[...] the discovery that disciplined fun is more fun than impulsive or hedonistic fun. [...] writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself an illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth of instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable. This process is complicated and confusing and scary, and also hard work, but it turns out to be the best fun there is.

[...] Since it does nothing that good old use doesn't do, its extra letters and syllables don't make a writer seem smarter; rather, using utilize makes you seem either like a pompous twit or like someone so insecure that she'll use pointlessly big words in an attempt to look sophisticated. The same is true for the noun utilization, for vehicle as used for car, for residence as used for house, for presently, at present, at this time, and at the present time as used for now, and so on. What's worth remembering about puff-words is something that good writing teachers spend a lot of time drumming into undergrads: "formal writing" does not mean gratutiously fancy writing; it means clear, clear, maximally considerate writing.

[...] if is used to express a conditional, whether to introduce alternative possibilities. [...] If you can coherently insert an "[or not]" after either the conjunction or the clause it introduces, you need whether. Examples: "He didn't know whether [or not] it would rain"; "She asked me straight out whether I was a fetishist [or not]"; "We told him to call if [or not? no] he needed a ride [or not? no]." [...]

[...] A subordinating conjunction signals the reader that the clause it's part of is dependent--common sub. conjunctions include before, after, while, unless, if, as, and because. The relevant rule is easy and well worth remembering: Use a comma after the subordinating conjunction's clause only if that clause comes before the independent clause that completes the thought; if the sub. conj.'s clause comes after the independent clause, there's no comma. Example: "If I were you, I'd put down the hatchet" vs. "I'd put down that hatchet if I were you."

[...] If there needs to be a comma before the rel. pron., you need which; otherwise, you need that. Examples: "We have a massive SUV that we purchased on credit last month"; "The massive SUV, which we purchased on credit last month, seats us ten feet above any other driver on the road." [...]

[...] Who and whom are the relative pronouns for people; that and which are the rel. pronouns for everything else. [...]

[...] Except for the ironic-idiom case, the only time it's correct to use all of is when the adj. phrase is folowed by a pronoun--"All of them got cards"; "I wanted Edgar to have all of me"--unless, however, the relevant pronoun is possessive, in which case you must again omit the of, as in "All my friends despise Edgar." [...] With all plus a noun, it turns out that the medial of is required if that noun is possessive, as in "All of Edgar's problems stem from his childhood," "All of Dave's bombast came back to haunt him that day." I doubt I will ever forge this.

The truth, briefly stated, is that Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and postmodernism in world literature. He is a modernist in that his fiction shows a first-rate human mind stripped of all foundations in religious or ideological certainty--a mind turned thus wholly in on itself. His stories are inbent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything.

And the mind of those stories is nearly always a mind that lives in and through books. This is because Borges the writer is, fundamentally, a reader. The dense, obscure allusiveness of his fiction is not a tic, or even really a style; and it is no accident that his best stories are often fake essays, or reviews of fictitious books, or have texts at their plots' centers, or have as protagonists Homer or Dante or Averroës. Whether for seminal artistic reasons or neurotic personal ones or both, Borges collapses reader and writer into a new kind of aesthetic agent, one who makes stories out of stories, one for whom reading is essentually--consciously--a creative act. This is not, however, because Borges is a metafictionist or cleverly disguised critic. It is because he knows that there's finally no difference--that murderer and victim, detective and futigive, performer and audience are the same. Obviously, this has postmodern implications (hence the pontine claim above), but Borges's is really a mystical insight, and a profound one. It's also frightening, since the line between monism and solipsism is thin and porous, more to do with spirit than with mind per se. And, as an artistic program, this kind of collapse/transcendence of individual identity is also paradoxical, requiring a grotesque self-obsession combined with an almost total effacement of self and personality. Tics and obsessions aside, what makes a Borges story Borgesian is the odd, ineluctable sense you get that no one and everyone did it. [...]

Here is an overt premise. There is just no way that 2004's reelection could have taken place--not to mention extraordinary rendition, legalized torture, FISA-flouting, or the passage of the Military Commissions Act--if we had been paying attention and handling information in a competent grown-up way. "We" meaning as a polity and culture. The premise does not entail specific blame; or rather the problems here are too entangled and systemic for good old-fashioned finger-pointing. It is, for one example, simplistic and wrong to blame the for-profit media for somehow failing to make clear to us the moral and practial hazards of trashing the Geneva Conventions. The for-profit media is exquisitely attuned to what we want and the amount of detail we'll sit still for. [...] You'd simply drown. We all would. It's amazing to me that no one much talks about this--about the fact that whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed citizenry can no longer exist, at least not without a whole new modern degree of subcontracting and dependence packed into what we mean by "informed."