[....]
Maybe in a hundred years, assuming there's anybody left around, people will be amused at their great-grandparents' failure to grasp the self-evident idea that what was called literature was a niche-marketed intellectual property, and that the war between the outlaws and the canonicals was another dispute between Big-Endians and Small-Endians. (Half a dozen people with a taste for the recherché will even get the allusion.) You can already see the borders getting porous. Final quiz: where do you put A) Mary Gaitskill, B) Nicholson Baker, C) Neal Stephenson, D) Jonathan Lethem? Canonicals or alt.canonicals? Or should we call them, along with Foer, Wallace and so on, postcanonicals? (Just plain ''writers'' would put the taxonomists out of business.) ''Don't join too many gangs,'' Robert Frost advised us back in 1936, but for the past 50 years or so, writers haven't had much choice: who you hang out with, and who watches your back, defines what you are. ''The Outlaw Bible'' still posits a literary East L.A., with palefaces and redskins tagging and throwing up signs. With a little luck, we won't have to live here much longer.