DESK/SPACE: Goodbye (See You Soon)
I.
I PLANNED TO BEGIN this long-delayed message by saying it was hard to remember what I meant this newsletter to be, but that wouldn’t have been true, because I remember exactly what I meant it to be: a semi-weekly summary of my progress and accomplishments that would: (a) force me to (a) make progress, (b) accomplish things, and (c) earn me some small bit of your respect and admiration.
I was inspired by the newsletters of writers and artists I admired, in which they provided regular updates about the lucrative TV deals they’d signed, the ecstatic reviews they’d received, the awards they’d won, the exciting new projects they seemed each week to be launching—all this artful gloating, in epistolary disguise, sent directly to the inboxes of subscribers they’d acquired after years and years of ceaseless self-promotion (and, I guess, to their credit, making progress and accomplishing things).
I wanted to do what they did. I wanted to tell you about exciting new projects, and awards, and TV deals. I wanted to sneak subtle brags about the expansiveness of my artistic life into weekly updates about cute things my kids had done, or the cool new porridge recipe I’d tried out, or the Very Important Book I’d just read. Then the world went down for its long nap, and, like so much else, this newsletter became a slightly different thing; a little more esoteric, a little more comprehensive (though no less a plea for your respect and admiration). That was fun. Many of you seemed to enjoy it. Yet, it’s been eight months since I’ve written. Not because there’s nothing to write about (there’s always something to write about), and not because I’m busy with other things. The thing that has stalled me is why—why write anything, why read anything? What’s the point?
II.
THE ONLINE WORLD is a great big cocktail party where everyone is having loud conversations with no one in particular, hoping to be overheard, hoping to talk loud enough, or in such a distinctive way, that they turn a few heads throughout the room and invoke a sweet and fleeting moment – just a fraction of a second – where the distinctive loud-talker is the center of attention.
They call this the attention economy, and it used to be controlled by big cultural institutions like newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses—pillars of the monolith once known as mass media. It was their party, and they worked the door, turning people away, inviting others in. Depending on your perspective (which probably depended on whether or not you were allowed into the party) you’d call them curators or gatekeepers.
But now the cocktail party has spilled out onto the street, and these institutions no longer have the same kind of power they once did. Which is neither a good or bad thing. It’s easier than ever to make a thing and put it out into the world and immediately find out whether the world likes it, loves it, hates it, or, worst of all, doesn’t care at all about it. You can, theoretically, succeed on the merits of what you make.
This freedom, like all freedoms, comes with a cost. One that I happen to find excruciating: to join the deafening chorus of loud-talking partygoers, incessantly chatting and scanning the crowd to see if anyone is glancing in your direction. To be a writer, today, one must not only write, but also develop a sort of split-personality: a disciplined introvert, eager to hide away, committed only to the work, and a hip-thrusting carnival-barker, gloating over a loudspeaker, committed only to the work’s external validation.
III.
MAYBE it has always been this way.
Imagine what use Truman Capote would have made of Twitter; he was the grandmaster of being deliberately overheard at cocktail parties. Norman Mailer wrote a book called Advertisements for Myself. Walt Whitman, the great genius of American poetry, was also a genius of self-aggrandizement: he wrote anonymous fawning reviews of his own books, posed for more than 100 portraits, and duped Ralph Waldo Emerson into publicly endorsing his work by publishing excerpts of their private correspondence. He once said:
The public is a thick-skinned beast and you have to keep whacking away at its hide to let it know you’re there.
IV.
THE POINT OF ALL THIS is to tell you that sometime in the next few weeks you’ll be receiving a slightly different version of this newsletter. It will be sent through Substack, where I will be migrating my mailing list and archive. It will probably look different. It might sound different. It may even be about different things. I am hoping it will be more fulfilling to write and more satisfying for you to read.
My problem is, I write slowly. The thing I want to say never makes its way onto the screen the first or second or third try, and when it finally arrives, it turns out not to be the thing I wanted to say at all. This sentence, by the time you’re reading it, will have taken me twenty minutes to compose. And just look how short it is!
And yet I have come to prefer the newsletter as both a container for my thoughts and a delivery device to share them. It requires more consideration than a tweet, but less engineering than pitching and publishing an essay/article with a magazine. These bespoke digital transmissions, bite-sized, slightly less prone (but not completely immune) to the miscalculations and misrepresentations of the current moment, seem like they might represent the future of writing itself.
This isn’t an audacious proposition. Like Twitter and Facebook before it, Substack is freaking people out with how effective it is. There’s a whole new cocktail party happening, open bar, no dress code, and no one is watching the door.
V.
AGAIN, maybe it has always been this way.
