they have to disagree with kundera. it seems to be an ironic and playful essay into a novel, as long as it is consistent with the rest of the book. thomas mahon, i guess, with a long disquisitions about time and that cosmically boring masterpiece. or the lecture in beethoven's last piano piece. or if you look at that handout, which has this page from the 1972 prize-winning novel, just to give you a bit of context. this is from the middle of a sex scene where burger writes off to discuss the impossibility of writing a sex scene. he also displays his great gift of being a visual artist as well. [laughter] to stress the kind of novel writing for him, he has a passage that appears as an essay in his own writing. before it was pasted in. before the days of computers. burger and susan sontag described themselves as storytellers. but i think their natural tendencies was towards the analytical. at different points they had defined forms of fiction that harnessed and made a virtue of this inclination of the dispersive. i think i