Tag: writing (page 1 of 3)

January 12, 2026

Excerpt from my Sent folder: Markdown

April 1, 2005, to John Gruber:

John, I just wanted to write to thank you for Markdown, which is one of the coolest and most useful tools I’ve come across in a long time. I’m an English professor who does a lot of writing, and one of my frustrations over the years has been dealing with the various file formats of the text editors and word processors that I’ve used: different versions of Word and AppleWorks, RTF files, Mellel, and now Pages. I have spent way too much time over the years cleaning up old files to make them usable again – which is one of the reasons I started using BBEdit: it will open anything, and you can’t clean up a file you can’t open. […]

Markdown, in conjunction with BBEdit 8, has pretty much solved my problems. The Markdown syntax is highly intuitive – relying on the conventions of plain text email was a brilliant stroke on your part – and enables me to use very straightforwardly all the formatting options that I normally need, including some that were difficult or impossible to access via Ulysses, whose file conversion tools aren’t nearly as good as Markdown’s. And now that BBEdit uses the OS X system spellchecker, and has one of the best implementations of drawers (which I usually despise) that I’ve seen, I have the best tools I have ever had as I move into my next book project. But without Markdown I’d still lack a really satisfying writing environment. Markdown allows me to write almost completely in plain text – this focusing on composition rather than formatting – but allows me to add formatting options when I need to. When I’m finished writing a piece, I run Markdown and save the document as HTML; then I can send it to anyone in that format; or, if someone happens to need RTF, it’s trivial to open it in TextEdit and convert.

This got a very kind reply from Mr. Gruber.

It’s a bit of a shock to realize that I have been writing almost everything in Markdown (and writing my Markdown largely in BBEdit) for twenty-one years.

Anil Dash, from a great post on the history and (now) ubiquity of Markdown:

As hard as it may be to believe, back in 2004, the default was that people made new standards for open technologies like Markdown, and just shared them freely for the good of the internet, and the world, and then went on about their lives. If it happened to have unleashed billions of dollars of value for others, then so much the better. If they got some credit along the way, that was great, too. But mostly you just did it to solve a problem for yourself and for other like-minded people. And also, maybe, to help make sure that some jerk didn’t otherwise create some horrible proprietary alternative that would lock everybody into their terrible inferior version forever instead.

You know, that really is hard to believe … but true! It was a different world then.

January 10, 2026

done, not done, undone

A few days ago I submitted my biography of Dorothy L. Sayers to my editors at Oxford University Press. I always find this stage of the book-writing process emotionally complicated. At the moment, while I feel gratified that I have told my story, that I have taken this person in words from the cradle to the grave, I also know that I’m not done. Indeed, just a few hours after I sent the file I got files back: an Author Questionnaire for marketing, the assignment to summarize each chapter of the book for the Oxford Scholarship website.

Later I will get suggestions from my editors, and probably suggestions from peer reviewers, and then later still there will be rounds of copy-editing with many queries, at least some of which I won’t know how to answer. All of this will take months, and I doubt that the book will appear until 2027. The one thing I know for certain is that at the end of the process I will be heartily sick of the book and will never want to think about it again — but I will have to, because there will be interview requests to respond to.

It hasn’t always been like this, at least not for every writer. Consider:

20 September 1935 (approx.): Sayers sends the complete typescript of Gaudy Night to Gollancz.
4 November 1935: Gaudy Night is published.

And remember, this was in the days of mechanical printing: no digital editing or typesetting. All the editing was done by people with pencils, and the typesetting and printing done on a Monotype machine.

The speed and efficiency of the operation meant that Sayers could then immediately turn to whatever she wanted to write next. What a beautiful dream.

November 5, 2025

Tot

I’ve tried all the major note-taking apps in the Apple ecosystem. For some years, starting more than a decade ago, I used Simplenote, then Drafts, then Bear. I used Ulysses for a while, though that’s really more of a text editor than a notes app. Obsidian, yep. Notion, yep. I tried Day One to take notes as well as keep a journal. I even tried Apple’s own Notes app, though I hate everything about it, starting with its ugly yellow color. Etc. (I’m not naming them all, so do not write me to ask “Have you tried … ?” Whatever it is, the answer is Yes: I have tried it.) My favorite was Notational Velocity, in its original form — I dislike all the supposedly more capable forks of it.

After a long while, I finally came to realize that what all note-taking applications have in common, what they primarily feature, is for me a bug. What they all offer is a place to store text — and in some cases images, though that starts to take us into Everything Bucket territory. And yes, I’ve tried all the Everything Bucket apps as well, starting with Evernote and then moving to Yojimbo and then DEVONThink — among others.

Anyway: the promise of the note-taking app is that you can jot down or copy bits of text, put them in folders or add tags or employ some other way to organize them, and then retrieve them later. But I didn’t retrieve them later. I dutifully tagged them and then … almost always forgot about them. If I happened to remember, then I could do a quick search and easily find them, but that was a rare event. Thus, the fact that all my little scraps of text were present and searchable did me no good at all. If I could have asked an app “Look through the hundreds of items in your database and find the five that would be of greatest interest to me right now,” and gotten a useful answer — well, then that app would have been tremendously useful to me. But technology hasn’t reached that point.

So for years I just kept on adding notes to apps and then forgetting about them. Lord knows what brilliant ideas of mine are hidden away in those now-neglected apps, because I have no idea how to search for them. I would just have to take time out to scroll through note after note after note, which of course makes the whole tagging-and-organizing thing pointless.

My search for a proper notes app ended when I realized that what virtually all notes apps do is counterproductive for me. The answer, for me, turned out to be Tot. Tot is beautiful, simple, limited in its formatting possibilities, easy of access on all my devices, and — this is the absolutely essential thing — it allows me to make seven notes. Seven. That’s it.

What that means for me is this: when I want to store a chunk of text, written by me or by others, I put it in Tot. But then, after a few days, I’ve run out of storage spots. So then I take a look at my most recent additions to Tot and ask myself: What do I want to do with this? I can put it in a micro.blog post, put it in a post for this blog, create a draft of an essay containing it, add some task associated with it to my Reminders list, or delete it. Tot’s limitations force me into that decision, and for me that’s ideal. Textual things don’t just disappear into the depths of a database: they have to be dealt with, so I deal with them. Productive resistance for the win, once again!

October 14, 2025

Socrates again?

Mark Liberman:

For decades, people have been worrying about declines in literacy rates, and even steeper declines in how many people read how many books, especially among students. For a striking recent example, see Niall Ferguson, “Without Books We Will Be Barbarians”, The Free Press 10/10/2025 — that article’s sub-head is “It is not the road to serfdom that awaits — but the steep downward slope to the status of a peasant in ancient Egypt”.

Although I mostly agree with the article’s content, I find the reference to ancient Egypt ironic, given how Socrates frames his argument against reading and writing in education.

And then comes the inevitable quotation from the Phaedrus. References to this passage annoy me about as much, and as often, as claims that in the Areopagitica Milton defends freedom of the press. Points to be kept in mind:

Socrates says in dialogue after dialogue that the only way truly to know something is through the process of dialectical disputation, the famous “Socratic method.” The problem with poetry, as he illustrates in the Republic, is that it’s anepistemic: it’s knowledge-free, it’s just empty storytelling. But he introduces his anecdote about Thoth and Thamus by saying “I have heard a tradition of the ancients, whether true or not they only know.” So he explicitly says that he doesn’t know whether the story bears truth; and in any case as a story it cannot bear truth into the soul of the inquirer.

Thus his later comment, which Liberman also quotes:

… writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

So Socrates’ argument is not really a critique of writing or books as such: it is an epistemic critique of anything — written, spoken, painted, whatever — that is not dialectics.

And finally: How do we know that Socrates had this view? Because Plato wrote it down and put it in a book. Maybe Plato would side with Niall Ferguson on this question.

By the way, the best thing ever written on the complexities of this passage in the Phaedrus is the chapter called “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Derrida’s Dissemination. I don’t suppose there’s any essay in criticism that I more fervently wish I had written.

August 25, 2025

notes of a supply officer

“You have to make your voice heard!” – so the exhortation goes, though the remainder of the sentence usually goes unsaid: “… on the issue that at the moment I think to be the most important.” Nobody thinks you have to make your voice heard about everything all the time, which in any case would be impossible. The same unspoken addendum fits onto “Silence is violence.” All these exhortations have the same essential meaning: If you do not care about what I care about in the way that I care about it, you are a bad person. The language of alliance works the same way: If you say what I want said and do what I want done you are my ally — and if not you are my enemy.

The problem with all these exhortations is their failure to understand how society works. A society or a culture is a vast corporation, a vast body of persons and things that functions only if the principle of division of labor is acknowledged and put into thoughtful practice.

Consider an army: Would an army function if everyone strove to fight on the front lines? Of course not. But that is just what the people who demand that you “make your voice heard” and “get involved” and “take sides” want us all to do: rush to the front and try to overwhelm the enemy with our sheer numbers. (One other unconfronted assumption of this way of thinking is that the other side won’t be acting the same way.) A successful army requires warriors but also generals, strategists, doctors and medics, supply systems, and, before all that, training systems. And a healthy society requires even greater diversity and specialization than an army does.

I often think of a woman I met some years ago whose life is devoted to rescuing abandoned or abused dogs. If she never thinks a thought or says a word about the issues that dominate social media, who cares? She is doing the Lord’s work. Not everyone should do what she does; but she should do what she does.

When I observe my country I am regularly horrified and outraged by the great evils done by our government and by our largest and most powerful businesses. I want to protest, I want to “make my voice heard.” But As I look around I find myself thinking not that too few people speak up, but that too many do: too many people with uninformed minds and unconstrained emotions. We have a surfeit of people who want to fight and not enough willing to train and supply. I often think about something Bob Dylan once said:

There’s a lot of things I’d like to do. I’d like to drive a race car on the Indianapolis track. I’d like to kick a field goal in an NFL football game. I’d like to be able to hit a hundred-mile-an-hour baseball. But you have to know your place. There might be some things that are beyond your talents. Everything worth doing takes time. You have to write a hundred bad songs before you write one good one. And you have to sacrifice a lot of things that you might not be prepared for. Like it or not, you are in this alone and have to follow your own star.

Well, what’s my place? As a teacher, I hope to train and liberate minds; as a writer, I supply people with ideas and contexts, with substantive frameworks to shape and interpret thought and aesthetic experience. Over my forty-three years of teaching, I have gotten used to the rhythm of my life: training and encouraging people as best I can, and then sending them out into the world as well-equipped as I can help them to be. And writing, of the kind I do anyway, is not so different: it too is a kind of provisioning.

In such matters it’s good to remember what the Preacher says, “In the morning sow your seed, and at evening withhold not your hand, for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good.”

When I get the itch to shout or protest or condemn, I remind myself of my place: training and supply. And I remind myself of what is not within my power to control. It brings me peace in convulsive times to remember that I am, after all, following my own star. Which star should you follow?

May 27, 2025

here we go again

Nicole Krauss:

In my lifetime, I have watched the demolition of the capacity to read and engage with books. Not just of our children, who have been the unwitting guinea pigs of growing up inside cellphones, but among all of us human beings. We have lost not just our ability to concentrate on deciphering long passages of written language; we have, I believe, begun to lose our attachments to the meaning of words and sentences, which we once trusted to carry the precious freight of communicating who we are — to ourselves and to each other. The blatantly, proudly senseless speech of our current leaders is not the cause, it is merely the most extravagant example of what happens when an entire culture — increasingly, the monoculture of the world — gives up on, and ceases to be capable of, the struggle to funnel meaning into language — to translate themselves, their thoughts, and their ideas into words that others can read and share. Writing and reading are not effortless. But, without that effort, we will slide deeper and deeper into inchoateness, darkness, violence, diminished freedom for all and a diminished state of human being.

I guess if people keep writing this sort of thing I’ll keep responding with the same questions:

When Krauss says “We have lost not just our ability to concentrate on deciphering long passages of written,” who are “we”?
Presumably she does not mean herself. She seems to be referring, rather, to “an entire culture.” But if our entire culture has “give[n] up on, and cease[d] to be capable of, the struggle to funnel meaning into language,” then how do we have novelists like Nicole Krauss?
Krauss says that people have given up on the struggle to “translate themselves, their thoughts, and their ideas into words that others can read and share” — but is that true? When I look at the internet I see an astonishing amount of writing, writing done for others to read and share. Is an underproduction of writing really our problem?
If “we have … begun to lose our attachments to the meaning of words and sentences, which we once trusted to carry the precious freight of communicating who we are,” when did “we” have that attachment? When did “we” acquire it?

