Kevin Spacey versus Billy Collins

Listening to Billy Collins on A Prairie Home Companion last week and tonight on YouTube, I heard the similarity in their voices -- both the timber and tone, and the accent.  They don't have distinctive accents, but they sound like they could be brothers.  So I looked up their bios and found that they both came from the New York City/New Jersey area (White Plains) and both spent some of their formative years in California.

What can I say?

I think at times everything has been said about things in general, or at least more than can or should be digested.  There's the local news and traffic updates that are helpful, and the schedule of events for the upcoming week, of course.  But in books and magazines, I wonder if taking a year off from new production might make us better consolidate or summarize the mountain of new every year and give us all a chance to catch up on the last decade of new.

I think of the several books about creativity or public policy, the authors of which could all just get together to work through their various points of view, cut through the chaff and to the bone to put together a more concise and balanced whole.  Let the bulk of the background reasoning be relegated to online appendices (with the shorter version in the published pages, of course).

When I think of putting my not small bundle of thoughts together for public consumption, this is my thinking.  Where would my voice add something of value to the din and cacophony?