Large Pyle used to be a senior fellow at the prestigious left-wing think-tank
in Point and Shoot, Florida, the Point and Shoot Institute (PSI).
So much
pressure.
His job was to write white papers on a variety of topics.
One meaning of white paper was commercial white paper, a marketing
communication designed to promote a company's particular product or solution to a
perceived need. Actually, to drum up the need.
Pyle wrote about books and
writing. The book business and the writing life. The life of a writer within the
book business as an industry. A corporate enterprise. Designed to maximize
profits and neutralize threats to profit-making as a goal, or end, of work.
Pyle had promoted himself to Chronicler-at-Large of the Mall Builder culture because
books were how a culture knew who it was, and what its choices were.
Nelson
Algren said it used to be if you went Hollywood you had sold out, but now, if you
write what New York wants you have sold out. New York is Hollywood.
New
York is Hollywood, books are television, the writer is a movie star, or a rock star,
Jane Fonda or Michael Jackson, the bookstore in the mall is the Gap and the Internet
is the bookstore in the mall.
* * *
Are these the choices a writer faces, or is Pyle a disgruntled failure who
couldn't hack it?
Well, let's see. What happened to Pyle's white papers?
To books that were collections of such white papers?
Were they published,
discussed, sold in stores, and taught in schools?
Or were they rejected,
unpublished, or underpublished, did he have to publish them himself, and put the
taint of self-publication on them?