I have been afraid that the writer and the artist has no value in the world today because they are just providing entertainment for people. My fear was that if I wrote that I would only add more to the pile of vapid entertainment. This pile so immense that my contribution would be meaningless in its miniscule comparison, but also terrible in the aggregate that I, just like so many others, add, like trash to a landfill. And it's true, I think, that there can only be so much entertainment. If every american engages in american entertainment during all non-working and non-resting hours, then that offers a limited number of hours for digesting entertainment material. Those are a lot of hours, but we also already have 24 hour broadcasting on all of the channels. Also on radio. Then with the internet, the digital problem is manifest. There is too more information--entertainment--than there are minds to digest it. Any serious ambition to write, if it is only to entertain, would be a joke, like whistling into the wind.

Now, there is the option, even in the digital age, of being swept out of the stream of common information and being forced into the attentions of people looking to be entertained. This is money, production, sponsorship. But you have to really be able to entertain in order to do this. You have to meet demographic quotas, write for advertising agendas, keep abreast of the opinion of political satire. But it is still entertainment, only this time for money and with the money backer's interests in mind.

Of course, what comes with this money is the ability to seriously pursue writing as a vocation.

And that's what frightened me. If I wanted to pursue writing seriously then it could only be in the form of absolute entertainment, with money's agendas supplanting any kind of cerebral substance. And I thought that was the case for writing, or any other manipulation of ideas in media format. The only place where literature survived and where ideas were still useful on university campuses where it survives artificially by a forced ignorance of its obsolescence, where it self perpetuates by educating educators who continue the tradition as something precious and where it feeds on itself this way, slowly dying and fading away in the most awful, gruesome and embarrassing way.

And I didn't want to be a part of that. I didn't want to be a part of lying about something that I loved so much.

But I don't think that is the whole case. Writing still has a use beyond entertainment. There are still people who crave its use. And the use is studying and describing a society, explaining the function and faculty of old moral guidelines and creating new ones; rediscovering the angle and direction of something by the many names of truth and realigning the trajectory of a given population's history and the momentum of its present towards it (since history is written and may very well impact the future of a group I think that it is fair to use history and to write history in effort to realign to this same said).

And then so that's why it's ok to write. There's still entertainment to contend with. But that's why literature is fluid. New strategies and devices must be created or it will fail, and deservingly so. Facing the examined reality had better be more entertaining than escaping reality.