Thank You For Not Reading

That's the title of a collection of essays by Croatian writer/scholar Dubravka Ugresic. I found it at the library while looking up agents and publishers. Mostly, it's about being a writer in times when literature doesn't really seem to have any social relevance in and of itself anymore; when it has been transformed into "content" — a (marginal, rather unprofitable) product of the cultural industries; when it can only be evaluated in terms of marketability or profitability, because there are no other shared cultural norms left to understand it with. Some of the essays are very funny, in an despairing, brave-face-putting-on sort of way. She is very clever. She writes with a kind of sardonic, longsuffering humour that is maybe slavic, or maybe just literate and knowing. There's a lot of stuff though about the tiresome difficulties of being a Croatian intellectual and her communist upbringing, which might have been interesting coming from a girl I was trying to chat up at a party, but which in a book, required more earnest attention than I could muster just at the moment. But I empathized with her about her main point, because it's the kind of thing I brood about on rainy days, only cleverer and more articulate than I could ever be. I could see myself in this self-portrait of a writer, an artist, who labours under the weight of the realization that, in this brave new millenium, in all likelihood, stupid vulgarity will always triumph in the end (and in the beginning too...), no matter how hard she claws; that right here, right now her values, her activity, what is meant to give meaning to her existence, somehow don't matter to the world at large; that all this has no resonance in the mainstream; and that she is condemned to be forever stranded at the periphery of contemporary life and experience because she is a real artist and intellectual and not one of the other things, the permitted configurations: the consumer, the enthusiast, the content-provider, the professional, the capitalist, the right-thinking, politically correct conformist. Big up Dubravka!