While we were discussing novice writer Cinnamon's latest work in Fiction Writing on Tuesday, I brought up the age issue created by the story's five-year time jumps.

Other people were also interested in the old "write what you know" dilemma and after minimal prodding Prof. Dintenfass went off on one of his trademark stemwinders, explaining how difficult it is to pull off that kind of thing. He mentioned the long tradition of heavily researched bestsellers, which he dated back to (and implicitly blamed on) James Michener.

I laughed at the name, because Michener books are basically just facts with a thin veneer of plot to justify them, but apparently I was the only person in that class who'd heard of the guy. Yeah.

That's up there with the reaction to my casual mention of gonzo journalism last year, apropos of a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas poster. The atmosphere of the room became stiflingly flabbergaseous.

Is it so crazy to expect people who claim to care about fiction (and who, on the whole, write as good or better than I do) to know something about fiction? Michener was quite popular in his day (my house has a few Micheners lying around) and without him we probably wouldn't have the popular fiction trinity of Crichton, Clancy, and Grisham.

Question. Where I am allowed to draw the line between tragic but coincidental ignorance (like, say, not knowing what color a black squirrel is, or how circumcision works) and a damning lack of intellectual curiosity? The latter is far more serious, but it still seems snobby to criticize ignorance of any sort. Stupid anti-elitism.

There might not be a line, I suppose. I found out, well into the 2004 election cycle, that my boss at Scripps hadn't heard of blogs. I gave him a crash course and, intrigued, he researched for half an hour before going back to work. Was that coincidental, or should I have expected him to know, in the morally significant sense of "expected"?

I'm not sure if I can ever expect anyone to know anything (unless I'm critiquing a text, in which case I think the author — who doesn't quite have the same reality as a real person would — should know quite a bit), and I'm not sure I like that.

No really. Where does it stop? Can I fault a native speaker of English for using "decimate" incorrectly, or pronouncing "prescriptivist" like "perscriptivist"? Must a citizen know how to vote? Is there an obligation to know one's elected representatives, and if so, down to what level? The Politician is always saying that local politics affect us more. Ignorance of what authors would justify not hiring a professor for a teaching position? If I can't remember which philosopher or theorist first formulated a theory of ignorance, should I be talking about the subject at all?

We have obligations to know certain things when that knowledge is necessary to perform our jobs, I think that's clear, but can we be faulted for a lack of intellectual curiosity about our hobbies, our interests, and the various other ways we define ourselves to others?

My short, elitist answer is yes, but like Mark Liberman's WTF grammar, I'm deciding whether something is an error based on the reaction of the ignorant party. The uninformed Scripps journalist realized that yes, it just might matter, and a'researching he went. An obviously incidental lapse, impossible to avoid.

Do I know everything about the things I care to know about? Since I might be misinterpreted otherwise (take that!), I'll forgo the usual ironic self-aggrandizing and say: no, no I don't. But it's in my best interest to know more about most of the stuff I enjoy, since it usually increases my enjoyment, so I've been learning about topics like modernism (in school) and cyberpunk (on my own time) for a while now.

And what about people who just don't care about anything that much, who take a shallow interest in a wide variety of activities?

There's a word for that, look it up.