A society without great books and readers can't be a healthy and successful society

Friday 10/9/26

From a letter:

Wake up today and see that public executions are going to be a thing, which, like a character in a horror movie, I thought couldn't be real at first, despite knowing how things now are, but is. What a horror movie we are living in. Without any of the entertainment value. The monsters aren't Dracula, the Invisible Man (he was far too witty for these times anyway; would hardly be anyone who could understand his one-liners now), Michael Myers, or Freddy, but the world-destroying hell beasts of mass stupidity, baseness, immorality, narcissism, ignorance, hypocrisy, illiteracy. The cult as the majority, the devil leader, but you can't even say devil leader or satanic cult, really, because in those movies (The Devil Rides Out, e.g.) the people in the cults were vastly more sophisticated. 

You cannot overstate the role that publishing has played in what this country has become. It goes back a long time. That system killed off writing. It made it nearly impossible for there to be great works by great writers.

You want to say, "But Cormac McCarthy!" or whomever. That wasn't a great writer. The people who act like that was a great writer are just doing what they think they're supposed to do because of other things, as we've often termed them in these pages, not the actual words on the page; that is, the purported thing. Virtually nothing in this world right now is about the thing it purports to be. The award-winning book didn't win the award because it was the best book or not a bad book. As one example. It was "other things."

If someone's neighbor wrote any of the books that McCarthy wrote and was simply that person's quirky neighbor Jim from across the street or upstairs, and handed one to that person who is the sort to post on Reddit about the genius of McCarthy and they sat down with it that night, they wouldn't think, "Wow, what brilliance, how life-changing for me, I'll spend a lot of time reading things by my neighbor Jim in my life going forward," they'd think, "This sucks, I'm not reading this shit."

A society without readers can't be a successful or healthy society. The problem isn't even that publishing just puts out bad works. It is that it killed off the possibility of there being great works that the world needs. There isn't anyone else out there writing masterpieces for this world that can impact this world. To succeed in the publishing system, you had to be a bad person who wrote poorly. For "serious literature," you need to be indoctrinated in the MFA system within publishing. Can you imagine a writer, an artist, of true ability, a Shakespeare, a Keats, having said, if there were such things available at the time, "You know, I really should get an MFA at somewhere like Iowa if I want to write good things."

Anything original, anything great, would be categorically rejected by that MFA system and the thinking--"thinking"--of such byproducts of that system. To be a good person and write great works required you to go entirely your own way all along the way of your writerly life, against many currents all at once, with no support, and what could end up being much animus. No one was going to put you forward, tout you, let you pass. Say, "Way to go!" and "More of that!"

No one else was going to keep going anyway. The people who might have written something necessary for the world didn't. They joined up with the system at whatever level they could--became MFA'ers--or they moved on to other fields far from publishing and writing. They aren't out there at desks lit only by their computer screens right now working away on something the world could use because of what it truly is. There is no cavalry of great writers. There are no great writers. You can give Bryan Washington and Anne Carson whatever awards you want, but they're bullshit, and they're no more a great writer than a child who hasn't been born yet.

None of that is real. No one truly believes that Bryan Washington is a genius. He doesn't believe it. No one can look at his writing and seriously say to someone else, "Look at this genius writing, isn't that remarkable?" Because that other person would just be left staring at the most ordinary, basic, anyone-can-do-this-shit shit in the world. The only people who could enact this kind of scenario would be mentally ill publishing system people completely divorced from reality whose lives consist of nothing save lying to others and being lied to, such that they don't even know what a lie is. That's someone who isn't even human anymore, if they ever were.

The way this industry works killed off the possibility of great works. Because it killed off there being anyone to make them. And the same goes for short form works. The magazines, the newspapers, the websites. It's all the same culture. The anti-greatness culture, classist culture, mean girls culture, sexist culture, racist culture, blue-blooded culture. A culture of insecurity and ego and pettiness. A kind of fascist intellectual culture. A subculture. The sub-est, if you will, of subcultures.

Most people in publishing are the fascist version of intellectuals. They're entirely fake intellectuals, of course. You have the power controlled by a small group of terrible people--look at the evil that is the agent Nicole Aragi, whom so much comes back to, and is someone we'll talk about more in these pages--which is then carried forth in the slavish devotion, the savage parallelism and mirroring, of what we'll think of here as their constituents, the other people within that system.

It's astonishingly similar to Trump and "leading" Republican politicians and the people who make them possible and who are like soldiers for them, as if made from one of their ribs and blindly giving their souls, and making themselves over, to this cause of...what? What is being built? What is being protected? It's just this church of evil and sickness in the middle of some fetid ecosystem, polluting and killing and sucking brains out of skulls and decency out of hearts and humanness out of souls...for what?

