I don’t want to brag but unnamed gods visited me over Christmas and whispered answers to the universe’s secrets into my unsleeping ear. Turns out the gods have a pretty narrow set of concerns. They don’t give a rat’s derrière about MOCCs or big data or Malcolm Gladwell and told me directly that both John Searle and Daniel Dennett could go to hades when I asked them about the mind-body problem.

What gets their goat is arts criticism, and trust me they know it’s in krisis. The cries of sacked critics have disrupted their celestial siestas for too long, and so (unsurprisingly, I might add) they visited me and revealed in voice audible how to solve this sucker in five easy steps:

1. Get rid of television and film and popular music, which have made opera and poetry seem kind of boring.  When people are bored stiff, they will buy poetry books by the millions again. Trust us.

2. Get rid of the Internet. How else are newspapers supposed to subsidize arts criticism with classified dollars?

3. Get rid of the Internet. When everyone’s a critic, no one is.

4. Get rid of the MFA. When everyone’s an artist, no one is.

5. Go back in time and  eliminate post-structuralism and postmodernism. Let’s leave political posturing to politicians, shall we?

I actually think some of these ideas are better than others, but I’m just the messenger.