Why Serious Readers Lost Faith in Modern Literature

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]Serious readers have lost faith in modern literature. But why? Literary fiction book sales are plummeting.

[00:00:07]Poetry book sales are plummeting. The only book sales that are remaining robust right now are book talk genre fiction which 99% of the time are not serious literature and influencer poetry. People like Rupy Carr, Gan Aiko, Gabby Hannah. And that's not good poetry. I'll just come out and say it.

[00:00:26]It's not serious literature if you're comparing it to actual poetry that can touch and transform your soul. And before someone hops in the comment section and says, "Social media has ruined everything. People aren't smart enough anymore." There are hundreds of millions of people this year that are going to read a classic novel. Do you guys understand that's a large nation of people? every single one of them would love to support a modern author whose writing invigorates them like the classics do. And then when we start to contemplate the amount of people who have the capacity to read a literary fiction novel that is of an average difficulty that number soarses into the billions and many of those people if you ask them would say yeah I like to read.

[00:01:13]So what's going on? Why don't we as readers feel represented anymore? And in today's presentation, I am going to tell you guys, and if you do not know, my name is Ian, and here on Right Conscious, I'm trying to create a literary renaissance. I'm trying to activate a billion new readers by talking about the best books and authors of all time so that we can change the world. And you guys already know that I'm going to bring the energy today in the presentation. And so, your boy could take our initial causal factors back to the 15th century with the invention of the printing press. But I will yield everyone helion heal. I will stop myself and take us rather to about 40 or 50 years ago because what is serious literature? What is literary fiction and poetry? What separates it? What separates a Thomas Pinchawan novel from Harry Potter or Rupy Carr or the fake dating YA book talk bestseller that's out right now? And the answer is that serious literature can clear ground in a soul that has already become entrenched.

[00:02:24]When you are 13 years old and you go see the new Marvel movie or you read Harry Potter, it's going to be profound to you. The ideas about empathy and love and the courageous moments are going to rock your world. And as adults, I still am moved by many of those things. But as time moves forward, a lot of those things become fundamentals, become principles, which are important to keep in mind. But do we just stop there? And for some of us that like to excel, for some of us that like an epic life and to and love to explore our intellect, our emotions, our spirituality, whatever, we don't want to just stop there like, hey, be a good person. We want more. But the bar to be able to clear and rock our world becomes a bit higher as time moves forward, as we become old and a little bit more bitter, a little bit more worn.

[00:03:15]And a piece of really good literature can clear the ground in your soul and create a conversation and create change, create expansiveness or create tear in your soul. And it's absolutely wonderful, right? It's addicting. We love it. That's why we're in this game, baby. Let's go. Never back down. Never what? And what literature does better than any other artistic medium by far is is allowing us to connect to the mind if you are a writer to the reader and if you are a reader to the writer in so many different ways because literature has interiority. So we can get in the head of these characters. So through my mind, I'm in the head of a character that's a similacra of a creative impulse or an experience or another person in the author's life. And when we interact with literature, what happens is a third body is created. This spiritual energy, this is what happens in relationship or in a friendship. We come together with someone and then the a certain energy is created and it's unique depending on the type of person that you are with or who it is I should say. And what separates literature from almost anything else and like solo artists, like folk artists or rappers or visual artists can kind of fall into this too, is that that correspondence, that third body is between you and one other person.

[00:04:35]Cormatt McCarthy sat down while he was in poverty, starving after being divorced two times, and sat down and wrote Blood Meridian by himself. I've been to the Cormat McCarthy archive.

[00:04:47]I've read the drafts. He got it a lot of the way. and his el ed editor Albert Erskrin helped you know finalize and touch some things up but it was all him.

[00:04:55]When someone works on an album, if a band works on an album, once we get through the band, the engineers, the producers, the label, if they have any influence, coowwriters, other people messing around with it all, it could be dozens of people. When we look at a movie that we like, hundred or TV show, hundreds, if not thousands of people are involved with it. And so, literature has this beautiful connection between the writer and the reader. And that and we've all felt it before especially when things are going well with whoever your favorite author is right and the most important writing rule the only one that you need to follow. Don't listen to Stephen King. Use adverbs. Use a semicolon. Screw it all. The one rule is that you are writing a message to somebody else. This is a communication.

[00:05:41]Somebody is on the other side and your little inside jokes, a lot of your gimmicks, a lot of that stuff can be hidden and is cool. But at its core, you are writing to another human being.

