chatter. It enables you to escape—for as long as you’re reading it, as long as you’re grasped by it—the confines of being you. You can sort of cast off the uniform of your own flesh in some funny way and put on the uniform of somebody else’s skin. You can escape the little world that’s inside your skin and live inside the world that the writer produces for you. It can be an escape in a frivolous sense, just escaping from you—which is not to be sneezed at, it’s rather nice to have happen—but escaping