Published Writing as Sempiternal

 

sempiternal - adjective - eternal and unchanging, everlasting (Google).

There is a paradoxical aphorism floating around in the atmosphere somewhere: "The more things change, the more they stay the same." It has been airborne since 1849 when the French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr penned it (Google) and released it to be quoted by Goodness knows who initiated the game of Telephone that persists in the present. I am always amazed at how total contradictions can make perfect sense, over time and in the present. Karr's really does, especially if you consider sempiternal trends in publishing and writing.

As I have found through personal experience with literary agents, the manuscripts that are being considered at present are those that reflect contemporary reality, what agents and publishers consider to be marketable. Most of the bestsellers I have read lately reflect politically correct or woke themes, such as autocracy, everyday lives within the LGBTQ or immigrant communities, Black Lives Matter, etc. Which are all valid, of course because the minority populations need a voice. If only the authors of the works could write like F. S. Fitzgerald, I might become addicted to what they have to offer. Unfortunately, most of these new releases are written on the seventh-grade reading level. Now whether or not that is intentional, I don't know. It could be that seventh-graders are doing the most reading these days, which would not surprise me.

The crux of this blog article is that the need to stay in the moment topically via poor, published writing is sempiternal and has been at least since 1922 when Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned was released. In the novel about a riches-to-rags-to-riches, young married couple and their nearly never-do-well friends, Dick, the wife's cousin, is depicted as a poor excuse for a novelist yet is critical of his colleagues in literary crime: "You know these new novels make me tired...If true to life, which I don't believe, the next generation is going to the dogs. I'm sick of all this shoddy realism..." I tend to agree with this fictive emblem to an extent, the tiresome part. What is ironic is that the generation to which Dick was referring is now known as the "Last Generation," or the G.I. Generation, composed of wonderful people, not Weiler Danes, who saved the planet from Hitler and his miscreant mates. Today, we, the aging, senior population, feel the same way in the sense that we look around and prognosticate that Generation Z is bound to go the way of hounds just because their values (and writing) might not reflect ours. Who knows? They might wind up saving the planet from the next Hitler or even climate change. Who cares if they can't spell? They have spellcheck. 

So what's my takeaway today? Karr's, of course. Human nature may be one of the only constants in the universe. 

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