All posts by barrett.hathcock@gmail.com

Dear Aliens

literary lint, plague journal, ,

You’re going to want to eat some ice cream during your visit. Trust me. There are all kinds of variations so go to a big shop. Baskin Robbins is fine. No need to be too precious about it your first time. Everything gets complicated fast enough. Basically it’s milk that’s been churned and chilled, almost but not entirely frozen. The process has something to do with rock salt? Doesn’t matter. You’ll like it. It’s made with milk, which comes from cows’ titties, believe it or not. You might encounter sci-fi, milk-like substances such as oat milk or almond milk. Avoid this stuff. This is computer food designed by dorks. Go for the real mammalian hit if you’re going to try it.

Important note: ice cream melts, so be about it. The hotter it is, etc. It’s compulsively transitory, qua substance. This somehow makes it better, like life itself.

But then you will probably see something called soft serve ice cream. This is also ice cream but just, well, softer. It gets ejected from a spigot rather than scooped from a bucket. So not as thick. The way you lick it is subtly but definitively different. You can get this at places like McDonald’s and sometimes it has toppings. Easily confusable with yogurt, also known as frozen yogurt, which is not the same as real yogurt.

See? Complicated. Real yogurt is made with bacteria cultures and milk. It occupies the same liminal, mouthfeel space in that you don’t really have to chew it. But frozen yogurt is basically soft serve ice cream without it actually being yogurt. I think it was basically a psyop by Big Yogurt back in the day to get people acclimated to the idea of yogurt, meaning regular, tangy, wholesome-but-not-really-dessert yogurt. Frozen yogurt also comes with lots of toppings. Generally speaking, the more toppings that are available, the less fancy the version of ice cream. Those people are just lipsticking the pig.

Then there is custard, which where I’m from we treat with suspicion. It’s made with eggs. These get pooped out by chickens daily, and we turn them into all kinds of stuff. That’s a whole other letter but they’re also weirdly liminal and creepy but still, somehow, delicious. Life here is weird. Custard is made with these but is still gross. It leaves a sticky film in your throat. But then sometimes ice cream doesn’t have hardly any milk or eggs at all and it’s called sherbert, and it’s mostly fruit and always pastel-colored. It’s like ice cream’s preppy, New England cousin. It’s also delicious, very rarely served with toppings, and springier. But then get ready because there’s also sorbet, which is like sherbert’s preppy cousin who’s been abroad for an entire year and is impossibly smug about it. I don’t think it contains any milk at all; it’s transcended it. Also lots of fruit, no toppings, and usually expensive. If they’ve got sorbet on the menu, ask a local to cover the bill.

But then also you might get a milkshake, which is like even softer serve ice cream. As in you don’t even lick it. You drink it through a straw. If you get it in a restaurant, you might get an additional spoon to scoop out the innards, complicating matters further. Quick logistical note: if it comes in a cone, you’re supposed to lick it. If it comes in a cup, you’re supposed to scoop it with a spoon, unless it comes in a long cup and then you’re supposed to drink it from a straw. A milkshake is just ice cream with even more milk so that it gets swampy and, yes, drinkable. Though sometimes it’s just barely drinkable and this is somehow a sign of its excellence. There are flavors here, and sometimes toppings, but they’re not really toppings. They’re in the ice cream swamp itself. Example: Chik-Fil-A peach milk shakes, but act fast because that one is seasonal and remember they’re closed on Sunday. Real proud of that little middle finger to all the pagans.

Alert: an ice cream sandwich is not actually a sandwich. It’s ice cream that uses a cookie as a containment mechanism. But you eat it like a sandwich. Honestly, if you’re looking for something to skip, this is the one.

