(toy fort c/o Kid Eco)

WHO ARE the Can’t Do This People?

Answer: Today’s literary intelligentsia and their spokespersons, established literary critics. They’re like generals fighting a previous war, embedded in outmoded attitudes, waiting to be toppled by armies with new ideas and more aggressive tactics.

In short, they leave room for their predictably-positioned rigid regiments to be outflanked.

Room? Wide avenues on either side.

The self-appointed highbrows are terrified of any writing smacking of “masscult” or “midcult,” “middlebrow” (listen to your Virginia Woolf-schoolteacher lessons you studious play-the-game pupils)– or any writing which might potentially become– gasp!– popular! NO! Can’t have that.

Politics? Not.

Melodrama? OUT!

Plot? Complex structure? NO WAY!!

Which provides the simple answer to this question: How to reinvent the literary art? Be willing to try things which the designated literary experts are unwilling to try.

There they sit in their immobile fortress, unable to move. Can anyone knock the fortress down? Unlikely. But one can go around it– and leave its occupants behind, stuck in one spot.

(c/o Regal Toy Soldiers)

-KW