STEWART HOME - Excerpt from Sixty Years Of Treason ( Neoism, Plagiarism & Praxis, 1995).

Today, anyone who wants to write a book that's worthwhile has to write
it themselves. No one who fears new ideas need be afraid of the lifeless
commodities thrown onto the mass market by those publishing houses active
in Britain. Newspaper and magazine sales have been completely stitched up
by Smiths and Menzies, they control the vast majority of the trade, their retail
outlets are unimportant, it's their stranglehold on distribution that counts.
Book production is no different, a few conglomerates own virtually every-
thing. They throw one Martin Amis imitator at us after another, and hype this
garbage as the future of English Fiction. This is a joke, English fiction has no
future. Subversive ideas would certainly sell, but don't expect to find them in
your local high street, any analysis of books on terrorism and spookery quickly
reveals that non-market forces set the agenda in British publishing.

Maybe you've been knocking around for years and the literary establishmen'ts
stone-walling of your work hasn't succeeded in getting you to shut the fuck up.
No problem! A major publisher will buy you up, put out your new book and then
get cold feet. It's a self-fulfilling prophesy, how could the book sell if it
wasn't promoted or given proper distribution? Bought up or left in the cold,
history will prove us right. Those so called "writers" and "editors" currently stuffing their faces at literary luncheons will be forgotten in a few years time.
We know it, they know it, and this is why they're so vociferous in their attitude
toward talent. The literary establishment is eaten up with tension, with frustration, at not being talented, at not being capable of pleasure of any kind, eaten up with hate - not rational hate that is directed at those who abuse, insult
and enslave - but irrational, indiscriminate hate; hatred, at bottom, of their own worthlessness.

The crippled minds who support the dominant culture value decorum and good taste
precisely because they are incapable of understanding " ugliness " as anything
other than a mirror image of their own deformed intellects. The literary establishment hates the sterility of the writers it promotes and so it projects
this quality onto progressive cultural tendencies. However, the dominant
" culture " eventually becomes so desperate for an infusion of fresh blood that someone whose work has long been the subject of irrational hatred among the
" literati " will suddenly be invited onto the subsidised gravy train of luncheons, readings, residencies, lectureships and grants. The young dog taken up by these vampires will be bled dry in three weeks, leaving official " culture " as sick as ever. The zombies who promote traditional literary values are incapable of facing the fact that their every last thought is a conditioned reflex, entirely determined by past experience, it's much worse than suffering from halitosis, thes people have a corpse in their mouth.

Our most pressing task is to bury this " culture " of mediocrity.