The biggest changes in my life have been the complete collapse of popular literacy (it used to be cool to actually read books, hard to believe now) & the emergence of a totalizing cultural japanophilia. Growing up they said “put down the gamebox pokemans and read your harry potter”
In a sense, popular literacy only exists now in the millennial-YA-to-erotica pipeline & in manga readers (most of which is erotica). That whole world I grew up in of David Foster Wallace being presented as a rock star, which provided this sense that such a fate was even possible, gone
The appeal of the “alt right literary space” in the year 2015 was the notion that this would somehow maintain this (elite liberal) literary culture— but the collapse of literacy was so total that by the time it was even viable there was no longer a market for it.
The real market is for “podcasts”— but even podcasts are over in favor of every podcast becoming a video, if not a livestream video. To write a book is only meaningful now to the dwindling population of NPR liberals. Youth culture has no relation to books. There is no “zoomer harry potter.”
There are videos of Haz & I talking about whatever from years ago that have twelve times as many Youtube views as Knausgaard being interviewed on NPR. Literary “celebrity” does not exist. John Green was the last one.
The meme of the “performative male reader” is the end of it all. “Reading books” has become solely an “aesthetic”— a performance— because no one is entertained by books now. Books now are “going to the gym” which may be trendy but is only “an aesthetic”— alongside “bedrot”
People now have “movie watch lists” and act like watching movies is “work” in the way reading a book is “work.” Check out how many movies I’ve watched! Wow! That is the intellectual culture of today. Not even tenured professors are reading contemporary fiction.
If you go to a book store right now— take note in the new arrivals— how many books are japanese translations with a cat on the cover or in the title? The publishing industry has found that “lo-fi homework beats” japanese books with cats is the most profitable market for contemporary fiction.
Why is that? Because a cozy japanese book about cats framed next to your matcha is “a vibe” for your “dark academic” autumn instagram feed. This is what “reading books” means now.
(My friend is a translator of japanese literature & clued me in to this & now I count them every time. There were 12 most recently.)
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