Ladies and gentlemen, the brain is thoroughly fricasseed, we can’t seem to sleep (hence 4:00 AM audio engineering jobs) and we’re on the verge of total collapse. We’ll see you on the other side once we’ve rested. Happy holidays.

One last thing (with a shift to first person singular):

As for this (yeah I know he wants attention with all the recent Maud-bashing but what the hell), the true nonsensism at work here lies with those who continue to believe that “you-are-with-us-you-are-against-us” dichotomies exist within literature. For the record, I read the New Yorker and enjoy a handful of the stories. But I am also a strong proponent of what Bill Buford has called “dirty realism.” However, the notion that reading an establishment story automatically makes you an establishment thinker (or, for that matter, “an intellectual liberal,” which I am, as Marxist as I can be at times, not always) is about as ridiculous as suggesting that because you immerse yourself in one perspective or world view, you are irrevocably attached to it. (And how fucking George W. Bushian is that, Mr. Lin?) I think it’s the duty of any serious reader to read as widely and as disparately as they can. The snobberies or reverse snobberies we attach to refusing to pick up something because it’s science fiction or because it’s popular or because it’s “chick lit” or because it’s too experimental or because it’s poetry or because it was published in The New Yorker or because it was endorsed by Dave Eggers or someone at n + 1 or because all the hipsters are reading it really pisses me off. It is nothing less than an extension of genre ghettoization. It is, let’s get right down to it, a kind of literary racism. A book is a book is a book, mothafuckahs. And if lazy thinkers are going to badmouth a title or a genre without reading it, why don’t some of these cretins so quick to condemn actually cite a few fucking examples from the text to back up their shit, yo? To do otherwise is to offer meaningless cocktail banter to make people feel smart and good about themselves but to essentially encourage their descent into the cerebral charnelhouse. To wallow in labels or dichotomies without actually delving into the text, providing examples and telling us why New Yorker fiction is bad, to not consider that sometimes a rose grows on the dunghill — in short, to imply on a regular basis that the whole expanse of literature is without a single grey area is to remain a clueless and inveterate moron.