[00:05:53]That's the point, right? We can tap into the mythology. I'm writing I'm not writing for anybody. I'm writing for the cosmos. I'm writing for myself. I'm going to throw it. But really, we are writing and hoping that at least one person is going to read it. And that one person most likely isn't going to understand everything about you. And they're only going to understand what they are given. I don't want to turn this into like a new critical presentation. And we're not going there.

[00:06:17]And so this is all easy, right? You guys know this. But something changed around 60 years ago during the golden age of publishing when literature was really at its peak in the 1950s, the 1960s, the early 1970s, even across the entire 1970s. Literature was still the dominant art form. Literature had a massive audience. People that were born in the in 1900 and had retired in 1960 had never been exposed until they were even older to the radio. And many didn't even adopt the TV and still resisted being consumed entirely by the television and were avid readers. Many people were educated in a much better educational system and also read the Bible at home which is literature which is which isn't easy literature and were trained to be able to read poetry and literary fiction. Many people in the you know early 20th century all AC across the world and to mid mid 20th century learned poetry had to memorize poetry in class. They had to graduate schools that had standards. They went through if they went to Catholic school, the Jesuit system of the trivia. Readers were intelligent. Readers weren't just good at reading. There were a lot of a lot of them. And the idea of becoming a writer was still a worthwhile pursuit. It was still something that you could do because slush piles were still open. You could still be found. And so even though in the 1960s and 1970s over 90% of American households had television and literature was starting to slowly get pushed out, there was this huge base of reading. Plus the government got involved with but u by the time the 1970s had started there were dozens if not over a hundred probably were getting close to the number of aundred because there are currently 250 over 250 MFA programs in the United States. And we're not counting all the bachelor programs that do creative writing. So we're talking hundreds of creative writing programs which offer opportunities for authors to, you know, teach a couple classes a week and then, you know, get paid enough so that they can write.

[00:08:21]Government grant money. Um, National Endowment of the Arts funding, a lot of funding. Plus, publishing houses were willing to give deals out to writers that maybe wouldn't make them that much money back because they were just rolling in money. There was so much coming in from other authors that they could give someone like a Cormatt McCarthy a deal even though he wasn't really making them money back. Yeah, here's $5,000, whatever. And this sounds great, right? But something started to happen. The writers at that time started to take that position for granted and stopped writing for readers. And this is what really killed literature everyone.

[00:09:00]long before social media, long before people start complaining about DEI and you know the publishing publishing houses are all woke now. Before people could ever say a word about that, serious writers stopped thinking that there was someone else on the other side of the aisle. And writers were allowed to do this because the institutions that they were serving no longer needed readers to survive. Right now the book publishing industry no longer needs serious authors or serious readers of you know literary fiction of poetry of the really hardcore stuff to survive anymore. And what starts to happen is that what writers thought that by being liberated from the reader but that by being liberated by becoming so good by becoming postmodernist by expanding out into these crazy maximalist novels which I love. I talk about them all the time.

[00:09:56]Let's go everyone. that they were being free of the reader, that they gained this new freedom. But what they didn't realize is that as an artist, there is always a master to serve. And by abandoning the reader, they selected the worst master of all, which is the institution. Because when you no longer have to write to readers who elevate you, writing art is a social exchange, right? How is money made? Well, you write, you do some form of art, and if you get enough fans, then there are enough people out there, if you have a good deal or whatever and enough promotion, and you know, you release enough stuff that they will allow you to be a full-time artist or, you know, help you at least live a more comfortable lifestyle. Plus, you were writing to you're trying to help them. But if you no longer want to write to them because you don't have to. I want to do something so great that no one's going to understand it. I want to be the next Thomas Pinchon. I want to I'm writing for myself. you'll realize really fast that the readers don't care about you.

[00:10:55]And in the past that meant that you wouldn't get paid and you slipped off into history and no one ever cared about you because even someone like an Emily Dickinson, even someone like a Kofka that weren't writing for readers weren't writing to become famous in their life.

[00:11:09]They were very human. They were very personal. They were touching on the most important things and they weren't bombastic. They weren't complicated.

[00:11:16]They weren't necessarily maxim maximalist. I know that Kofka in his day was very progressive and Kofka-esque.

[00:11:23]They were really connected to the human though. But if you were a writer now and you can no longer write for people because we live in a world now where how can you get your work out there? Let's say you had a masterpiece. Let's say I you you wrote right now you sat down and you did like a William Faulner as I lay dying and in six weeks you wrote the greatest novel of all time. Literally the best. And let's say it wasn't even that hard and you sent it off to all the companies and no one liked it or they just didn't reply. They're like, "Yeah, they got like AI responses like, "Yeah, great job." And no one picked up your book. How would you get it out there? Do you think that just that there by word of mouth that it would explode and become a best-selling novel? We're talking the greatest novel of all time.

