The Current Sad State of Literary Affairs...

In the United States, much more than in China or Russia, we can genuinely talk of a blog revolution. American culture has been decimated during the last 50 years. American newspapers are mainly under leftist control. The book market is practically dead. Some of the best authors pay to have their books published in the order of 3,000 copies for a market of 150 million. This is ridiculous. Even when people write, they face censorship at every level—other than their own conscious or unconscious censorship. Meanwhile, professional journalism is rare.

Pause for a moment and hold that thought.

The paragraph above is actually a HazZzmat rewrite of a paragraph extracted from a remarkable interview with Lebanese webmeister Pierre Akel. Akel's original graf, however, which we carry below, referred to a slightly different source of oppression:

In the Arab world, much more than in the West, we can genuinely talk of a blog revolution. Arab culture has been decimated during the last 50 years. Arab newspapers are mainly under Saudi control. The book market is practically dead. Some of the best authors pay to have their books published in the order of 3,000 copies for a market of 150 million. This is ridiculous. Even when people write, they face censorship at every level—other than their own conscious or unconscious censorship. Meanwhile, professional journalism is rare.

Some people think we're kidding when we write about the censorship of the left and concurrent the Gramscian remanufacturing of our culture and institutions, geared toward replacing them with a People's Paradise. We're not.

Akel's article is quite fascinating for a lot of other reasons. And it's more complex than our useful little parlor trick above might indicate. Read it here. Then start to wonder whatever has happened to our once-vibrant literary culture. And why.