6th
reader mail
A reader puts it nicely:
About that underground, I always figured Eggers and Franzen et al. were expressing guilt and reservations about their success and were, in some bizarre and even backward fashion, attempting to save their underground street cred by turning it back on the underground. Didn’t Franzen write a humor piece about Fiction Collective 2 in which he gets in the mail a book from them and wonders if it’s from a terrorist organization? Hilarious stuff! When you come up through the underground, you nourish yourself on, among other things, a healthy skepticism for the mainstream. You even define yourself in relation to it. I’m not John Fucking Updike, I’m Dave Fucking Eggers. If the world doesn’t take note, as the world mostly doesn’t, it’s because the world doesn’t know any better. The world called: it likes Esquire, not Might. But so what do you do when the world does take note, when the mainstream turns around and taps you for promotion? You’ve spent years doubting the mainstream. Did the mainstream, which you’ve thought so incomprehensibly stupid and doddering, just get one right for a change? Or did you, in your doddering thirties, become more mainstream and, by definition, more stupid? Or were you mainstream-ready all along, just biding your time, waiting, and wanting, to be noticed?
