'The Varieties of Religious Illusion' -- a novel.
Yesss.. we gots our very own Soap Opera novella, with satire re real-liff characters, deconstruction of Deconstructionists (metaDeconstruction?) and footnotes which parallel the same within the opus:
Is that recursion or is that recursion !?
Sample:
Humanity is an ape with its head full of stars, and the precarious intersection it occupies between the corporeal and the transcendent is one of literature's great subjects. Sometimes, an author approaches this incongruity as a tragedy; even the most exalted among us are creatures of the flesh and doomed to die. But satire works, too, as Rebecca Goldstein's new novel, "36 Arguments for the Existence of God," effervescently demonstrates.
The novel's protagonist, Cass Seltzer, dubbed "the atheist with a soul" by the press, is a psychology professor at a small Massachusetts college who is rocketed to the intellectual's version of fame after he publishes a surprise bestseller titled "The Varieties of Religious Illusion." He's been profiled in magazines and invited onto "The Daily Show." In the course of the day during which the novel takes place, he encounters an ex-girlfriend, moons over his current girlfriend, thrills to a job offer from Harvard and prepares to debate the proposition "God exists" with a suave, ruthless neoconservative theist before a standing-room-only crowd. Much of the novel, however, consists of Cass' reminiscences about the past couple of decades, years during which he made the unlikely journey from dutiful pre-med student to celebrity philosopher.
Ahh.. shades of God Warz from Infoworld (and the ambiguously-gay Duo, defenders of NT-is-the-Futcha of Computing cha cha cha) and onward --> to later venues -- plus, for IWT: fusillades of rapier sharp logic from Brandioch, hurling lancets to pierce various boils of bile, aka Certainties.
Lost his e-mail.. hmmm 27K G. hits on Brandioch, one saying he's on Facebook; haven't quite gotten around to actually playing in that sandbox, but it would be good to see what he's up to now, in the post- Cheney Shogunate Decade of Idiocy.
Ah well, you can never, of course -- go home again. Nor encounter the Hamster Dance in quite the same mindset as when you were just getting off of Lynx via dial-up to local library -- and finally seeing color PIctures, eh?