where is the next Kathy Acker?
So Gina Frangello has a fabulous post up wondering, among other things, about the effects of chick lit on the next generation of women writers:
I laughed my ass off at Bridget Jones' Diary when I read it in Amsterdam in 1998. I even sent it to a friend who reminded me of Bridget, and she loved it too. Now, I find myself feeling guilty. This was pre-Bush, pre-9/11; who could have guessed a cultural revolution was coming to the United States? I was under the mistaken impression that Kathy Acker and Helen Fielding could both exist--that the universe of fiction was big enough for them both. In the past 5 or 6 years, it seems I am being proven more and more wrong. I just wonder, by the time the cultural pendulum swings back, how many promising women writers of the next generation will already have been silenced.