Prosaism

The young writer must be paranoid about dating his work, wary of indiscreet passés, and, ultimately, bent on immortalization. Contemporary references are to be avoided. Novelties such as email should be used sparingly, only when it is anachronistic not to include them. (The word email [without quotes or hyphen, uncapitalized] must make him cringe, as should most neologisms coined by technologists; it will eventually join "telegram," "videotape," and "typewriter" in obscurity.) He should never mention, say, text-messaging, Dr. Phil, American Idol or anything remotely related to pop-culture, no matter how applicable. Such references, even when absolutely necessary, sing for justification. The writer could include explanatory paragraphs (disrupting the pacing of the work, gratuitous to contemporary readers) or footnotes (allowing readers to ignore the addenda. But coming across superscript without at least glancing at the gloss is like eating around the mustard on a hot dog. Footnotes are sore spots, tedious and unruly, extra work for readers thinly invested in fiction, which is an exercise in excess). The writer could justify the asides or footnotes by claiming that his is a postmodern work, intertextual, forever referential, an amalgam of narrative and essayist forms, interrupted with purpose because that's what great writers who "get it" do. But then the work becomes attached to its school of thought, which everyone has grown tired of since no simple definition seems to exist and anyone who tries to explain it does so in a huffing, circuitous, condesceding, and ultimately fruitless way, and so the claim becomes distasteful, elitist, an attempt at irony, a banal homage, like referencing an off-air TV show that hasn't yet reached its vintage, too old to be hip, too recent to be memorial. Which brings us back to the problem of dating.
It's a wonder writers can even get out of bed.