Regular Reluctant visitors may remember my query a few weeks ago about the possible existence of a gene causing the Hemingway family to spontaneously take their clothes off. Fortunately, the able team at The Literary Dick has attempted an answer to my question. One doctor declared the question a weird one. While the Genome Project hasn’t yet been consulted, the Literary Dick speculates that until such a gene can be demonstrated, it cannot possibly exist. There are additional possibilities over whether this might be a nature vs. nurture argument. But I leave the able scholars of nudism to unravel potential genetic dispositions.

Michiko on DFW: “These moments, sadly, are engulfed by reams and reams of stream-of-consciousness musings that may be intermittently amusing or disturbing but that in the end feel more like the sort of free-associative ramblings served up in an analyst’s office than between the covers of a book. Mr. Wallace’s previous work shows that he possesses a heightened gift for what the musician Robert Plant once called the ‘deep and meaningless.’ But in these pages it more often feels like the shallow and self-conscious.”

Count the adjectives in those last two sentences.

Some guy named Ben Brown is guest-blogging at Bookslut this week. All we know is that Mr. Brown may or may not be Neal Pollack and that he has slept with everyone at 826 Valencia. He does, however, possess an important skill: the man can insert breaks between paragraphs. We wish Mr. Brown well on his temporary journey and we will be reading him with delight. We encourage you to send incriminating photos to benbrown@gmail.com.