IT’S A LABOR DAY MISC. WORLD, perhaps the only online column that has never been to Burning Man.

JAY JACOBS STORES, R.I.P.: Another locally-owned chain succumbs to the global giants. Or is it rather the case of a mall-based specialty chain succumbing to the big-box superstores? You decide.

AT WIT’S START: Last Friday, I discussed Francine Prose’s rant in Harper’s about PC but poorly-written stories force-fed to kids in high-school English classes.

I suggested an alternative: A sequence of courses in which the teens would be introduced to Great Kickass Writing.

My own introduction to G.K.W. came some time after college. I’d come to believe there were two main kinds of fiction: the popular stuff (which, considering how well it sold, had to have some solid construction and fun elements, right?) and the highbrow stuff (like the turgid prose I’d been forced to read as a student).

I thought I’d try to cleanse my mind from the boring highbrow stuff and learn to read bestsellers.

Only, to my surprise, the bestsellers I picked up were even worse-written than my old English Lit required texts had been.

Ponderous science-fiction trilogies in which the future was always exactly like the present only more so. Sluggish fantasy epics about how, five thousand years after the Earth was nuked, a race of wizards emerged. Fictional Presidential widows marrying fictional Greek shipping tycoons. Whodunits in which the most grisly wastes of human lives were treated as mere premises for clue-solvin.’

Then a kind person introduced me to Flann O’Brien.

Real wit! Real pacing! Funny characters! Clever yet poignant stories!

My life was forever changed.

No longer would I settle for unadventurous “adventure” stories, flaccid “horror,” or clueless “mysteries.” Nope, I would insist, and still insist, on Great Kickass Writing.

Herewith, a few links to Great Kickass Writing on the Web:

• “I meet men who deliberately inject themselves with HIV-infected blood so that they will henceforth be attractive to Byronic women who think that fatal illness will make them interesting…”
• A long, long treatise about why web writing ought to be short and punchy.
• Here, meanwhile, are examples of the value of brevity…
• A lesson in e-commerce buzzwording…
• “Thats bull, I’ve said ‘I love you’ to a girl and meant it, and I would never use her for sex.”
• “One time I found a whole system of corridors I’d

  never seen before but I couldn’t check them out because I’d been away from my desk too long.”

• “Futons your girlfriend will hate.”
• “Leave my website ALONE! I can’t take this ANY MORE!”
• “The water from the hose tasted like spiky minerals and it iced Alma’s gums straightaway.”
• A site that proves even cliches can be kickass writing.
• “Softly, he runs his finger up and down my spine. ‘Women all look the same in the dark.'”
• “It’s the smell of new upholstery and car mats that gets us, and how a drink holder slides out smoothly from its tiny compartment. We like figuring out what size cups the holder can hold, and what kind of adjustments you can make to the driver’s seat.”
• “Nicole has a wonderful ambiance, and I mean that in the vaguest possible way.”

TOMORROW: As 1/1/00 approaches, Y2K survivalists become less communalist and more capitalist.

ELSEWHERE: A Disney subsidiary offered free home pages; this was one result…