And Tom Stoppard said about james Joyce, “An essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice be universally recognized.”

cuz that’s sayin that stories don’t matter. If writing isnt the place for big ideas (especially fiction, novels & short stories), then there is no point and its dead, a topic for some obscure academic department.

But I have a big However to all this. What TV shows or YouTubes or Hollywood hokums are the equivalent to Hemingway or whatever, in terms of idea and where it takes you, in terms of Art?

How can motion pictures possibly replace writing, anyway? Writing can describe a world in such a way as cannot ever be filmed.

I do agree that most everybody’s watchin TV and not many are reading or at least reading good works (opposed to Dan Brown whatever).

As for the old arguments, the thing that got me (also like this post of Blake’s here) is that good stuff doesn’t seem to be publishable now. Everything now needs some kind of dumb gimmick, if “experimentation” or flashy “innovation” and has to be kind of pomo wacky and I don’t think that writing is a big long line of being wacky. I don’t think it’s always “pushing the boundaries” of the next generation whatever. But something seems Seriously Off right now, it bothers me. No one can really say who “the greats” are right now and if they do they’re not Hemingway Household Word, you know? It’s Off right now. Seems like there is no Authority maybe that is it and has been since late Sixties, the whole anti-authoritarian vibe that killed it. No more Authority no more good stuff. Even nonfiction books, they all have to be cutesy and really dumbed down, don’t they? Even nonfiction can’t be serious for fear of being stodgy or stuffy or uncool, Cardinal Sin, that.

We are not readers who don’t have choices anymore. If you’re looking for high-water mark experimentation, you’re more likely to find it in a graphic novel or a DIY website where the artist or writer has free rein.

Your column is fascinating and I love your passion for The Word but I must reject the premise. We study Hemingway and Ullysses because of academic inertia. Students are told, “This is a masterpiece to stand for all time.” Some of those students become professors who bequeath the same wisdom in perpetuity. If it weren’t taught (i.e. institutionalized) it wouldn’t be sold today at all. What it has is good propaganda going for it. That’s what keep it on shelves. Yeah, context beats the shit out of 80-year-old fiction not because it hasn’t changed. We have. The lag of what is willed us has kicked in and now if you write a single sentence in a query letter that could be remotely ambiguous, it’s rejected.

The arbiters of taste are all MFAers now. That communal, non-inclusive, intolerant-of-challenge homogenized voice will dictate what all our e-books will be. (Paper is dying and the editors are getting younger.)

It’s not the publishers fault, exactly. The subculture of readers, we who equal the number of people who fetishize amputees, want what we want. Our reading has to be multi=platformed, video-ready and video-equivalent.

Of course, you’re thinking I’m not as serious as you guys who actually made it all the way through Ullyses. Okay. True. However, I’m the average reader. (Your number equals the people who fetishize car upholstery.)I’ve got Stephen Hawking’s book on the shelf too, and yeah, most people didn’t read that, either. Maya Angelou is a national treasure blah blah blah who thinks good reading should be tough. Man, I’ve got shit to do. I don’t want convoluted. I want Chuck Pahlaniuk. (Boo! Philistine! Yeah, yeah, I know.)

Sorry. Just got back from a writing workshop and I’m feeling a tad cynical about the entire enterprise.

First off, I never said anything about “weird or wacky” I said innovation. But if you want to use the terms weird and wacky in this way I guess it is true that Hemingway seemed weird and wacky to people back then and Kafka seemed wacky before than and ditto with Proust and Joyce and so on and so on.

My point is that you have to be doing something new. New doesn’t mean wacky language po-mo stuff (although it can), but it certainly doesn’t mean a return to copying F. Scott Fitzgerald.

As for the punk thing, that seems more like the problem with the LROD people to me. They are trying to bring back a style that died decades ago. THEY are the people walking around with dyed mohawks and spikes on their leather bracelets talking about how the music of today isn’t as good as it was 30 years ago.

Just read a brand new magazine: any good stories? Any place for ideas equivalent to the greats?

yes! Tons of great stories.

Place for ideas equivelant to the greats? No. But that isn’t because the ideas aren’t there, but because fiction doesn’t hold the place it did in the era of TV, Film and YouTube… not because people stopped writing identically to the modernists.

Let some experiment. And hopefully only give us the great grand results (IF ANY) and not the whole messy lab setup yukyuk. Let some innovate weird. Let some innovate in styles that once were dominant, why not? For that is also innovation and experiment and in some ways goes much deeper. I dunno but I do remember something bout how good books can’t be published now and great books of the past would never be repped by today’s ICM / William Morris / Trident whatever, they wouldn’t touch it. Just read a brand new magazine: any good stories? Any place for ideas equivalent to the greats? No only allsame mundane tritery, yucky garbage running on autopilot going nowhere down. Compare current magazines to all the forgotten ones of old, there’s an enormous gap, something big is rong, I think that was the point (of the postings that I so fondly remember, maybe you remember something else).