Let me ride my old hobby-horse once more: The reading and writing of books — and when Krauss says “books” I think she’s primarily referring to novels — has always been a minority pursuit. Until recently Western cultures did not even aspire to universal literacy, and until quite recently no one imagined that universal literacy would extend to the reading and comprehension of novels and poems by all young people. The idea that Western culture as a whole should involve encounters with serious literature is largely a product of World War II and the period following. That’s when we saw the percentage of the population who read novels rise to the highest level in human history. As I wrote last year:

The not wholly tangential question, of course, is what counts as “long-term.” The kind of variation in skills and interests that I have described can happen over a handful of years but also over decades and centuries. One might ask not just how American university students today compare to those of twenty or thirty years ago but also how they compare to students from a century ago. That would have been a much smaller population, for one thing, because before the G.I. Bill of 1944 sent millions of former soldiers to university, many of whom otherwise would never have considered it, a university education was not the passport to white-collar employment and a stable middle-class life that it has since become. As Kotsko’s essay indicates, we now expect what in historical perspective is a shockingly large percentage of our young adults to be able to read and write about complex texts in philosophy, literature, and related disciplines. But perhaps those are, over a truly long period of time, not reasonable expectations. What looks like a disastrous collapse in literacy may be simply a reversion to a kind of mean.

What percentage of English people could have read Paradise Lost when it appeared? What percentage of Americans could have read Uncle Tom’s Cabin when it appeared? We have to know things like this if we’re going to make comparative assertions. But people make comparative assertions all the time without even thinking about such matters.

I agree that novels, and other long narratives, have become less culturally central, less influential, than they were fifty or sixty years ago. (And I regret this.) But are they less culturally central than they were a hundred years ago? I’m not sure about that. Two hundred years ago? Hard to say.

How many ambitious and masterful novels can we reasonably expect our culture to produce each year? How many thoughtful and sensitive readers can we reasonably expect those novels to have? I don’t find these questions easy to answer.

May 2, 2025

sentences

Arjun Panickserry:

Sentence lengths have declined. The average sentence length was 49 for Chaucer (died 1400), 50 for Spenser (died 1599), 42 for Austen (died 1817), 20 for Dickens (died 1870), 21 for Emerson (died 1882), 14 for D.H. Lawrence (died 1930), and 18 for Steinbeck (died 1968). J.K Rowling averaged 12 words per sentence (wps) writing the Harry Potter books 25 years ago.

J. K. Rowling is the wrong comparison here, since the Harry Potter books were written first for children and then (in later volumes) for young adults. For recent writers, the proper comparisons to Austen, Dickens, and Emerson would be Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, and Joan Didion.

The bigger problem is the failure to recognize the developments in the punctuation of English prose over the centuries. Chaucer and Spenser wrote before the current roster of punctuation marks — in addition to periods and commas, we now have colons, semicolons, parentheses, and dashes, which add often subtle variety of meaning, variety of clausal relations, without necessarily affecting comprehensibility — became clearly established. Ancient texts were typically written in scripta continua: not only did they lack punctuation, there were not even any breaks between words. In such a regime of writing, there’s nothing even to correspond to the word “sentence.”

(Indeed, an important subset of the history of written language is the history of punctuation: see e.g. Malcom Parkes’s wonderful, and wonderfully titled, Pause and Effect. Also brilliantly titled, and a fine read: John Lennard’s history of parenthesis in English verse, But I Digress.)

Also, consider this famous passage from Hemingway:

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights would come on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.

One could re-punctuate it thus:

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early; then the electric lights would come on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows: there was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails, the deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers — it was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.

That would make the sentences longer, but it wouldn’t make them more sophisticated or challenging. It would just make them a bit worse.

April 22, 2025

a taxonomy of writers: 2

A couple of years ago I wrote about kinds of thinkers: Explainers, Illuminators, and Provokers. That classification was based on effect, that is, what those thinkers do for me as a reader. But you can also classify thinkers by their purposes. Thus my second tripartite scheme, thinker-writers who are

Diagnostic
Prescriptive
Therapeutic

Diagnostic writers are usually also Explainers, and what they’re trying to explain is What Is Wrong. What’s our affliction? Where did it come from? (Diagnosis is commonly etiological.) Our moment, it seems to me, is greatly overpopulated by diagnostic writing. As I’ve commented before, most of our diagnostic writers seem unaware that hundreds or thousands of writers before them have made precisely the arguments that they make. (That doesn’t stop readers from treating them as savants, though.)

We don’t have nearly as many Prescriptive writers, but those who exist tend to be really bad at it: obvious and abstract. (“We need to cultivate a society of mutual respect.”) I remember long ago seeing a cartoon: a clown is standing in front of a TV camera, while someone is holding up a cue card that says, “Make a funny joke.” That’s what our current prescriptive writers tend to do.

Therapeutic writers try to help us manage our misery. They may or may not have diagnoses of it, they may or may not have prescriptions for cure, but they know that while we’re in the midst of it we need entertainment, distraction, or consolation — ideally all three. I don’t think we have enough of this kind of thing either; and even when it’s good it’s not especially highly regarded.

We have so much diagnostic writing because it often tells us something we very much want to know: which of our enemies are to blame. That, I think, is why we can read it endlessly, even when it repeats what we’ve already read.

March 3, 2025

method and madness

I think often of a passage from Patricia Hampl’s gorgeous memoir, The Florist’s Daughter. Scattered through the book are images of her father, short films as it were that emerge from memory. Here’s my favorite one:

He’s in the design room, just off the first greenhouse where all the shiny green plants are kept. He’s holding a knife, the pocketknife every florist has in his pocket at all times, the knife that is never loaned to anyone else.

It must be a Sunday afternoon. The greenhouse is closed, the design room silent. He’s getting something ready, no doubt for a funeral or the early-Monday hospital delivery round. I’m sitting on the stool by the design table, as I always do, just watching.

He emerges from the walk-in cooler with an armload of flowers — tangerine roses and purple lisianthis, streaked cymbidium orchids, brassy gerbera daisies and little white stephanotis, lemon leaf, trailing sprengeri fern, branches of this, stems of that. He tosses the whole business on the big table, and stands in front of what looks like a garbage heap. An empty vase is set in front of him. He appears to ignore it. He just stands there, his pocketknife in his hand, but not moving, and not appearing to be thinking. He doesn’t touch the mess of flowers, doesn’t sort them. He just stares for a long vacant minute. He’s forgotten I’m sitting there.

Then, without warning, he turns into a whirlwind. Without pause, grabbing and cutting, placing and jabbing, he puts all the flowers into the vase, following some inner logic so that — as people always said of his work — it looks as if the flowers had met and agreed to position themselves in the only possible way they should be. He worked faster than anyone else in the shop, without apparent thought or planning. I could distinguish his arrangements — but they weren’t anything as artificial as an “arrangement” — from across the room from the dozens lined up on the delivery table for the truck drivers.

(What a writer Hampl is.) Now, I am no artist — it seems that Hampl’s father was an exceptional artist indeed — but there is something here that reminds me of my own working methods. I often hear about writers who write 500 words a day, come rain or sleet or snow or Breaking News. And that’s admirable! But I have never written that way and never will.

Now, to be sure, I always have at least one and usually two writing projects going on, and I’m working on something almost every day — but the working doesn’t always mean writing words. I can’t write words until the words are ready to be written, and sometimes they might not be ready until I’ve read and re-read books, until I’ve made and then deleted and re-made outlines, until I’ve re-ordered my index cards in half-a-dozen ways, or — this is most common — until I’ve just sat in my chair and thought for a long time about what I need to say. Then I write.

So it’s not uncommon for me to go ten days or even two weeks without writing a single word that ends up in the book or essay I’m working on, and then write 6000 words in a morning. I’ve learned not to force it, I’ve learned to recognize the symptoms of readiness — and maybe more important, learned to note and heed the absence of such symptoms. Whenever I have tried to do the 500-words-per-day thing I’ve just ended up with more stuff to delete. My job, as I understand it, is to wait patiently and be ready when the words are ready.

I don’t recommend this method to anyone else. It’s simply the only one I’m capable of following. And I describe it here only because it may be encouraging to some other people who feel guilty about not being able to be perfectly regular in their habits. It’s possible to follow a practice that looks highly inconsistent and irregular and yet, over the long haul, ends up being consistently fruitful.

P.S. I’m slightly hesitant to post this because I know I will get lots of messages from dudes with writing advice. I’ve published fifteen books and hundreds of essays and articles, and yet there will be guys (mainly guys who have just written some blog posts) who’ll write to tell me what I need to do to be productive.

January 20, 2025

things made and in-the-making

A while back I commented on a post by Robin Sloan in which he says this:

Sometimes I think that, even amidst all these ruptures and renovations, the biggest divide in media exists simply between those who finish things, and those who don’t. The divide exists also, therefore, between the platforms and institutions that support the finishing of things, and those that don’t.

Finishing only means: the work remains after you relent, as you must, somehow, eventually. When you step off the treadmill. When you rest.

Finishing only means: the work is whole, comprehensible, enjoyable. Its invitation is persistent; permanent.

I like this, but I want to make a distinction between resting from your labors on a particular project and resting from your labors altogether, through retirement or death.

My attitude toward the works I have completed — at at this point that’s fifteen books and a couple of hundred essays and reviews — is that I have never finished anything to my own satisfaction, I have only been forced to abandon it. That’s why I am psychologically incapable of re-reading anything I’ve written. I may retrieve small chunks of it for one purpose or another, but I’ve never re-read anything of mine longer than a blog post. I learned early in my career that revisiting what I’ve published brings only regrets. So, you know, as the man said: “Fare forward, voyagers.”

Maybe for this reason I am drawn toward the work that is never finished in the sense that it’s never handed over to someone else, never designated as complete. Take Montaigne’s Essays for instance, a page of which, in a modern edition or translation, looks like this:

Montaigne published the first edition of the Essays in 1580 – that’s the main text here. Then in 1588 he published a second edition with new essays and revisions to the earlier ones: those are marked [b]. He continued up to the end of his life to add new essays and revise the old ones: those most recent changes are marked [c]. Montaigne died at age 59, but if he had lived twenty years longer we might have had further editions of the Essays and, consequently, texts with markings of [d], [e], and [f].

I love this. “Essay” means “trial” or “attempt,” of course, and thus Montaigne’s book by its very nature invites second and third thoughts, second and third trials: iteration that ends only when you die, or when you grow tired of it all and retreat into a life of pure contemplation.

I’m a big fan of contemplation, but I tend to contemplate most effectively when I have a pen in my hand. And a notebook provides endless opportunities to revisit, rethink, fail again, fail better. Though I never re-read my published works, I re-read my notebooks regularly: I consider such revisitations essential to thought, to growth, to intellectual and moral and spiritual maturation.

For me — for my personal wants and needs and satisfactions — my notebooks are the most important writing I do. Then come my essays, and then my books. I think I have written some good books, and they’re made a place for themselves in the world — I’ve sold about 300,000 copies all told, most of those The Narnian and How to Think, which is nothing compared to having a YouTube channel, but not altogether contemptible for a writer of books — but if I had not been in a profession that places a premium on the publication of books, I don’t know that I ever would’ve written a single one. (Maybe a collection or two of essays, though, if I had found any publisher charitable enough to put them out.) It has been good for me to be pushed towards book-writing, but it’s not my natural métier — the essay is. And maybe the notebook is, even more.

But what about blog posts, like this one? This blog stands at the juncture of the essay and the notebook. Some of these posts are essays, though usually briefer than the ones that get published by other people; others are basically notebook entries shared with the public. What makes a post an essay is completeness: a story told to the end, a train of thought traced to a destination, a pattern of ideas or responses fully woven. Conversely, you can tell that a post is essentially a notebook entry when I say something like “I’ll revisit this idea later” or “Perhaps a topic for a future post.”

In my recent series of posts on the family I was writing on a topic so complex, so nuanced, so difficult that it would have been an impertinence, I think, to issue a finished word. I would dishonor the multiplicity of people’s experiences, the complexity of my own experience, by offering anything like a complete statement. So I put some thoughts out there, related them to one another as best I could, and now I am pausing to reflect. Probably there will be more later. On a blog there can always be more later, and one of the best uses of hyperlinks is to link to your earlier self, even (or especially) when you think your earlier self was wrong about something or left something out.

It’s great to finish (or in my case abandon) something: to tell this story, to make this argument as well as you possibly can, crafting it with all your skill, and sending it out into the world to make its way as best it can. But there’s a place also — and I feel this increasingly strongly as I get older — for the tentative and incomplete, for “I’ll revisit this later,” for “Oh, I forgot this when I wrote that” — for, maybe above all, being corrected by charitable but honest readers and then being able to try again on the basis of what the lawyers call “information and belief.” I am always, and hope I always will be, gathering more information and developing my beliefs. As the man also said, “Old men ought to be explorers.”