But if you go to a Dairy Queen, you can get a trad milk shake, but also you can get a Blizzard, which is their proprietary milkshake-like concoction that’s even thicker and comes with chopped-up candy bars inside. Or cookies. You get the idea. These are a little sus and are mostly the terrain of adolescents and adults who have given up on life. They should put a diabetes warning on those bad boys. And then if you go into a gas station you can also get almost edible drinks, like a Slushy which is a fruit-flavored, chunky ice drink that will stain your tongue. More fruit flavors but not like sorbet sophisticated real fruit but like lab-grown, ultramarine alien blue flavors. No offense. Also sometimes at the gas station are the Icee machines which are basically Slushies but cola-flavored and, to my discriminating palate, much better. These are ingested through a straw but a special straw that sports a tiny spoonlet on the end so that you can scoop out those truant half dozen ice nugget crunchers at the bottom.

A Frappacino is just a coffee-flavored milkshake that costs more and comes with a line. A smoothie is just a milkshake that’s pretending to be healthy. Gelato is just Italian sorbet — sorbet’s sketchier, sluttier cousin. You will have a good time with gelato.

While you’re here, lots of people are going to tell you that they’re the real ones in charge. Be that as it may seem, it’s important to remember what one of our best rappers said about all this: the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

The website Quarter Mile held a contest for letters to send to the aliens, should they ever arrive. This was my entry. No, I did not win.

The curse of spring

plague journal, ,

I try not to be superstitious, honest, but as one gets older they creep in. It’s like when people once referred to diseases by whispering, or the way some people pray before take-off. Mostly foolish. Mostly harmless, a small dam against the unknowable and uncontrollable. But there is one medieval, superstitious belief I hold onto and it’s that springtime is weird. Shit goes down in the spring. Excuse my language, but this is serious. Mistakes are made. The fukú reveals itself. The karmic bill comes due. Beware the Ides of March. All that. 

Perhaps it’s just when the statistics catch up to me, or when they are revealed to me, the stochastic churning of the gyre briefly visible underneath the sidewalk, but there does seem to be something about the spring, by which I mean the period between Spring Break and Memorial Day. This is when the accidents happen, the expulsions, the seemingly random deaths, the It-like instances of small town terror, the enactment of scenes from Donald Barthelme’s story “The School.” Spring is when Artax is swallowed by the Swamps of Sadness. Every March I tell my kids: “Don’t catch a case of the Dumb Ass in spring, because spring keeps the score.” They roll their eyes. It has recently been pointed out to me that I repeat myself. Very well, I repeat myself. 

I know what you’re going to say. And sure. But old man yells at cloud because old man got electrocuted on the golf course that one time. The reason Ahab storms across the shipdeck is because he knows who ate his leg. It was spring. The clock-digesting crocodile in Peter Pan? That’s spring. The old men are angry and terrified and feel the phantom injuries from springs past, and no one will listen to their raving. 

There’s something about the pollen in the air, the histamines, the promise of summer or graduation. When I was in high school, I had friends commit impromptu acts of vandalism just before graduation. Of course they got caught, and thus began the intense negotiations between parents and school administrators regarding continued enrollment and hence pending graduation. I had friends who stole props from the local goofy golf course. I think it was to impress a girl? Back in the 90s, grownups wore ties and such acts were not tolerated. Maybe this kind of chaos happens all year long but the consequences arrive in the spring. But even that implies a causality that is not consistently apparent. That’s what makes it all the more unsettling, the lack of clear structure to the misfortune. This ambiguity is what makes me superstitious and makes me harangue my children, this paranoia over somehow angering the gods. 

The thunder shakes the windows more. I hate astrology. I hate hippies. But, like, I feel it in the air, man. There’s something about spring. The truth is out there. Thankfully, it’s almost over. But still, be careful.

Artistic publishing

literary lint, ,

Yesterday Anne Trubek, founder and publisher of Belt Publishing, posted the provocatively titled “Are Agents Now The Real Publishers? And Are Publishers Making Themselves Redundant?” Her premise is that publishing is itself a creative act, and she thinks through how a publisher might differentiate itself from others, and where creativity lies within the Rube Goldberg machine that is contemporary book publishing. 

