1.The way I see it, there are two places where I have a “zone of disagreement” with you. One is just in the general assessment of the conglomeration era. You seem to assess it in three different ways — neutrally, as historical fact; negatively, with a trepidation for what it does to fiction; and then positively in the sense that it creates conditions of production that writers then respond to. I kind of just want to put a big negative sign around the whole thing and say that this is something to fight against and a lesson to learn from. I would characterize the conglomeration era as basically a protection racket that squeezes out independent competition and then forces writers into a subservient relationship to the conglomerates. Want to argue with the way I see it?
Three things!
First: on putting a big negative sign around the whole thing. I can point to a lot of books I love that were published by conglomerates. Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers. Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist. Lauren Groff’s Matrix. Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection. Ben Lerner’s 10:04. Rachel Cusk’s Outline. Just saying conglomeration is bad is too crude because so many great books come from it.
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