October 30, 2024

essaying architecture

Elisa Gabbert, “The Essay as Realm”:

This lecture I’ve been working on has itself become a place. It started as notes, ideas on paper, but as I built them into sentences and paragraphs it took on the impression of a frame. There’s a point when the frame seems finished; I’m reluctant to change the fundamental shape. But I’m adding walls and doors and windows, light fixtures, furniture. I’m building from the inside. All of this is functional, but also aesthetic. What kind of place do you want to be in? When an essay starts to get a bit ungainly, I often think about the Winchester Mystery House, which, it won’t surprise you to hear, I read about in that book from my grandmother. Sarah Winchester, the heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, believed she was haunted by the ghosts of the victims of Winchester guns. On the advice of a medium, she attempted to appease them by building them a house. The house is full of peculiar, seemingly useless features like one-inch-deep closets, stairs leading up to the ceiling, doors on exterior walls of upper stories that open onto nothing. It was under continuous construction until she died.

As I modify the house of my essay, all the corners and transitions and passageways start to create different wings, which have their own moods. They give the essay what we might call sub-realms. Christopher Alexander, writing in the 1970s, said that many modern buildings give us feelings of acute disorientation. I think of endless hospital hallways, or apartment complexes with multiple clonelike constructions differentiated only by numbers or letters. It induces mazeophobia, the fear of getting lost. A navigable building has “nested realms” you can easily draw from memory, mappable realms, and, as Alexander writes, the realms “must have names”: “This requires, in turn, that they be well enough defined physically, so that they can in fact be named.” The sub-realms in an essay needn’t actually be named — though they can be, as in Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, with its many little titles, for each sub-realm and sub-sub-realm: “The Fear of being Touched.” “The Open and the Closed Crowd.” “Invisible Crowds.” “Slowness, or the Remoteness of the Goal.” But the sub-realms must be distinct enough in shape or in mood or both that they could be named. As readers, we love essays that have sub-realms because they allow us to enter the essay in multiple ways. People like to be able to roam through a building by their own path, to choose their own doors, which is why guided tours can be unsatisfying.

This is beautiful. I love essays about essays, especially when they’re this imaginative. I’ve written a few myself, including this one.

October 4, 2024

writing for money

A while back I wrote a post about my financial history as a writer, situations in which I have made money, situations in which I haven’t made money, etc. Phil Christman does his version of that post here, and adds a taxonomy of writers based largely (though not wholly) on the results they get from shakin’ their money-maker. It’s a great post and an example of why Phil’s work is worthy of your support.

At one point he writes:

When I look at what I do on this newsletter, and then compare it to the amount of worthwhile writing that someone like Alan Jacobs or Adam Roberts gives away for free, I feel like I’m opting to be part of a decivilizing trend by charging people money for what is basically focused blogging.

I have some comments.

First, there is no one like Adam Roberts. Not remotely. So I’m going to factor him out of this discussion, while strongly recommending his blog, for instance this terrific recent post. But you can support that blog financially if you want.

The same is true for me, because I have a Buy Me a Coffee page. You can pay for what I write on this blog if you want, and God will surely bless you if you do, but you don’t have to. IIRC, I have suggested to Adam that he’d be a good candidate for Substack, but I don’t know why he hasn’t done it.

As for me, I haven’t gone to Substack for three reasons:

I am an enthusiast and advocate for the open web — see that tag at the bottom of this post — and want to write here if I can possibly manage it.
By any reasonable standard I am well paid. I am a “Distinguished Professor” with an endowed chair, and while my salary wouldn’t go a long way in Cambridge MA or Brooklyn or Palo Alto, it goes pretty far in Waco, Texas. I can afford to make my online writing free.
What I do, in contrast to Phil’s work on his Substack, is unfocused blogging, and I would feel bad charging directly for it.

So I’m sticking it out here on the open web. But Phil deserves to get paid for his writing, and it’s not “decivilizing” of him to say so. If the publishing industry were properly functioning Phil would be making a decent living from writing essays and reviews, the way Elizabeth Hardwick and Dwight Macdonald did back in the day.

However, I will — when I get out of the Slough of Despond I am in — be changing how I write here. The big thing I have learned from emails I’ve received in response to this post is: Even people who really like my writing miss a lot of what I do here. Especially the series I write — like the one on the City of God, the one on Babylon, the one on Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers — get very few readers who track them from beginning to end.

Now, I like writing the series, because they enable me to take my time in thinking through a topic. But if people aren’t reading them, what’s the point? So when I have time to write here again, I’m going to write fewer but longer posts — I won’t post something until I have achieved a complete arc of thought, or nearly so.

So stay tuned.

September 16, 2024

my forever lament

Also: Every time I get to the copy-editing stage of a book project I want to write a long angry post about how much I hate Microsoft Word. But I have done it, and other people have done it. Here I am in 2016.

And here’s Charlie Stross back in 2013:

The reason I want Word to die is that until it does, it is unavoidable. I do not write novels using Microsoft Word. I use a variety of other tools, from Scrivener (a program designed for managing the structure and editing of large compound documents, which works in a manner analogous to a programmer’s integrated development environment if Word were a basic text editor) to classic text editors such as Vim. But somehow, the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems. They have warped and corrupted their production workflow into using Microsoft Word .doc [.docx] files as their raw substrate, even though this is a file format ill-suited for editorial or typesetting chores. And they expect me to integrate myself into a Word-centric workflow, even though it’s an inappropriate, damaging, and laborious tool for the job. It is, quite simply, unavoidable. And worse, by its very prominence, we become blind to the possibility that our tools for document creation could be improved. It has held us back for nearly 25 years already; I hope we will find something better to take its place soon.

(Fat chance of that.) And Louis Menand, all the way back in 2003:

When, in the old days, you hit the wrong key on your typewriter, you got one wrong character. Strike the wrong keys in Word and you are suddenly writing in Norwegian Bokmal (Bokmal?). And you have no idea how you got there; you can spend the rest of the night trying to get out. In the end, you stop the random clicking and dragging and pulling-down and have recourse to the solution of every computer moron: with a sob of relief, you press Ctrl/Alt/Del. (What do Control and Alt mean, by the way? Does anyone still know?) A message appears: “You will lose any unsaved information in all programs that are running.” O.K.? Cancel? End task? End life? The whole reason for rebooting was that you didn’t have access to your information, so how can you save it? You can always pull the plug out of the wall. That usually ends your “session” (a term borrowed — no accident — from psychoanalysis).

I could use some psychoanalysis right about now.

September 16, 2024

behind the scenes

In the long slow complicated process that leads to the publication of a book — in this case, my biography of Paradise Lost — I am at the copy-editing stage, and whenever I am at that stage with a book, I remember Lauren Lepow.

In the publishing world, there are many different kinds of editor — or rather, many different editing tasks, more than one of which any given editor is likely to perform. For instance, an acquisitions editor will probably not just acquire your book but will also be for it a developmental editor, a structural editor, maybe even a line editor — that is, one who goes through the book line by line. The great Robert Gottlieb famously did all of these things, which is why he was just called (and called himself) an editor. No adjectival limitation.

But one task is almost always given to a person called the copy editor. He or she goes through your text just before it gets to production — that is, just before it is designed, laid out, and typeset — to make sure your spelling is correct, your command of grammar and syntax competent, your quotations and citations (in a scholarly book) appropriate, accurate, and consistent. This is sometimes thought to be a rather mechanical job, so it is often outsourced to freelancers. But some projects place more demands on the copy-editor than others, and for such cases a press dedicated to excellence will have the best in-house copy editor it can find.

Lauren Lepow — who worked for Princeton University Press from 1991 until illness forced her to retire at the end of 2022, just months before her untimely death — was the copy editor than whom no greater can be conceived. Lauren elevated copy-editing to a high art form. She worked on the first two Auden critical editions I did for PUP, and in both cases I was simply staggered by how much she noticed — she saw every little error, every tiny inconsistency, from one end of the book to the other, and cheerfully corrected it or asked me to do so. (Once she noticed that I had quoted the Revised Standard Version of the Bible in one place and, dozens of pages later, the New Revised Standard Version in another.) She was terrifyingly fast and terrifyingly precise and after that first time working with her I wanted her to copy-edit every book I wrote.

But that was not possible. I recently wrote to Fred Appel, my (acquisitions, developmental, structural) editor at PUP for the Paradise Lost book, to say how vividly I remember Lauren — even when the copy-editing process is going just fine, as it currently is! — and he replied:

My colleagues and I miss Lauren Lepow terribly and we still mourn her passing. I was in awe of her ability to cite chapter and verse of the Chicago Manual of Style, and also of her great judgment, thoughtfulness, and thoroughness. I can’t tell you how many PUP authors who had been copyedited by her who then requested her services — in some cases, pleaded for her services — for their second or third books with us.

I was of course one of those pleaders, back when I wrote my biography of the Book of Common Prayer. But she was then largely occupied with the massive and technically demanding task of copy-editing Auden’s Complete Works, a job she worked on almost up to her retirement. (I am so pleased that she saw that great project through to the end: the final two volumes, the Complete Poetry, appeared in 2022.)

When I learned that Lauren had died, I wondered whether I had ever thanked her properly for all that she did for me. Searching my email, I discovered that I had: in late 2017, when I was struggling with the production of The Year of Our Lord 1943, I sent her an effusive message of gratitude, to which she replied, “Thank you for your very kind words — the best possible holiday gift!”

Copy-editing is often invisible labor, thought by many to be grunt-work and not really intellectually demanding. This is unfair to every competent copy editor, but grossly unfair to Lauren, who in her thirty years at Princeton must have made hundreds of books far better than they would have been without her. She did an important job, and she did it better than I have ever done anything.

July 4, 2024

donkey work

John Gregory Dunne, from The Studio:

The Studio was simplicity itself to write. It was mainly a matter of transcribing and rearranging my notes. That there were no surprises—I knew exactly what I was going to do—was for me the problem. Writing is essentially donkey work, manual labor of the mind. What makes it bearable are those moments (which sometimes can last for weeks, months) when the book takes over, takes on a life of its own, goes off in unexpected directions. There were no detours like that in The Studio. My notes were like plans for a bridge. Writing the book was like building that bridge.

This chimes with my experience. The two books I most enjoyed writing are Original Sin and The Year of Our Lord 1943, because they posed serious structural challenges. It was not obvious to me how those stories might best be told.

July 1, 2024

supple and athletic minds

Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (1871):

A new theory of literary composition for imaginative works of the very first class, and especially for highest poems, is the sole course open to these States. Books are to be call’d for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay — the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of supple and athletic minds, well-train’d, intuitive, used to depend on themselves, and not on a few coteries of writers.

A recommendation more important now than ever.

June 21, 2024

the uncanny valley of blogging

I used to call my blog Snakes & Ladders, because that reflected my belief that culture – culture-as-a-whole – is never simply ascending or declining, but is undergoing in its various locations constant ups and downs. But beneath that point is an image of myself as an observer and critic of this cultural moment. Now I call the blog The Homebound Symphony, in honor of the Traveling Symphony in Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven, because I have stopped thinking of myself as an observer and critic and started thinking of myself as a preserver and transmitter. Another way to put this: Whereas I once tried to be a public intellectual, I now just want to be a … I dunno, maybe a convivial conservator.

There’s no money in being a conservator, no prestige either, and almost no attention. I am dramatically less visible now than I was a decade ago, or even five years ago. But for me that’s a feature, not a bug; I have consciously worked to make my audience smaller, chiefly by focusing on what interests me, especially when it interests almost no one else. (I have my number.) That focus warms my heart and gives me peace, so I’m going to keep doing it, even if nobody notices. Looking at the whole public-intellectual game now, I think: I’m way too old for that shit.

This change of focus has also led to a renewed commitment to blogging. If you’re a public intellectual, you may need to write books and essays to make arguments, and to intervene in the Discourse via social media, to change minds. If that’s your thing, then maybe you’d want to use Substack, since it pushes its writers towards (a) hosting comments and (b) engaging with readers via the comment section and Notes. But that is soooooo not my thing; by contrast, a blog is an ideal venue for what I want to do, which is preservation and transmission. It’s a great way to put ideas and images and musical compositions in meaningful relation, including creative tension, with one another. It’s an attention cottage.

What’s funny about all this is that a blog is probably the least cool way to communicate with people. It doesn’t have old-school cred or state-of-the-art shine; it falls into a kind of uncanny valley. To be a blogger is sort of like being that Japanese guy who makes paintings with Excel. But that suits me.

May 23, 2024

editing

A couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted to re-read Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, which I hadn’t read since high school. I picked it up and saw the first sentence: “From the outset, let us bring you news of your protagonist.”

He means “At the outset.” “At the outset” represents a single point in time, while “from the outset” refers to an ongoing sequence of events. If you say “At the outset of our trip the weather was miserable” you say something only about that moment. Maybe later on the weather got better, and indeed that’s what the phrase suggests. But if you say “From the outset of our trip the weather was miserable,” you’re indicating that the weather started bad and stayed that way. Mailer is using an ongoing-sequence phrase to refer to a point-in-time experience.

So Mailer has messed up the first sentence, indeed the very first word, of his book.

One page later:

On a day somewhat early in September, the year of the first March on the Pentagon, 1967, the phone rang one morning and Norman Mailer, operating on his own principle of war games and random play, picked it up. That was not characteristic of Mailer.

