For those of you who were wondering why yesterday's list of potential "Foes of GalleyCat" (for which you can still vote, if you haven't already) didn't include John Freeman, a ringleader of the National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass. There's a couple reasons. Despite previous disagreements with Freeman, we've had perfectly nice social encounters on the literary circuit, and I don't think I could bring myself to dump on him often enough and viciously enough to provoke a rebuttal column. Then, too, Critical Mass probably wouldn't bring us enough lookyloos; we need a grand enemy. And, finally, we need an enemy who can focus his or her anger and frustration on us to near-exclusitivity...and with many of the major literary bloggers taking their whacks at him over the last few months, I feel like we'd just get lost in the shuffle.

Case in point: Freeman reviewed the new Mark Z. Danielewski novel, Only Revolutions, last week, decrying as he did "the stunning lack of experimentation in American fiction during the past two decades" as a means of underscoring the uniqueness of Danielewski's accomplishment. Scott Esposito of Conversational Reading is having none of that, and offers up a list of recent experimental American fiction, while Mark Sarvas of The Elegant Variation strikes an even harder critical blow: "It's less of an indication of the state of experimental fiction and more a reflection on how poorly read a critic Freeman appears to be." Edward Champion takes a lighter approach, offering support to Esposito's thesis regarding "the long legacy of experimental novelists who have been long ignored by newspaper critics."