If Ideas Are What Feed Serious Literature

We Were Born To Die; We Were Born To Endure, On The Way To Death, Sorrow-sorrow In Manifold Shapes.

Much Of The Academy On The Humanities Side, English Departments In Particular, No Longer Write What Can Pass For Normal English.

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.

I Measure My Life In Sentences Pressed Out, Line By Line, Like The Lustrous Ooze On The Underside Of The Snail, The Snail's Secret Open Seam, Its Wound, Leaking Attar.

Women Who Write With An Overriding Consciousness That They Write As Women Are Engaged Not In Aspiration Toward Writing, But Chiefly In A Politics Of Sex.