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Unlike a classic, content looses freshness right away. Content displaces classics — whether of art, music, literature, film, philosophy — without qualification. Whenever I consume content, which is daily, if not constantly, I displace, and disgrace, the traces of the classics I’ve internalized. Content, simply, is a weed that eats up our garden, and chokes out the fat vines upon which the soul had planned to feed.
People I meet in publishing are always cold, even when they think they’re being warm. I think they sense that I don’t take their work very seriously, that I don’t confer prestige upon an industry just because it is an industry. Millennials get hired at Harper’s or FSG or The Paris Review and feel very benighted and special, and they want their peers to recognize and validate those feelings. But what I want is less books, less magazines, less noise — and more work of absolute value. I want less editors in the same way I want less doctors: so the natural system can reassert itself. I’d like to be truly wild writers and not smarmy Ivy League grads who want to please everybody and be pleased by everybody.
