Chap 16, The Price of Wisdom is above Ruby's...

[alice wellintown]

Success as well as failure finishes off the fragile and transient
Avant-garde because its unity depends upon a collective "NO" and upon
those who push it even as the artists suspect and perhaps know that
the pushermen are exploiting them. All this ink, all this talk,  all
this chit-chat,  in the ivory tower, in the bookstores, in the
journals and magazines,  and on the web keep the avant-garde floating
like Charlie and Grandpa in Wonker's smoke stack. Eventually the
burping and farting brings it down. The artist changes and so too do
his attitudes; he ages. The public will co-opt and disarm him. His
fans, his pushermen too,  will age,  and thier outrage will soften or
turn cranky. After reading AGTD, I was in agreement with those who
argued that P is one of those artists who do not grow old gracefully
and, that his late work equaled and surpassed in many respects his
best works, but IV seems to refute this assessment: it is flaccid and
phony; it is a packaged product stuffed with old dangled farts and
bloated with belching manikins who fail to amuse or disturb our peace.
A project he liked. Three California novels. P works better with more
space. A thin work like IV or CL49 doesn't give him room. VL is a bit
better,  but still, he needs room, space, pages and pages. He has yet
to write a decent short story. Well, TSI is a fine work but for the
hotel scene that drags along and spoils its unity. As others have
noted, P writes short pieces, not stories, and weaves them into
voluminous labyrinthine texts. I take what he says in SL seriously, he
doesn't much care for Entropy or CL49 and time will discount both, but
he may yet have a big book to publish. We await....