on deliberation

so there's some terrible flooding in iowa right now, and some incredible pictures have been taken of the event. one particularly moving image depicted a man in his late 20s or so wading through waist-deep water in cedar rapids while holding a cat in each arm. both cats were orange tabbies, terrified of the turbulent waters swirling just inches below them. their names? fry and bender. i nearly wept.

i got drunk with lucas tonight at a blue-collar bar in town. the blue-collar bar's clientele this evening was surprisingly middle-class and collegiate, and i didn't see the 46-year-old ex-porn star that i bedded back in october (even though i'm pretty sure i saw her car in the parking lot). lucas and i talked soccer, the modern novel, sexcapades, and our upcoming date with the antiquated u.s. highway; or, our trip to new mexico and then to louisville. regarding the modern novel, we discussed the bare-bones empirical structure of a novel--an extended fictional narrative almost universally confined within the front and back cover of a hardback or paperback book. obviously, with the advent of the internet and sites like tufts university's perseus library, one can find various complete novels and shit like shakespearean plays online, but the experience of reading something from a page on the internet differs greatly from that of reading from a book in one's hands. in any case, our discussion led to the evolution of the novel through postmodernism, discussing obvious postmodern paragons such as calvino's if on a winter's night a traveler, delillo's white noise, and wallace's infinite jest, but once again, all of these fit snugly within the confines of the front and back cover. my question was as follows: is it possible for one to create a novel that defies the conventions of the front and back cover? a novel that requires more than just the right-to-left turn of the pages but that does not stoop to the level of a choose-your-own-adventure story or a mad lib or instructions for a scavenger hunt?

my time probably would have been better spent buying mixed drinks for the semi-cute girl with the nice tits and the mousy face.