So this phone rang on one morning of a day? What happened on the other mornings of that day, I wonder. Also: Hi, I’m Norman Mailer, and my own principle is war games and random play. – What the hell does that mean? I don’t even know if I could turn these sentences into comprehensible and coherent English, but here’s my best effort:

One morning in early September 1967, the year of the first March on the Pentagon, the phone rang and Norman Mailer picked it up. That was uncharacteristic, but on principle Mailer sought out random events and war games.

That’s better, but still doesn’t make much sense. For one thing, if Mailer really did, on “principle,” seek out random events and war games, then wouldn’t he regularly pick up the phone when it rang, in those days when you couldn’t tell who was calling? Wouldn’t picking up the phone in fact be characteristic of him?

After a few more pages of this, I put the book down. But I left my mark in it, a mark I’ve been using for several years to annotate books: EP. EP is short for “editor, please.”

There are four levels of editing:

Structural
Stylistic
Mechanical (grammar/syntax/spelling)
Factual

That first sentence of The Armies of the Night needed mechanical editing; the second stylistic editing. (Whether it received any structural editing I can’t say, though I suspect that at this stage in his career Mailer wouldn’t have allowed that — hell, he might have considered himself above any kind of editing.) In book publishing, the mechanical editing and at least some of the stylistic editing is usually done by a person called the copy editor – perhaps an employee of the publisher but more often, in my experience, a freelance. The person called simply the editor will rarely comment on mechanical matters, and may or may not get into the weeds of style, but will certainly have things to say about structure: how the book is organized, whether some matters deserve more or less treatment than you’ve given them, whether a given passage needs to be excised, etc. The great Robert Gottlieb was a fastidious, not to say compulsive, line editor, but this kind of attentiveness is by no means universal.

As for factual editing, that would have happened to Mailer when he wrote an earlier version of his experiences for Harper’s, but not when he submitted it to his book publisher. Sometimes people reading a book will ask “Didn’t anyone fact-check this thing?” — not realizing that the answer, typically, is No. In special cases (for instance, books whose claims might result in legal action) lawyers can get involved to demand justification of certain claims. When I wrote The Narnian the HarperCollins lawyers went over the manuscript with the finest-toothed of combs, and asked me, for instance, whether Charles Williams might take offense at some of the things I said about him. Since he had died in 1945, on balance I though it not likely.

So most books aren’t fact-checked, though many magazine pieces are. The fact-checking at Harper’s, at least since I’ve been writing for them, is relentless, and the experience of justifying your claims and statements arduous.

But there’s a fuzzy line between the editing of mechanics and fact-checking: the spelling of names, for instance. Right now I’m reading the first volume of Clinton Heylin’s biography of Bob Dylan, and while I sympathize with a writer who has to deal with as many names as Heylin does, he gets too many of them wrong: It’s Samuel R. Delany (not “Delaney”), Jackie DeShannon (not “Deshannon”), Kenneth Rexroth (not ”Roxreth“), etc. Each of these is faithfully recorded in the index (”Roxreth, Kenneth”) but didn’t get checked by the copy editor.

Heylin is not the most careful of stylists, either. He writes sentences like this, when describing what a guy named Steve Wilson thought about a friend named Paul Clayton, who had become obsessed by Dylan:

In Wilson’s view, ‘Bob was everything [Paul] wanted to be’, save heterosexual.

What Heylin means is that Clayton, who was gay, wanted to be like Dylan in every respect except sexual orientation; what he says is that Dylan is homosexual. Me in margin: “EP.”

Writing about Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” Heylin is critical of Dylan’s condemnation of William Zantzinger as a murderer — Heylin thinks the facts don’t bear out that charge.

What he was, to Dylan’s closed mind, was guilty. And guilty he would remain, the songwriter insisting to Bob Hilburn forty years later, ‘Who wouldn’t be offended by some guy beating an old woman to death?’ Answer: any halfway decent investigative journalist.

What Heylin means is that any halfway decent investigative journalist would be sure to have the facts right before condemning anyone; what he says is that such a journalist wouldn’t be offended by the murder of an old woman, as though sociopathy were a prerequisite for journalistic competence. Me in margin: “EP.”

As I have often lamented, almost every book contains errors on the last three of the levels I’ve identified; it is the blight we writers were born for, to paraphrase Hopkins. (Some books, The Great Gatsby or Gilead for instance, are structurally perfect.) But the more times I have to write “EP” in the margin of a book the more likely it becomes that I will abandon the book. Not in high dudgeon, but because it’s just tiring to have my concentration interrupted by error after error after error, most of which could have been avoided if the responsible parties had taken proper care. I want to keep reading Heylin’s biography of Dylan, because the subject is extremely interesting to me and because Heylin is by far the best-informed biographer of Dylan I have come across, and in many respects — especially the difficult matters of chronology, made more difficult by Dylan’s compulsive lying — the most scrupulous. But I don’t know whether I’m gonna make it through.

May 8, 2024

back to the brows

After reading various writings about the brows — including, first of all, this unsent letter by Virginia Woolf and this 1949 essay by Russell Lyne, I find myself impatient and wanting to cut to the chase. I’ll come back to these matters later when I’ve had more time to think them over, but in the meantime, some Theses:

A work of art can largely confirm the expectations of those who encounter it, largely thwart those expectations, or touch any point between those extremes. This is true of all the arts, but for present purposes I will speak only of fiction.
These expectations can be of many kinds, but the most commonly invoked expectation involves difficulty: How hard-to-track, hard-to-comprehend do we expect and want a book to be?
The reader who demands that all of his or her expectations be met is often called a lowbrow reader; the writer whose work habitually meets such readers’ expectations is often called a lowbrow writer.
The reader who craves surprise, excess, extremity, who is impatient with work that confirms typical expectations, is often called a highbrow reader; the writer whose work consistently violates norms and transgresses standards is often called a highbrow writer.
N.B.: Higher-browed readers often want to have their aesthetic expectations challenged, but not their moral ones. Almost no one wants that. (But they get it sometimes, from some writers. George Eliot and Vladimir Nabokov are good examples — I’ll write about them, in this regard, one day.)
“Highbrow,” “middlebrow,” and “lowbrow” are all characteristically pejorative terms, meant to insult, though in some cases (e.g. the piece by Woolf above) a writer will claim and even treasure the insult. See for comparison the history of such words as “Quaker” and “Methodist.” If Virginia Woolf does not think that your novel sufficiently resists your readers’ expectations, she will call you and your readers middlebrows; Graves and Hodges in the same circumstance will call you and your readers lowbrows. (They don’t mention C. P. Snow in their book, but if they had they’d probably have called him a lowbrow writer, but something like The Search is clearly meant for the educated reader.)
The three brow-terms are most commonly used by people who are or believe themselves to be highbrows, though they may dislike that language and (implicitly or explicitly) put ironic scare-quotes around it.
Even the most challenging writer will not always want to read works that constantly challenge or repudiate his or her expectations. Auden used to say that great masterpieces demand so much of their readers that you simply can’t take one on every day, not without either trivializing the experience or exhausting yourself.
It is characteristic of highbrows’ use of these distinctions — see the Woolf letter quoted above and T. S. Eliot’s encomium to the music-hall entertainer Marie Lloyd, which employs the related socio-economic terms “aristocrat,” “middle-class,” and “worker” — that they articulate some alliance of themselves and the lowbrows against the middlebrow.
Lowbrow readers do not know, and if they knew would not care, about this supposed alliance.
Middlebrow readers and writers alike are often aware of the disdain of them felt by highbrows, and may respond either by defensiveness or mockery. (Think of Liberace’s famous response to his critics’ scorn for his music: “I cried all the way to the bank.” Funny to think of that line having a known origin, but it does.)
For a long time now there has been no genuine lowbrow reading. Those who insist on all their expectations being fulfilled can get that hit much more efficiently through movies, TV, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
The brow-discourse is conceptually distinct from, but overlaps considerably with, genre-discourse. For instance, detective novels that adhere strictly to the conventions of the genre — the Ellery Queen stories, for instance — will often be called lowbrow, while those that frequently deviate from the conventions — the later novels of P. D. James, for instance, or Sayers’s Gaudy Night — may get called “highbrow” or, more likely, “literary fiction.”
The tripartite brow-discourse is much less useful than a more nuanced and more detailed account of readerly expectations, one which is sensitive to the ways different genres can generate different sets of expectations, and respond to those expectations in diverse ways.

UPDATE 2024–05–27: It suddenly occurs to me that I have been confusing two quite different things: the three-brow distinction as a way of talking specifically about reading books and as a way of talking about culture as a whole. If you’re talking about reading, then of course there are lowbrow readers, lowbrow books, etc. But if you’re talking broadly about culture, then in an age when the popularity of movies, TV, and social media is at least an order of magnitude — I use that term with care; most people use it to mean “a whole lot” — I repeat, at least an order of magnitude greater than the popularity of reading, then anyone who reads books at all is ipso facto a middlebrow.

UPDATE 2024-06-05: I have received a salutary word of criticism from my friend Francis Spufford:

It is slightly nerve-wracking saying this, Professor Jacobs, but you are uncharacteristically misreading the Woolf. Yes, she’s a vile old snob in literary as much as in social terms. But I don’t think you can adduce what she says here about the ‘common reader’ as proof of that. To my ear, she’s being ironic throughout. She says, with stagey astonishment, that the common reader fails to measure up to proper critical standards, insisting on reading for such low satisfactions as pleasure, amusement, and a sense of meeting real human beings. She observes, as if baffled, that the survival or otherwise of literature over the long term is determined by the reputation of a work among these amateurs, and not among professors or theoreticians at all. How ghastly! Just for once, I’m sure the irony here means that Woolf is putting herself on the side of what’s common. There is a hole on her snobbery, a subject on which she feels like an insurgent rather than a possessor, and it’s to do with her lack of a university education. Unlike Sayers at Somerville, Virginia Stephen did all her reading at home, devising her own critical standards based on her own reactions. She is a common reader, by her own lights. Indeed she publishes two books of critical essays called The Common Reader and The Common Reader 2. She’s claiming the right to read Cervantes for fun, rather than the right to borrow three romances a week from the Boots Circulating Library, but it’s still a claim to centre pleasure. Virginia on the barricades! Virginia ‘Che’ Woolf!

I think Francis is almost wholly right here, though I do believe Woolf’s irony is not united with snobbery. Anyway, criticism taken gratefully on board, to be deployed later.

April 26, 2024

advancing

Elle Griffin seems to have carved out a niche for herself telling hard truths to would-be writers – which is an unpleasant but useful service, I think. But there’s one troublesome point I think she actually understresses — though it will take me a few minutes to get to that point.

Griffin cites this chart from Penguin USA:

Category 1: Lead titles with a sales goal of 75,000 units and up
Advance: $500,000 and up

Category 2: Titles with a sales goal of 25,000–75,000 units
Advance: $150,000-$500,000

Category 3: Titles with a sales goal of 10,000–25,000 units
Advance: $50,000- $150,000

Category 4: Titles with a sales goal of 5,000 to 10,000 units
Advance: $50,000 or less

Four times in my career I have received Category 3 advances; in two of those cases (The Narnian and How To Think) I ended up with Category 1 sales, thus significantly overperforming my advance. In one case (Breaking Bread with the Dead) I have achieved sales to match the “sales goal,” though not (yet?) enough to earn back my advance; in the fourth case (Original Sin) I underperformed the sales goal.

All this assuming that the above information is correct, which, I dunno.

Anyway, this track record should make it possible for me to get another Category 3 advance, should I want one, and if I can come up with the right proposal. I’m not a sure-fire winner, but I’m a decent bet when I do get a big-house contract. (My academic books don’t figure into this discussion, because while they sell well for academic books, even taken together they don’t make enough money annually to pay my property taxes.)

And if the numbers Griffin cites are correct, the sales of my more successful books put them, to my surprise and puzzlement and discomfort, in the top 5% of published books. It’s true that How to Think has sold more copies than books from the same period by Billie Eilish and Justin Timberlake, which should tell you something – mainly that fans of Billie Eilish and Justin Timberlake don’t read books. I should also add that How to Think really took off for a little while because Fareed Zakaria loved it and hyped it on CNN. Funny old world, ain’t it. But still … the “top 5%” thing just feels wrong.

Anyway, let’s imagine that I receive a $100,000 advance for a future book. Not impossible by any means. The thing is, and this is the point I think Griffin should lean on more heavily: “advance” is a misleading term. Advances don’t come all at once, they come in stages, either three or four of them, for instance:

$25,000 at contract signing;
$25,000 at submission of an acceptable (but still to be edited) manuscript;
$25,000 at publication of the hardcover;
$25,000 at publication of the paperback, or, if the publisher chooses not to make a paperback, one year after the publication of the hardcover.

(Sometimes the unit payments vary: for instance, for Breaking Bread with the Dead my agent negotiated bigger payouts for the first and third stages, smaller ones for the other two.) In a typical situation, after you sign the contract you might need two years to write the book. Supposing that your manuscript is pretty good and just needs editing, that process can take several months, and then getting the book ready for publication can take several more months. And the final payout will come a year after that initial publication. So while a $100,000 advance sounds like a lot of money, it often ends up being $25,000 a year; not nearly enough to live on.

