The Lacanian phallus (his term, not his cigar) is said not to be the penis.
I know how that goes. Everyone tries not to be a dick. For instance I was once giving a talk in Cleveland (many jokes involve Cleveland, though this as people rushed to say was Cleveland Heights) and afterward someone asked me what quality of art I thought mine was. (He had been asking about back-story, though not by name–the phallus is not the penis, and wondered whether there was any principle of selection in hyperfiction. “You just seem to leave everything in, where great art would select,” he said. He was a physicist. We are very far from the story now, though not this story. I sometimes wonder whether what prompts this writing is merely self-gratification. I sometimes wonder whether this kind of gesture is empty postmodernism (I wonder whether there is a full postmodernism, or what could be fuller than this, I am telling you everything I know at this moment, I am in El Paso in a hotel suite, this section is about plenitude, about variations, about principles of composition, about passing time; when I began working on the 22 short section I had the notion of linking everything, but in the meanwhile, though along the Hudson not in El Paso, I wrote something with some others in which every word was linked and now I am not certain why this continues ever inward.). I have recently read criticism of hyperfiction on alt.hypertext (if you are a computer person this is as much an address as El Paso; the place where we linked, almost, everything was on the web; even if you are not a computer person you cannot have avoided hearing about the web, people other than postmodernists have big plans for it) that suggests there is a popular audience which these fictions do not speak to, an audience which gives itself to reverie, to television specifically. If you have read this far, this likely makes you a postmodernist rather than a televisionist. (If you can read this, you are too damn close. Bumpersticker.)
“Do you mean how would I rank it?” I asked the physicist.
“Yes, compared to Homer, say, or Shakespeare.”
I did not want to be a dick.
“I’m afraid an artist cannot say that,” I said.
He got a big bang out of that.