The Aloof Author is Dead, Long LIive the Writer

The Aloof Author is Dead, Long Live the Writer

Ezra Pound

I'm obviously not convinced this is true -- obvious because I am, more or less, an aloof writer. That Grand Elitist, Ezra Pound, saw this coming in his ABC of Reading, a democratization of art so severe (his culprits were book clubs) that standards would disappear. "Remarks," Stein told Hemingway, "are not literature," but they've sure become successful as popular lit. I don't mind pop lit. I mind the hype surrounding it and the loss of serious lit because new economic models in the publishing industry have no place for it. Serious lit was never meant to sell! Never! Older publishers supported serious lit with pop lit and published the former from a sense of cultural duty, a duty now considered "elitist." As if elitism were a bad thing. I want my brain surgeon to be "elitist," someone who rises far above the average. Why wouldn't I want the same thing in my poets?

 I began my intellectual life in mathematics. The wonderful thing about math is you know where you stand. You solve a problem or not. As a sophomore at Cal Tech, I saw the handwriting on the wall, which is to say, I saw my limitations. I met fellow student-mathematicians who smoked me. Fine, I had published as a sophomore! What a fine engineer I could become! But I wanted to be a creative mathematician, a pure mathematician, and I just didn't have the chops. I was like the miler who couldn't break four minutes and knows in his gut he will never break four minutes. I'm sorry, Modern Mom, but little Johnny is not going to be a baseball star. That's the breaks.

There's a great confusion in the land, the confusion of "democratic rights" with "talent" and "skill." The reach of democracy does not include all possible human activity. If you want brain surgery to be democratic, you are a masochist. If you want mathematics to be democratic, you don't understand what mathematics is. And I say, if you want the arts to be democratic, you are flirting with giving far too much attention to mediocrity.

In my 19th C Popular Lit class at UCLA, we studied the best selling novelists of the 19th century. I never heard of any of them. Q.E.D.