The moral: Writing books can be a nice supplement to your day job, but it is virtually impossible for it to replace your day job, even if you’re in the top 5% percent of sales. That I, several of whose books appear to be in that category, couldn’t make a decent living if I sold three times as many of those books as I do, should suggest … not, as Griffin keeps saying, that no one buys books, but that the whole industry is smaller than most people think and a money machine for only a handful of writers. You probably have to get into the top 1% of published-by-publishers writers to make a living solely by writing. Probably only a few hundred, or at most a few thousand, people in the entire world manage that. (Griffin seems to think Substack offers a better chance for success, but I bet the percentages there are roughly the same.)

P.S. I’m probably not going to get another significant advance, because I doubt I will ask for one. I can’t at the moment imagine wanting to write a book that a Big Five publisher would want to pay for. That could change, of course, but I don’t expect it will. I decided to write my Sayers biography for a university press rather than a trade house primarily to write the book I wanted to write — not the book I needed to write to earn back an advance.

P.P.S. I see Freddie has weighed in also. Some good thoughts there, but I’m not sure about the title: “Publishing is Designed to Make Most Authors Feel Like Losers Even While the Industry Makes Money.” Maybe that’s right. It’s certainly that advances used to be smaller for the biggest sellers and larger for the mid-list writers, which made it possible for mid-list writers to make a modest but firmly middle-class living — especially when they could supplement their book income with writing for periodicals that, in inflation-adjusted dollars, paid much more than they do now. (Why could so many magazines back in the day pay so much more? Because they got much higher ad revenue in periods when ad money didn’t have nearly as many places to go.) The publishing industry has clearly borrowed the Silicon Valley venture capitalists’ practice of hoping for one or two hits in a thousand investments, but I don’t understand how that affects their decisions about how to distribute the money they have available for advances. I wish I did.

February 6, 2024

Terry Teachout and the Last of the Conservative Critics | The Nation:

But Teachout, whose natural inclination was toward equanimity and collegiality, perhaps never fully confronted the politics of his conservative peers. Unlike Didion and Wills, Teachout never stopped writing for National Review. His review of a biography of Graham Greene ran in the magazine last year — a magazine that is no longer that of the Goldwater or Reagan right but one that that seems to have settled on a position of being anti-anti-Trump. Not only that, but Teachout eschewed a larger reckoning with the question of how Trump took over the GOP so quickly. It would have been a major contribution for a writer of Teachout’s caliber to make an inquiry into how the right had gone haywire, but he never made the effort.

Why should Teachout have made that effort? He “eschewed” political controversy so he could write about the things he most cared about: the arts. Seems a reasonable decision to me, and one I wish more writers made. There aren’t enough writers who are conservative in Teachout’s mode.

(Teachout was a terrific writer in so many ways, but I must pause to note that the one great outlier in his body of work was his absurdly unfair, tendentious, and just plain hostile biography of Duke Ellington. I’ve never understood his attitude towards the Duke. Ethan Iverson’s detailed critique of the biography, mentioned in the Nation essay, is very good, and is usefully supplemented by an equally detailed response by the Duke’s nephew.)

December 31, 2023

Who’s Counting?

I’m not doing an end-of-year roundup of what I’ve written this year, or what I’ve read, or what I’ve watched, or what I’ve listened to, or where I’ve traveled, or the museums I’ve visited, or the concerts I’ve attended – that last one because I didn’t attend any concerts in 2023, not even Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. But I’m not writing up any of that other stuff because I don’t know: don’t know how many books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen, etc. etc. I couldn’t tell you what the most-read posts on this blog are because I don’t have analytics enabled. I don’t know what my Top Ten Books of the Year are because I just don’t think that way.

I used to; when I was a teenager I kept a list of the Ten Best Books I’ve Ever Read and every time I read a book I felt obliged to sit down and think about whether it broke the top ten – and if so, where did it belong? (Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End reigned unchallenged at the top for quite some time – and then I read Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed.) But then after a few years I realized that some of the books that meant the most to me were, unaccountably, not on the list; while some books that I had put on the list … I squirmed just seeing the titles. And the whole business was so much work. I now think of the day I crumpled up the sheet and threw it in the trash as my first real step towards maturity as a reader.

But it took me a lot longer to rid myself of that year-end feeling of accountability, of the calendar-turning responsibility to make a report. Now that I’ve put all that behind me, it seems odd that I ever felt the pressure to report.

Micro.blog has a great feature called Bookshelves, which I often – though not altogether consistently – use to note what I’m reading, less for myself than for those who ask. You can note what you want to read – which I never do, because I read at whim – what you’re currently reading, and what you’ve finished reading. But there are (blessedly) no dates on that page I just linked to, only book covers. I could figure out how many of those books I read in a given year, but I never have and never will. And in any case those three categories are insufficient: something important is missing.

I am inspired by my buddy Austin Kleon’s list of the books he didn’t read this year, the idea for which, he says, he got from John Warner. Inspired not to do that, exactly, but some year – not this year, mind you – to make a list of Books I Abandoned This Year.

I think one of the most interesting things you can do as a reader is to sit down and think about why you abandon a book, when that happens to you. Many, many pages in my notebooks discuss just this question. Over the years I gradually came to an awareness: the kinds of book I am most likely to abandon are history and theology; the kinds I am least likely to abandon are novels and biographies. It turns out that while I am deeply interested in both history and theology, my mind needs a human story to hook itself to. (Thus the great narrative historians, like Gibbon and C. V. Wedgwood, command my attention in precisely the same way that novels and biographies do.) Novels and biographies raise certain questions for me that I pursue by mining works of history and theology for information and insight, which means that I read quite a bit of history and theology; I just don’t read those books from beginning to end. I don’t read them the way I read narratives.

If you ask yourself why you’re abandoning a book you can learn a lot about your own intellectual habits, preferences, needs. The books you don’t finish can be even more important to you than the ones you do, if you learn to inquire into your own responses. And that’s one reason why I don’t make these year-end lists: they tell a misleading story.

And I’ve only noted one of the ways they mislead: What about short stories and poems and essays and even blog posts? In any given year, those short-form genres may shape your thoughts and feelings, may contribute to your flourishing, more than any work that happens to be book-length. One of Pascal’s pensées or one Psalm may matter more than a dozen books.

A few years ago, I started the practice of taking one hour each week to reflect on what I read and wrote in the previous seven days; and one morning each month to reflect on what I read and wrote in the previous month. I think that has been infinitely better for my intellectual and spiritual orientation than any year-end list could be. Something to consider, maybe?

A blessed new year to you, to me, and to this poor wounded world.

UPDATE 2024–12–31: In the year since I’ve posted this, I’ve found myself thinking of another reason to avoid year-end lists. As I have often said, some of the most important reading experiences of my life have been re-readings — coming back to a book for a second or third or fourth time. Ditto with movies and records. But if you’re making a list and checking it ~~twice~~ obsessively, then you just might not need the impulse to re-read, re-watch, re-listen. To return to something that means a lot to you is to forego the chance to add a new item to your list, and if you’re a list-maker, that’s a tough call to make. But if you’re not counting, then you can obey the call to revisit — which, IMO, is often an important call to heed.

November 10, 2023

time well spent

Today I spent a few hours I didn’t really have to spare writing a long post about Israel, Hamas, and Gaza. Why? Because I had to. It was intellectually and psychologically necessary for me to write out my thoughts, at length, with documentation — affirmations and hesitations, words of grief and words of hope, everything. I drafted and re-drafted, organized and reorganized, put things in and took things out, linked to everything relevant and helpful. I said my phrases aloud, trying to get the rhythm and the tone right. Finally, and after considerably more time than I had expected to spend, I decided that I was done. My mouse pointer hovered over the “Publish” button, I paused, and …

I deleted the post. Why? Because our entire discourse surrounding Israel is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. No word of mine could ever be heard over the cacophony, and in any case I have no expertise to share, and probably no wisdom either.

I do have this bit of wisdom about writing for you, though: Always remember the difference between what you need to share and what you just need to write. And try, if you can manage, to remember that difference before you click the “Publish” button. I am glad that I wrote the post — the topic would have nagged at me until I finally broke down and addressed it — and very glad that I deleted it.

October 23, 2023

one cheer for “negative experience”

Nicola Griffith:

Once you have the reader’s empathy, though, you must keep it. You must persuade the reader to trust you enough to lower their guard, to let go of the constant low-level self-protection most of us experience in the real world. This means you must be very, very careful how you handle negative experience. Every reader is different, and you can’t please everyone, but my personal bias (and I’m far from alone in this), is extreme antipathy to wanton cruelty towards helpless living things. If you make me empathize with a dog or child or young woman, and then torment them using visceral language, I will experience visceral revulsion, throw the book at the wall, and never read anything you write again. I won’t trust you.

I feel exactly the same way about the same things, and yet I am reluctant to endorse the prescription Griffith makes. For one thing, the category of “negative experience” is so vast and amorphous that, especially when you consider the obvious fact that, as Griffith says, “every reader is different,” it’s hard to think of anything that would clearly escape it. Reading about a happy family might be a “negative experience” for someone whose family is unhappy.

No, I’m inclined to say to writers, Don’t be careful about portraying negative experience or any other kind of experience. If Shakespeare and Dostoevsky and Toni Morrison had been careful, we wouldn’t have King Lear, The Brothers Karamazov, and Beloved — three works that have been enormously painful to many readers. But that pain hasn’t always been bad; sometimes, for some readers, I am inclined to say for most readers, it has been necessary.

I just don’t think we need more books written by people who walk on eggshells for fear of offending or hurting. A world in which some readers are wounded by what they read is not an ideal one, but a world in which writers self-censor to avoid disturbing those most prone to disturbance would be worse. There are other and better ways to protect endangered people than muzzling our writers.

UPDATE: One more point. Griffith’s essay, like much writing on arts and ideas these days, operates from the assumption that any given reader’s vulnerabilities and sensitivities are fixed, unchangeable. The idea that a sensitive reader could become less sensitive, or could adapt to his or her sensitivities in some constructive way, is not on the table. I think it ought to be on the table.

August 11, 2023

outreach and generativity

Over at the Daily Nous, Alex Guerrero, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers, argues that the traditional three branches of academic work — teaching, research, and service — needs to be augmented by a fourth: outreach or engagement.

Colleges and universities are supported (1) by the general public, through government funding; (2) by students and their families, through tuition and fees; and (3) by rich people, through donations. What education and what knowledge will be pursued in colleges and universities is not set in stone; it is, rather, a function of what those three groups want and demand. If we want philosophy to be part of the education and part of the knowledge that is pursued in the years to come, we need people in those three groups to want and demand philosophy. And for people in those three groups to want and demand philosophy, we need to reach out to them, engage them, make them aware of what philosophy is and why it is wonderful and valuable. Given what philosophy is, and given our contemporary situation, that task is monumental, and must be undertaken at many different levels, in many ways. No small number of us can do it on our own. Therefore, it should be a part of all of our jobs — quite literally — to do this work.

Such outreach can be accomplished in several ways:

There are obviously central enterprises: exposing children and adolescents to philosophy and serious humanities in K–12 education, for example, something that many are already doing. Writing “public facing” philosophy that appears in newspapers, broad circulation prestige venues, trade books, and so on. Creating online philosophy courses and videos and other broad access materials like podcasts. There are also more local, more intimate efforts: organizing a public philosophy week at a public library, running a philosophy club or ethics bowl team at the local high school, organizing community book groups and “meetups” to discuss philosophy, running “ask a philosopher” booths at the train station, farmers’ market, or mall. These activities bring philosophy to people outside of the academy and bring people into philosophy, giving them entry points and a better sense of what the subject is and why it is of value. They also are a lot of fun. And a ton of work to do well. And, for the most part, they are treated as outside of one’s job, falling outside of the big three: research, teaching, and service.

Obviously this idea would apply to many other disciplines (most of them? all of them?) and it certainly applies to mine. When I write here on my blog, or for non-academic magazines and websites, I am certainly and quite consciously practicing such outreach — but none of it has any value in the eyes of Baylor University. My position at Baylor is wholly due to my academic work. You could of course argue that that’s as it should be, that strictly academic work is what universities ought to value and support; but for what little it’s worth, I think that’s shortsighted.

I could cite several reasons for my view. For instance, some students want to attend the Honors College here at Baylor because they have encountered the public work, the outreaching work, that I and several of my colleagues do. We can in a similar way help with the recruitment of faculty also. But I suspect that there may be other benefits to my kind of public-facing work, benefits that are more strictly academic — even if the work itself isn’t academic, or not in the familiar ways.

Consider the career of the great computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra. Cal Newport recently wrote about Dijkstra’s work habits in a post that’s interesting in several ways — but I just want to call attention to one thing: what Dijkstra did after he received a research fellowship from the Burroughs Corporation. Newport quotes one colleague of Dijkstra’s: “The Burroughs years saw him at his most prolific in output of research articles. He wrote nearly 500 documents in the EWD series.”