[00:12:04]You just wrote it. And the answer is probably not. And so we've become so alienated. And this started 60 years ago in of of instead of writing for readers, we started to write for the machine because the machine can give us money.

[00:12:17]The institution can elevate us, can support me and I could do whatever I want. I could write some [ __ ] and call it art. When the committee becomes the audience, the bea the committee, excuse me, becomes the main style. And so in time immemorial or 70 years ago, Vladimir Nabokov, who was progressive, who was this kind of post-modernist, you know, writer was writing things like Lolita and Pin and um Speak Memory and Pale Fire, but he knew that he wasn't writing to the bgeoisi. He wasn't writing to a committee. He was writing to humans. Lo, you know, Lolita isn't that difficult of a novel. Pale Fire is a bit of a conundrum, but it's pretty easy. pin. You know, all these novels are very complex and like magnificent and ecstatic if you read them in the correct way, but they were written to an actual reader. But what Nabokov created, the the the technique, the ambition, the the language, the syntax was picked up by very talented and very smart people.

[00:13:18]Someone like a Thomas Pinchon. And I love Thomas Pinchon. You guys know that.

[00:13:21]But think about this you guys. For every Thomas Pinchon, we have one Thomas Pinchon. Thomas Pinchon figured out somehow to write a very maxim, you know, write these maximalist novels that were very convoluted, very complicated, have random songs in them, have cryptograms, have, you know, the in the the integration of the Cabala and like this crazy stuff going on, but also write to a reader, also like make things very human. You know, David Foster Wallace, Don Dilo, Mark Danieli, um, you know, they maintained a connection with the reader and that's why we rever them, that's why we love them, that's why we talk about them. But for every David Foster Wallace, for every Dawn Dilo, for every Thomas Pinchon, how many authors out there, you know, that were professors that were trying to make it didn't live up to that and failed.

[00:14:05]Honestly, you guys, how many people out there have tried to be the next Cormatt McCarthy, have tried to be the next Thomas Pinchon, have tried to be the next Don Lillo, have tried to be the next David Foster Wallace. And the answer, the answer, excuse me, is countless of them. And it's no surprise when you look that Cormatt McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, William T. Vulman, Thomas Pinchon, and Don Dilo were talented and bred to be the best authors in the world. Vulman and Pinchon went to the Ivy League. Cormat McCarthy was a high IQ driven individual whose dad was a validictorian of the Yale law school.

[00:14:37]David Foster Wallace was had two parents that were professor. David Foster Wallace got into Harvard's uh PhD program in philosophy that only accept people a year. Like he was Ivy League technically. Like they were cut from a different cloth and were able to bridge that gap. But they became the ambition.

[00:14:54]They became the golden boys. And they were writing in a time when the readers, the masses, still had the educational capacity to understand them, to follow them, to connect with them, and didn't have this distracting universe around them to, you know, deprogram them. Most people, you know, got out of high school, went through college, kept going, and kept their reading skill.

[00:15:18]Didn't take 15 years off and get, you know, getting sucked into stuff.

[00:15:21]Obviously, some people did, but if you look at how writing was functioning before that, what the ambition was before that, the writing was meant to be very human. The writing didn't need to be maximalist. The writing didn't need to be this highlevel thing, the greatest thing of all time, the mo most hard thing of all time for all the optimized bros out there. Oh yeah, I read Gravity's Rainbow. Yeah, that wasn't that hard. Yeah. Yeah, I did it. Yeah, I did all I did literature. Now I'm going to go watch Tarovski. Yeah, slow. You don't know about slow cinema? Oh, now I write. No, I just I You don't know about Baie? Oh, you don't know anything about metal music, bro. It's this chain. What did writers used to do? What was the ideal? And when you start to look at 20th century literature before it took a more m a more maximalist tone. And I understand that there are interludes. I understand there are outliers. I I understand there's James Joyce and Pound and a lot of these people. But at its core, it was still serving the people.

