When You Put On A Clown Suit

Rewrite Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%.

I'd Been Raised By My Parents To Believe Barfing Your Feelings On Other People Was The Height Of Impoliteness.

I Think Most Of Us Are Fascinated By The Macabre And By The Weird And Even The Nastiness That Comes Along.

A Lot Of Us Grow Up And We Grow Out Of The Literal Interpretation That We Get When We're Children, But We Bear The Scars All Our Life. Whether They're Scars Of Beauty Or Scars Of Ugliness, It's Pretty Much In The Eye Of The Beholder.

These Self-appointed Deacons In The Church Of Latter-day American Literature Seem To Regard Generosity (of Words) With Suspicion, Texture With Dislike, And Any Broad Literary Stroke With Outright Hate. The Result Is A Strange And Arid Literary Climate Where A Meaningless Little Fingernail Paring Like Nicholson Baker's Vox Becomes An Object Of Fascinated Debate And Dissection, And A Truly Ambitious American Novel Like Matthew's Heart Of The Country Is All But Ignored.