welcome to the future

My friend just recently became acquainted with the World Wide Web and is having a difficult time navigating his way through the blogosphere.

This is my response that is not posting.

I am reading Mantissa by John Fowles. I don't read a lot, so all you fucking nerds out get off my back. Here are two reviews from amazon, five stars and one star.

John Fowles KICKED by Muse!, By Carra R Lane (Bishop Hill, IL United States)

John Fowles minus his usual novelistic costuming relaxes, writes brilliantly, reveals craft secrets, pokes gentle, if firm, fun at both himself & the business of literature, adores/insults his muse & is properly inspired/kicked for his trouble. MANTISSA is sweetly funny, roughly true, a deft tale of the endless left/right (or male/female or rational/intuitive) mind combat which is the natural environment of creation, the brainswamp from which much of our best writing emerges. Complete with a terribly nice pun on the names of a writer & a shrink, adequate eros (every bit of it strictly imaginary), & some charming intermusine backbiting, in the end. Astounding! Hilarious! The Nubile Prize for Metafiction!

Don't bother!, By R Bell (Dun Eideann/Edinburgh Scotland)

Many books have been labelled "verbal masturbation", but this is the real thing. John Fowles indulges his sexual and literary fantasies, entering them from every angle he can manage until he expends himself. What results is not "one man's interaction with his muse" as one review called it, but unreadable and pretentious and not remotely sexy subporn... that wouldn't have been publicised - or noticed - if they hadn't come from someone as well known as Fowles.
Some of the parts, such as his encounter with a black nurse, and a guitar wielding dominatrix muse read like something out of a bored private schoolboy's diary.

It's a pity, because John Fowles was once a great writer... but this book and "Daniel Martin" do him a great disservice.

Mercifully short, and that's it's one bonus.

"Not remotely sexy subporn"?

I think we've found a winner!