In doing so she addresses the Big 5 publishers: 

“The expectations are that the editors at the press need a book to be ‘done’ when they get a query. They won’t do much editing, and there’s so much competition, so when an agent sends a manuscript to the editor, the book needs to [be] just about printer-ready — some copyediting and proofing, sure, but not much beyond that.

“But what does it mean for a book to be ‘done’ when it has not gone through the publishing process? It means that what publishers do is not germane to the book itself. That publishers don’t shape manuscripts. That their work is less creative and more operational.

“Because this is now the way things work with many Big Five presses, agents are now the people who do the heaviest lifting when it comes to shaping a book.”

She keeps thinking through this situation and arrives at the reasonable questions of “what is a publisher actually for?” and also whether or not the agent, having done all of this editorial heavy lifting, would be better positioned to move the book through production, that is, become the publisher him or herself. 

These are pertinent questions, and I’ve already written about some of these ideas before here: 

Strangers in the night: A note on agents
New York Review of Book Design

To summarize myself and to put it slightly more bluntly than Trubek does: literary agents are pimps.

Trubek is absolutely correct that a publisher forfeits its aesthetic judgment, its designation as a publisher vs being merely a printer (a book-binder, a marketer; they do not even distribute them) when it outsources its queries to an agent. A grim, necrophiliac incident from a few years ago is instructive here. In 2015 HarperCollins published Harper Lee’s Go Tell a Watchman and described it as the sequel to To Kill Mockingbird, though it quickly became apparent that the text was actually that classic novel’s nascent form, as yet untouched by editorial guidance. In the related brouhaha, the history of how Watchman became Mockingbird was documented. That is, it was the result of an intense collaborative relationship between publisher and writer. Back then the publishers employed figures who served as a kind of book doula, creating the best environment for the best book to be born. I believe these people were called editors. If it weren’t for that heavy editorial hand, it’s arguable that we would never have had To Kill a Mockingbird, much to the devastation of 8th-grade English teachers everywhere. (P.S. if there is a Hell, all the people who participated in the exhumation of this text and the exploitation of Lee, then senile and near death, will go there.) But now these figures are called agents and they do the same intensive editorial work, with the major exception that they do not put any money up to publish the book. They get paid a cut when the book gets bought, pimp-like, but they don’t write the check. 

As I get older and slightly more cynical (only slightly!), I think that the one who puts up the money, the person who pays the bills, is the one who is the true publisher/producer/etc. They are the ones with skin in the game. If the book doesn’t get sold, the agent has indeed lost time — uncompensated labor. But they’re still not the one who’s going to pay for all that printing and shipping and have to take it in the teeth when they pulp those remainders. 

To be clear, I don’t think the agent-as-pimp comparison is completely negative. Sometimes one needs a pimp! Or at least an explanatory sidekick. There are complex financial transactions that due to their sensitive nature absolutely benefit from a neutral-ish middle-person. Buying a house, engaging in a complicated insurance transaction, the thorny contractual stuff. The kind of stuff your parents warned you about. It’s not fundamentally evil. But with any kind of consultant figure, one who doesn’t make anything, or put up their own capital, or whose contribution to human flourishing isn’t immediately apparent, there is the constant question of “what is that guy doing here?” — aside from raising the price of the underlying transaction, aside from functioning as a kind of professional turnstile.  

Are there publishers actively publishing as a creative act, who are distinct aesthetic entities? Absolutely. But they tend to be of the more independent and small press variety where the skin that is in the game is a lot more precious. The books hew closer to aesthetic objects rather than commodities. Everyone keeps wailing online about AI in book publishing, but have you been to Barnes & Noble lately? Have you seen the covers on the table? I’ve seen more aesthetic risk and individuation in the cereal aisle. Oh, look, there goes another middle-aged woman finding herself after heartbreak. Oh, look, another searing historical family saga that is somehow related to WWII. And the turnstiles only let through one sub-30 female novelist a year. I wish her all the best, and I hope they let her publish a second book after her kid is born.

