies really are sociopaths. With OCD. Totally narcissistic self-absorbed freaks.

We missed you in the chat, FJ, but I do hope you'll at least duck into the last page about storytelling and myth. It's pretty quiet in there.

My younger brother had a totally played-straight Disney movie fan club site that was actually a pretty humorous parody. "The Disney Team Club." A team that was also a club. And it looked just like these….

There are at least two really lovely songs on that first album of theirs. "Home" is a really nice track, in my memory. Still, hearing it as an Internet Cassio song is nothing but funny.

No, I'm really into that as well. In fact, for the last year I've been working on a novel which incorporates among other things, a retelling of the evolution of the Universe from the Big Bang to a recent decade on Earth using the language and ideas of Navajo "Holy People" creation mythology. (NO ONE STEAL THIS…

The atom bomb, sure, though that was also guided by the less-than-rational impulse toward destruction. The Holocaust relied in large part on people's existing irrational prejudices, religious backgrounds, et cetera, even if it did attempt to make its case from an arguably intellectual perspective. And the Bhopal…

Thanks, Swibble—that's incredibly nice of you to say, and I could return the compliment exactly, to you and to a number of others. This is just a great crowd. Seriously. Even if I only know you all primarily as lower-case names and Internet-culled avatars—those names and images are backed by impressive intellects,…

I was wondering what was up with the slow crowd myself. I'm still in a mood to talk about all this, but other commenters here might choose more often to engage with non-literary realities as well. This page is also missing a lot of the most vocal commenters for this book, but I expect they'll be along eventually. …