On Wylie – David Marchese in NYT:

‘I wonder if any of the many literary greats represented by Andrew Wylie ever considered using his story. The raw material is certainly worthy: Wylie, whose father was a high-level editor at Houghton Mifflin, grew up a privileged young scalawag, attending St. Paul’s School, from which he was dismissed, and Harvard, where he insulted one of his thesis advisers, and eventually moved to New York in the 1970s to become a poet and interviewer. Once there, he fell in with Andy Warhol’s crowd, behaved in various ways like a wild man and then, in 1980 and in need of steadier work, began transforming himself into a hugely successful literary agent. Over the years, the Wylie Agency’s clients have included Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Martin Amis and John Updike. (All of whose estates, along with those of other luminaries like Borges and Calvino, are now represented by the agency.) Wylie’s roster of contemporary authors includes Sally Rooney, Salman Rushdie and Karl Ove Knausgaard among its blue-chip multitude.’

(…)

‘You don’t think that a sufficiently advanced A.I., which is not that far away, trained on, say, Elmore Leonard’s work couldn’t create a salable facsimile of his novels? No way. But take the best-seller list. That’s a little susceptible to artificial intelligence because the books on it are written without any particular gift in the nature of their expression. Stephen King is susceptible to artificial intelligence. Danielle Steel is even more susceptible to artificial intelligence. The worse the writing, the more susceptible it is to artificial intelligence. I was talking to Salman Rushdie in Frankfurt, and he told me that someone had instructed ChatGPT to write a page of Rushdie. He said it was hilariously inept. I’ve had a couple of anxious emails from authors saying should I be concerned about artificial intelligence. It’s out there, and no one knows quite how to deal with it, but it’s not relevant to the people that we represent. It is relevant to other people who tend to be very popular.

(…)

‘One, the goal of the people we represent is not to be Beyoncé. It’s not directly connected to popularity. Let’s say you’re inviting some people to your house for dinner. Do you want everyone to arrive? Or do you want a select number of intelligent people who are amusing and understand what you’re talking about? The latter, I think. There are some people I don’t want to have join the dinner. They deserve to live, but they don’t need to come to my house for supper.’

(…)

‘The sequence, as I see it, is this: In the old days — ’80s, ’90s — there was always a discussion about the quantity of print advertising that would be attached to the publication of the book. Then publishers began to declare, and then decisively declared, that print advertising doesn’t sell books. There’s no logic to it. Why should movies, television shows be advertised in print if that didn’t produce a favorable result? What they should have been saying, if they were telling the truth, which sometimes publishers avoid, is that the cost of, say, a full-page ad in The New York Times is not directly recoverable from the number of copies of books sold from that specific ad. What that means is, it’s disadvantageous to the publisher’s balance sheet. Though without question it is advantageous to the author’s balance sheet, because the author doesn’t have to pay for the ad. Now publishers have declared, in their opinion sincerely, that the only way to sell books is through social media and stuff like that. I have gone to a number of meetings with astute groups of people employed in the publishing business who have talked like someone from a very remote island speaking 50 years in the future — it’s like science fiction. They say, we do this, we do that, but it’s not directly measurable. I find myself taking exception to their estimation of their social media skills and the effect those skills have on the sale of a book. I don’t buy it.’

Read the article here.

It’s not the amount of people who buy your books, although from an economical point of view this is the essence, it’s who is reading you.

It’s almost impossible to disagree with this statement.

Whether it’s acceptable to look down in popular culture is a different question. At least you can be indifferent in some cases.

‘You want to matter in this culture? Not me.’

But are you willing to wait for the right culture in order to matter?

It’s a possibility.

A true stoic holds his nose and matters.