Louis L’Amour was a great author because he didn’t waste his pen on self-referencing overly precious naval-gazing pretentious trendy bullshit. Generally, when opening up a Louis L’Amour book you could expect to find a man, a gun, possibly a woman or two, and justice to be dealt, all cleanly wrapped up in down-to-earth humanness. He wrote some other wonderful non-Western stories, all of which can be summed up by the following: just enough words, and then follow through.

Unfortunately, self-referencing overly precious naval-gazing pretentious trendy bullshit sells really well now, as does lots of talking with no follow through.

Several years ago I nearly consumed B. R. Myers’ book A Reader’s Manifesto, a book which takes modern literature to task for that bullshit. I think I need to read that book again, the reason being that, in some sense, it can apply to the broader plague of the emperor’s new clothing as found in art, writing, and those activities assigned as being done by the consummate intellectual.

Few things are as excruciating as reading and suffering through an interview of an artist or writer or performer of some sort who has unwittingly come to believe he or she has something valuable to say about broad, abstract things, filling intellectual magazines printed on heavy paper stock with a matte finish and an over-abundance of solitary photos of urban blight. There are moments when I think such written interviews, or even interviews on public radio, are little more than tear sheets for grant applications.

It is the flood of talk and ideas that lead to nothing.

In the past two years (never mind the lengthly history of such things in the years prior), I have been baited for ideas, brainstorming, and suggestions of working or collaborating on everything from illustrations to historic marker signage to research assistant for a local intellectual, all for naught. Lots of talk, little action. The brain dump. The chumming for artists. The “let’s meet for coffee so I can say I met for coffee.” The  meaningless “let’s touch bases (while still remaining baseless).”

Oh, for a meeting that led to something. Sometimes I just want a horse and a gun and an obvious villain.

“…over the years I have learned to avoid people who sort of create a ‘creatives’ Rolodex of contacts that they can throw ideas out to and pick from the clamoring takers (artists are always desperate, and we always clamor). It wears me out, always being tossed a bone and then ‘oh, sorry, no’,” I said in an email to a friend this week.

Fewer words, more follow-through. As it is, the many and excessive words of a few make up for all the silence of the rest of us. The point I am trying to make is that the same culture that continues to eat the bullshit starts to stink after a while.