I recently received an email telling me that someone “liked” a comment/post I made to a Substack last June. One wonderful thing about writing when you’re in your last quarter is that you often forget about some of the stuff you wrote–both on the fly and even stories and passages in novels you’ve been working (for far too long). The forgetting allows at times happy surprise and even pride.

Indeed, I’m quite happy, surprised, and feel pride in what I wrote below. If you go back in my website here, you’ll find numerous references to this issue over the past decade and a half.

What I mean to say now, though, mostly, is thanks “Reina” for pointing my eyeballs back at this little dither of mine.

Reina liked your comment on The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction.

Lots to think about here. My own take (I’m a 67 year old slow reading partially addled lover of intelligent writing…and always have been, except the age declaration) is that male “literary” writing in the 20th century was constantly grappling with the opposing forces of macho/tough guy/wisecracking/lone wolfing vs. insecure/sexually driven/emotionally confused/lonely wolfing. I read tons of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Roth, Bellow, Updike, Nabokov, Kerouac, Henry Miller, Robert Stone, Vonnegut, Ford, Salter, DFW, DeLillo, Hannah, etc. (Also plenty of non-American writing). Loved em all. Then realized they were all either unable to write about emotion or felt that wasn’t what they were allowed to do. Since about 2012 I’ve been reading everyone from Joy and Diane Williams, Rebecca Solnit (yeah, non-fiction, but…), Lucia Berlin, Renata Adler, to Clarice Lispector, Karen Russell, Lydia Davis, Amy Hempel, Elena Ferrante. The list could be much longer. The point from my small and uneducated literary perspective is the ability to write about emotion, to in fact in some way write stories where emotion is more the story than morality (stretching there). Funnily enough, though, so many of my over-educated, thoughtful male friends (and their sons and grandsons) think reading fiction is a waste of time. Most don’t and wouldn’t ever read books and stories by women. There’s more I could say, but my point is hopefully clear. I in fact would say one of my biggest pet peeves from the “literary world” is the problem so many still think they have with sentimental writing and sentimentality in general. How ironic! These days if you’re against sentiment and emotion, what good is being alive? Why should anyone read books about stereotypes that probably began to die sometime back around 1975?

Also, if you’re wondering about the state of fiction these days, I recommend checking out all the comments to this one piece by Owen Yingling.

Finally, just to be a bit incendiary, I think any online venture that does not allow comments is extremely suspect. Yeah, there are plenty of trolls who can’t help themselves, and pissing matches are never pretty in any dimension, but posting news, opinions, essays – whatever – without commentability is like writing without genitals and a sphincter…kinda.