All I can think is that, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of manuscripts, by the ever-growing mountain of editorial decisions to make, publishers employed the prophylactic of agents, a filtration device, one that has worked too well, one that has alienated them from the crucial job of editing books themselves. This changed the nature of publishing from editorially focused to production focused, as Trubek says. As a result, readers have virtually no interest in or awareness of the publishing house. The only people who care who published a given book are other writers, who are always everywhere aspiring, and thus keeping score. I would say that publishing house inside dope is the province of dorks but that would be an insult to dorks. (All hail the New Directions colophon!) 

And yet, publishers are valuable, because despite their aesthetic impotence they remain good at one thing and that’s getting books on those Barnes & Noble tables. Or on the tables at the hip indie cultural touchstone of your choosing. It’s all about distribution. I remember buying the Miranda July novel All Fours a couple years back in the Orlando airport. I was already aware of it and was surprised to see that novel, presumably high brow, in the airport. A smooth move, publicity wise. (Side note: it’s a good novel. I find July’s public persona slightly grating, but her talent is undeniable.) A writer friend of mine quipped once, when his own father compared his newly published novel to a can of peas lining the shelves at a grocery store, that his novels weren’t peas, and he was right, but also wrong. They are peas. They’re going to be shelved just like peas. They are relentlessly physical objects. (Still working through why I can’t get excited about ebooks). It takes a lot of skill to make the trains run on time. 

And maybe that’s the real lesson here. Maybe the publishers are right: the aesthetic/editorial judgment doesn’t matter. What matters is getting peas on shelves. If they’re on the shelves, if they look like the other peas, people will buy them. Who knows what will actually sell, people are so weird in their tastes, but whatever takes off, they can get more of those same peas to that shelf pronto. Maybe that’s what the publisher is really good for and good at. The best of what has been thought and said was always a low priority — more of a side quest. They just outsourced the part they don’t really care about: what the book actually says.  

In it to win it

literary lint,

The other day on Substack Ross Barkan wrote a note about Ben Lerner and how he didn’t publish frequently and how that surprised him — how back in the good old days successful writers published a book every couple of years. And he’s right. People don’t seem to publish as often now. I was reminded of Lorrie  Moore, who went ten years between Birds of America and A Gate at the Stairs. I remember the good old days (the 90s) when Updike and Roth were publishing books so frequently that keeping up was a form of cardio. 

I realize that material conditions are different now. And I’ve read enough author interviews to know that Moore was likely raising a child by herself during that time period. The frequency of publishing is not really a judgment on that person’s character, but a desire to see that person more, read that person more. If you like their voice, you just want more of it. It sounds like judgment but it’s really just the greediness of admiration. 

There are a couple of current writers who publish frequently, Brandon Taylor and Lauren Groff and Barkan himself, and props to them. They are out there hustling. Then there are the semi-famous who have almost stopped writing books entirely. I am thinking of Michael Chabon, who has been working on TV stuff perhaps? But still. It’s been ten years since his last novel Moonglow. I realize that everyone’s conditions are different, man’s gotta eat, and television is a valid medium, all that, but still. There’s being stuck in development hell and there’s books being stuck on my shelf, and I know which I’d rather have.  

The list of people I wish would publish more frequently is legion. I won’t list them out of fear of being whiny and weird. (Batuman! Gates! Beatty! Wherefore art thou?)

Some people get so famous that any additional publishing dilutes the brand’s prestige. Example: Cheryl Strayed. But that’s marketing logic, not reader logic. Was I excited when Updike published Gertrude and Claudius later in life? Did I think it would help his brand? No and no. But I’m glad he was out there trying new stuff. The other night I caught Andre Agassi playing pickle ball on TV. Pickle Ball. On the one hand: what a pathetic attempt at garnering attention and prestige and money from a person past his prime. On the other hand: dude was covered in sweat, smacking that ball like a man who knew what he was doing, in the game. And I was on the barstool watching him. Turns out you don’t ever win the game. You just stay in the game. 

And the crowd goes wild. 

