More Matter
Essays and Criticism
Excerpt
"More matter, with less art," Queen Gertrude advises Polonius; she sounds like a
modern magazine editor. The appetite in the print trade is presently for real
stuff — the dirt, the poop, the nitty-gritty — and not for the obliquities and
tenuosities of fiction. A writer is almost never asked to write a story, let
alone a poem; instead he or she is invited to pen introductions, reviews, and
personal essays, preferably indiscreet. (Pen them, then fax them. Instant
modemed communication and rapidly overlapping semes are à la mode.) Human
curiosity, the abettor and stimulant of the fiction surge between Robinson
Crusoe's adventures and Constance Chatterley's, has become ever more
literal-minded and impatient with the proxies of the imagination. Present taste
runs to the down-home divulgences of the talk show — psychotherapeutic
confession turned into public circus — and to investigative journalism that,
like so many heat-seeking missiles, seeks out the intimate truths, the very
genitalia, of Presidents and princesses. It is as i ... read full excerpt from: More Matter ebook