A nation, a society, a culture without great books and great writing is in the worst kind of trouble. People don't make the connection. After all, publishing is way over in the margins of the margins. No one cares about it. You have the people in it, who need it to be this sick thing that it is to get what they want from it. If you have to have skill, if you have to be legit, they don't have a chance. So they've made it--rigged it--such that it works out in their favor, rewards them for their absence of these things.

Then you have millions of people outside of it, pretending to be writers, declaring that they're writers in the bios of their Instagram pages, who've never read in their lives, have no interest in reading or writing, aren't serious about writing, just want attention and to have this thing they can say that they think makes them "special," who've never and will never care enough to look into how this system works. Because they don't really care. They're not serious in the slightest.

Who does that leave? Everyone else in the world, who couldn't care less about writing and reading and books and publishing. There is literally nothing they could care less about. So it goes. You have me. Just me. The only person in the world who is not in one of those three aforesaid groups who says and does anything, and has the courage to. One person. That's it.

Think about that. There isn't so much as a subreddit looking at the real state of publishing and writing. Publishing or writing. There are subreddits for just about everything. Because no one cares. About this thing that has actually had such a deleterious effect on the United States and the world. But the connection is real. The results are real. Great writing is a pushback, too. It helps to fight injustice, to restore sanity, decency, natural order. The longer unnatural order persists, the more it comes to be seen as natural order, taken as natural order. Unchallenged as natural order by a brain dead populace incapable of thought who devolve in such a fashion, and to such a degree, that they can't even tell how wrong and bad things are no matter how wrong and bad they've gotten.

When I'm in the Bunker Hill Monument, I know in the space of three words from the other people there how they voted, if they've ever read a book. That's how easy it is to tell now. We have to be so far gone as a people for that to be the case. Like sub-primate. Creatures less than monkeys dragging the backs of their fingers on the ground. All these people voting against their own interests. Too dumb to realize that their lives are worthless to those they empower. Those they worship. Donald Trump would murder them--I mean that literally--if it got him five bucks. Amazingly, they'd be okay with it.

The brains might as well have been removed from the skulls of these people as in some 1950s sci-fi film. The Brain Suckers. They are totally incapable of rational thought, never mind critical thinking, and it may not be going too far to say that they're incapable of thinking at all. What is a human who can't think? Is that a human anymore? Fungi can't think. We are like fungi. But self-defeating fungi.

There was once a time when I didn't think we could get here. I'd consider Nazi Germany and conclude it couldn't happen again. Not with the internet and things being as "showable" as they were. Life being as public as it could be made to be. That may be true in terms of the murder of six million people. Perhaps the United States can't repeat what Germany did there. But the ideas? The going along with those ideas by the masses? The acceptance of those ideas? The blind, insane devotion to those ideas? To evil? Not only is that possible, it's happening. And as bad as this is, it can get exponentially worse. We are really just starting out in what can easily be the end of humanity. Which isn't to suggest that that need take millennia. We could achieve this in decades.

This isn't about different viewpoints. Like some healthy debate. Beatles versus the Stones. Who do you got and why? It isn't possible to make an argument for why you'd be for Trump and what is happening. You could fume, get angry, threaten, storm off, but you can't lay out in five to seven sentences why this is good, good for you, good for a country, good for the world.

Think of the lack of self-awareness you'd need to be like that as a person. That means you're incapable of seeing anything about yourself. How is that possible? It's like being able to stand in front of a mirror and not see your own reflection even. Speaking of Dracula. He was supernatural, though. This isn't. Those people aren't.

Things that are almost always true about Republicans: they've never read a book. They have no interest in any kind of art. They won't have like some cool list of favorite albums, films. There isn't a Republican out there who is this big Bergman fan, you know? Or Grateful Dead fan. Or Charles Dickens fan. No Republican could say to their daughter, "Hey, this is Pink Moon by Nick Drake, it's one of my favorite records, I think you might like it."

I could see a few bragging about being Hemingway fans, without having read Hemingway, because they would think of him like the writer version of John Wayne and someone Trump would like. I mean, if you had to pick someone he'd name as a great writer, Hemingway is as good a choice as any, because Trump would think he was manly and tough and strong, like Trump likes to think of himself. Man's man. A man as a man ought to be. (When Hemingway was actually such a pathetic little man, and a one-note, at best, author.) You wouldn't select Keats now, would you? Donald Trump, the Keats reader. Your MAGA cousin, the Keats reader. What an absurd conceit. A virtual impossibility.