But hang on a minute. His entries in “the EWD series” were not in any conventional academic sense “research articles.” They were, basically, letters, originally typewritten and later handwritten with a Mont Blanc pen, which Dijkstra photocopied and mailed to colleagues. (He numbered and labeled them, and each label began with his initials, EWD, thus their familiar name. “I got a new EWD today!”) The initial recipients numbered only in the dozens, but since they had photocopiers too, it’s estimated that each EWD had hundreds or even thousands of readers.

Sometimes EWDs developed into proper research articles, but, as the home page for his archives notes, “the great majority of his manuscripts remain unpublished. They have been inaccessible to many potential readers, and those who have received copies have been unable to cite them in their own work.” The archive was created precisely in order to enable proper academic citations, since “personal communication from the author” is not a recognized form of documentation in the CS world.

So Dijkstra’s EWDs were not proper academic research, were not the sort of thing that one can put on a CV or include in a year-end report; nor were they “outreach” in Alex Guerrero’s sense, since they were directed to Dijkstra’s colleagues and peers rather than to the general public. Yet, as thousands of computer scientists over the decades have testified, the EWDs were enormously generative: they inspired and guided research throughout the field of computer science.

Universities know how to reward the dissemination of ideas through standard peer-reviewed publication; what they do not know is how to reward generativity. And, to be fair, that’s true at least in part because it’s hard to know in advance what ideas will generate other ideas, what projects other projects. It took a corporation to risk supporting Dijkstra, not knowing what the results would be; but perhaps there are expansive and stimulating thinkers in disciplines that no current corporation would care to support. Maybe that “fourth branch” should, in addition to outreach or engagement, also seek to discover and reward generativity.

The best service I could provide through this blog is to stimulate others (and not just, or even primarily, academics) to pursue ideas that I don’t have time to pursue myself, and while I don’t expect Baylor to reduce my teaching load so that I might have more opportunity to hand-write letters to twenty or thirty colleagues — or, um, blog a lot — a guy can dream, can’t he?

August 8, 2023

Justin Smith-Ruiu:

The risk of attempting such a thing is that one will appear unserious and will accordingly begin to lose the professional and social advantages that slowly began accumulating throughout all those years of pretending to be an adult. I don’t mean to overdo the curious parallels between art and faith, but it does seem to me that to be willing to take this risk is somewhat analogous to the choice Saint Paul said one must make to become a “fool for Christ”. The sixteenth-century Muscovite saint known as “Basil Fool for Christ”, for whom the world’s most iconic onion-dome church is named, was also known as “Basil the Blessed”: it comes out to the same thing.

I want, I mean, to spend the rest of my life, consciously and willfully, as a fool, at least in those domains that matter most to me. Of course I can still “clean up real nice” whenever the circumstances require, but I now see those circumstances more or less in the same way I see filing taxes or updating my passwords — just part of the general tedium of maintaining one’s place in a world that pretends to be built around the interests and expectations of sober-minded grown-ups, but that in the end is a never-ending parade of delirious grotesques.

I have in effect undergone a double conversion, then, to both faith and art, which in the end may be only a single but two-sided conversion, to a mode of existence characteristic of children and fools.

July 21, 2023

Unanswered Questions

Over the past few months I’ve occasionally made oblique references to a book I’m working on. That book is tentatively titled Unanswered Questions: The Art of Terrence Malick. It will be an exploration of the whole arc of Malick’s career as a filmmaker, though its structure will not be linear. A linear structure, working chronologically through all the movies, would not be a very Malickian way of doing business, would it? That said, the book will begin with a moment from Malick’s first movie, Badlands (1973) — this moment:

Badlands this very moment

But it will quickly move on from there to later films, then back to earlier ones … you’ll see when the time comes what my initial perception is, and how it will shape everything that comes later. (One hint: it involves Ralph Waldo Emerson.)

I won’t be writing about the project here, because that would reduce the likelihood of my eventually placing it with a publisher — and this is a book that I’m genuinely unsure I will be able to place. Books about movies are less common than they used to be, for reasons not totally clear, though some people think that real movie fans are more likely to invest their money in social Blu-Ray editions of their favorites, complete with commentaries and other special features, than in books. And this one will not have a conventional structure, so … well, we’ll see, in time. And this will take time: I won’t be able to finish it until Malick’s next film appears, and I don’t know when that will be. In the meantime, I want to write as much as I can, while remaining aware of the possibility that this great-work-to-come will change my mind about many things.

In the meantime I will be posting here about movies in general. Watching and thinking about other movies has helped me better to understand Malick, who makes movies unlike anyone else’s — he has his own distinctive cinematic grammar and syntax and vocabulary, and I find that by having a clearer sense of the movie languages he is departing from, I am better able to describe what he’s up to. (I once saw an interview with Christopher Nolan in which he commented that on the basis of a 30-second clip you can with absolute confidence identify a movie as Malick’s — though he went on to say that if you ask him to explain how he recognizes it as Malick he can’t do it. I’m hoping to achieve more explanatory power.)

Anyway, check out the “movies” tag for more. But probably not much more about Malick.

June 10, 2023

Forthcoming: The Shield of Achilles

I will be returning soon to my posts on Augustine’s City of God, but maybe not for another week or so, because I need to devote my full attention to the final edits of my forthcoming critical edition of Auden’s collection The Shield of Achilles — my most recent contribution to Princeton University Press’s Auden Critical Editions series. I will admit to being very excited about this project. Though things may change, below please see my Preface in its current form.

The Shield of Achilles appeared in 1955, which for Auden was right on time: he tended to publish a collection of poems every five years or so, and the previous book, Nones, had appeared in 1951. The poems of Nones indicated the beginnings of a major transition in his work. Through the first half of the 1940s he had written long poems in which he worked through the implications of his newfound Christian faith for politics and history (For the Time Being), for art (The Sea and the Mirror), and for the psyches of people devastated by war and by the various dislocations of modernity (The Age of Anxiety). But in the major poems in Nones Auden began a reckoning with certain themes that, he came to realize, he had neglected: the embodied life that humans share with all other creatures, and the character of genuine human community.

That he spent much of his time in these years living on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, around people whose language he knew imperfectly and whose habits he struggled to share, in a country that reminded him constantly of the complex relationship between Rome’s empire and the great claims of the Christian faith, exercised a powerful influence on the course of his thinking. To Ischia he wrote, in 1948 when he was new there,

How well you correct
Our injured eyes, how gently you train us to see
Things and men in perspective
Underneath your uniform light.

If in Nones Auden inaugurated his new quest to “see / Things and men in perspective,” in The Shield of Achilles he provides a powerful report on the fruits of that quest. It is the boldest and most intellectually assured work of his career, an achievement that has not been sufficiently acknowledged, in large part because its poetic techniques are not easily perceived or assessed. It is the most unified of all Auden’s collections, and indeed — once its intricate principles of organization are grasped — may be seen as the true successor of those long poems of the 1940s.

April 24, 2023

March 9, 2023

A Nighttime Walk with Garnette Cadogan:

GC: Night walks are incredibly important. The city becomes a different creature at night. There are levels of intimacy, of openness, of freedom, of control, of interaction, of encounter, that far surpasses—or, at least, offers a very different quality than—those of the day. People get drawn into associations and affinities that come from seeing each other regularly at night. In part, because places are more sparse; less obstructions to a welcoming eye contact. You feel it on the sidewalks, in the streets, and in the alleyways. The stoops are yours much more so than during the day. The very atmosphere feels more ready to accommodate you. Many places have one, singular, ingrained core story during the daytime, but at night? At night, these places give up many stories. A multiplicity of stories waiting to reveal themselves to you.

I: Do you have a preference between, let’s call them Day New York and Night New York?

GC: Give me Night New York over Day New York a million times over. That may partly be due to my constitution, and less to do with New York. I come alive at night. My friends say I get my second wind at midnight, but the truth is I get my first wind at midnight. My second wind hits at around three o’clock. I love the night. I love the sense of mystery that comes with it.

Garnette even walks my neighborhood in Waco in the middle of the night, when he comes to visit. I sort of feel that I ought to be with him, but I keep on snoozing…. Garnette is our great documentarian of city walking. He’s mainly in Boston now, but to go for a long walk with Garnette in Manhattan is a great thing. On one walk I think we covered the whole of Greenwich Village.

March 6, 2023

unstacked

This afternoon, after I got some dreary-but-necessary work done, I took some time to browse through a goodly number of Substack newsletters that various folks have recommended. Now, this is by no means a random sample of Substacks, so I don’t claim any general validity for the judgments I am about to make. But in reading through a whole bunch of these newsletters, I noticed two major themes:

The great majority of these writers consider themselves to be the World’s Greatest Expert in something. They truly believe they know more than anyone else about how to fix AI, or what various literary classics really mean, or how to renew Christendom, or who the next POTUS will be. Again, no random sample here, but holy moly is there a lot of pontificating, asserting from on high, dictating, declaring. Is there some narcissism-elevating chemical in the Substack water? I ask because while there are obnoxious bloggers — that is to say, other writers who don’t have editors — they do not, in my experience, nearly as often assume the tone of relentlessly pedagogical arrogance that characterizes many of the Substacks I’ve been reading.
Almost all of them write four times more posts than they have ideas to fill.

There are probably some hidden Substack gems out there, but … then again, maybe not. Please don’t recommend any to me.

UPDATE: I’m thinking maybe this is the value proposition of Substack — i.e. You should pay me money because I am bringing something super-special that you can’t get anywhere else. There might be a little more of that tone among Substackers who haven’t already made a career elsewhere. If you’re already known quantity, then perhaps you can afford to be a little more modest.

February 27, 2023

Re: my buddy Austin’s recent post on indexing notebooks, for most of the last decade I have used Leuchtturm notebooks, which helpfully have index pages at the beginning. And I have faithfully used those, but I have not found them especially useful. What works best for me is this: Whenever I start a new notebook I devote the first few pages to summarizing the most important ideas from the previous notebook. I also have a monthly text-file journal on my computer, and each time I start a new month I do the same: write down what seems most important from the previous month.

February 21, 2023

his harshest critic

I recently re-read Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture, in the third edition of 1880. Ruskin had originally published the book in 1849, when he was 30 years old, and though it had proved quite popular, later in life Ruskin was reluctant to authorize a new edition. His reason? He hated the book.

He finally gave in, but insisted to the publisher that he be given the opportunity to annotate it. The resulting ongoing ill-tempered commentary is very entertaining.

Even when he liked what he had written, he could be cynical. For instance, he approved of the glorious and justly famous passage in which he repudiates the tearing down of old buildings:

Of more wanton or ignorant ravage it is vain to speak; my words will not reach those who commit them, and yet, be it heard or not, I must not leave the truth unstated, that it is again no question of expediency or feeling whether we shall preserve the buildings of past times or not. We have no right whatever to touch them. They are not ours. They belong partly to those who built them, and partly to all the generations of mankind who are to follow us. The dead have still their right in them: that which they laboured for, the praise of achievement or the expression of religious feeling, or whatsoever else it might be which in those buildings they intended to be permanent, we have no right to obliterate. What we have ourselves built, we are at liberty to throw down; but what other men gave their strength and wealth and life to accomplish, their right over does not pass away with their death; still less is the right to the use of what they have left vested in us only. It belongs to all their successors. It may hereafter be a subject of sorrow, or a cause of injury, to millions, that we have consulted our present convenience by casting down such buildings as we choose to dispense with. That sorrow, that loss, we have no right to inflict.

On the phrase “my words will not reach those who commit them” the older Ruskin wrote, “No, indeed! — any more wasted words than mine throughout life, or bread cast on more bitter waters, I never heard of. This closing paragraph of the sixth chapter is the best, I think, in the book, — and the vainest.”

But he is rarely as kind to himself. Of a passage on the Gothic architecture of Venice he noted, “I have written many passages that are one-sided or incomplete; and which therefore are misleading if read without their contexts or development. But I know of no other paragraph in any of my books so definitely false as this.” And one of the funniest moments comes in response to a passage about neo-Gothic architecture, which was just getting started in 1849:

The stirring which has taken place in our architectural aims and interests within these few years, is thought by many to be full of promise: I trust it is, but it has a sickly look to me.

Ruskin’s comment in 1880:

I am glad to see I had so much sense, thus early; — if only I had had just a little more, and stopped talking, how much life — of the vividest — I might have saved from expending itself in useless sputter, and kept for careful pencil work! I might have had every bit of St. Mark’s and Ravenna drawn by this time. What good this wretched rant of a book can do still, since people ask for it, let them make of it; but I don’t see what it’s to be.

This wretched rant of a book — why didn’t I practice drawing instead?

