It Isn't The Instrument That

I Wanted To Use What I Was, To Be What I Was Born To Be - Not To Have A 'career', But To Be That Straightforward Obvious Unmistakable Animal, A Writer.

We Often Take For Granted The Very Things That Most Deserve Our Gratitude.

I Can't Claim To Be Disenchanted "with The Current State Of Fiction" Because I Read So Little Of It. My Reading Is Mostly Drawn To History.

We Are So Placid That The Smallest Tremor Of Objection To Anything At All Is Taken As A Full-scale Revolution. Should Any Soul Speak Up In Favor Of The Obvious, It Is Taken As A Symptom Of The Influence Of The Left, The Right, The Pink, The Black, The Dangerous. An Idea For Its Own Sake - Especially An Obvious Idea - Has No Respectability.

What's Impossible Not To Notice, Though - It's All Around Us - Is The Diminution Of American Prose: How Pedestrian It Has Become. Pick Up Any Short Story And Listen To Its Voice, The Tedious Easy Vernacular That Mistakes Transcription For Realism. This Would Display An Understandable Pragmatism If It Were A Pandering To Common-denominator Readers; But It Is, In Fact, A Kind Of Hifalultin Literary Ideology, The Less-is-more Hemingway Legacy Put Through An Up-to-the-minute Industrial Blender.