[00:16:18]It was still trying to reach people. It was still connected to people. Do you not think that the Ernest Hemingways, do you not think that even someone like a William Faulner that was still very much connected to people could have written harder novels could have gone more maximalist? Do you think that Faulner couldn't have gone further? The answer is yeah, he could have gone further, but he held himself back because he wanted to write something for humans. And that's why when you read something like a Faulner, it can actually read more human than a Cormatt McCarthy. And what's funny about a Cormatt McCarthy is that at the end of his career when he started to write more human novels, yeah, they're not as good, but something like The Road or All the Pretty Horses or even No Country for Old Men. Now, no country for men's a kind of a mix, but like All the Pretty Horses or The Road is much more human and much more accessible while still being very literary novels. You know, like The Road is has the most beautiful style of any apocalyptic or dystopian novel ever. But I've taught The Road to when I was a high school teacher to countless of my classes and everyone followed it. One time Cormatt McCarthy in the road, he uses like he describes the darkness as like the autistic darkness, which is like so good. And when I said that, there was this autistic kid in the class and some kid said like, "Johnny, you got that autistic darkness in you." I'm like, "Oh my god." And so for decades, this was somewhat okay. But the writing industry, the culture of writing started to view the new standard, the new apex as this maximalist ambitious novel, this disconnected novel. Our modern technological society, everything that was going on also fueled that. And then within that, within the academy, within the MFA program, suddenly we were having these swings. We were having maximalism.

[00:18:02]Now we're doing minimalism in the 80s.

[00:18:04]Then we get the Bellises. Then we get the David Foster Wallace's and Mark Danny Looski's responding to them. And then we get the TC Boys. Like we start getting these swings and eventually it puttered out, you guys. Eventually sometime in the 2000s, literary fiction sales just kept going down and down and down. And we also as a culture stop being able to produce the writers that were able to do this. Because if you are an Ivy League talented person, this talented artist that's been bred, do you really want to be a writer anymore?

[00:18:37]Especially when the academy is so locked down that to succeed in the academy today, you basically have to be a ladder climber and align with whatever political vision. Even if you're a liberal, even if you are like a hardcore leftist like William T. Bulman is a liberal. Thomas Pinchon, I would say, is a liberal. Don Dillo is a liberal. David Foster Walls voted for Obama or was going to. Do you think he didn't vote for Bush, I know that, too. How good would they have done in the academy?

[00:19:03]David Foster Wallace had be given a special post where he taught one class a year. He did one class out of the entire year. He did one class across one semester, then spent the rest of the time writing. These other dudes never taught because they can't fit inside a box. Their opinions, their ideas are not meant for the academy. They would get themselves fired. And so this model that we built of the hardcore maximalist literary author is now gone because we live in a distracted world where people aren't bred to be that anymore. And even if they are, they're going to choose to go into AI or some other better paying pursuit even in some other artistic medium that will, you know, yield them much better results than writing. And so because of this, we have been sucked into a vacuum because in the 21st century, we have zero literary celebrities, you guys. Like literally zero. Is George Saunders a Otessa Mashf?

[00:19:51]Is she the N? She's not She's sold a million books or two million books.

[00:19:54]She's not a literary celebrity. No one knows who that is. Are they comparable to the literary celebrities of the past even of the present, right? The old archons, the Thomas Pinchons, the Don Dillos, the you know, David Foster Wallace was still alive like David Foster Wallace was the last literary celebrity. Chuck Pollenic isn't a like you know there are some genre celebrities, the George R. Martins, the Brandon Sandersons, the JK Rawlings, the whoever, but they're in genre fiction.

[00:20:19]And I would say out of that group, George RR Martin is the only kind of serious author that's a celebrity in the genre world. And that's just because of somewhat of a lucky circumstance. And he's not really relishing in it and writing any new books and like having these huge launches. Do you imagine if George R. Ardan released the next Game of Thrones novel 6 years ago or 5 years ago when it was somewhat expected how big that launch would have be would have been near the conclusion of the show in like 2018 2019 whenever there would be lines you guys that would be the most serious literary event that we've seen and if you are serious about reviving literature then you need to hop on Substack which is the home of the literary renaissance so over on Substack the best readers and the best writers in the world are assembling There have been authors that have serialized their novels on Substack that have gotten big publishing deals. We are starting to gain momentum slowly but surely. We are starting to push back against big publishing and providing the first platform in history, the first medium for independent authors to get out there. And so, if you don't know, I have my own writing over on Substack, which you can read for free. But I also host literature courses, writing courses, and a book club over on Substack for a paid subscription. And I also do free live streams every Friday at 5:00 p.m. 600 p.m. Pacific time over there if you are interested. But the Right Conscious Book Club is the most active book club in the world, everyone. We are reading 28, yes, 28 transformative novels in 2026 together. And so if you want to get serious about literature, if you want to get into reading, then you need to join the book club. This year we have been reading actually some novels that have been published in the last few years.

[00:21:56]We're reading many novels by living authors. And so if you want to read books with the group, then hop on that.

