Make it new, baby
Forget the doomsday prophecies. The written word has survived for centuries, and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. Enough stalwarts, true believers and Ivy leaguers exist to keep the industry afloat through the 21st century, but the form of literature itself will undergo drastic evolutionary changes in order to survive.
Tomorrow's books will be strange creatures, metamorphosizing to compete with the flashy primacy of TV, film, cyberporn and whatever other techno-entertainments await.
Writers have been following Ezra Pound's "make it new" maxim for a long while now, eventually running headlong past the new and into the acid-refluxing up the stylistic detritus and technical tics of the past.
Literature needs to shape up-or be crushed by the invisible hand. Expect an an orgiastic explosion of genre interbreeding that will result in pulpy mutants and hardcover fauna as quirky, eccentric and inexplicable as the platypus.
The expiration date of so-called "chick lit" will come soon enough, causing savvy post-feminist hacks to baste their slim sagas in a coating of violence and riot grrrl retribution-picture "Sex in the City" meets American Psycho.
It's time for serious literature to stop pandering to the masses and start obeying the mandates of extreme niche marketing. Gaze into a future of intimidating tomes that make Ulysses seem like a beach book, replete with allusions that'll require a PhD and a tab of acid to even begin to penetrate.
Oprah's Book Club may be a vital force in propping up the drooping corpse of literature, but why not have the talk show maven, à la Stalin, ghostwrite each title herself? This would help build the cult of personality that it is the Oprah brand, while also satisfying middle-aged housewives sick of feigning affection for William Faulkner. Gay fiction can mate with Bukowski and Fante, creating a fascinating hybrid that brings together the flamboyance of Christopher Street with the dingy maleness of the racetrack and the dive bar. Straight erotica might merge with Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, so that smutty text can compete with porn DVDs that let you pick the angle of action.
The demand for dirty laundry shows no signs of decline. We'll see tell-all memoirs that cover incest, abandonment, anorexia, drug addition, recovery, religious enlightenment, financial bankruptcy, mental illness, forays into the adult-film industry and bids for political office-all in the first four chapters. This New Memoir could mount and impregnate the graphic novel-picture A Million Little Pieces rendered by R. Crumb.
Surely, authors will need to be young, attractive, well-groomed and -dressed, and charmingly multicultural. If they're smart, easy-on-the-eyes lit superstars Zadie Smith and Benjamin Kunkel will procreate, ensuring an ongoing lineage of aesthetically superior brainiacs. Author photographs, formerly resigned to the ghetto of the back cover or disregarded altogether, could be restored to a position of prominence. These should harken back to a velvety Martin Amis with cigarette, or a bare-chested and elfin Truman Capote.
Soon, shamelessness shall lay down with integrity. To avoid the fate of the dodo, VHS and the compassionate conservative, writers must rejoin the great Darwinian struggle.