Does Daniel Mendelsohn Spend All His Spare Time on Technorati?

I intended to link to this earlier, but it seems that Daniel Mendelsohn has a new hobby: responding at length to anyone who invokes his name. A post on Barking Kitten caused Mendelsohn to take offense to Ms. Kitten’s use of a commonplace expletive expressing the frustrating divide between print and online critics. Barking Kitten followed up with another post, hoping that the conversation doesn’t “devolve into a flame war,” with Mendelsohn cheerily announcing that he’s happy to “debate this point in a serious medium, and at length.” Mendelsohn has remained silent. Perhaps he still doesn’t view the Internet as a serious medium because some of us use Dell laptops. (For the record, Mr. Mendelsohn, my laptop is a Toshiba. So hopefully this disqualifies me from any misinterpreted broad brushes. I’m game, as time permits, to discuss “the novel as a genre that has reached its end.” And isn’t the novel a medium and not a genre?)

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