[00:22:02]But I am also doing so many cool things, you guys. I have a William Blake course that's pumping right now. I have a simple literacy course I'm going to be doing. I have so many cool literature and writing videos. So, if you guys want to be motivated, if you guys want to see me do deep dives for an hour on just a book or even a poem or an idea, then you got to hop over to Substack if you want to support me and help me continue doing this full-time. I'm supporting a family.

[00:22:26]I'm trying to create a literary renaissance. And literally, if you can swing it, you guys literally keep the power on. And so, thank you guys for the support. If not, I have 700 videos on this YouTube channel. Help me out here.

[00:22:36]Do what you can. Save your money. You can join the Substack whenever you can.

[00:22:40]And thank you guys for the support. And I will see you very soon back in the video. You know, is Ocean Vong the new Robert Frost. I mean, then we can look at quality, too. Like, I love George Saunders. I like a lot of his work. Um, it's not the type of work that's making modern readers believe in literature again. It's not the type of work that clears that much ground in your soul, even if it does a little bit. like he's cleared some ground in my soul before.

[00:23:02]And so right now we are in a vacuum where the book publishing industry has tried literally tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of times to create the next big thing. I mean thousands of times if not tens of thousands of times that this this book's going to do so well and it doesn't do well. And it's because we've checked out you guys. And so we don't believe in modern reading anymore because they modern writing first of all cannot live up to this previous expectation. So we no longer have these authors. that's cool with me.

[00:23:30]Like I don't need another I'd love another infinite jest or whatever, another you know underworld or another gravity's rainbow, but I would also be open to something, you know, half as hard and half as short. And what's interesting is that those novels are being written and published right now.

[00:23:46]I'm not going to sit here and say that modern authors aren't, you know, ready and aren't like, you know, don't have what it takes to do this. But the problem is that over the past 20 years, we have been shown so much slop, so many bad stories, been sold on so many lies from people who are within the industry that we no longer trust and want to go seek out these readers. Because what happened was that 20 years ago, the literary the world of literature and the book publishing world after its freefall started to say, "Okay, what can we do?

[00:24:19]What is the path back? we we don't need to be publishing you know I think after like Roberto Bologani was 2666 didn't it become a worldwide sensation when you look at the marketing they were pushing it as this is the next you know gravity's rainbow this is the next infinite just like I think they thought that it was going to be huge even though Bologanio was dead that there was a general turn back to the back to the well maybe for the first time really ever to the marginalized coming of age novel and this aligns with you know political correctness and the rise of or I say kind of, you know, the rise of of of DEI in the world of the book pub, you know, the book publishing world and the university system. And I'm not, guys, I didn't vote for Trump. I've never voted like this isn't going to turn into like a Ben Shapiro rant. And it's actually not the full story, but if you guys remember what I said earlier about the academy not producing people who are dangerous as authors, the culture started to create. Guys, I went to university. I went I got a bachelor's in creative writing. I, you know, the MFA program, the PhD program that I went to had diversity um marks within the program that basically said that we need to every single MFA class have a black person, have a Mexican, have an international student, and then the rest can be whatever of whatever race based on a kind of a meritocracy ideal. And so I got to know dozens of these people, these, you know, MFAs because I was involved in the, you know, with the university and, you know, had friends that were graduate students and were talking to all these people. And what I found, and this isn't a surprise, was that none of them were dangerous thinkers. None of them were willing to rock the boat. None of them really had any crazy opinions. The craziest opinion they would have is like free Palestine or like something like that or like yeah, we should live in a socialist country. And it's like, dude, like we've been people been saying that for 200 years, but none of them were really living dangerously. None of them were connected to the current of ideas that was circulating around the world. The disenchantment, the resentment because many of them were bred in upper middle class homes and um went to good universities which enabled them to get into these MFA programs. They were raised in suburbia. They weren't raised in actual environments around, you know, most of the time people that allowed them to become these kind of freethinking radical individuals. and they were told that if you you know and so that's okay but they were funneled into a system that continued that then they were funneled into a publishing world that was looking for that that you know was we want these firsterson point of view coming of age novels from a marginalized voice and how many of those have we gotten how many of those have we read how many of those have killed the faith of modern readers I don't have a problem reading about a chick's perspective from Afghanistan right That's fine. I don't have a problem about reading about really any perspective. I would love that. Like I don't need to [ __ ] hear some, you know, I like all the pretty horses and like hearing about some random dude, white guy in 1940 like ride around on a horse. Like that's great, the loss of the world. But the power of actually knowing that perspective and bringing it full spectrum was never there. Because when you look at Cormatt McCarthy, he knew that perspective because he starved. He left his life behind. He grinded. He was a [ __ ] sexual predator. like, you know, there was like weird [ __ ] going on and like that gave him this like like he was just like a weird southern dude. Like literally he hit all the archetypes, right? Like loves incest, like loves all this stuff.

