Science & Tech Quote by Jonathan Carroll

Carroll is casually detonating a myth writers are supposed to nurture: that “your audience” is a stable thing you can picture, cater to, even flatter. His itinerary turns that notion into a punchline. In Poland, he’s framed as a romantic or literary cult figure for young women; at U.S. conventions he’s slotted into the genre apparatus, where fandoms bring their own codes of status and expectation; at Harvard, the same work becomes an object for credentialed interpretation. The comic sting of “It’s so schizophrenic” isn’t just self-deprecation. It’s an admission that authorship in public is a role, and the role keeps being recast by institutions with different needs.

The word choice matters. “Audience” repeats like a drumbeat, less about readers than about the social theater around reading: who is allowed to claim him, and on what terms. “Fantasy and science fiction crowd” evokes a subculture that’s often patronized, yet commercially powerful; “Harvard” signals cultural capital and the prestige economy. Carroll is describing a passport-stamp version of Pierre Bourdieu without the theory: the same sentences accrue different meanings depending on the room.

Subtext: the writer’s “identity” is partly outsourced. Translation markets, convention circuits, and elite universities don’t just deliver readers; they manufacture the author as a different product. The line lands because it’s funny, but it’s also a little bleak: to be widely read is to be continually misread in new, highly organized ways.