Well, if the current bids on The Nation's First Ever Online Auction are any guide, it'll cost you upwards of $2,500, but really, according to the description of the item, its estimated value is "priceless."

Other items for sale include a signed copy of Victor Navasky's A Matter of Opinion and original art by Edward Sorel and George Shreiber.

There's also an autographed DVD of John Cusack's Mark Leyner-cowritten movie War, Inc. that's currently at $80, perfect for that Halliburton-hating, Military-Industrial-Complex dismantler on your Holiday gift list.

In the 12 years since that broadcast, Mr. Leyner would step back from fiction, co-authoring a series of popular medical advice books and dabbling in television- and screenwriting. Mr. Franzen would receive, however reluctantly, the literary equivalent of the Key to the City from Oprah Winfrey and a National Book Award for The Corrections. Mr. Wallace would write half a dozen more books of short stories, essays, journalism and criticism before committing suicide last week at 46.

"It's been awful. I really haven't thought about much else," Mr. Leyner told The Observer of Mr. Wallace's passing.

After a brief pause, he continued. "It's a shocking thing. It's kind of a more terrible shock because in retrospect, given the things we know now, David's unhappiness, which was profound, was a long-lasting thing."

Mr. Leyner described Mr. Wallace as "a very courteous, diffident person," someone who "lived life with an enormous amount of concern. ... He was the opposite of an arrogant, swaggering person."

The other member of Mr. Rose's panel, Jonathan Franzen, told The New York Times' Bruce Weber that Mr. Wallace "was a huge talent, our strongest rhetorical writer. ... He was also as sweet a person as I've ever known and as tormented a person as I've ever known."

Mr. Wallace and Mr. Leyner only had a handful of encounters over the years, but they spoke to each other intensely through their work and in interviews. Mr. Wallace was at times critical of Mr. Leyner. In an essay called "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again), he called the author's second book of stories, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, "the biggest thing for campus hipsters since The Fountainhead." (That was surely not a compliment.). In William Grimes' New York Times Magazine profile of Mr. Leyner, Mr. Wallace called him "a kind of antichrist." He also said, "He's so into making fun of everything that, reading him, I think of the culture as a cancer patient with a terminal diagnosis."

Mr. Leyner says that before their appearance on Charlie Rose, Mr. Wallace apologized for those remarks. "He was so considerate about it. He said it was taken a little out of context and started to explain. And I said, 'Oh, it's not necessary.' He was very concerned that I not be hurt by something."

"I never took any of that personally," Mr. Leyner says of the criticism."I thought it was great. I took pleasure in it. ... I never ever felt a tinge of insult about it. David was not capable of that." (Mr. Leyner managed to jape Mr. Wallace with a 1997 satire of The Jenny Jones Show devoted to a "recovering postmodernist," which Mr. Wallace apparently appreciated enough to hang on his office door, according to Mr. Leyner.)

"When I was with David, we never had those kinds of conversations you can have with people about 'the business,' about agents, about editors. It was always about the work."

Of that work, Mr. Leyner says, "What we're losing is someone who saw a kind of profundity in almost everything as a human being and as a citizen and as an artist. ... He's irreplaceable and at a moment in the culture when he's desperately needed, he's gone."

One of those ways was the play, Betrayed, which was based on his article of the same name from March 2007. (In January, The Observer's Doree Shafrir profiled Mr. Packer as his show was set to debut at the Culture Project in Soho, where it will close June 16th.)

He also says he has "a little novelistic idea," but, for now, that project remains in his head. "It's as if, maybe the journalism has run its course," Mr. Packer says. "But there are other levels of experiencing it that journalism can't capture."

Other journalists are thinking the same thing. Salon's Phillip Robertson says, "There'll be stories that allow us to make sense more. I don't think history really explains it to you. I don't think history buys you all that much. I think what buys you a lot is films and novels."

"Because you have to process all this war with its infinite tentacles and its extraordinary reach and unbelievable cost. It has to be processed in almost a parable. Somebody would have to write it."

In his recent film War, Inc., actor-producer-screenwriter John Cusack tried to satirize the Iraq invasion by setting his story in a world that he described in an interview with The Observer as "reality plus."

