The Longer The Book, The More Effective As A Melee Weapon

Still no success turning this into a political blog. I don't think I want to narrow down my options: I'm waiting for the highest bidder. Once bought, though, I will stay bought. None of this Armstrong Williams nonsense.

In the absence of politics, violence. Am beginning what will be a very slow plough through William Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down, a seven volume, ten-billion-word treatise on that very subject. I'm not sure how this is going to grab me: I love Vollmann in principle, but his books seem to be getting longer and longer, and he seems to be insisting more and more that they be published in their entirety, without all that tedious trimming and snipping and miscellaneous stomach-stapling... because what's better than a five-hundred-page novel about whores? A nine-hundred-page novel about whores, that's what!

Still, there's nobody out there trying to do what he's doing. It just makes one grateful that David Foster Wallace listened to his editor and excised a rumored several hundred pages of material concerning dentistry from Infinite Jest. Because if there's one thing Infinite Jest really needed, it was to be longer. Lacking in girth there, David Foster. Not so much on the page count. Might want to think about beefing it up a bit. Have you considered double-spacing?