Commerce in the morning

The Portable Son, ,

I love the feeling of commerce in the morning. Grabbing a bagel at the coffee shop, stopping off at the drive-thru bank teller, booking a car while briskly walking to an elevator in a distant city. I don’t know. It gets my small-town, merchant-blood flowing. It’s my middle-aged belief that all real business transpires before lunch.

All that’s throat clearing to say that there is a new online spot where you can buy my book, specifically my Bandcamp page. I do realize that books are not usually sold on Bandcamp, but I’ve already got the page up, and the pipes connected, and that “merch” tab was sitting there unused. This effort is partially inspired by the “you can just do things” discourse, which I’m a sucker for, and partially inspired by a couple of friends out there doing cool stuff. 

The paperback is the “limited baby blue” edition. I’ve got about 19 left.

Notes on ‘Privacy’

book reviews, ,

Privacy by Molly Young
2025

It’s a short novella-length memoir derived from the journal she kept while pregnant. Her wit sparkles throughout. It’s basically a normal pregnancy, punctuated by her particular sensibility, until the post-pregnancy hemorrhage that almost kills her, which she narrates in a surprisingly brisk and unemotional fashion. Perhaps all that’s occluded here is what’s meant by the title, which puzzled me throughout, until I finished the book and sat pondering the crumbs of my breakfast, suddenly grateful for all the mothers I knew who became mothers without dying. 

It seems difficult to write any kind of memoir, but then also to write any kind of memoir that has a lever regarding how much personal information to include. I have written before how I have come to think that personal writing, or “reality television,” for lack of a better phrase, invites judgment on behalf of the audience/reader, whereas fictionalizing somehow invites empathy. This is not my idea, and I don’t know why this seems to be the case, but it still strikes me as true. That’s to say that Young is able somehow here to disclose personal details of her pregnancy and its aftermath without it being personal, or “too personal,” or personal enough so that it transpires into the kind of “real” performance that invites audience judgment. Perhaps it has something to do with her brisk narration, her rather clear obscurities. Perhaps it’s because it’s more focused on details in the world than her own psychological theater. 

Throughout the book, Young mentions how there appear to be no works of literature that deal with pregnancy, and so this memoir stands as a small corrective. It’s not as if all the details are groundbreaking. There is the routine transformation of the mother’s body from an autonomous being into an animal that exists to provide sustenance to another animal — the rude assertion of nature that occurs while everyone is still living in a semblance of civilization. Routine stuff, but still, it’s made interesting and new by Young’s voice, the details she notices. She collects obscure pregnancy pamphlets and peppers the text with historical flotsam related to her progress. It’s the most normal story of all, until it’s not. 

In the final pages of the book, when the hemorrhage takes place, pregnancy turns into trauma, or rather giving birth is the trauma. While there may not be many books where pregnancy is the underlying narrative, I do think there are books where giving birth is depicted as a traumatic event. Two recent novels spring to mind: Miranda July’s All Fours and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman is in Trouble. In both novels, the mother characters undergo terrible births, and they are (understandably) haunted by this experience throughout the book. It functions as a gigantic, characterological explanatory event, like a personal Nagasaki. 

This isn’t bad per se. I think that both mother characters in these two novels would be more interesting without the trauma-birth story, but that being said, the traumatic birth story does serve as a reminder, that amidst the comedy of pregnancy and child-rearing, or the accidental drudgery of marriage, all of this entertainment floats by on a river of blood, potentially. 

At least that’s how it feels in Young’s zine. That’s how she refers to it. The short book is self-published, and brings to three the number of novella-length nonfictional zines she’s published. It’s a sharply designed, all black, perfect-bound paperback that’s not quite thick enough to weather the kind of aggressively splayed bookreading I prefer, but otherwise it’s a nice object. Young is a successful journalist and book reviewer, having written for the New York Times Magazine for years, and also having done stints at New York magazine and the New York Times Book Review. I think I’ve got all those credentials right. What’s interesting is how despite her consistent success in established legacy media publications, she has continued to publish her own stuff as well. That is, it’s interesting to me, a total nobody. She refers to a meeting with an agent at one point, who throws out wild ideas she could pursue. It’s played for comedy in the book, but it makes one wonder. Did this small book ever get pitched? Why did Young choose to publish it this way? Aside from being glad that it exists, qua book, it’s neat that it exists in this particular way, so tightly envisioned and executed. It’s as if Geoff Dyer and Maggie Nelson had a little sister who knew her way around InDesign. 

