I've been a writer since I was sixteen, nearly fifty years now. I remember being scared. One phrase struck me, referring to the supposed "narcissism" of the artistic life.

That is the definition of the artistic life foisted on artists by this idiot culture. Artists are no more narcissistic than any other human. If your vision of art is that it is all about expressing yourself, yes, it will seem narcissistic. But as Yeats said, it's better to go down on your knees and scrub kitchen pavement, or break stones in all kinds of weather. As he explained (the poem is "Adam's Curse"), "to articulate sweet sounds together" is "to work harder than all these."

The fact is, an artist's life in the U.S. is extremely hard. You care a lot about a sort of precision almost nobody else in the culture even understands, but unlike mathematicians, you are not paid for your knowledge. You get no moral support whatsoever. People think you are a narcissist, lazy, weak-minded (I have a degree in math, by the way), impressionable, gullible, and on and on.

The fact is that art is not about self-expression. If it were, any fool could do it. Karl Rove could do it. It is about creating something as marvelous as mountain or a lake, something as useful to the few people who come across it. The self is useful only as the vehicle which can be trained. The best way to defeat the fear that a young writer feels is to meditate continually on the fact that writing is NOT ABOUT THE AUTHOR. Forget yourself. Get into the discipline, the learning. When you do that, it is perfectly easy to ignore all the naysayers and know-nothings.

I am not saying a good writer has no ego. Everybody has an ego. I have one. It must be fed. I just mean that self-concern is not a productive path to writing well.

When I taught writing I did everything I could to discourage my students from the life, because it is so bitterly hard. Some took it up anyway. They were the writers.

If you can talk yourself out of it, good. If not, good luck.

Nicely done, nice irony. I enjoy your short takes on the financial absurdities we are daily asked to swallow.

It's "down the pike," however, not "down TO the pike." Probably a typo.

One of the more amusing recurrent fictions is the death of fiction. Happens with every literary generation, apparently. I remember when Mailer, Wolf, and Capote were declaiming the end of fiction and the rise of the "nonfiction novel" some forty years ago. Strangely, some of us kept writing fiction, and some it kept getting published. If writers of that caliber got it wrong, I am not deeply impressed by Yagoda's assertions.

One reason people get away with such total hypocrisy is that our culture is saturated with military worship. A friend, a liberal friend, recently sent me a series of photos--no doubt most of you have seen them--supposedly representing more eloquently than words could certain conditions like friendship, grief,curiosity, humor, kindness--and nearly half the images featured either a man in uniform or a military reference (like the shot of the prostrate woman on her soldier husband's grave). I admire courage in whatever form we find it, but I find it revealing and disturbing that most people can no longer imagine the better human qualities unless you stick a uniform in the picture.

A related gripe: Have you ever noticed that the all the local papers refer to all the people in uniform as "heroes"? You don't have to risk your life, or save others. All you have to do is enlist. How convenient! How easy!

The question I pose to physicists and other thinkers: Which is the essential fact, the lightning bolt or the electron?

He's just further blackening the name of papistry. Anyone who has ever read even a cursory history of the evils committed by the popes and the Vatican in the supposed name of Jesus, including murder and the covert amassing of huge fortunes, knows better than to believe a word the pope says or to think he has any connection whatsoever with god or anything holy.

Almost makes one wish their theology were true, just to laugh as the smoke begins curling up from the fancy hat of the world's biggest liar.

How many know what part of the chicken is called the pope's nose? How many realize that name results from what comes out of the pope's mouth, which is just under his nose?

Came to the same conclusion after watching a few porn pieces. I hadn't had sex for a long time, so was horny, but after a few times even being horny wasn't enough. It dawned on me: These guys don't know how to fuck. One clue is the word they use for the act: pounding. That's what they do, pound.

Very boring, if you like reality.

I read a few of the letters. Quite agree that most aging frat boys do not turn out as lovable as these guys. Most of them are just as clueless and offensive as they age.

But this IS tv-land she's talking about, not real life. So long as one keeps it very clear that television does not do reality, one is okay. And really, after all these years, how can it be a surprise to anyone that tv doesn't do reality?

Good ending on the necessity for courage and humor as the unavoidable indignities of aging pile up. What else can you do? Nothing. As Leonard Cohen puts it, in "The Tower of Song," "I ache in the places I used to play."

Actually, that line and others have saved me from tv. Makes it completely unnecessary.