where's the skill in catching fish that are clambering into your boat?

every time i enter a bookstore, i add a truly distressing number of books to my Big Damn List which i will probably never be able to finish. and then i pause and consider all the literature, non-fiction, and bestselling entertainment that have so far been published. and all the interest-perking works that have yet to be contracted. and how no one since John Milton and other 17th century scholars with eidetic memory and absurd amounts of money has the time or the resources to track down and absorb all of the music, movies, television, essays, fiction, poetry, plays, visual or performance art, etc that has ever been and/or is currently being produced.

technology has caught up with the creatively-inclined inhabitants of wealthy countries, and so this last century has been spent self-publishing all sorts of projects that would never have seen the light of day even as recently as the 1920s, when the mostly white, mostly male, always affluent, and eternally erudite people of the world were the only successful artistic types. nowadays, anyone gets acclaim from numerous supposedly-prestigious societies that no one has ever heard of, and therefore becomes 'known' in ever diminishing bubbles of popularity that have no impact or resonance with the idea of mainstream society.

for example, how many names out of these current world poets laureate are recognizable by any majority? and how many people in those majorities can name poetry by those writers? what prestige is there in a manifold mediocrity?

i'm all for breaking down unfair boy's club boundaries, but whatever happened to the positive kind of standardization? the one that meant if so-and-so said you were worthwhile, that yes, objectively, you were? because i want to embody that, but i can't think of a single name newer than Sylvia Plath (of the 1950s, so 60 years ago) that provides instantaneous artistic acknowledgment; even if someone thinks she was shit, or only recalls her suicide story, she's still remembered by America's semi-educated masses. the only people with that kind of fame in the modern world are tween celebutantes and cultural douchenozzles.