Look, the guy meant well, he really did. He wanted to stand up and give a middle finger to the establishment, stick out his tongue and say, “people like to read because it’s fun, you buncha stuffy dripdrop dumb asses!” The only problem was he pissed off a bunch of people who probably would’ve ended up agreeing with him because of the way he said it. That’s one of the dangers of manifesto writing- sometimes you piss off your allies cause you take it all a wee bit too far.
Basically, it boils down to: “hey, genre isn’t bad. And there’s nothing wrong with reading for fun. Maybe we should pay a little more attention to what Dan Brown and the Sparkly Vampires are up to? They must be onto something.”
And then, for some reason, he landed at plot. And then that’s where things got sticky. Cause he’s mostly wrong about that. Plot isn’t the cause, the culprit, plot isn’t the reason why there is a big fence between real literature that them thar snobs read and stuff us common ordinary folksie folk like. Nope, not in the least bit.
The word he was looking for here was fun. Not plot. Plotty books can be just as boring as nonplotty books. Stream of thought random day in the life of stuff can be just as fun as plotitcal* plotty plot books. It boils down to the writer picking you up by the shirt collar, getting right in your face and saying, “Look at this motherfucker. look at this!” and then he shows you something that will burn you up and make you go, “Damn damn damn. That’s cool.”
The worst crime in the world isn’t writing/reading for/by/about escapism or plot or middle class anxiety fiction for white males. The worst crime is being boring. If he’d just said, “boring books are boring, I don’t care how smarty pants you think you are,” he might’ve gotten away with it, too. If it was for Matt Cheney and those meddling kids.
ps-
I had a point somewhere, and I think I lost it. At least it wasn’t boring to read, right? Right? Right.
*and no, this word is not spelled wrong. it was a play on the word plot.
