This post, and several others to appear in due course, are generously sponsored by a gentleman-scholar from County San Francisco, supportive of the production and assessment of nasty novels, dealing familiarly with gamblers, misandrists and flashy reprobates.  Before there was Liz Lemon, there was Avis Dobell: devoted to her career, proudly single (for a while, anyways), lovably fallible, vociferously feminist, and trying to Have It All. (Unfortunately, Avis’s sense of humor isn’t as finely…