In writing the film (with Mark Leyner and Jeremy Pikser), he says, "You wanted to see if you could process... Obviously, in satire and absurdity sometimes, you take trends to their logical conclusion."

To make it absurd—but not too absurd—Mr. Cusack and his collaborators drew from books like Washington Post National Editor Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City (all about the Catch-22-ish madness of the Green Zone), Thomas E. Rick's Fiasco, Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, and Evan Wright's Generation Kill. (The latter book has been adapted by The Wire's David Simon as a mini-series debuting on HBO in July.)

Patrick Graham, who covered the war for a number of outlets including Harper's and The Guardian, is also looking to comedy as a way of processing his experiences. He's currently developing a TV show with The Daily Show's resident curmudgeon Lewis Black. "It's a comedy about the war on terror," Mr. Graham says, but he's quick to point out it's not explicitly about Iraq.

Another comedy about the war on terror? Hey, it could work. As The New Yorker's Mr. Packer says, "Maybe [we] need other forms."

"Not that journalists are necessarily gonna succeed at those other forms," he says. "But sometimes you just have to try."

Choire Sicha bravely asks, "Why can’t men write anymore?" According to Mr. Sicha, "A little penis, it turns out, can be a dangerous thing. But it’s not crazy at all to feel bad for the young male writers of our time, despite all they have done to us with their books. There are these legends that loom; all women, all terrifying."

John Koblin looks at the Dolans' purchase of Newsday and notes, "The Dolans haven’t been known for their warm embrace of the media. Ask any Knicks beat reporter about life at Madison Square Garden (as we did for a November article in these pages), and you’ll get your share of war stories about Cablevision’s Moscow-like media policies."

Want more local news? Felix Gillette checks out WNBC's looming 24-hour news channel serving the tri-state region. "Underlying NBC’s announcement is the theory that for too long, broadcast journalists have been a wasteful bunch. In the brave new world, every last scrap from the cutting-room floor promises to be picked up, mopped off, and served up on multiple, varied platforms, from the Internet to podcasts to the video screens in the back of taxicabs."

“I was an infinitely hot and dense dot. So begins the autobiography of a feral child who was raised by huge and lurid puppets. An autobiography written wearing wrist weights,” Mr. Leyner wrote in one of the riffs—“chapters” would be too conventional a description of his style—in his 1990 book, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist.

Mr. Leyner, who lived in Hoboken, had already published I Smell Esther Williams, a collection of experimental stories that The Times called “prodigiously original.” My Cousin was met with similarly favorable reviews by critics, who saw in Mr. Leyner’s punctuation-flouting, form-bending, au courant prose a reflection of television’s growing influence on a new generation of writers. In 1992, just before the release of his third book, Et Tu, Babe, he was featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in a tank top, hoisting an inflatable dumbbell beside the cover line “Mark Leyner Is America’s Best-Built Comic Novelist.”

Et Tu, Babe told of the rise to fame and power of a writer named Mark Leyner, a fabulously successful muscle-bound man of letters who’s photographed nude by Annie Leibovitz via spy satellite and swooned over by Martha Stewart: “It’s almost impossible to conceive that this is the body of an acclaimed writer. And not just an acclaimed writer, but perhaps the most influential writer at work today,” the fictional Ms. Stewart said of the fictional Mark Leyner.

His byline began appearing in the pages of The New Yorker, The New Republic and Esquire (where he was a columnist). He became a free-floating arbiter of culture, interviewing his idol Keith Richards in Spin, dispensing insights on “hipness” to Time magazine. Mr. Leyner appeared on Letterman. He participated in a Charlie Rose roundtable on the future of fiction with Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace. He published another book, a collection of odds and sods called Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog, followed by a novel, The Tetherballs of Bougainville, which again featured his greatest creation, Mark Leyner, this time as a 13-year-old boy trying to save his father from execution while carrying on an affair with a female prison warden.

And then what happened? As the 21st century dawned, both Mark Leyners disappeared—poof!—just like that. It’s as if the ’90s held him captive.

Today, however, 52-year-old Mark Leyner has resurfaced with an entirely new act: screenwriter. He’s co-written War, Inc., a Dr. Strangelove-esque satire of the Iraq occupation, with John Cusack and Bulworth co-writer Jeremy Pikser.

