The bus ride home was packed with amusements; lots of material I soaked up like a sponge. Totally got a short story out of the raw material. Just jotted notes to create it. A literary story, nothing genre.
I had a kind of epiphany today -- namely, that nobody sets out to write a Literary story -- that the whole "Literary" idea is bullshit. There are simply stories that stand the test of time, and those that don't. And the ones that survive become "Literature" -- regardless of their origins. Yesterday's "Genre" fiction become today's "Literature" and tomorrow's "Classics." Not all, naturally. Most vanish, but I think that's really how it happens.
Which is why the so-called "Literary" shit so many acolytes of the NYC Litfic industry churn out are just so bankrupt artistically -- exercises in pointlessness. Things that Litfic types sneer at -- you know, ephemera like "plot" -- are what make stories stories. And these colorless waifs, these paragons of Litfic, they work strenuously to write evocatively about ultimately nothing.
I mean, Stephen King wrote horror fiction, yes? And he was hugely popular in his day, of course, while the Litfic types generally shunned him. By his own admission, he wrote "salami" -- he admired writers like Joyce Carol Oates, among others. However, isn't it likely that some (certainly not all) of his books will stand the test of time? Already he's become a kind of literary elder statesman, earning some grudging plaudits from the avatars of good literary taste. Perhaps belatedly, or perhaps it's a bowing to the inevitable, I'm not sure. I mean, I read King as a teen, and stopped reading him after high school, but what's the separate King from, say, Robert Louis Stevenson or Jules Verne, except the span of time? It will be impossible to discuss fiction in the 20th Century without referring to Stephen King.
Then again, maybe people will have all but stopped reading in a century, and we won't be discussing literature at all.
I saw a "Manga Explains Physics" book at the bookstore -- basically a comic book explaining physics. The initial amusement factor if it hit me straightaway, like "Funny!" but then I thought "Wow. Maybe this is how ALL books will look in another 20 years. Maybe it'll all be a comic book."
Yikes.
