GRANTAGATE. The thing is: that piece is the end product of all the purply fiction and ponderously similitive poetry people have been fawning over for years (you know, the “he spooned the world out to her with his hands like memories sifting the sugar of her heart into the coffee of their bodily union” kind of thing). Journals and bookshelves have been filled with that stuff for so long the pirates trained the machines on it, and now the same journals are stuck without any capacity to evaluate actual quality—no one knows what that looks like anymore. Maybe literature itself was even secondary for people invested in that world: they really seemed more invested in laundering the entire profession of the public writer through that precious hiccupy sentimentalese, I guess so their institutions could assert some authority over the domain of emotional expression, which is the only authority left in an era of self-as-brand-on-the-internet. So now the official literature of identity has become the official literature of machine writing. Beautiful irony, in a way.