February 17, 2023

strings and bows

Making the Sausage – Freddie deBoer:

That said, I feel that the only value proposition I really offer is my writing, the writing itself. The fact of the matter is that anybody could come along and offer the exact same political perspective; it’s a weird lane, but one that could certainly be replicated. What’s not so easily replicated is my writing ability. I have worked very, very hard on my prose for a long time. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at. I became a fairly good guitar player, as a young man, but never good enough; I’m bad at almost all athletics and almost preternaturally shitty at team sports; I’m a disaster at most video games; I cook and cook and cook and never get any better; it takes me approximately seven hours to learn any given boardgame; my drawings and handwriting are genuinely indistinguishable from those of a 7-year-old; in the extremely unlikely event that you can get me to dance, kind witnesses will likely ask me if there’s someone they can call to come help me. I’m terribly clumsy even when I’m not on meds, and meds make it even worse. My bike was my primary means of transportation for four years and I still can’t look to my left or right while biking without turning in that direction. And after I got fired from Brooklyn College in 2020 nine months of applications in all kinds of fields got me nothing but a single offer for a $15/hour job. This is all I’ve got.

A terrific essay from Freddie.

I often wonder how I would do in Freddie’s situation. I am blessed in that I have two strings to my bow rather than one: My day job is teaching, and I’m past the publish-or-perish stage, so I could just teach if I wanted to. (And I love teaching.) Vital though my writing is to me, I haven’t pushed all my chips to the middle of the table the way Freddie has.

One of the topics of Freddie’s essay is the response to a recent essay of his on growing up in the Nineties. It was widely read and shared and admired, but there were of course some naysayers. And — also of course, even more of course — most of the naysayers hadn’t read the essay. Some of them, it seems, didn’t even manage to read the entire title.

There are millions and millions of people like this on social media, and especially on Twitter — I can’t count the number of times I saw people responding to the first half of a tweet, not having been able to make it all the way to the 200-character mark before blessing the world with their Opinion. (I think those people are pretty much the only ones left on Twitter now.) But that’s par for the social-media course; you can’t expect anything better.

What bothers me is the extension of these habits of mindlessness into longer-form writing and even into professional journalism. Genuine critique is a great gift to a writer — maybe the single most helpful response to How to Think that I received came from Jonathan Rauch, in a conversation at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who was gracious and friendly but also quite critical. Made me want to run back home and write the Revised and Improved Edition. But criticism of that kind is relatively rare, because it depends on a careful reading of the work in question. You’re much more likely to get a review based on a more superficial reading, which is perhaps inevitable given the tyranny of deadlines.

But occasionally I have seen a review of a book of mine written by someone who quite evidently hasn’t read the book at all. I mean, maybe they’ve skimmed a few pages, but that’s it. And such reviews are not always negative! — some reviewers have been quite complimentary towards the book that they inaccurately assumed I probably wrote. That sort of thing annoys me in a weird way, but not as much, of course, as the review that attacks an argument I didn’t make — an argument I explicitly repudiated on page 49 — or that wags an admonitory finger at me for leaving something out of my book that in fact is right there on page 73 you dumbass.

This sort of thing annoys me enough that years ago I stopped reading reviews — though that doesn’t prevent people from writing to me to ask What do you think about the bad things so-and-so said about you? So I end up anyway hearing more than I want to about such responses. And it annoys me even though it can’t really hurt me — so imagine how strongly I would feel about such things if, like Freddie, I were depending on my writing to feed myself and my family.

I go on about this because it’s a recent theme of mine: the perils of a media culture that’s indifferent to truth. Thus my argument about truth as a commons; thus Operation Diogenes. I’m going to be mulling over these matters often in the weeks or months to come.

February 6, 2023

From my dear friend John Wilson:

Ever since I “discovered” book reviews, when I was in high school, I have been in love with this simple but infinitely flexible genre. Much of my adult life has been devoted to scouring publishers’ catalogues and other sources of information on forthcoming books, reviewing books myself and assigning them for review, editing reviews and seeing them into print, and of course reading thousands of reviews over the decades — a practice I will continue as long as I have my faculties. […]

At the same time, I feel some reservations. When Nadya Williams invited me to lead off this series, she spoke of “the value/virtue of book reviews in this day and age,” and she added: “My thought is that we can encourage much more productive discussions about cultural crises using books than via provocative op-eds.” But I don’t want to encourage more discussion about “cultural crises”; in fact, I think much of our public conversation, across the ideological spectrum, is characterized by an obsessive focus on “cultural crises.” I’m not saying that these “crises” are simply manufactured (though certainly some of them are). Rather, I believe that endless talk about these crises characterizes public discourse to an unhealthy and extremely tedious degree. Of course, that is apparent not only in op-eds and essays and books claiming to unpack these “crises” but also in reviews. And yet the blessed range of reviewing ensures that such voices do not dominate.

Amen to all this. But goodness, is it difficult to get many editors interested in books that aren’t somehow implicated in (or can somehow be shoehorned into) the American crisis discourse.

January 16, 2023

Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose:

Study, in effect, is per se interminable. Those who are acquainted with long hours spent roaming among books, when every fragment, every codex, every initial encountered seems to open a new path, immediately left aside at the next encounter, or who have experienced the labyrinthine allusiveness of that “law of good neighbors” whereby Warburg arranged his library, know that not only can study have no rightful end, but does not even desire one.

Here the etymology of the word studium becomes clear. It goes back to a st- or sp- root indicating a crash, the shock of impact. Studying and stupefying are in this sense akin: those who study are in the situation of people who have received a shock and are stupefied by what has struck them, unable to grasp it and at the same time powerless to leave hold. The scholar, that is, is always “stupid.” But if on the one hand he is astonished and absorbed, if study is thus essentially a suffering and an undergoing, the messianic legacy it contains drives him, on the other hand, incessantly toward closure. This festina lente, this shuttling between bewilderment and lucidity, discovery and loss, between agent and patient, is the rhythm of study.

January 13, 2023

John Warner:

Many are wailing that this technology spells “the end of high school English,” meaning those classes where you read some books and then write some pro forma essays that show you sort of read the books, or at least the Spark Notes, or at least took the time to go to Chegg or Course Hero and grab someone else’s essay, where you changed a few words to dodge the plagiarism detector, or that you hired someone to write the essay for you.

I sincerely hope that this is the end of the high school English courses that the lamentations are describing because these courses deserve to die, because we can do better than these courses if the actual objective of the courses is to help students learn to write.

January 9, 2023

projects and methods

Perhaps because I write different sorts of books, one of the most important writerly skills I have developed is the ability to adapt my working methods to the project at hand. Not every project calls for the same approach, the same model of organization, or the same tools.

For instance, when I was writing The Year of Our Lord 1943, with its five protagonists, the two most essential tools for me were (a) a color-coded timeline in Excel, so that I could see what each character was doing at any given time, and (b) a set of index cards. I had five protagonists so I got cards in five colors, and gradually accumulated information. Then, laying the cards out on a table or pinning them onto a cork board, I was able to understand the relations among those different pieces of information.

However, when I was writing How to Think I didn’t need that kind of system — I needed something very different. In that book, I had a sequential argument to make, one in which each chapter or section built upon the previous one. So I used OmniOutliner to lay out the whole argument in outline format, and then fill in the details.

When I was writing Breaking Bread with the Dead neither of those two methods would work for me. I was trying to create a kind of mosaic of ways in which we can encounter the past — a task that did not require and indeed did not admit a rigid argumentative or historical sequence. I had rather a set of portraits of people engaged in the complex activity that I call breaking bread with the dead, and each of those portraits needed to be coherent, vivid and, to some extent, self-contained. So in writing that book I just kept a set of text files open on my computer. I could go back and forth among them, but I didn’t need to do that very often, because each chapter had its own integrity. And on any given day, getting whatever chapter I was working on properly shaped was my primary task.

But now I’m starting a new book. I’m not yet ready to talk about what it is, though I’ll get to that point before too much longer. For now, I’ll just say this: After fumbling around for a while to figure out how I could organize my thoughts in for this project, I realized that once again, the good old multicolored index cards were my best friends. And it’s actually been very pleasurable to go back and, for the first time in several years, build up a collection of cards and figure out how to relate them to one another. I use my own version of the Zettelkasten system, and maybe one day I’ll write a post about what that looks like.

But for now I just want to say that I think writers make a mistake when they try to use the same method, the same organizational system, for every book. The character of the project — its structure, its form, the demands it makes upon you as a writer — should determine the way you write the book. If you’re writing the same kind of book every time — like Robert Caro, for instance — then by all means use the same system. But if not, exercise your imagination!

Screenshot 2023 01 07 at 3 22 57 PM

December 19, 2022

two kinds of work

Almost forty years ago now, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote to a New York Times reporter to respond to critiques of his work and himself, most revolving around accusations of antisemitism. The whole article is interesting, but I am especially fascinated by the last sentence quotes from his letters:

My task is to write true historical research on the Russian Revolution, beyond that it’s not so important to me whether my books are accepted precisely in this decade and precisely in this country.

Solzhenitsyn not only said this but, I think, truly believed it. He possessed a serene confidence that sooner or later his work would be recognized as both great and necessary, and if that recognition happened to come later rather than sooner — perhaps even long after this death — he didn’t mind.

This strikes me as something that every writer ought to know about himself or herself: Am I writing for Now or for Keeps? Is it my role to shape my own moment, or to write primarily for those who might benefit from what I have to say even if they live after I’m gone? Of course, for many writers there’s not really an option: If you’re writing to pay your bills, then you have to write for Now whether you like it or not.

I guess I’d like to have it both ways: To write for my contemporaries, to try to do my very small part to light candles and repair my corner of the world, but also to hope that I’ll have readers later on. But maybe you can’t have it both ways. (I wonder if there are examples of writers who thought that their work was immediate and ephemeral … but turned out to be wrong.)

December 8, 2022

the blog as a seasoned technology

For several years now I’ve been writing about the distinctive virtues of blogging, which has become, I keep saying, a seasoned technology that promotes lateral thinking. When people start talking about the imminent collapse of Twitter — something that now looks like it won’t happen, and I’m inclined to bet that the next year will see a gradual return from Mastodon to Twitter — there was talk of the possibility of a blog renaissance. But I don’t think that will happen either.

You have to have a peculiar kind of mind to enjoy blogging, and even those who have such a mind might prefer platforms that enable certain modes of interaction that blogging doesn’t make easy. (For instance, speedy exchanges.) I dislike those modes of interaction, and I love to blog, so I will continue to do this.

But as Robin Sloan says in a comment I quoted the other day, “Publishing on the internet is a solved problem; finding each other on the internet, in a way that’s healthy and sustainable … that’s the piece that has never quite fallen into place.” A while back I asked a question about this: “How can I encourage readers of my blog to seek some of the benefits that I get from it?”

I do increasingly feel like that Japanese guy who paints in Excel.

December 5, 2022

and then?

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Illustration by my buddy Austin Kleon

As I mentioned in earlier posts, Noah Smith wants to outsource much of the process of writing, and Derek Thompson wants to outsource his research. In other news, Marina Koren is bothered by the slowness of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and her partner wants to watch the movie at 2X speed. Perhaps he also participates in the TikTok practice of listening to songs at double-speed.

My question about all this is: And then? You rush through the writing, the researching, the watching, the listening, you’re done with it, you get it behind you — and what is in front of you? Well, death, for one thing. For the main thing.

But in the more immediate future: you’re zipping through all these experiences in order to do what, exactly? Listen to another song at double-speed? Produce a bullet-point outline of another post that AI can finish for you?

The whole attitude seems to be: Let me get through this thing I don’t especially enjoy so I can do another thing just like it, which I won’t enjoy either. This is precisely what Paul Virilio means when he talks about living at a “frenetic standstill” and what Hartmut Rosa means when he talks about “social acceleration.”

I say: If you’re trying to get through your work as quickly as you can, then maybe you should see if you can find a different line of work. And if you’re trying to get through your leisure-time reading and watching and listening as quickly as you can, then you definitely do not understand the meaning of leisure and should do a thorough rethink. And in both cases maybe it would be useful to read Mark Helprin on “The Acceleration of Tranquility.”

December 2, 2022

I like my job

Derek Thompson:

“These language models enable the automation of certain tasks that we’ve historically considered part of the creative process,” Olson told me. I couldn’t help but agree. Writing is less than half of my job; most of my work is reading and deciding what’s important enough for me to put in a paragraph. If I could train an AI to read as I do, and to determine significance as I do, I’d be essentially building a second mind for myself.

So Derek Thompson wants to oursource his research, and, as we saw yesterday, Noah Smith wants to outsource his writing. Is this boredom or frustration with the basic elements of their work universal among journalists these days?

I hope I’m not the only one, but just for the record: I like researching, and I like writing. I like the hard work of making my prose more clear and vivid. I like overcoming my ignorance. I like synthesizing the disparate things I read and then trying to present that synthesis to my readers. I like it all.

