thedarkages | The Gospel Of Success

Does anyone else see anything wrong with putting John Updike on the cover of this month's Poets & Writers? The accompanying article is of a promotional nature, flogging a collection of his art essays collected from the New York Review of Books. It seems so pointless to me; it's like putting Arnold Schwarzenegger on the cover of Muscle and Fitness. Updike has already out-everythinged everybody in the field; everyone knows about his brilliance, his productivity, and his versatlity. In a way, he is the summation of all those worldly qualities which constitute the none-too-secret dream of the writer, as set out in P&W. It's all about success; the implication is that if your intention is pure and your productivity is high, you will prevail. Nowadays, that's simply not true. Although there are sufficient warnings to that effect in the middle of the magazine, they're like the End User License Agreements that everyone clicks through in the software installer to get to the good stuff. For all you know, you could be obtaining a license for the software in exchange for your immortal soul, and that -- the soul -- is what is at stake in writing poetry or prose or creative non-fiction, all considerations of genre aside. Putting an icon of that "good stuff" on the cover implies that there is a transaction that can be made.

Perhaps I'm just not on the right side of the divide.