Mr. Cusack (who also produced the film) stars as Hauser, a black-clad executive and occasional assassin for Tamerlane, a corporation run by a former vice president of the United States (Dan Aykroyd, barking his cameo) that is executing the first completely privatized war, in the nation of Turaqistan. Any resemblance to Halliburton, Dick Cheney and Iraq is entirely intended.

The film, which opens in New York and Los Angeles on May 23, co-stars Hilary Duff as a Turaqi pop star named Yonica Babyyeah and Marisa Tomei as Natalie Hegalhuzen, a columnist for The Nation who bears a passing resemblance to The Nation’s Naomi Klein. An article Ms. Klein wrote for Harper’s in 2004 on war contractors served as partial inspiration. (Reached in Toronto, Ms. Klein said she offered some suggestions to the filmmakers and met with Ms. Tomei, but made it clear that she had no formal relationship with the project.)

So, where has Mr. Leyner been since his last novel? “Whatever this period of time has been, I’ve needed it. Given the extremity of my personal identification with that work, I think 10 years is probably sort of minimal. … I made a very conscious decision to try to do other things,” he said recently over coffee near Union Square.

Those other things included developing a pilot about a kilt-wearing, punk rock surgeon for MTV called Iggy Vile, M.D. In one scene, Dr. Vile performs an impromptu liposuction on a woman using a drinking straw. “I’m still proud of that,” Mr. Leyner says with a laugh.

He also worked for Peter Berg’s ABC series Wonderland, which was canceled before any episodes he wrote could air. While there, he met Billy Goldberg, M.D., who was the show’s medical consultant. The two collaborated on a book called Why Do Men Have Nipples?, which playfully answered such questions as “Can you catch diseases from a toilet seat?” (sometimes); “Will staring at an eclipse make you go blind?” (not necessarily); and “Why does poo float?” (Do you really want to know?)

To both men’s surprise, the book and its sequel, Why Do Men Fall Asleep After Sex?, were monster hits, bigger than all of Mr. Leyner’s books combined. The book landed the authors on Today and was spun off into a desk calendar. (A third volume is on the way.) It was during the Wonderland period that John Cusack contacted him. “I had read his book,” Mr. Cusack said by telephone from Los Angeles. “And called him up, kind of as a fan, and said, ‘Let’s do something together? Can we do something?’”

Together they adapted Et Tu, Babe, but that project languished, according to Mr. Leyner, because “Et Tu is like an enormous, Wagnerian epic film.” Maybe, but the main problem with a film of Et Tu, Babe is how the material has aged. The type of fame Mr. Leyner satirized in 1992 is quaint by contemporary standards. It’s a pre-Internet, pre-glossy-tabloid world dominated by figures like Connie Chung and Clarence Thomas that looks like an age of innocence compared to our current era of camera-phone pictures of celebrities in bathrooms. Those movie references and infomercial jokes that made Mr. Leyner’s work so well suited to his moment call to mind the pop-drunk sensibility that made Quentin Tarantino such a thrilling writer-director circa Pulp Fiction.

Today, Mr. Leyner is a bit like a living embodiment of VH1’s I Love the ’90s: He has no official Web site; he still uses AOL for his e-mail; he’s just gotten around to reading Bret Easton Ellis.

War, Inc., which by all indications takes place in the present—or the very near future—is also weirdly stuck in the past. John McLaughlin makes a cameo as a newscaster; when Mr. Cusack’s character needs to externalize a bit of his character’s inner monologue he converses with his car’s GuideStar operator—a joke on 1995’s cutting-edge OnStar technology—voiced by Montel Williams. Even a side plot about a leaked sex tape feels tacked on, a nod to the current moment of Paris Hilton-type pseudo-celebrity epiphenomena.

Then there’s that other totally ’90s element of War, Inc.: John Cusack, who can’t seem to break free of his ’90s icon status. In his 40s now, he still comes off as a post-Reagan, pre-grunge searcher. Quick: Name one movie in which Mr. Cusack has seemed fully at home this decade. Did you say High Fidelity? That’s based on a 1996 book. Grosse Pointe Blank? When that movie came out, Bill Clinton was still president.

