With the NYTM in physical form next to me..

I have to thank our lovely host for the blog symposium for really bringing our posts all together with his response. I've had a lot of fun taking an open-ended perspective, and seeing how it all converged. Actually, I think I might have to re-read Barthes. My (personal) author is not so much dead, but physically disassociated from the text that ends up in the world at large.

For my own part, I want to thank Preppy for pointing out the angle that was simmering a bit below the surface. I think it even speaks to my slight alienation from equating the taste of food with the physicality of family. Even as I aspire to enter the journalistic ranks, I know that I focus on style first - and Aslam's fiction is weighed heavily on sounding excellent, even if doesn't take account all of the ramifications of language choice. Lives is one of my oldest and dearest reading staples, but I think the more we can talk about the subtext of a column that is the anecdotal version of "This I Believe", the more we can take away from such a regular feature.