A LOOK AT THE POSTMODERN LITERARY PRODUCTION LINE

Subject: The essay, “Why Cormac McCarthy Stopped Reading New Novels” by Vincenzo Barney.

best literary site

I’d link to the essay, but it’s paywalled. Unherd (an Orwellian name if there ever was one, because none of them exists outside the literary cattle pen) needs the money! YOU pay for every one of those 9,000 words by Mr. Barney. Subscribe today!

Never mind that the plutocrat who owns Unherd, Sir Paul Marshall, is hugely rich and just invested $70 BILLION-with-a-B in AI. Gotta keep your scam artist tech hustler wannabe-trillionaires going!

APPROPRIATELY, the subject of the 9,000-word essay is verbosity. Words. Production. Output, in the form of two of the wordiest writers who ever lived, Cormac McCarthy and David Foster Wallace. Apex of technocratic insanity. (With a quick shot taken at equally verbose fifty-nine overwritten-novels-and-counting Joyce Carol Oates.)

One can picture what it’d be like if you ever met Cormac and Foster Wallace in real life. The kind of guys who just won’t shut up. KIcking back, mouths flapping an endless barrage of words they don’t care, the guests have fled, stampeded out the front door or snuck out the back: “I’ll return in a minute. Going to the store.” Tires squealing cars roaring away but the two yakkers keep blabbering, enraptured with themselves, captured by their own unstoppable content.

REMEMBER: Verbiage is the point.

best litmags

-K. Wenclas for New Pop Lit NEWS