In the Golden Age of Hollywood (roughly 1900-1950), movies were produced in much the same way as a stage play: a set was built and the actors acted out scenes at length—there just happened to be a camera shooting it all. But as film technology evolved – particularly as cameras became smaller and more portable – it was suddenly possible to shoot on location, away from the studio lot. The camera could move in ways it couldn’t before; changes in film stock meant that you could shoot more scenes, in more places, from more angles. Fewer people were required to operate the equipment. The process became more intimate. To direct a film, you no longer had to get permission from Louis B. Mayer—you could gather a crew and do it yourself. The infrastructure of a studio was no longer essential.
As always, this was neither good nor bad. European cinema flourished: Bresson, Bergman, Fellini, Godard, Truffaut, Tarkovsky, etc. American studios made bigger, better spectacles: The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, From Here to Eternity, North by Northwest, etc. It wasn’t until the late 1960s, with the success of Bonnie & Clyde and Easy Rider, that the studios recognized they could make money with inscrutable, anti-establishment films. That’s how we got The Godfather, Chinatown, The Last Picture Show, Taxi Driver, and, ironically, the two blockbusters that steered power back into the hands of the major studios, Jaws and Star Wars.
I suppose the connection I’m trying to make is: Substack newsletters = smaller cameras. Technology evolves, and with it the means by which an artist can make things and show them to you. Soon (maybe even months from now) Substack will be one of those cultural institutions it was originally meant to be a remedy for.
One’s original intentions, as I am constantly learning, have an expiration date.
VI.
I LOVE KARL OVE KNAUSSGARD. He seems to me the modern incarnation of all those midcentury writers I loved when I was young: Updike and Roth and Bellow and Cheever. I kept my quarantine beard far longer than I should have just to look like him (and shaved it off when he did). A decade ago, he gave a lecture on the subject of why he writes, which was published as a pocketbook called Inadvertent. In it, he says:
Literature was a hiding place for me, and at the same time a place where I became visible. And this, an outside place where what is inside becomes visible, is still what literature is to me. Literature and art, along with religion, are the only places I know of that are capable of establishing such an outside. Politics is inside, journalism is inside, scientific research and academic theses are all inside, philosophy and social science, in fact every discipline I can think of is inside, and with the technological avalanche of recent years, tying together different parts of reality in a vast here and now, the reasons to write have not necessarily become more numerous, but they have become more acute.
He follows this up by saying:
I would by lying, however, if I said this is why I write. Obviously I write for personal reasons, having to do with my private life, and these reasons are banal. I also write for existential reasons, concerning what it means to be, and these reasons are or can easily be perceived as being pretentious.
And then subverts the whole idea of trying to explain himself by saying:
The problem with an essay like this is that if I take on the first role and discuss my private reasons for writing, which have to do with wanting to be seen, wanting to be someone, with ambition and desire for success, I will come off as self-centered, shallow, and more than a little stupid, while if I focus on the other two roles, the existential side of writing and the function of writing in society, I will seem conceited, self-important, and perhaps also megalomaniac.
Only a Norwegian, conditioned by bleak winters and an even bleaker diet of root vegetables and oily fish, could write something so wonderfully self-negating. I have Norwegian blood, too, and this also happens to be a very accurate description of me, his adoring fan: self-centered, shallow, more than a little stupid, but also conceited and self-important and perhaps a megalomaniac.
Of course, in very Nordic fashion, Knaussgard kind of doesn’t care what you think:
But as it happens, writing is precisely about disregarding how something seems in the eyes of others, it is precisely about freeing oneself from all kinds of judgments and from posturing and positioning. Writing is about making something accessible, allowing something to reveal itself.
VII.
SO, WHAT IS THIS NEW NEWSLETTER going to be about? What will it reveal?
I’m not sure exactly. It’s an ongoing experiment. One that I’m recruiting you into, probably against your will. I like to think deeply about things. About books and ideas and articles I’ve read. About songs I’ve heard, movies I’ve seen, places I’ve been. I like finding connections between seemingly disparate things, and I like thinking about how contradictory ideas are often, impossibly, both true. I like floating a thousand feet above the world, and also crouching on the ground with my face inches from the dirt. I like an edifying historical perspective on brand new things.
It will be something like that, I suppose. Or maybe not. When I read, sometimes, the aperture in my brain widens by tiny degrees and a little more light gets into my thoughts; the edges of the world are clearer, the shapes within it more distinct. This is a bad metaphor – I’m talking literally about enlightenment – but if there’s a unifying principle behind what I’d like to do, it would be to make you feel some variation of that feeling: like the lansdcape inside your head is a little sharper.
And, listen: that’s a lofty, ethereal goal. But let’s see how it goes. Let’s have a nice, quiet conversation at the cocktail party, just the two of us—who cares if anyone else is listening.
(But, please, I beg you, ask all your friends and relatives to listen.)
Talk to you soon.