O.P.P. (Yeah, You Know Me)
Struggling to scroll through essays about offensive art, bad desk placement, Ben Affleck's parallel parking, and how the 1990s was the last best decade.
I like to read, but I have a hard time reading things on a screen.
The depthless quality of a high-resolution display has something to do with this, I think. It’s less a surface than a window: the words you’re meant to be reading always seems to be floating in the foreground, jittery, elusive, barely there. When I’m reading digital text, I’m not really reading it, I’m scanning it, my eyes are skipping over the surface of the sentences like a stone across a lake. This is a problem, because cumulatively — including emails, texts, chats, and the random browsing I do to distract myself from the responsibilities of the real world — I probably read more on my phone and laptop than I do in print.
One’s life opens up in small fractions, what time can be stolen is often measured in minutes, and it’s so much easier to pick up your phone than it is to open a book or magazine. But when these quick bits of casual reading take place on a screen, it doesn’t feel satisfying or relaxing, it feels oppressive, wasteful, like you’ve stupidly avoided your chores by doing an another chore. I feel dumber, somehow, when I read things on a screen. The same way I feel smart when I read things in a book.
But is this simply the psychosomatic nostalgia of a forty year-old? Intimidated by changing norms, by advancing technology, by the impermanence of an online world I no longer understand? Are phones the new books? In the late 1400s, when Gutenberg started pumping out bibles, there was probably some forty year-old guy whining about how much better it was to read on a papyrus scroll.
Ironic, then, that you are right now reading these words on a screen. This text exists nowhere else but the indistinct foreground, elusive and barely there. And so I’m trying hard to be a better digital reader. To keep my focus, to stay stoic in the glow of blue light, to do what I’m asking you to do every month when I send this newsletter: pay intimate attention to my phone.
To that end, here is a bit of Other People’s Prose—essays, articles, and interviews with which I’ve attempted to train myself to be a reader in the modern age.
Cinematic Fiction
The American novelist Brandon Taylor writes about the prevalence of what he terms cinematic fiction—“writing that recreates the objective literalness of a camera’s recording by using a written text.”
I recoiled every time someone in a workshop described a piece of fiction as “cinematic,” or said “I could picture it, so visual” as though that were something to which a person should aspire in their prose. I wanted it to stop. Immediately. Not my recoiling, but people describing things that way. Particularly because I found the passages described as “cinematic” to be among the weaker aspects of the pieces under discussion. It often involved inane physical action or rote phrases like “padding across the room” or “took a sip” or “sat in the chair” or long paragraphs in which nothing happens except someone going upstairs or pulling a door open. Or it involved end-on-end incident—action without insight or commentary. Just relentless event after event after event, often making use of some formal gimmick like fragments or present-tense to conceal a troubling lack of exposition. In the face of the rich discursive possibilities of the prose novel, I considered visual, pictorial writing and relentless action as being the outputs of an inadequate and miserly eye. Obsessed with blocking and stage direction and writing like a picture.
You can read the full piece below:
In Defence of Offense
The literary types that I follow on Twitter have been fainting and fawning and generally going apeshit over Garth Greenwell’s recent essay on the relationship between art and morality:
Within the small world of people who care about literature and art, the culture is as moralistic as it has ever been in my lifetime: witness our polemics about who has the right to what subject matter, our conviction that art has a duty to right representational wrongs, that poems or novels or films can be guilty of a violence that seems ever less metaphorical against an audience construed as ever more vulnerable. We have a sense that the most important questions we can ask about a work of art are whether and to what extent it furthers extra-artistic aims, to what extent it serves a world outside itself.
On the dangers of social media being the central platform for debate:
What I want, really, is an escape from argument altogether. We need a way to think without the kind of untrammeled assertion that characterizes public discourse, especially on social media, which has, to the detriment of our institutions and ourselves, become public discourse. Much of the value of art for me lies in its ability to provide a space free of such argument. Turning from Twitter to Henry James, say—an early and enduring influence on Roth—I’m amazed by how much more spacious thinking feels in his sentences, not for their length exactly but for their avoidance of plain assertion, for their endless qualifications and corrections, their syntax of scruple. We have created a public discourse in which one’s ability to be heard depends on speaking with a certainty, a lack of nuance, a stridency utterly inadequate to reality.
You can read the full piece here.
Stink Train
If you (a) live in Ottawa, (b) have ever taken the LRT, (c) or just enjoy stories in which everything that can possibly go wrong goes spectacularly wrong, you’ll enjoy Brett Popplewell’s piece about the construction of Ottawa’s (still unfinished) Light Rail System.
Nearly 200 years after being founded as the northern terminus of an ambitious yet accursed transit project, the city is more than eleven years into a $6.7 billion civic calamity once promised as a “world-class transit system” but which—with the help of two train derailments, one monster sinkhole, countless engineering failures, and general bureaucratic ineptitude—has become a local disgrace and a national joke. It has triggered the fall of several politicians, tainted the legacy of Ottawa’s longest-serving mayor, and prompted a public inquiry that culminated in a damning doorstopper of a report. And the project’s not even halfway done.
