Knock, knock... Someone is knocking at the door.
Best to open it and read liberally:
"Siloed information is over. Narrative-controllers are going to have to actually fight for hearts and minds moving forward. Blocking, cancelling, shaming, brigading and shouting down are going to be less effective with every passing year.I'm reminded of the famous 1968 Playboy interview with Truman Capote, who saw it for what it was even as early as the 50s."
"Playboy: For many years, American letters seemed dominated by Southern writers, but, as you have said, “during the last ten years the large percentage of the more talented American writers are urban Jewish intellectuals.” How do you feel about this shift in ethnic, geographic and literary emphasis?
Capote: Well, it has brought about the rise of what I call the Jewish Mafia in American letters. This is a clique of New York-oriented writers and critics who control much of the literary scene through the influence of the quarterlies and intellectual magazines. All these publications are Jewish-dominated and this particular coterie employs them to make or break writers by advancing or withholding attention. I don’t think there’s any conscious, sinister conspiracy on their part—just a determination to see that members of their particular clique rise to the top. Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and Isaac Bashevis Singer and Norman Mailer are all fine writers, but they’re not the only writers in the country, as the Jewish literary Mafia would have us believe. I could give you a list of excellent writers, such as John Knowles and Vance Bourjaily and James Purdy and Donald Windham and Reynolds Price and James Leo Herlihy and Calder Willingham and John Hawkes and William Goyen; the odds are you haven’t heard of most of them, for the simple reason that the Jewish Mafia has systematically frozen them out of the literary scene.
Now, mind you, I’m not against any particular group adhering to its own literary values and advancing its own favored authors; such cliques have always existed in American letters. I only object when one particular group—and it could just as well be Southern, or Roman Catholic, or Marxist, or vegetarian—gets a strangle hold on American criticism and squeezes out anybody who doesn’t conform to its own standards."
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