Kanye West Didn’t Ruin Your Literary Career

The daily rebirth of the news/bile cycle—like a swamp god churning out fresh anacondas each spring—has given the literary world a peppy new mantra:

We’re better than millionaire musician Kanye West.

Because you know what Kanye said?

He said, “I’m a proud non-reader of books”!

And each time he surfaces at the White House in his MAGA hat, you FUCKING JAGBAGS who publish your friends’ pretentious garbage and then tell the public “Hey, this is the best literature out there! Top o’ the pile! Mwah!” all shit your pants with rage.

But god, isn’t it better than feeling like crap when you get out of bed?  C’mon, fellow unsung literary geniuses—all ten million of us—you know those days. You crawl toward your morning toilette all butt-hurt: the chances you never got, the ones you screwed up, your big mouth and itchy trigger finger…

I used to deal by thinking: “Ann, most lives are tragic, so why shouldn’t yours be tragic too?”

This is true, but it feels bad.

Thinking “I’m better than Kanye” feels way, way more gratifying.

Never mind the fact that Kanye finessed his statement by hitting the nail on the head with: “Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.” Sure, “wordy and self-absorbed” is a dead-on description of every book the powerbrokers in the literary scene have pushed on the public in the past two decades. Oh my goodness, why don’t the unwashed read literature? Because the literature your coteries tout is CRAP.

Note that I refuse to say “mainstream” literary scene. You fuckers have destroyed the book market to the point where there is no mainstream. There’s just the high-budget obscure vomit sector and the low-budget obscure vomit sector, with a few gems lost at random points in the ass-kissing inferno. The first circle of this hell is where you go when you were born in New York, and the ninth circle is occupied by anyone who can type 2,000 words, upload them to Smashwords, and add “author” to their Twitter profile—but they’re all assholes. The result is an endless lake of print where the layperson has the same odds of seeing a good book bob past as they have of accidentally swallowing a molecule of David Foster Wallace’s cremated corpse and turning into a sentient bandana. Dante would have walked off and become a day trader.

Blaming Kanye for turning his nose up at the visible tip of the shitberg is like running a restaurant where you serve… I would say diarrhea, but you’re not even that fun. We’re talking the rabbit turds you plunk out, boople by painful poople, when you’re constipated .. God, what are you eating? I suspect it’s wadded-up pages of Foucault with Noam Chomsky sauce. There’s one sous-chef in the back who cooks a mean prime steak, but it’s hidden in the menu under the legal disclaimer. As the crowd flees in disgust, you burst from the kitchen, brandishing a toilet brush and screaming like Gordon Ramsay with a pocket thesaurus. This is definitely Trump’s fault.