[00:27:44]He hit every single bell and whistle.

[00:27:46]When I look at a lot of these authors behind me, they live these very odd like Frank Herbert was like studying with the Union society back in the 50s in San Francisco and then was like writing speeches and was living out in Washington and like had this ecological vision of the world. Like when I talk to all these writers, like I know them and many of them have been published by big five publishers and are out there uh in creative writing positions now. None of them were doing anything like very unique or like very radical. They were just like focused mostly like on writing and like sentence structure and like making it very beautiful. But literally none of them shocked me as someone that was like out there. And now in now that I'm online and I'm writing on Substack and doing all that, what I've noticed is that everybody, not everybody, but the best writers that I've seen that are independent or weren't ever in the university system are kind of weird people. you guys like have these like idiosyncratic behaviors that remind me of these people behind me like have this crazy self-belief and this chip on their shoulder and they have like the you know we like they're very religious or like they have like crazy political views like they're like got like they just have crazy theories like literally across the board like you crazy leftist theories, crazy rightist theories like wild stuff and when you start to talk about their lives like they're drug users like or there's stuff going on there and you can see it in They're pros. They write about things that are shocking. They're not scared to back down on extreme topics. How many novels have tried to be written about the mentality of men here in America, the dumb men of America, by a bunch of random dudes that aren't really men.

[00:29:20]David Foster Wallace was an athlete. He was a drug addict. He was a womanizer.

[00:29:23]How why do you think he got away with, you know, writing brief interviews with hideous men? That was him. He could write about the modern man because he was doing it. Could you guys imagine how hard David Foster Walls would have been me too if he was still alive in 2018?

[00:29:35]Like I don't even know what he did. And I'm not saying you need, but that's what writers all throughout the past were.

[00:29:40]They had an edge because that's who we want to interact with. I don't care.

[00:29:44]It's like who do you want to be? Like it's nice to have a nice neighbor, right? Like you don't want your neighbor to be the [ __ ] weirdo with a [ __ ] meth lab, right? You want them to be like the Orthodox like my my my I live in an apartment like type thing and I my neighbor is a nice Orthodox Christian lady that's single and like I don't even know she exists most of the time like perfect neighbor like no problems but my friends like one of my friends I moved to a town in the Pacific Northwest and one of the friends that I've met and who I like I like he's literally an acclaimed socialist but he loves Julius Evola he loves like all the fascist stuff and like when you start talking he starts like mixing it all together and like talking about this super socialist state with this like he starts going on.

[00:30:23]I'm like, "Why are you hearing this?"

[00:30:25]And he's like, "Oh, no. I like like he's got all this stuff that he makes up and he's just like a random dude and he's kind of crazy, but to me he's perfect. I love him. Let's talk. Do I want to talk to him or some random dude talking about the [ __ ] Bengals? Like, oh, do you hear about the Ducks and Lawrence trade?

[00:30:39]Shut the [ __ ] up. Why do you have a wedgie? Like, what's going on with your pants, man? Let's talk about something.

[00:30:44]If we can't talk about something real, let's talk about at least something real now." Anyway, you guys feel it. Funny enough, like a writer that I know, he's had two novels published by a big five publisher. I won't I won't dox him here, but very nice guy. I was friends with him when I was at going through my program. He we met and then he got into the MFA program and then got his PhD, yada yada yada. But we were friends cuz I had like an intellectual curiosity and we could talk about books and stuff, but like when I heard him like he like he liked to box. He took like one boxing class a week or two and like he would actually spar. And when I would talk to him about it or I would hear other people talk to him about it like, "Oh, you box? Why do you box? Yeah, good exercise. Hey, what do you think about this or that generic response? And then you'd read his writing and it was like there was explosiveness in there. But when you look at our modern culture, you guys, who do we like? Like, let's just be Why do you guys like me? You guys are still here if you're still here. I'm a little bit crazy. I'm a little bit out there. The energy is a little bit off sometimes or a little bit on, a little bit everywhere. And when you look at influencers and you look at the people, when you even look at musicians and artists and all these people, there's this it factor about them that actually translates to their work. And in all the other genres, the limitations aren't there. Because the problem with books is that somewhere across the hundreds of thousands of words that you write, you're going to actually have to say something. If I sit down, let's say I'm a rapper and I make a 12 track album and it's even like some conscious more elevated rap. Like what is Kendrick Lamar ever? Like guys, I've seen Kendrick Lamar two times in concerts.

