For a long, long time, there was a Complex. It was built on writers.
Novelists, poets, playwrights.
The
structure included agents, publishers, critics, professors,
grant-issuing foundations, magazines. Cocktail parties on the Upper East
Side of Manhattan.
These elements raised up certain writers, buried others. It was a kind of community.
Readers
were handed the names of the new rising-star writers, the enduring
greats, the hacks, the past legends. Pulitzers and Nobels and National
Book Awards were doled out.
Now, nobody cares.
The prestige and authority of the Complex are in the hands of a bunch of tired political bullshitters.
Whatever shreds are left are devoted to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. 3 jokes in clown suits.
For
better or worse, there is no Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Philip Roth,
Thomas Pynchon, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac, William
Burroughs, Gore Vidal, Don DeLillo.
Looking back, you can see that those writers were promoted and elevated and sustained by an apparatus.
And the apparatus studiously ignored brilliant authors. David Lindsay, AE Van Vogt, Norman Spinrad, James M Cain.
So now, what do we have?
The ominous answer makes any intelligent person shake in his boots:
READERS.
No. No, that can’t be.
That
should be the last thing we rely on. You mean the people who once upon a
time would have bought novels and sat down and actually gone through
them, page by page?
That motley bunch?
Yes. That’s who I mean.
And the writers…will pick up a torch, and since no one will promote writers, THEY’LL PROMOTE THEMSELVES?
Yes. That’s what I mean.
And these writers will publish their own work on platforms like Substack? Nakedly? Right out in the open?
Yes.
Well…that seems dangerous. It seems like something bordering on suicide—relying on READERS to make up their own minds.
Yes.
That’s right. These readers aren’t told who to lift up and who to cast
aside anymore. These readers aren’t under the control of the Wiser Ones
from the Industrial Complex. These readers aren’t trained monkeys.
Worse, they aren’t a GROUP at all. Each reader makes up his mind separately.
Well, that can’t succeed. That has to fail. Come on.
Because
these days, success is supposed to depend on skin tone, whether you’re
wearing a dress or pants and what you have or don’t have under the dress
or pants. It depends on what you pretend to believe about the climate.
It depends on how you talk about Trump. Those things.
There may not be a literary apparatus anymore, but there’s always an APPARATUS. Which is how people know what to think.
You’ve got to go along.
Really? Do you?
I
know a guy who writes on Substack. I won’t mention his name. He goes
along. He’s quite, quite intelligent. No doubt about it. The field he
covers is very broad. But whenever he writes about a subject long
enough, he’ll fall into a familiar liberal stance. He has to. He can’t
escape. He elevates and promotes the Eternal Victim. That’s his m.o. You
can rely on it. And if you read him carefully, you’ll see he KNOWS it’s
a pose. He knows he’s doing his duty as a card-carrying bleeding heart.
He’s selling himself to the victims…and to the readers who think like
he does.
That’s his response to the vanished Literal Industrial Complex. Endear himself to The Group.
We’ll see how that works out for him over the long haul.
The
real challenge for the writer these days is different. It’s throwing
caution to the winds. This includes making a stand for himself.
And he’s looking for individual readers. The great un-brainwashed.
I’ve found a lot of them on the Internet these past 22 years. And they’ve found me.
When
I was, say, 40, if you’d told me that was possible, I’d have told you
to get lost. What I needed was a good publisher with connections. To the
apparatus.
And
yet, even then, as I was thinking that thought, I knew it wasn’t going
to happen. Because I was…let me be frank about it…a fireball with a
Royal Portable typewriter. Nobody was going to rein me in or train me or
tell me what to write, much less how to write.
I had already staked out that position...
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