What We Think We Are Surely Going

It Isn't The Instrument That Influences High-minded Or Low-minded; It's The Quality Of Mind Itself.

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.

If Ideas Are What Feed Serious Literature And Arresting Language, Who Today Is Writing A Novel Of Ideas (which Can Often Mean Comedy)? I Think Of Joshua Cohen. Who Else?

The Imagination Has Resources And Intimations We Don't Even Know About.

Literature Is An Instrument Of A Culture, Not A Summary Of It.