[00:32:10]I've I've listened to every single Kendrick Lamar song that he's ever released. Back to the Star, back to K dot, and I've probably heard 90% of the features he's been on. I know Kendrick Lamar is very talented. What has Kendrick Lamar ever said that's out of the box? That's even radical. What about like black people being oppressed?

[00:32:28]People have been saying that for [ __ ] ever. We know that in the world of literature and in the world of poetry.

[00:32:33]And that's why, but he doesn't have to because within the span of three minutes, you don't need to get that across. You can just pick some general topics, do some word play, you know, talk about some of the main cornerstones and get it done. The same is true in movies. The same is true in art. You could basically, you know, it's it can be a little bit touchy in movies because there's like sensitive things and how do you handle that as the director or the actor or whatever. But in general, you could always defer too. If you're an actor, you can say, "Oh, I didn't do this." If you're a director, I didn't write the script. But as an author, you have to stand behind a lot of work. And as an author, you are seen as an intellect. Who's smarter, you guys?

[00:33:08]Kendrick Lamar or Thomas Pinchon. Who's smarter, Absol or David Foster Wallace?

[00:33:12]And the we know what we know the answer, right? Who's who's smarter? Kendrick Lamar or Amir Baraka? If we want to compare him to a black poetry Baraka is way smarter because he reads, he writes, like he's functioning at a literary very high literary level. And we know that.

[00:33:27]And we know authors have to do that. And we request that poets write non-fiction or write a novel or give statements or do all these different things. And it's because we are functioning in the most complex and lengthy form of art out there. And in a world that doesn't allow that dangerousness to live out, you can't hide. You actually have to work through these things. And idiosyncratic behavior is somewhat cool. This is why Michelle Welbeck over in France is such a prominent and um you know somewhat of a literary celebrity in Europe. There are actually other literary celebrities.

[00:34:01]This is why Murakami's like Murakami is weird you guys. Like he has like these sexual idiosyncratic ideas and behaviors that's like what? But like it's fine.

[00:34:09]Like yeah that's like he he doesn't give a [ __ ] He'll put it all in there. He'll get cancelled. Like he'll have you know he keeps going. He never stops. And so the flattening, so writers losing touch with readers was already really bad, but writer writers, you know, becoming less talented and less of us being trained to be great was bad. But then now us having to fit into certain molds to be elevated by the institutions is the death shot.

[00:34:35]And that's why we no longer care because we have real issues, you guys. Like pick pick your poison, right? Like I don't know what you are. I don't know if you have a problem with phone addiction. I don't know if you're addicted to weed. I don't know if you are depressed and because you're living in the suburbs and you've become disconnected. I don't know if you have a porn problem. I don't know what's wrong with you. But the problems that we can fall into have become magnified. The isolation, the decadence, the cultural loss, the disconnection, the lack of finding people to be able to be friends with or get in a relationship with, whatever it is, has become grossly magnified.

[00:35:12]literature throughout the past was the medium to be able to explore some of these deeper things. And so it's really sad to see that we have fallen behind that funny enough like random influencers on like how the hell are random influencers online giving more life to these problems or other even genres of artistic mediums giving more life to our modern problems than writing. Writing has endless interior.

[00:35:40]You know, books have endless interiority. They should be the ultimate champion of the lost inner world that we are all stuck in and give us solutions and give us pathways out by showing us through narrative how someone liberates himself or how they descend so that we don't take the same path. What are we doing? And you know, it requires so much honesty though. requires you to be so honest to be able to confront those problems to be able to confront you know I know a guy he's writing under a pen name but over on Substack he's had he's his channel has exploded he's got a lot of followers because he wrote a novel about like the dark shadow of red pill culture which is like by disconnecting from women we've become too connected to pornography like all this crazy stuff and that and he has like he he'll say anything and in his personal life that dude's wild from at least what I've you know talked about with him over you know a couple chats on video and over some emails and DMs. And so to take the f problem even further though, like I I we'll talk about solutions in a second.