Yes, there was a long period where the hub station beneath the Rideau Centre smelled (literally) like crap.
The city’s explanations for the smell kept changing. After the first few weeks, they thought it was being caused by a broken sump pump in an escalator pit that had triggered a moisture buildup. A few months later, they said a sewer line must have been punctured during construction. At one point, a councillor took to Twitter to reassure the public that it was still safe to breathe on one of the stations in the tunnel. “RTG has completed tests of the air quality,” he wrote. “There is no risk to our customers or staff.” No one seemed impressed. “It’s reasonable to expect #LRT stations not to permanently smell like a toilet,” someone tweeted.
You can read the full piece here.
Bad Feng Shui
Paul Skallas (aka. Lindyman) on how technology has changed the way we arrange our living and working spaces, often for the worse:
A new norm I've noticed (because of monitors) nearly everyone's desk is facing a wall. Doesn't seem like it was the norm before all work moved onto the computer. In more flexible situations people almost always default to facing the room or the entrance…Traditionally, a desk facing a wall would be a form of punishment. Facing a wall lowers our panoramic vision and removes peripheral vision. Stress levels increase when we narrow our field of vision for too long. Ever try working on your phone? Notice how tense you get. Maybe that’s why everyone is so angry online.
You can read the full piece here.
Ben Affleck
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter about his new movie Air, Ben Affleck — always candid, always funny — offers some fascinating insights into the economics of filmmaking and the profit-sharing model for his new production company.
I was talking to [cinematographer] Bob Richardson. He’s a genius. And I said, “Bob, what if I gave you a million bucks to save me five [million]? Could you do it?” And he goes, “Fuck, I’ll save you 10.” There are people who just have their hand on the wheel in ways people don’t understand. Your editor, producer, DP, first AD, production designer. The idea is you get really good people, and you say to them, “Look, if we’re able to accomplish what we set out to accomplish, you’re going to participate in a very significant way in the delta between what the movie costs to make and what we sell it for.” The people who were bonused on this movie, like Bob and all the crew, their bonus was a piece of the pool of the sale [to Amazon]. Almost all of them are, on a weekly basis now, the highest-paid crewpeople in history, by a multiple.
When asked about recent tabloid photos that showed him apparently struggling to get out of a tight parking spot, he said:
Dude, you know how many people can get in that spot? That was world-class Boston finesse. Granted, I did decide maybe I’m not going to bump these people anymore because it’s the Pacific Palisades and they may view bumping the bumper differently than we did back home, but it was so fucking snug. I’ve never gotten a spot that good. It was not parking assist either. It wasn’t blocking anything, but I’m sure it was like, “Ben Affleck blocks traffic.”
You can read the full interview here.
The 90s
Author Freddie deBoer makes a strong case for the 1990s as the superior decade of the last century.
There was an immediacy to experience back then. I know what you’re thinking: that’s just because you were young. But honestly, there was something different, an intentionality and a lack of a certain sort of self-consciousness. Of course people were still anxious and shy and overthought everything. But there wasn’t yet this second mind thing going on, this sense of another consciousness that’s welded to your own consciousness and has its own say all the time. Your own mind might have been mixed up and gripped by worry but it was still one linear mind. Nowadays people have both their own anxious and worried mind and another mind that worries about how they’re anxious and worried and whether they should be. This is the part of the mind that’s concerned, bizarrely, with how the mind might appear to others, despite the fact that the mind cannot be observed by anyone but the self. And that’s a creation of the internet. I think you can best understand what I mean if you consider the difference between 90s politically correct culture and today’s social justice culture; in many ways, the concerns and vocabulary are the same, but the latter entails a type of mental self-surveillance that’s new. It’s how you think eating what you think.
On the dynamic between monoculture and counterculture:
There’s nothing to stand against anymore, just endless little covens of people telling each other how valid they are. Old countercultures were defiant of monolithic elements of dominant culture and defiance is cool. New subcultures are almost always inventing a fake mainstream to complain about, usually with therapeutic language, and nothing’s less cool than applying therapeutic language to places other than therapy. I do dearly miss when people were flippant and disrespectful towards the systems that held them down, instead of weepy, telling everyone that it isn’t fair.
You can read the full piece below.
Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this particular issue of TOLSTOYAN, you can share it with a friend by clicking the button below.
I’d love to hear about what you’re trying to read on your phone and/or tablet. You can get in touch by responding directly to this email, or by clicking the button below to leave a comment.
I have to admit I did not read all the articles. It is a struggle for me to read lengthy pieces on screen. I think you will understand Jared! Nevertheless, as always, I enjoyed this edition of The Tolstoyan. Thank you.