Transmitting Our Thoughts

Jeez. First Steve Almond and now Lev Grossman reveal that they're obsessed with what's said about them on litblogs.

Although he can't resist referring to the Internet as occupied by "these people," Grossman does at least concede that "I am impinging on all of you on the back page of Time magazine. Why shouldn't Ed Champion get to talk back? In a way writers do have a superpower, the power to transmit our thoughts to other people around the world with a few keystrokes. Why should we be the only ones? Why should we get to be in the X-Men, while everybody else is merely human?"

No reason at all, although I'm hardly in the habit of thing of book critics at Time as superheroes. The allusion only reminds me why I stopped taking Time-style criticism seriously a long time ago.

And since when does "getting paid" confer some kind of intellectual superiority? Selling out is more like it.