Akkam’s Razor

I can’t begin to tell you the amount of generational criticism I’ve come across about MY generation, Generation X. The reviewers beef with his review of editor Kevin Smokler’s
Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, is that the internet, with its egalitarianism and the vast lowering of the barriers of entry (and the quality) of writing and literature.

“Smokler’s 11-page introduction to his collection does have the virtue of concisely stating everything that seems to have gone wrong with Generation X, at least in its upper-middle-class division, from an endemic attention deficit disorder propagated by multimedia dazzlements and distracted, self-involved parents to a fatuousness (born of a collapsing educational system) that presents itself as a kind of creative populism. Everyone is above average now, and being a writer or artist is no longer a matter of exploring the self and the world or of coming to some sort of reckoning with giftedness ? often in the face of indifference or hostility ? but of starting a blog or writing a novel like a chain letter, to name but two au courant forms of expression that confuse exhibitionism and entertainment with art. “

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