Money on the Table

I SOMETIMES THINK that underground writers are the stupidest people on the planet. There’s a hundred million dollars on a table waiting to be picked up, and no one will go near it. It’s possible for a lit movement to be bigger than McSweeney’s. Bigger than the Beats.

Of course, to do that, writers would need to moderate their solipsism and their egos. They’d have to realize that simply writing what’s in fact therapy ruminations or diary entries isn’t good enough. The missing person in the equation is the reader.

They’d also have to be willing to let Promotion drive the bus. As soon as the ULA kicked Promotion out of the driver’s seat, the ULA bus stopped moving. Anyplace.

The minute we start competing, which means behaving as if we had a team in the National Football League (the literary buy-in for lit is way cheaper), things will get exciting.