Moby Dick's one of my favorite books, and I agree with you about his digressions. I thought they're too weird not to be charming. Plus every time Ahab starts talking it's like a drunken, whale-obsessed Shakespeare has wandered into the book and you're forced to pay attention.

Dave Eggers is kinda bad, but at least he's not trying to stuff paragraphs and dumb sentences about birds into burritos or whatever the fuck it is Jonathan Safran "My-Book's-Fulla-Holes" Foer is trying to do.

Well, you know. The Seer was pretty great — the title track especially. But this might be better… I'm only halfway through so far, but it's ridiculous and incredible. "A little God in My Hands" — he sounds EXACTLY like Johnny Rotten in Public Image Ltd. as the song goes on… "Screen Shot" makes my day.

I read By Nightfall. It was pretty terrible. I mean, prettily terrible — it was well-written and kind of beautiful, but really just ultimately pointless. If you want to ONLY write pretty sentences, with not much narrative, you better be a hell of a talent. Virginia Woolf could do it, obviously. Michael Cunningham…

Well, I don't know. I'm not the biggest Vonnegut fan in the world, but I think Slaughterhouse-5 is a great book, not as much a novel, but more like a nonfiction piece about a weird, wounded guy trying to make sense of a massacre. Anyway, almost all writers make things "work out" the way they want them to, I think…

No I don't. Who asks for the real world in fictional books anyway? Where's realism in the Bible, Shakespeare, Juvenal, Petronius? John Updike? Bill Cosby? I don't know whose realism you're talking about, but if you can't define it, then you're necessarily talking out of your whistling ol butthole.

Well Vonnegut could probably help you make a decision if you're trying to figure out if life is worth living or not. But then it might be a little ambiguous, and you might end up killing yourself.

Is it weird that I really dislike, say, David Foster Wallace's "This is Water" speech, or that George Saunders graduation speech, but Kurt Vonnegut, as always, manages to convey something wonderful and simple? He was essentially just a goofier, weirder Mark Twain, and that's incredible.

My problem with letter grades, especially when they're reviewing classics, is that it feels like they're assessing Ingmar Bergman like he's turning in a goddamn homework assignment.

The John Niven passage sounds like the work of someone who desperately wants to be mean-spirited but can't because they're about as imaginative as Simon Cowell. Right? That's your go-to guy for literary misanthropy? Someone similar to Simon Cowell? I don't think Douglas Coupland knows what "nihilism" means, or…

Tolkein was, ah? I'd have to reread the books. From memory, I'd say garbage. Like, garbage along the lines of, why would you read Tolkein when, if you wanted fantasy, you could read Mervyn Butt-F@#kin Peake — probably the greatest fantasy writer of the past who-cares amount of years. I mean, Tolkein may have his…

My face is almost covered but it ain't quite covered country-style

That's the wettest I ever been, reading what you just wrote

Head chop bro. Axe body spray. Pumps. Plus, guy eats a lot of omelets. You ever try and write a bunch of novels while eating, like, a bunch of omelets every day? Not possible. I eat like, four omelets every day, sometimes every three or four hours. How many novels do I write, eating that many omelets? Maybe…

This guy isn't James goddamn Joyce, I honestly don't get why it takes him this long to write his stories. I was convinced back in high school that he spent all his time getting blowjobs in hot tubs and only ever resurfaced in order to satiate (give a blowjob to) a publisher for a little bit. Just to buy himself some…

Reading Suttree by Cormac McCarthy after finishing Blood Meridian for the 4th or whatever time and wanting some more of his style. Suttree continues to prove to me that everyone who says McCarthy is a humorless writer (he's hilarious even in parts of Blood Meridian) must think puns or something are the highest form…

What was your opinion on Ferdydurke? I read it a few months ago and liked a lot of it, though it was a little frustrating. Agree with you on George Saunders, who has moments that're pretty great surrounded by annoying glibness and false aw-shucks-iness.

But he wrote a book with holes in it! ART!

Yeah, I read that article and it was pretty godawful. The whinging regret of it… You just wanna shake her and tell her to get another job. Like, I think a lot of these types just see writing as an output for narcissistic bullshit. Like novels have suddenly become diary entries — and the public is supposed to care…

I'd agree. People like to quote Flannery O'Connor who said something like everyone who survived childhood has enough material to write about, but I'd argue not everyone is Flannery O'Connor, and anyway Faulkner and I think most great writers would side with you on the necessity of a wide-range of experience. Celine…