Where was I?
At some point this week I want to comment on the Meyer article in the Atlantic Monthly (alas, not on-line at www.theatlantic.com). This article was referenced by the PW booksellers e-mail I get every day, so I went to check out what Meyer had to say in his "passionate" response to pretentious writing. I haven't finished it, but the section on Delillo comes straight out of Bruce Bawer's take on Delillo in the New Criteria ten years ago, and even then it was pretty much crap. At least, however, one can respect Bawer as a reader (for a recent article by Bawer, check out Salon's book section, http://www.salon.com/books, for /2001/06/28/) I suspect that since the Atlantic's editorship was taken over by Michael Kelly, we might be seeing more articles arguing, as Myer's does, for a basically conservative aesthetic.

But more on that later, as I say.