On the Idea That We Need a Harsher Literary Culture
I haven’t done the accountability-post thing in a few weeks. I’ll start putting those at the top here, in italics. During the Congressional budget negotiations, I called Gary Peters’s office more times than Stan wrote Eminem, for all the good it did any of us. The other day I hoisted banners at an anti-Tesla protest. There must be a trick to holding up big pieces of fabric on a windy day, one that every sailor knows and that I don’t, because I struggled to stay upright at certain points. I did nothing very interesting. I pledge to continue doing these not very interesting things, until a more interesting thing offers itself. It is better than nothing. Also, one of the paragraphs below reminded me that I need to renew my membership in the National Writers Union so I will do that before I post again, and I will return the message I just got from a local DSA organizer.
For as long as I’ve been paying attention — which is a couple decades now — it’s been a commonplace that our literary culture (which I take to mean critics, little magazines, readings, public discussions about literature of all kinds) is too nice and too complacent, and that somehow literature itself suffers from it. I don’t dispute the first claim, at least not the “too complacent” bit. Writers, who have less guild-consciousness than e.g. lawyers, teachers, or Teamsters, have failed to recognize that the existence of readerships at all, beyond the very richest social circles, needs continual collective defense, as democracy in general does. We haven’t rallied to defend universal public education, or to protect children from threats to their own literacy (smartphones in classroom, education as “content,” library closures in poor neighborhoods, AI hype, whole-language classrooms, the post-Nixon Republican Party1). In general, any society that loses the ability to recognize “common goods” as, you know, real, is going to be one where literature has trouble making a case for itself. And we certainly are reaping the results there. Literature won’t die, but it will contract: the only writers who make it will be privileged or very, very lucky,2 till we fix that.
So, sure, complacent I’ll give you. As for “too polite,” I dunno.