"Signs are taken for wonders. "We would see a sign!""

Astonishing.

A counterpoint with which I largely agree. Wood is limited in his ability to speak of the patterns that prevent a work from collapsing into a mere cobbling-together of separate, stylistically distinguished strands. Wood's evaluations---about style, about consciousness, about the ability to render a scene or a character realistically, about, in other words, representation---direct the tyro novelist's attention to precisely those elements of his prose which already cause him a great deal of concern; distract him from the larger question of how to make those elements cohere.

If there's only one thing you can read this week, let it be this.

Heh.

This tactile, fey pleasure from Julian Barnes is the only good to come from the New Yorker's otherwise hackneyed, thematically transparent offerings of the past few months.

Also: don't forget William Styron.

The most excellent video in the observable universe.