Are there limits to the pursuit of realism in fiction? For Cervantes, at least, those limits are to be found somewhere in between three hundred goats and the bodily needs of Sancho Panza. 

It snowed yesterday in Seattle.  The locals acted like it was the Second Coming.  I received an avalanche of identical Facebook status updates ("It's snowing!") and the news shows went into wall-to-wall breathless-coverage mode.

In her recent post about a conference on Futurism at SFMOMA, Marjorie Perloff raises several important literary-historical questions.  One of them:  To what extent do a writer's noxious political opinions require us to construe as suspicious his or her activities and affiliations earlier in life?