Why Reading is Dead and It's Your Fault

A manual to restoring great writing in the world

Almost all I think about these days is creating a literary renaissance. I get blasted by comments daily that tell me I’m just a racist and sexist worshipping dead white authors and that modern poetry and fiction authors are better than greats like McCarthy, Delillo, Pynchon, Morrison, Silko, and Atwood (among many others.) And don’t even get me started on the great poets from the 20th century!

Yet, it isn’t technology's fault. It’s our fault for putting out shitty writing that is painful to read, not promoting our writing, and not elevating other authors we enjoy.

Diversity quotas, MFA programs, and national endowments for artists won’t save us from the oncoming destruction of literacy rates and the publishing industry. For the past seven years, I’ve been on the ground with high school students, teaching them to read and write. However, when I say things with the younger generation look dire, it's not coming from a paranoid rejection of my own mortality by tapping into the timeless cliche that new generations of students are worse and worse.

I’ve worked at multiple schools in multiple states, and you guys would be horrified by the reading and writing abilities of graduating seniors. You’d even be more scared if you talked to them about their beliefs. Narcissism and close-mindedness are so rampant, even in a generation exposed to endless diversity, that the only way back to equilibrium may be through the West’s self-destruction.

But can you name one living celebrity author who is actually good? Where is our Hemingway? Where is our David Foster Wallace? But, wait… Fuck Hemingway and David Foster Wallace because they didn’t do enough, either. Infinite Jest has sold one million copies. How many of those copies were even read? How many who read the book cured their addictions? Solved their family trauma?

Catcher in the Rye sold 60 million copies. A Mr. Beast video gets that amount of views in the first week.

I can watch a popular YouTube video in twenty minutes with a clear beginning, middle, and end. However, it may take me four hours to read The Great Gatsby.

Three billion people saw the first Avatar movie….

Books are like meditation. They are both the most potent paths to growth in their respective fields (intellectual and spiritual growth). Both practices require focus, discipline, humbleness, talent, and consistency to excel. Any Joey Bag of Donuts can sit down and watch a movie. Most Joey Bag of Donuts can’t understand any of the top 100 greatest books of all time.

Pettiness in the Writing Community

Rumi had a lot to say about why there is so much hate in the writing community.

We should ask God
To help us towards manners. Inner Gifts
Do not find their way
To creatures without just respect.

If a man or woman flails about, he not only
Smashes his house,
He burns the world down.

Your depression is connected to your insolence
And refusal to praise. If a man or woman is
On the path, and refuses to praise-that man or woman
Steals from others every day-in fact is a shoplifter!

The sun became full of light when it got hold of itself.
Angels began shining when they achieved discipline.

The sun goes out whenever the cloud of not-praising comes near.
The moment that foolish angel felt insolent, he heard the door close.

—

In my eight years in academia, most of the graduate students I knew were on SSRIs and had a host of mental health issues. Most also loved to tear down writers of the past as racists, sexists, and whatever else they could think of.

Rumi says the cap of your happiness is your ability to praise. That doesn’t mean you can’t criticize some of the shitty work being released today. But how much are you actually praising other authors? Cormac McCarthy and David Foster Wallace aren’t my favorite authors, but does it sound like I care when I talk about them? Do I make them sound like a big deal? When I talk about their sensitive personal life issues, do I make that their entire identity? Or put a parental advisory or trigger warning before my videos on them? How would you like to be judged in retrospect about your biggest mistakes?

I think most of my audience and readers of literary fiction are mature enough not to be manipulated by cancel culture. But what is holding back the praise then?

Logical Insanity

Most of you guys reading this are really smart. You're the group's most well-rounded thinker when you hang out with your friends and family. Many of you are more intelligent than me. But, most writers have no balance between the pen and the sword (body and mind.)

Mishima popularized the idea in modern consciousness with his manual Sun & Steel. He promoted the idea that artists should be weightlifting and work on their bodies' aesthetics. Do you want to end up as a dead schizophrenic like Mishima, though? Mishia missed in his analysis of harmonizing the mind and body that there is solar and lunar energy.

In 25 years, Mishima wrote 34 novels, 50 plays, 25 books of short stories, 35 books of essays, one opera, and one film. All while controlling every aspect of his image and life. If you were an old friend of Mishima and wanted to grab dinner, he’d make you sign a contract to only talk about certain things with him. You’d have to go through the list of questions prepared by him in order over dinner. Does that sound like a relaxed man tapped into his yin energy?

Even worse, Mishima doubled down on his yang energy through his pursuit of bodybuilding. What if he decided to meditate instead?

Mishima’s imbalances remind me of a lot of male readers today. They read challenging books with hardcore characters with fucked up heads. They drink caffeine and beer and indulge in other substances. They’re addicted to technology, porn, and god knows what else. In their past is a history of familial trauma and broken relationships caused by their inadequacy to express emotions (or their love of crazy women.) They love aggressive sports like MMA, and football and get FIRED UP when David Goggins tells them to get their shit together and push it to their limit. In school, they felt misunderstood and accumulated a ton of educational trauma.

Does that sound like a person who has the ability to praise? What if we add mental disorders, extreme trauma, and hatred of women to that list above? What kind of monster are we dealing with?

We are dealing with monsters who only see reality through a lens of logical insanity. They have no ability to flip into subjective reality in certain scenarios. Without the ability to do that, we’re fucked.

I’m also not here demonizing men like that. Most are non-violent citizens who I would trust to help me in distress and who see many of the bullshit aspects of reality.

But I’m in the business of finding SOUL-JAHS for a literature revolution.

Reading is dead because we haven’t cultivated a new path balanced path away from Mishima, Hemingway, McCarthy, Wallace, and others as men. We’ve doubled down on their model, and the rest of the world has moved in a different direction. But we need to return to a place where we can praise each other, reach out to a global audience, and create our own beautiful art.

We don’t need to pierce our septums, watch soccer, or go do any other silly shit that goes against our masculine nature as men. But, we do need to go deeper into our souls, tune into the state of nothingness, and find a new, more silent, plain, and radical path that the authors listed above never had an opportunity to take.

When the champions of this path rise to the top, we have to PRAISE and elevate them beyond Colleen Hoover and other bestsellers. Why didn’t Cormac McCarthy’s “The Passenger” not crack a bestseller list? Well, for months, everyone with advance copies talked shit, and then on launch day, people (and articles) tore down his works.

Having reread The Passenger multiple times, the quality is no lesser than any of his other works. Cormac didn’t change. We changed. As a collective of readers, we didn’t elevate a book with deep commentaries on the US military, love, science, and the purpose of life to the top of the rankings. Instead, we fought like bitches or bitched about how he included a trans character for ten pages.

The malignant masculine mind can get behind and promote the shit out of Anton Chigurh, Judge Holden, Lester Ballard, and a bunch of cannibals in The Road (iT Really tAught ME About FAtherhood.) But, when our boy releases a book on shit that matters, we flop because the thriller line doesn’t resolve, and the hallucination scenes are a tad boring. A balanced group of male readers (90% of McCarthy’s readership) could have come together as BookTok fantasy readers do and got some momentum behind his final work. 15-year-old depressed girls who cut themselves for attention are out promoting us and determining the future of literature.

Our inability to praise ruined our last opportunity to push one of the GOATS.

How long will we have to wait until the next one?