"Long-con" is a pretty reductive way of looking at it…it's self-conscious, sure, but there's more to it than that… The book would be so much less (less hypnotic, less variegated, less singular, etc.) without the cetology…

Brian Evenson is a lot of fun. No monsters or anything, sort of philosophical (Deleuzian) horror. Very nicely written (he runs Brown's writing department).

bananas

well no one's going to top that

The Public Burning is probably his best by a mile, but Briar Rose is fantastic and can be done in a single sitting

Have you read any other Barthelme? I thought the Sixty Stories collection was, miraculously, even more amazing than Forty. Highly recommend Coover as well if you haven't checked him out…

I'm not terribly fond of drugs anymore, but attending a music festival sober sounds about as fun as taking the GRE drunk

Out of some, I don't know, incurable penchant for self-abuse, I've read that Mr. Difficult essay like 6 times. I've come to the conclusion that Franzen isn't just unimaginative in the sense that his plots and characters are dull and platitudinous (which I think they are), but that he is quite literally a solipsist:…

I did Herodotus just last week; I really liked the digressions (actually, all of it, really) but am for some reason actually preferring Thucydides

It's a joy just how beautiful the prose is as well; I'm really digging his somewhat sardonic tone…

You write the story of Byron the Bulb, you get away with things

One Doctor Hilarius fixed his teeth!

perverse, sublime; tomato, tomahto

Oh god there's so much out there. I finally got around to Don Quixote back in April(?) and liked it so much I had to read it again, immediately. And Rabelais! So far ahead of his time…

Just got Gibbon (all six volumes!) in the mail yesterday! It's the Everyman's Library version, or whatever that publisher is called. Not leather, but still quite beautiful! Thucydides is indeed Pelopennesian War, Rex Warner's translation.

Haha I should read more Amis, only ever did Time's Arrow

Oh yeah it's a dead horse after the 70s

Drowning myself in The Story of the Stone and The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, because, hey, why the hell not? Finishing up Thucydides today as well. Good stuff.

And for the most part the difference between modernism and postmodernism is purely era-related. Some might say modernism is all high-culture whereas post- combines high and low; most major writers labeled postmodernists more or less reject the tag

It's sort of bringing the ridiculousness of, say, Dickensian characters to the most extreme possible conclusion and highlighting the fact that, yes, this is a work of fiction. With Pynchon you can basically think of it as "part of the vibe."