Matt Haig's excellent blog post - completely the wrong forum for this, but I'm not sure there is anywhere to put it other than private members. Do we have anywhere for miscellaneous writing-related stuff? Oh well, here's the link anyway:

http://www.booktrust.org.uk/writing/online-writer-in-residence/blog/558/

Very good. Should be required reading in . . . well, you know.

A slight quibble: a) Lichenstein didn't turn comics into masterpieces; he just blew up a comic panel and called it a painting, b) and didn't he rather snottily claim his work was on a different level to comics?

So, while this is good balancing stuff, I feel the 'answer' as such probably lies somewhere between the two extremes, e.g. Martin Amis isn't nearly as clever as he thinks he is; on the other hand, Stephen King can't half write a load of crap at times. Maybe the truth is we can all get penned in by our prejudices, when the challenge is to say something worth saying in an entertaining way whatever genre or mode or style we're writing in.

Interesting piece - and nice to see someone repenting being a book snob. Most are wear it as a badge of pride.

I feel the 'answer' as such probably lies somewhere between the two extremes,

I think the answer to almost everything lies between whatever extremes people try to push towards. In the messy, middle muddle, in other words, but that makes people feel insecure, of course. Snobbery/inverted snobbery is one resort of the insecure.

he just blew up a comic panel and called it a painting,

He didn't quite do that - he re-shaped and re-worked images in various ways, as artists have always done, and painted every millimetre himself.

His work doesn't specially do it for me, but it's just as valid as that of any other modernist artist.