Matt Cheney on Empty Writing

Great post by Matt Cheney on Mumpsimus. Says kinda what I was getting at in my oh-so-terrible post last year, but from a different perspective.I'm tempted to say that the plodding comes from the prose not doing what I desire prose to do: offer me more to think about than just one thing, but I'm not entirely satisfied with saying that; it doesn't feel like it gets at the heart of what bothers me about such writing. It's true that the feeling I get from such writing is that my brain isn't being engaged enough, but it's also that the abstraction sends my readerly brain down paths it finds dull and vacant, that such writing creates an imaginative distance more appropriate to, as Gibbons says, an outline than a piece of narrative fiction.