The two ’90s guys (and their collaborator, Mr. Pikser) got on well. (Mr. Leyner and Mr. Cusack have another script in the hopper, a satire called Pipe Dream about a performance artist who works with his own feces.) But while Mr. Cusack’s take on War, Inc, is overtly political, Mr. Leyner’s is more abstract. “What John and Jeremy might see as the foreground of the movie”—Halliburton, Cheney, etc.—“I kind of saw it as the background. I’m more interested in other aspects of the movie. The sort of critique of heroic iconology. The idea of a person who’s actively in conflict with himself.”

If you’re catching an echo of the Mark Leyner/Mark Leyner divide, you might be … Mark Leyner. “There’s almost nothing anyone can say about my work that I probably haven’t thought about at some point,” he says. “I’m very thoroughgoing about it.”

With War, Inc. set to hit theaters, Mr. Leyner, who by some miracle still lives in Hoboken, is starting on a new work of fiction. For his next act, he will be reborn as the master of his own pantheon of gods and goddesses: He’s writing his own book of myths. “There haven’t been new myths in a long time,” he says. “The gods live on the upper floors of this fabulous apartment building of Kuala Lumpur.

“I’m not in it,” he’s quick to add with a smile. “But it does, I think, embody my signature hubris.”

mhaber@observer.com

If Joshua Long gets his way, he'll be a TV studio chief by January 2004. Never mind that he's never spent a single second in the TV business.

"The timeline is to have a deal on the table within 45 days," said Mr. Long, talking about his would-be startup, General Television Company, which exists only as a business plan on the desks of some unnamed private investors. But Mr. Long said he's thisclose to bagging $10 million. His big idea: tapping Manhattan's talent pool of magazine writers, novelists, film directors and producers to create sophisticated TV pilots aimed at 25- to 35-year-olds, and selling them to cable networks. The business plan is simple: "One out of 10 is knocked out of the park and recoups the rest," he said.

"We're trying to get the investors a system they understand, because this has never been done before," he said, before putting his chances of success at "95 percent."

Mr. Long, a rangy, jug-eared kid from Minnesota, is a former fashion entrepreneur and onetime business manager for Maer Roshan's ill-fated Radar magazine-not exactly a Les Moonves résumé. But as eye-popping self-confidence goes, Mr. Long, cell-phone glued to his ear, radiates inevitability.

Mr. Long said he has an impressive array of friends to help him, too: He named as advisers, mentors or potential partners the radio personality Kurt Andersen, novelist Bret Easton Ellis, failed Talk magazine editor Tina Brown, Men's Journal editor Michael Caruso, former Primedia chief executive Tom Rogers, novelist Harry Cruz and satirist and screenwriter Mark Leyner.

"Sometimes it seems like one person's pipe dream, and it also seems ingeniously ambitious at the same time," said Mr. Leyner, who has worked on shows for CBS and MTV and is developing ideas with Mr. Long. "These are all the qualities of a mogul in the making. And sometimes you think, 'Is this guy for real?' But if he does this, it will change everything."

Included in Mr. Long's proposed pilot ideas-many of which he wrote himself-is a K Street–inspired reality series about the New York media world called The Gray Area.

"I think Joshua has a remarkable ability to get disparate, but oddly congenial people together," said Mr. Leyner. "He's certainly not shy. If he wants to talk to somebody, he'll just call them."

Of course, some people may have regretted picking up the phone. A few of his so-called "advisers," it seems, were unhappy to have their names used to prop up his enterprise. His former employer, Mr. Roshan, declined to comment, as did Mr. Andersen; Ms. Brown's assistant said she was unavailable for comment; Mr. Ellis didn't respond, either.

"Josh is a smart, slightly autistic, incredibly ambitious guy who talks a good game," said one associate, who declined to be named. "He's constantly spinning grand schemes that rarely seem to materialize. But he's also hardworking and extremely eager and seemingly well-intentioned-very talented in a Mr. Ripley–ish sort of way."

Mr. Long is a graduate of the University of Minnesota, where he studied architectural history and started a cashmere sweater company out of his frat house.

"I was the only one there who had a fax machine, so I'd be on the phone to Nordstrom, or Neiman Marcus, while a party was going on downstairs," he said.

