"Every Man's Work is A Portrait of Himself"

I have to agree with Alyssa on this one. The "bright splinters" part seemed to catch my attention the most, and I feel like Shields did a much better job of not contradicting himself so much in the latter half of the book than in the first few chapters. I know he was probably compiling a lot of stuff, and I still feel sort of weird about the lyric essay thing, but maybe I'm just getting too caught up in that particular concept. Maybe it's just so much of his talk about finding the "real" in everything that gets to me. Toward the end, he says, "I'm bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters. I want to explore my own damn, doomed character. I want to cut to the absolute bone" (175-6). I would like to say that I'm all for dishing out the personal sometimes, (never in my writing, unless it's communicated through another character, obviously) but I feel like Shields just really shoves the importance of the reality of nonfiction in our faces. I'm not saying that what he says about reality and unreality isn't necessarily true, but for a fiction writer who does make up stuff all the time and who doesn't want to write about her personal life, I feel sort of... offended, maybe, by his notion that the lyric essay seems to mean so much more in terms of reality than what's contained in fiction. All in all, I did like some of the things he said about the laws of copyright and the significance of compiling a bunch of different things together to make something bigger and more meaningful to the new artist and the new audience... I just can't seem to make myself get past the pushy-ness of his lyric essay argument.