A typical poet’s mansion, after the bailout

A lot of people ask me how I can live in such opulence, given that I make my living writing award-winning literary fiction that nobody actually reads.

— Julian Gough gives a writer’s view of a proposed bailout of the US publishing industry

Members of the t&p editorial collective were jolted from their months-long lethargy recently by an article in the New York Times which detailed a bailout package for the US publishing industry. “Heck,” we thought, allowing an uncharacteristic coarseness to creep into our language. “If poets can once again expect to dine regularly on truffled partridge and champagne, perhaps it’s time to take up the pen again!”

The text of the proposal analyzes the “irresponsible writing and irresponsible reading” practices which got us all into this mess, practices which “simply put too many families into books they could not finish”:

We are seeing the impact on readers and neighborhoods, with 5 million readers now behind on their reading. Some are just walking away from novels they should never have been reading in the first place. What began as a sub-prime reading problem has spread to other, less-risky readers, and contributed to excess inventories. These troubled novels are now parked, or frozen, on the shelves of libraries, bookstores, and other reading institutions, preventing them from financing readable novels.

Write on!