He headed east in 1996 with dreams of being a kind of male Donna Karan. "We made some beautiful fucking clothing, some incredible garments," he said.

His parents-his father is a retired biology professor, his mother a retired resort owner who lives outside Tuscon-helped foot the bill, but the company failed. He started working for a downtown art magazine, and then convinced Nelson Aldrich III and Mr. Andersen to assist on a hipster urban-planning magazine called Real World. The funding never materialized. So he called up Mr. Roshan and landed a job as business manager for Radar. When that fizzled after two issues, Mr. Long immediately got started on his current venture, inspired by the way Mr. Roshan seemed to keep landing on his feet.

"They were willing to do it for Maer because he had a vision, he had the drive, the hubris, the talent," said Mr. Long. "They all wanted to do it. That's the great lesson I learned: That you can do that in New York-here. First of all, you have the talent to choose from. But they will follow."

-Joe Hagan

David Bowman is the opposite of Mark Leyner. I say this upfront because it's likely that Mr. Bowman, a more or less unknown young writer with an agitated style, a screwball imagination and a comic compulsion-the kind of guy you just have to call "hyperkinetic"-will be frequently compared to Mr. Leyner, who is a cult hero on campus and the reigning king of hyperkinesia.

Mr. Bowman's prose jumps out at you, a flash of staccato wit and freewheeling imagery. It's easy to imagine him careening out of control, impossible to imagine him shying away from risk. Six years ago, in his wonderful first novel, Let the Dog Drive, he tried to capture a character's severe look by comparing him to "Rudolph Giuliani, D.A." ("Oh, that gaunt jawline! Those rigid cheeks! That humorless upholder of justice-Yes! Yes!")

Was Mr. Bowman showing off? I doubt it. He gives the impression of being the hapless victim of his own oddity, compelled to tell jazzy, eccentric, hysterically funny stories. His novels feel like sloppy accidents that somehow turned out exactly right. It's all very human, by which I mean two things that may be related: He's fallible and lucky and reeks of promise; and he can write about love and literature without irony, without the quarantine of quotation marks.

Mr. Leyner, the opposite number, never leaves home without his irony. A master engineer of postmodern humor, he wraps self-awareness around tight spirals of wit to build dazzling, mazelike constructions. He cheerfully accepts that his many satiric jabs at a grossly commercial culture are themselves carefully crafted entertainment product. He never broods over paradox or absurdity. He laughs at it, packs it neatly away in expert prose, machine-tooled paragraphs, sentences eerily accurate, as though derived from scientifically tested specifications. Mark Leyner's books (his most recent is The Tetherballs of Bougainville ) are always unabashedly about the cleverness of Mark Leyner. David Foster Wallace has noted Mr. Leyner's "amphetaminic eagerness to wow the reader." The eagerness is at once obvious and invisible, flawlessly disguised because the reader is indeed wowed.

David Bowman also wows the reader. But unlike Mr. Leyner, he aims to disappear. He slots you into his weird world and once you're in, you're meant to forget everything except the vivid strangeness screaming in your face.

Bunny Modern kicks off with a rollicking shootout in Washington Square Park. We've been parachuted into the near future, some two decades into the great Millennial Blackout. Electricity is history, fertility rates are kissing zero and any baby born is a rare treasure guarded by a gun-toting nanny. Before we have time to assimilate what this post-AC/DC Manhattan might be like, before we can get used to the fact that the nannies are dressed in "Lit Wear" ("Ambrose Bierce boots," "Bret Harte duster") and that a prominent publishing house is called Calvin Klein-in short, before we can catch our breath, we're plunged into violence. A kidnapping is under way, decoys clutching plastic babies running in every direction. A posse of nannies, weapons brandished, wheels into action. "Man!" our narrator enthuses, "I have to tell you that the resulting gunfire is just pop! pop! pop! " Pure pop, in fact: Quentin Tarantino mayhem well sauced with gore, cruelty brightened by the sheer fun of cartoon choreography.

The narrator, Dylan, whose father invented Lit Wear, has just caught his first glimpse of Clare, the nanny who foils the kidnapping with a fine display of pop! pop! pop! He falls in love at once, though it takes him a while to place the feeling. "When Con Ed died," he explains, there was a collective "brownout of the heart." Later he elaborates: "We New Yorkers, maybe all of Western Civilization, have forgotten so much about romance since volts took a powder that we're functional idiots." By the time Dylan gets the hang of it, he and Clare are embroiled in a ludicrous plot involving a baby who never ages, and whose seeming immortality may or may not explain the disappearance of electricity.

