We've all heard of and value the notion of speaking truth to power. Forget that; this may be better: SPEAKING TRUTH TO KVETCHING. Go, Garrison!

I think back to creative writing classes in college and the first-person essays or chapters on writing I encountered. Invariably, the best were those that were not primarily concerned with the mechanics of the writer's art, regardless of the essay or chapter's title sometimes suggesting otherwise. The best used the writing life as a metaphor, if they focused on it greatly at all. The writing that focused on the act or writing itself--especially if that included detailing the anguish of it all--were the least enjoyable to READ and often the least well written.

Try this on for size, writers: Writing about how hard writing is makes for bad reading! So stop it!

I think back to Dillard's "The Writing Life," and even if she did write about how hard writing was (and I don't know that she did) that's not what I remember. I remember the details that seemed to ring true as supporting elements of the writing life as metaphor for something else altogether anyway! (In her case, at least as I remember it, the writing life as risk-taker, the act of writing really an end in and of itself, and a daring one.) The image from her book I still remember years late is her in a little rented room on a small campus library one summer, puffing away on Vantage cigs, eating chocolate-covered raisins, and one day finally joining one of the regular pickup games of softball some of the few students on campus used to enjoy nearby. Those sort of details rang true--they were at least memorable--and without self-pity, CERTAINLY without complaint.

Which Victorian was it who supposedly used to be seized with paralysis of the arm at the prospect of a day's writing ahead...so he'd dictate to his daughters, who I'm sure had nothing better to do than dutifully aid daddy's genius. Bunk! The old fart was lazy, I say, and the daughters exploited. Sorry, no sympathy from me. Your arm seizes up when you try to write? Then use your feet.

I enjoyed Garrison Keillor's column, "A writer is born." I was born, raised, and educated in Iowa, but have lived in New York City for nearly 10 years. I appreciated both Garrison's retelling of his trip with his father to New York City and his observations on memory. His paragraph contrasting memoirs as a luxury of the upper middle class with the urge of Protestant day laborers to efface self-identity was a gem.

The BBC World News this morning (EST) was still reporting on Bush's apology for using unsophisticated language relative. What the BBC is missing in their coverage--mainly because the BBC consists of journalists raised in the UK (or a Commonwealth nation) where education is valued--is that the U.S.'s most enduring national characteristic is anti-intellectualism, steeped in part in particular Pauline injunctions that evangelical Christianity is so fond of, and also in the "rugged individualism" mythos and its attendant romanticizing of the "plain-spoken" American frontiersmen. When I hear Bush admitting that he used unsophisticated language, I hear him essentially celebrating that fact with his political base--voters who are self-assured not only in the knowledge that Bush is God's chosen president, but that the universe was created in 6 days, gay people are a curable conspiracy, global warming is a lie, and the liberal arts are a dangerous enterprise and effectively a form of treason.

The BBC World News this morning (EST) was still reporting on Bush's apology for using unsophisticated language. What the BBC is missing in their coverage--mainly because the BBC consists of journalists raised in the UK (or a Commonwealth nation) where education is valued--is that the U.S.'s most enduring national characteristic is anti-intellectualism, steeped in part in particular Pauline injunctions that evangelical Christianity is so fond of, and also in the "rugged individualism" mythos and its attendant romanticizing of the "plain-spoken" American frontiersmen. When I hear Bush admitting that he used unsophisticated language, I hear him essentially celebrating that fact with his political base--voters who are self-assured not only in the knowledge that Bush is God's chosen president, but that the universe was created in 6 days, gay people are a curable conspiracy, global warming is a lie, and the liberal arts are a dangerous enterprise and effectively a form of treason.