[00:36:36]But now independent bookstores are basically dead, you guys. Like there is one bookstore within a couple hours driving distance. I could drive to many different metropolitan cities that I would say and there are dozens of bookstores, but only one I would say represent maybe two represent actual literature. The rest are just, you know, mostly codified or filled up with like a bunch of book talk slop or a bunch of like genre slop, which like I said isn't bad. Like people reading is okay and it can be a funnel. But compare that to decades ago. So we no longer have independent bookstores to get our work out there. The, you know, Amazon has been saturated. The distribution pathways are gone because of Amazon. We no longer know how to make websites. We no longer understand how to actually market outside of social media. But the solution is you guys that there's been so much potential energy. There's been such a constraint on the world of writers that we are waiting to break out. Every other artistic medium has had a breakout you guys. Like people say, "Oh, yeah. Music is better than what it was." Oh no. Guys, I understand they used to play Black Sabbath on the radio and now they play [ __ ] on the radio, but there are bands way better than Black Sabbath. The sound, the expansion of sound is has been insane in the world of music. If you like math rock, if you like shadow rap, if you like folk country, yeah, they may, you know, modern artists may not live up to the the the the top person in the genre from before before, but if we take and and and in filled out mediums like rock or country, sure, that's a lot more contested, but there's such a new world of sound and artistry that it's wild.

[00:38:12]And those artists have figured out what to do to get people to listen to their music. They figured out the hustle that it takes to be independent. the world of film and independent cinema, the visual arts, you know, depending if you're willing to kind of bring in especially, you know, AI is gonna kill almost everything. But, you know, the internet, you know, artists have taken up the internet revolution and the digital art revolution, you know, pretty easily have produced some insane stuff. Even if you just look at like the combination of art and, you know, uh, film with animation and anime and stuff has been wild. And so, the obvious solution is this, you guys. There's one only one way to create a literary renaissance. writers are going to have to abandon the old model.

[00:38:49]Before the government and before MFA programs saved us, we were needing we were on a trajectory toward the old model. And unfortunately, it happened in a time where we needed those decades to learn. The new model that every other artistic medium has to function in is this. You have to put yourself out there. You have to actually learn how to influence people on the page and off. I don't want to be an in Okay, cool. Do you think that your favorite niche musician or filmmaker or visual artist views themselves as an influencer? No.

[00:39:22]Because they offer you an integrated experience. They have these idiosyncratic behaviors, but they still post on social media. They still go out on tour. They are still branding and promoting and packaging and doing all these different things. They are still worried about the listener. They are still activating and like doing these things. And you love them a lot of the time because they're living also.

[00:39:41]They're not dead. Writers need to learn that if we just step up and put ourselves out there, even if it's sloppy, but we're trying and actually doing something, people will want to support us. The problem is is who's stepping forward? Who has really pushed the envelope with writing? Guys, if there was somebody, we would literally know about them. If there was someone who was writing and was willing to play the game of getting their work and message out there, they would be a full-time independent literary celebrity right now if they had been trying for five or six years and doing whatever they could. Literally, we need to be willing to self- mythologize, be willing to align our transformative message, our identity, and our beautiful writing into one package. And we need to figure out a way. We need to adapt and figure out a way to not let it ruin our writing because yeah, the rumors are true.

[00:40:29]People will say, "Oh, that's going to kill your spirit. Writers aren't." Well, writers are weren't that writers need to become this to be able to do it. And we can do that. We can adapt to anything.

[00:40:40]We can make anything happen. And I believe in you. I believe in us. I believe in the literary renaissance.

[00:40:45]It's an inevitability. We have been disconnected from readers too long. We have been shunned. Us writers, us independent writers who don't want to follow the mold. We've been shunned from the industry for too long. There is an army of us out there and we need to activate. I'm trying to do what I can and I need you to do whatever you can.

[00:41:02]Whether you are a reader or you are a writer, don't buy books from big publishing. Start finding small presses.

[00:41:07]Start finding independent writers on Substack. Start finding people. Start wasting time. Start going through duds.

[00:41:12]At least, guys, I'll read a dud piece on Substack. Sometimes I'll read a piece that's trying to be literary and I'll sit there and be like, you know what?

[00:41:18]This sucks. This honestly sucks. this I could view this as a waste of 15 minutes, but you know what? This guy's trying. This guy's trying to connect with readers and maybe one day he'll be good. But if he's trying, there's other people trying and I'm going to find this. I don't view this as a loss. I view this as a win because this guy could become better or there is a culture that's starting to brew up where there will be someone that I can find.

[00:41:40]And when I find that person, they're going to become my person. So, everyone needs to go find if you have a a piece of homework from this presentation, I want you to go find an independent author out there that isn't that big yet. You can most likely find them over on Substack that you want to support, that you want to give $5 a month to, whose book you want to buy, whose post on Instagram you're just always going to like, always going to try to help them with the algorithm on. Go find that person. Send them a message. I'm with you. I got you. It may take you a couple months. Give them that support. And if you do that, and if everybody does that that watches this video, that's going to be huge. Thank you guys for everything.

[00:42:15]Thank you guys for the support. The literary renaissance is live. And I'll see you guys very soon in the next