Thursday, December 6, 2012

Why Did Eggers Relocate?

This is a question touched on only briefly in my new e-novel, The McSweeneys Gang. Why did Dave Eggers move his base of operations to San Francisco from New York City?

One can speculate that there were too many uncontrollable, independent-minded journalists in NYC. Eggers couldn’t control the city’s literary scene. His history indicates that he dislikes contention, disagreement, and debate. His entire philosophy stands against the notion of literary contention and debate. His solution is either to remove himself from such possibilities, or take out such opponents as he’s able to, as he more or less did with the ULA.

But as Mohamed Morsi may be finding out, one can’t remove oneself forever from democracy and debate, except by becoming a dictator. Disagreement will eventually reawaken. It will follow Eggers even to his protected city. Ideas and freedom have ways of seeping their way in through tiny cracks of the strongest fortress. Possibly even into a monothink operation like McSweeney’s.

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