Dave: “prose that matters” can have a lot of concentricity–on a variety of levels, personal and political. And yeah, I know that the nonfiction titles brought up in the excerpt aren’t exactly transferable to our little fictive world. I worry, I guess, that the assumed expectations to please those on the art school steps somehow bleed into the conditions that allow that slippery “prose that matters” find its audience. Or whether people in the future will even have the tools to recognize it when they see it (to see depth instead of surface play). Stories have their built-in toolboxes to teach readers how to read them, but…what is the baseline of basic skills?

Or is this a moot point–or a prophecy already fulfilled? People already aren’t reading much. But in the community that supposedly is supposed to CARE about these things, at least nominally, it seems that there can be precious little about the work itself. “Show your work” (as your blog puts it) should involve some actual work.

Perhaps this is needless worry. Perhaps these things will work themselves out, like they always seem to do.

Mr. Nawotka is putting the horseless carriage before the buggywhip. There’s always been people who wanted to be microcelebrities but didn’t have anything to say; the difference is that once (Upon A Time at any rate) you could become a microcelebrity by writing a book, and now — because there are so many more microcelebrities and so many more ways to become one — a book is something (one of the things a book can be, is something) a microcelebrity (“wine guy,” “business guru”) writes, an accessory, a tie-in, to extend their microcelebrity brand. (You — as a fan — don’t have to read it, just buy it and tweet to other fans that you bought it. And maybe the author tweets back!) It’s got fuck-all to do with prose that matters.

(There’s always been people that didn’t want to draw but wanted to sit on the steps of the art school in black turtlenecks smoking Gitanes, too. It’s not the same thing — or is it? But it hasn’t got a whole lot to do with prose that matters either.)

I wonder, really, about this prose that matters business. I wonder increasingly if prose as culture (high culture, pop culture) wasn’t essentially a nineteenth-century phenomenon, born with the industrial press, dead with the Saturday Evening Post. Maybe we’re fucked this century, stumbling around in the ruins of all that, and prose as a medium will have to wait a few generations for somebody raised on socially-networked massively-multiplayer location-aware cross-media participatory Culture 2.0 to rediscover it as outsider art.

It does mean, alas, that for awhile at least while things are figured out, it’s going to get even harder to get paid.