Confessional Culture

In our confessional culture, it is socially acceptable—even fashionable—to disclose your sexual predilections, your husband’s problem with painkillers, your penchant for high colonics. Our hypertherapeutic society lets it all hang out.

But plenty of feelings remain in the closet. In the privacy of our own heads, we cringe with dread when we meet someone in a wheelchair, wish our aged relatives would hurry up and die, smirk over our friends’ bad taste and think babies are ugly and annoying. Meanwhile, we assure ourselves—and one another—that we’re really very nice people.

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via Seven Deadly Sentiments | Psychology Today

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Publicly Stroking Your Ego can lead to a place in literary history…

…or being arrested for public indecency!

(sorry this is long)

Dear Charlie,

I believe such a passionate email, deserves a considerate reply. Please forgive me for taking so long to reply. I totally loved your email – more than I have loved the last pieces of fiction I’ve read. Probably more than I would have enjoyed any of the NYT bestseller list over the past year. It has lingered with me since I first read it on my way to work, via my BlackBerry on what has to be one of the most tedious weeks of the whole year. Returning from a holiday always brings out my client’s worst emergencies. As if 5 days without me will make the world suddenly spin off its axis & into the ether, or something close to that.

So now that I have sated everyone & they can have a wonderful weekend, it is time for me to do what I do best. Write a passionate response that will match yours. Although, I can hardly be angry at someone I’ve just met, and especially not one who even in his annoyance with something I said – did not answer the question at the heart of what I wrote. Logically – you offered no evidence that Literature is not dead. You have offered me no proof that timeless classics are being born. I do not of course fault you for that, indeed even while I agree with most of what you wrote, I fault who I am rightly upset with. The publishing industry and our society.