SLIME

H.G. Wells - "They haven't any spirit in them - no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn't one or the other-Lord! What is he but funk and precautions."

Everything from the Oprah Book Club to the Wall Street bailout to YouTube pushes us toward self. Alexis de Tocqueville noticed this about us more than two hundred years ago: “Democracy turns man’s imagination away from externals to concentrate on himself alone. Democratic peoples may amuse themselves momentarily by looking at nature, but it is about themselves that they are really excited. Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”

I dont know about this part though...
But then he went on to say, “Here, and here alone, are the true springs of poetry among them, and those poets, I believe, who will not draw inspiration from these springs will lose their hold over the audience they intend to charm.” I don’t know about “charm,” but on a variety of levels the culture is pushing us toward shallow self-inquiry. I can only point to good work that is seriously self-excavating; perhaps more importantly, there’s a distance in good work, an irony, a complicity—a sense that self isn’t being explored for self’s sake, but for readers’ sake; there is an acute sense of the writer knowing that he or she is guilty as charged, guilty before being charged.