UPDATE: As I was walking this morning I suddenly understood the most fundamental thing that’s wrong with the way Smith and Thompson think about these matters: Smith assumes that at the outset of a writing project he already knows what he wants to say and just has to get it said; Thompson assumes at the outset of a writing project that he understands what he needs to know and just has to find a way to know it. But for me writing isn’t anything like that. For me writing is discovery, discovering what I need to say — which often is something I had no intention of saying when I set out. And some of the most important research I have ever done has been serendipitous: I have been looking for one thing and instead (or in addition) found something quite different, something I didn’t know I needed but, it turns out, is essential to me.

December 1, 2022

words: bashed

Noah Smith and “roon”:

It’s important to realize exactly why the innovations of the past didn’t result in the kind of mass obsolescence that people feared at the time.

The reason was that instead of replacing people entirely, those technologies simply replaced some of the tasks they did. If, like Noah’s ancestors, you were a metalworker in the 1700s, a large part of your job consisted of using hand tools to manually bash metal into specific shapes. Two centuries later, after the advent of machine tools, metalworkers spent much of their time directing machines to do the bashing. It’s a different kind of work, but you can bash a lot more metal with a machine.

Note the planted axioms here — the governing assumptions that the authors may not even know they’re making:

That metalwork is neither an art nor a craft in which humans might take satisfaction but is simply a matter of “bashing” metal;
That it’s better to direct machines to bash than to do one’s own bashing, because working with metal is drudgery but overseeing machines isn’t;
That more metal-bashing is better than less metal-bashing.

I have, shall we say, some doubts about all those axioms. But let’s move on.

Consider the following, produced in the year 2322:

If, like Noah’s ancestors, you were a writer in the 2000s, a large part of your job consisted of using keyboards to manually bash characters into specific shapes. Two centuries later, after the advent of AI, writers spent much of their time directing machines to do the bashing. It’s a different kind of work, but you can bash a lot more characters with a machine.

What a utopian dream! No one has to write any more — no one has to think of what to say, to struggle for the best words in the best order, to strive to persuade or entertain. You just say, “Hey Siri, write me an essay on why there’s no reason to fear that AI will replace humans.”

Wait — I was being sardonic there but it turns out that that’s what Smith and roon really think:

Take op-ed writers, for instance – an example that’s obviously important to Noah. Much of the task of nonfiction writing involves coming up with new ways to phrase sentences, rather than figuring out what the content of a sentence should be. AI-based word processors will automate this boring part of writing – you’ll just type what you want to say, and the AI will phrase it in a way that makes it sound comprehensible, fresh, and non-repetitive. Of course, the AI may make mistakes, or use phrasing that doesn’t quite fit a human writer’s preferred style, but this just means the human writer will go back and edit what the AI writes.

In fact, Noah imagines that at some point, his workflow will look like this: First, he’ll think about what he wants to say, and type out a list of bullet points. His AI word processor will then turn each of these bullet points into a sentence or paragraph, written in a facsimile of Noah’s traditional writing style.

Behold: an image of the future of writing produced by a writer who quite obviously doesn’t like to write.

What seems to be missing here is the question of why the people who now pay Noah Smith to write wouldn’t just cut out the middleman, i.e., Noah Smith. Maybe that’s the future of Substack: AI drawing on a large corpus of hand-bashed text so that instead of paying Freddie deBoer to write I can just say, “Hey Substack, write me an essay on professional wrestling in the style of Freddie deBoer.” After all, people who write for Substack have limited time, limited energy, limited imagination, but AI won’t have any of those limits. It can bash infinitely more words.

I think Smith and roon don’t consider that possibility because they have another planted axiom, one that can be extracted from this line in their essay: our AI future “doesn’t mean humans will have to give up the practice of individual creativity; we’ll just do it for fun instead of for money.” But we will only do that if we have time and energy to do it, which we will have only have if we’re not busting our asses to make a living. Thus the final planted axiom: AI and human beings will flourish together in a post-scarcity world, like that of Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels.

November 23, 2022

the media ecology of college writing

Richard Gibson:

Practically speaking, GPT-3 and the like demand that educators reconsider the writing process in fundamental ways. Symons entertains the possibility of returning to handwriting; other commentators have suggested collecting drafts at multiple stages and perhaps tweaking the assignment between drafts. Educators are now administering the Turing test in reverse: What are questions that only humans can answer well? What kinds of thinking does writing make possible for us?

In 1987, Flusser worried that AI would outstrip human writers, assuming responsibility even for the recording of history. The current crop of AIs pose no such threat, since they are not autonomous understandings but dynamic reflections of human-built textual culture. Their danger lies instead in short-circuiting the development of human writers, at least if educators fail to adapt to our new media ecology in which the medium can compose humdrum messages on demand.

My dear friend Rick is precisely correct. Some years ago, when I noted the dramatic increase in professors’ use of services like Turnitin, it seemed obvious to me that students and teachers in the humanities — or rather, students and teachers as puppets of a parasitical online ecosystem of “educational services” — were entering a kind of arms race, and one that could never have a winner. I also saw that the entire arms race was made possible by the overwhelming dominance of one particular assignment: the research paper. And then I asked a question: What if I stopped assigning research papers?

After all, my goal is not to make my students better writers of research papers. My goal is to help them grow more skilled and more confident as readers, writers, and reasoners. (My proximate goal, anyway; I have deeper aspirations for the enriching of their humanity, but those are better described as hopes than as goals.) If the dominance of this one genre is actually impeding my pedagogical purposes, then wouldn’t it be wise for me to look for other kinds of assignment that could enhance my students’ reading, writing, and reasoning without getting us all sucked into that arms race?

I’ve been giving unusual writing assignments my whole career, but not in all my classes. When I taught literary theory I always had my students write dialogues, in each one ventriloquizing two major theorists; in some classes I’ve had students build websites; in others I’ve had them prepare critical editions of texts, with introductions and annotations. But until fairly recently I felt an obligation to teach the good old research paper in at least some classes. Around 2016, I think, I ceased to feel that obligation. I haven’t assigned a research paper since, and I don’t expect ever to assign another one.

Pretty soon, I think, my entire profession will need to go through a process of reconsideration similar to the one I’ve already been through.

November 22, 2022

a change of attention

After the killing of George Floyd, my first response — after sympathy for poor Floyd, I hope — was to think that the protesters were overreacting to an event that, while tragic, was not nearly as common as they were saying. (No, there’s no “Black genocide” in America.) But then I started noticing the response of many white conservatives: an opposite exaggeration, in their case of the dangers of protests; a noticeable lack of sympathy for the victims of police violence, and a tendency to blame those victims; and in general a disinclination to see racial prejudice as a meaningful element of American culture.

I wrote a few posts about all this, including one about the difference between acute and chronic suffering.

Similarly, when the whole controversy over Critical Race Theory blew up, my first reaction was dismay at the ways that “activists” were using shoddy scholarship, or wholly bogus pseudo-scholarship, to implement a radical political agenda for America’s schools. But then, again, the white conservative pushback was both uncharitable and extreme, and seemed determined to treat any reckoning with America’s history of slavery and racism as “CRT” and therefore to be banished. Increasingly, white conservatives took up the view that explicit declarations of hatred for people of a certain color is the only kind of racism there is.

This struck me as just as historically as blinkered and uninformed as, I dunno, maybe the views of the Black Hebrew Israelites. So, me being me, I started thinking about the past, listening to the voices of our ancestors — in this case mainly recent ones, which in my view is okay, because they always have a strong gravitational pull, and anyway people think that anything that they haven’t thought about in the past 72 hours is ancient history and therefore irrelevant. Ralph Ellison is as much a mystery to them as Homer.

But I’ve been reading Ralph Ellison — a lot of Ralph Ellison, letters and essays; and that led me to Murray’s dear friend Albert Murray, whose curious and wonderful body of work I’m seriously into. (After all, Murray is my fellow native of Alabama.) There’s a tradition of thought and expression here that seems deeply relevant to the current scene, capable of illuminating much that otherwise remains dark for us.

I posted a couple of passages relevant to all this stuff in a recent newsletter, and fifty or sixty people immediately unsubscribed. Okay, well, I guess that’s not really what my newsletter is about, so fair enough. But heads up: Here at the old blog you’ll be hearing more about some of the leading Black intellectuals of the past half-century or more. Because they’re fascinating in themselves — and they tend to illuminate our own weird moment.

So my thanks to white conservatives for leading me into this fertile field of reading and thinking. I owe you, guys.

November 19, 2022

Ralph Ellison in his Harlem apartment, 1986

November 15, 2022

showing

You’ll probably not be shocked to learn that I agree with Adam about this. My agreement is on three grounds:

First: If you want simply to tell — if you have a direct blunt message that you want to get across — there are genres for that: genres of expository and persuasive prose that have developed over the centuries for the specific purpose of communicating clear and straightforward messages. Whenever I read a didactic novel that tells me everything I am supposed to think about the story, I always think: Why did you write a novel, then? You’ve got all these “characters” and “events” getting in the way of your message. You’re not making your message better, you’re just making your story worse. Stories are best reserved for experiences and thoughts that simply won’t fit into the structure of an argument — this is, I think, what T. S. Eliot meant when he said that Henry James had “a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.” Eliot thought James distinctively attentive to those aspects of our experience that can’t be condensed into a solid idea.

Second: If you know precisely what message you want your story to convey, then your story almost certainly will never convey anything more than you explicitly intended. Which is to say, you will never learn anything more from writing it than you knew when you started. For writers who think they already know everything there is to know, this may not be a problem.

Third: If you know precisely what message you want your story to convey but are a little too artful, make it too lively, then your readers may draw conclusions you don’t want them to draw — see the experience of Bertolt Brecht as related in the final paragraph of this post. That gives you an incentive to make your story as rigid and simplistic as possible. Which means, again, you’re not making your message better, you’re just making your story worse.

Finally, I think it worth noting that this critique of show-don’t-tell appeared on Twitter, which is populated largely by people who are vigorously hunting heresies and people who are desperately trying to avoid being labeled as heretics. I can’t bring myself to read the replies to Tade Thompson’s original tweet, but from Adam’s description it seems that many of them are more hostile to “showing” than Thompson is (after all, he allows writers sometimes to show). Being on Twitter might be the worst thing writers of fiction can do, because it habituates them to the fear of Error and promotes practices of declarative belligerence. It makes them terrified of any experience that can’t be condensed into a solid idea; and that diminishes them as writers and as persons.

In a 1939 poem called “Our Bias,” Auden contrasts human beings to a lion or a rose — those creatures that simply are what they are and can’t be other:

For they, it seems, care only for success:
While we choose words according to their sound
And judge a problem by its awkwardness;

And Time with us was always popular.
When have we not preferred some going round
To going straight to where we are?

November 14, 2022

two essays

My Harper’s essay on (not?) becoming an anarchist is now online – though paywalled. But why not subscribe?

My (much briefer) Hedgehog Review essay “Staying for the Truth” has escaped from its paywall and become free for all to read.

I’m going to be commenting on both of these when I get some time. They’re actually quite closely related, in my mind anyway.

November 12, 2022

Thomas Harrison:

Musil was not the only writer of his time to think of the essay as the method and intellectual mode most appropriate to ethical reflection. A predilection for this flexible genre had taken strong root by the end of the nineteenth century, with brilliant standards established by Søren Kierkegaard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and half a dozen prominent others. Their essays bent “positivistic” accounts of objective phenomena to the purposes of feeling and subjective need, to matters of spiritual and moral import. A loose manner of prose composition without fixed rules of method — incorporating aphorism, lyrical condensation, confession, invective, and satire — the essay straddled a spectrum along which Western metaphysics seemed to have arrayed two components of human experience: head and heart, science and art, truth and fiction, body and soul, law and desire.

This is why the essay is such a culturally vital and underrated genre, a topic on which I hope soon to write an … essay, I guess.

[Some of you may have seen that I originally posted this as a screenshot from Instapaper, which was easy and looked pretty good … but because it was an image rather than text (a) the text so imaged didn’t resize properly in different-sized browser windows and (b) the content isn’t searchable. So I’m back to the usual way of posting. But I dunno, I might try again at some point; it not being searchable isn’t such a big deal if I have tags. The value for me is that it’s a way of sharing with less friction.]

November 8, 2022

a parable

Almost all of Tolstoy’s early stories were published by a journal called The Contemporary. Some of them focused on the miseries — and also the human dignity — of the serfs, whose emancipation Tolstoy fervently advocated. (Indeed, he freed his own serfs — he was a nobleman and a landowner — some time before universal emancipation was proclaimed by Tsar Alexander.) But The Contemporary fell under the influence of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who, while praising Tolstoy’s ability, chastised him for being insufficiently devoted to the most radical political positions. Tolstoy, unwilling to alter his writing to conform to Chernyshevsky’s demands for political purity, took his work elsewhere and became, along with his contemporary Dostoevsky, one of the two greatest writers of the nineteenth century. Chernyshevsky, meanwhile, took over The Contemporary and banished all writers who did not conform to his political preferences; after his death, though he was always a clunking and tub-thumping writer, he became a great influence — perhaps the greatest single influence — on V. I. Lenin.