Why Essays Are So Damned Boring

If you want to read essays that are not so damned boring, I recommend that you cut and paste the following:

http://www.amazon.com/Gritos-Essays-Dagoberto-Gilb/dp/0802141277/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217291831&sr=1-1

The problem is obvious, few writer have lived lives before trying to make a career in writing, you have nothing to say, and have been so busy with how you write, you have no idea how to process information and come up with insights. The world is too specialized, with few having broad viewpoints that have developed organically, and are concerned more with career than finding truth, or even knowing what that is. See my essay at

artnewsblog.com

and find out what passion is, few writers have any except to get a career and in the writing itself, it is a means, not the end. As Cartman would say, lame.
Donald Frazell
dfimagery.com

Culture? Social Commentary? What the heck happened to standing up
and saying/writing/blogging what you believe without taking shots at someone else or something else? Essays in the format of letters is the best shot this ex-pat can hope for since off the grid and apart from THE new world power - China/USA, or should that be USA/China? Letters are: 1, Mano y mano, assuming the reader actually values the human writing the correspondence; and, 2 - Trust is something you earn and as all of us humans clogging up the Mothership move closer to the brink where is truth let alone trust? During these not great at all LAST days of Gringolandia have all you folks up North been consumed by your consumption? Take a change - get out of email-itis and the narcissism of blogosphere and sit down and write an essay/letter to someone you admire, love, can't abide or consider to be a cool person and make a difference for the pen. If all does not go as plan take the paper with its writings and burn it baby and start over from the beginning. Are we clear? Getting the message? Sometimes the smoke-forms from my signal fire gets blown off-course and turns to garblely-glut contributing to cultural pollution, rather than simple human clarity.

Yes, yes, and no. I agree completely that the modern essayist is too egocentric to be particularly interesting and too limited to be particularly useful. Yet, the idea that there are no absolute truths, which this essay says is the reason we avoid thinking about them, is precisely what makes for an interesting essay. As Nehring says, "It is ideas with which we engage," but without the ambiguity of truth, there is nothing to engage in. The one thing that is absolutely true of humanity is that there is no singular truth, no singular ideal, no singular person to be. I'm not against the personal essay at all. I want to see through another person's eyes and to hopefully understand where they're coming from--even if I disagree. Especially if I disagree.