Punchbowls

ANSWERING A CRITIC

1.) MONOMANIA
My blogs in their diversity are hardly those of a monomaniac. In my words and my actions I don't limit myself to being "just" a writer.

I'd say instead that the literary world suffers from monomania. Its focus is strictly on the work, and within the work, the sentence, and beyond this, on the self, while I examine literature within the broader context of the machine which produces it, and the civilization within which that machine is placed. This complex nation is a conjunction of systems, giant wheels of machinery which the writer must negotiate. To think that the production and presentation of the art happens by random accident is naive.

2.) WRITER
My fiercest critic has insisted I'm not a writer. I don't know then what all these words are on my blogs! Numerology? Needlepoint? Whittling?

Something I've written perhaps has strenuously exercised this person with dislike. Maybe that's the idea.

3.) PUNCHBOWLS
That I'm a person who puts his head into punchbowls at parties-- it's said-- must show I'm a mere exhibitionist. Is this so? Why then was I not such a performer through most of my life? In truth I'm a modest, fairly private person. I seldom if ever narcissistically obsess over my childhood, for instance, as seems required for writers of the workshop "literary" variety. No memoirs about driving out west (I've driven out west) as advertisement for the self have been forthcoming from me. What then is really happening?

Could the ULA's "crashes" have been a planned tactic? A way for shut out writers to address literature's caretakers directly, face-to-face, in order to recapture, in a monopolistic society, our democratic rights and freedoms? It's a possibility.