more matter | less art

There are two of us. We’re married. CW loves CW forever. You get the idea.

the wife is married to the most amazing man in the world and is the mother to a beautiful baby boy. He apparently got her Impatient gene, because he was born nearly three months early in March of 08 and spent the first 129 days of his life in the NICU. In 2009 he was diagnosed with CFC. He is not without his challenges, but he is the happiest little boy the wife has ever seen. In addition to staying home and being mom/nurse/teacher/therapist to her son, the wife likes to read books. She absolutely loves animals and has three cats and a dog. She’s afraid that she’s killed her houseplant She’s definitely killed the plant but is giving it another go around with two more She has now killed a fourth plant and is thinking maybe her green thumb is not quite ripe yet. New passions include home decor and cooking. She loves to laugh and tries to make people laugh, but her sarcasm gets in the way sometimes. Word of choice is “iguana” (if you need to know why, just say it a couple of times… you’ll see). She has recently started working for Pearson Education at home and loves it. As of 1/17/10, she had outposted the husband by a ratio of 219:11 (“but these go to eleven…”). She also enjoys typing bios in the third person.

the husband STILL (still!) needs to put something here.

and “more matter | less art”?
It’s derived from a Shakespeare line spoken by the queen in Hamlet.

Polonius:
Your noble son is mad:
Mad call I it, for to define true madness,
What is’t but to be nothing else but mad?
But let that go.

Queen:
More matter with less art.

Polonius:
Madam, I swear I use no art at all
That he’s mad, ’tis true, ’tis true ’tis pity,
And pity ’tis ’tis true—a foolish figure,
But farewell it, for I will use no art.
Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 92–99

In one of the funniest scenes in Hamlet, the politician Polonius, who has declared that “Brevity is the soul of wit” [see p. 17], continues to enlarge upon Hamlet’s supposed madness. The impatient Queen dryly demands “More matter with less art,” that is, more substance and less rhetoric.

In Shakespeare’s age, rhetoric was an element of the so-called “trivium” (grammar, rhetoric, logic) into which every schoolchild was indoctrinated. Highly rhetorical, sometimes pedantic literature had been extremely popular throughout the late sixteenth century. But by the time of Hamlet, Polonius’s brand of “art” had begun to seem affected, passé, almost vulgar; there was a new insistence on the value of spontaneity.

Polonius, despite his protests, is anything but spontaneous. By claiming that he uses “no art,” he pretends that polished rhetoric comes as naturally to him as breathing. His tautologies and “figures”—rhetorical devices, such as chiasmus (inversion of word order), occupatio(pretending to pass over something one actually mentions), and parallel clauses—are, however, blatantly affected, as befits his character. Polonius, a self-satis-fied, tedious old man straight out of classical comedy, tries so hard to please that he becomes annoying.

http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/that-he-s-mad-tis-true-tis-true-tis-pity

So, in a nutshell, we’re trying to be honest, spontaneous – not carefully crafted. More matter with less art.