The plot jerks forward, its silliness made sillier by Dylan's telepathy. He can read minds, though only women's minds. He calls this gender-specific talent "sheldraking" in honor of British scientist Rupert Sheldrake. It's a hokey device that allows Mr. Bowman to poke some fun at New Age theories of "morphic resonance" and at the same time claim for Dylan convenient moments of omniscience.

Other features of Mr. Bowman's through-the-looking-glass future go down more easily. Because there are no telephones, the carrier pigeon has been "genetically resurrected by Sharper Image." The nannies make perfect sense: They have to be kept from bonding with their wee charges because otherwise they might turn into kidnappers, so they dope themselves with Vengeance, a designer drug that sharpens the maternal urge and then twists it to unleash steely killers indifferent to the infant lives they protect.

Of course, the average gun-crazed au pair tends to dress head-to-toe in Poe-it's shocking, toward the end of the novel, when you meet a nanny wearing an Emma Bovary.

Mr. Bowman lives for allusion. Dylan's namesake (Bob Dylan, not Dylan Thomas) crops up every few pages. "You're not one of those Tower Records freaks," Clare asks, "who believe that all our current is flowing back through time to when Bob Dylan went electric at Newport?" Bunny Modern is brilliant patchwork, bits and pieces snipped from literature and pop culture, some of them sewn securely in place, others loosely pinned. The novel begins with an inversion of Moby-Dick -Mr. Bowman insists on calling his reader Ishmael. Halfway through, Dylan rinses Clare's feet with Perrier, a brand-name update of T.S. Eliot's ditty from The Waste Land : "O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter/ And on her daughter/ They wash their feet in soda water."

What is the point of all this?

I believe that Mr. Bowman is at work on an anatomy of yearning, the current of desire that sparks consciousness and makes us feel most alive. In Let the Dog Drive , he tackled romantic love. He invented a delightful and tragic heroine, the divinely eccentric Sylvia Cushman, and a teenager (all teenagers are champion yearners) who aches for her. In Bunny Modern , Mr. Bowman widens the scope of his inquiry to include maternal yearning-not just what it's like to be desperate for a child, but the whole greedy gamut of mother love. Here's Clare, breaking the nanny taboo, bonding with someone else's baby: "It's a metal funnel that's been plugged into her heart. It is Clare's fancy that it's slim like an old-fashioned ear trumpet. An elongated cone. Yes. A cone is leading out of her heart. And this baby is pouring unadulterated empathy up to the brim. Clare can think of only one name for this experience: Cone Heart." Ignore the echo of Saturday Night Live' s Cone Heads and you hit pay dirt, Mr. Bowman's stubborn sentimental streak. Yearning is the wellspring of his writing. Incipient love, baffled love, perverted love, love that's always a little off the mark.

Mr. Bowman is a romantic escapist. From the "plastic heart of America" (a phrase he uses in Let the Dog Drive ) he scavenges scraps of our popular culture, anything from Versace to Mr. Boston's Official Bartender Guide .

But he yearns for something else, like the glories of 19th-century literature, especially Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson (the belle of Amherst haunts his first novel). He yearns for the grace of Fred Astaire ("Ishmael, let's shoot up his beautiful steps like a drug or dream"). He yearns for the grit of a hard-boiled detective novel.

But mostly he yearns to tell a grand weepy love story, something along the lines of the Alexander Graham Bell anecdote he tacks on to Bunny Modern , his motley tale of the Millennial Blackout: "You know Bell invented the dial tone, the receiver, the wrong number. But did you know he also invented a telephone that sent messages with light? Yes. The telephone was a byproduct of Bell's search for the perfect valentine for his wife. She was deaf, you see. Mrs. Alexander Bell was deaf from birth. Bell spent his life searching for a way to talk with her. He worked with light, believing he could somehow send his voice through her eyes."

Mr. Bowman's sentimentality is precious-and I mean that in the old-fashioned, sentimental sense of very valuable.