The book is available here.

Against coherence, part II

Uncategorized, ,

Once again I am deeply disappointed in my home printer.

Everyone talking directly to a camera, holding a gimmicky, small microphone, explainitorializing. 

My review of all modern tacos: entirely too much crema.

All software is too slow. 

When people show me their AI creations, I feel embarrassed for them.

New York Review of Gift Guides

All literary criticism is just an excuse for making lists.

You’ll be more interesting without optimizing.

Look, you can either do your life’s work, or you can look up stuff on Wikipedia, but you can’t do both.

Modern life contains entirely too much beeping.

Gulf of Amnesia

You’re not “obsessed” with that object — backpack, lemon-peeler, whatever. You just like it. Just say that.

The United States of Lines

The only people who care about audio fidelity are dorks. Dorks are important, but they are necessarily a subset.

Home design shows: problematic.

Something powerful about making a soup.

I always forget how many people dig on the Pope.

Indifference to royal family as principle of adulthood.

Every interaction now triggers a survey. “How did I do?” shrieks the mailbox, the fire hydrant, the paper towel dispenser.

Jazz lives (at the airport).

The people who travel with their pets are different.

Dancing, as a part of live musical performance: almost always overrated.

AI iconography reminds me grimly of glitter.

To go on sabbatical from being one’s self.

If it doesn’t work all of the time, it doesn’t actually work.

This is a test of the mundane broadcast system.

I am anti-Holidays, but the innovations in seasonal inflatable decoration are undeniable.

Is it possible to dislike a golden retriever?

The internet sped up the lifecycle of cliches. It’s a superspreader of conventions.

I rather fancy the Midwest.

Overall I applaud the proliferation of Substack newsletters and related examples of writers banging their own drum, but I encourage better proofreading.

I don’t understand how pop-ups on web pages are still a thing.

Camping: I don’t see the appeal.

Primal disgust: wet cat food.

Thinking of taking my mimetic desire out for a run on my hedonic treadmill.

At some point we all became diatribalists.

Country dogs hit different.

I dislike sequels.

There are people of the Word, people of the Excel, and people of the Confusing Color Charts.

Small dogs hit different. 

Going through life on the lookout for that Danver’s ice.

Airports should be silent

plague journal, ,

Can you hear it? It’s the silent airport, the text-only airport, the airport of the future, the airport of your dreams. This is the progress of civilization. Airports shouldn’t be library quiet. They should be completely silent. Abandoned-church-in-the-middle-of-the-night quiet. Welcome.

There are lots of indignities in the modern American airport. The food, both on the ground and in the air, is somehow both overdetermined and bland. TSA is our contemporary theater of the absurd. The process of herding on and off the planes with all our nicely designed luggage puts the idea of human intelligence into question. The overwhelming presence of coordinated sweatsuit sets does not help matters. All of it makes me feel crazy. And yet, I’ll take it everyday. What I want to change is simply the noise in the modern airport.

Here in wonderful 2026, there is no need to have anything but text-based communication in the airport. No public announcements. No announcements from the gate. No more innocuous “welcome to our city” messages by whomever the mayor of Atlanta currently is. (I always seem to hear this while I’m urinating.) No more well-intentioned announcements about child trafficking. There should be signs saying what’s arriving, what’s departing. There should be signs outside the gates showing the same. There should be text messages delivered silently to your phone updating you on the whereabouts of your flight. If you come into the airport, you automatically consent, along with the TSA body search, to receiving silent text messages from the airport. Like with firearms, all audible alerts should be removed once you enter the premises. If we can make AI happen, then we can make this happen. No phone calls. If you need to talk on the phone, there should be private booths where you can conduct your shameful business. (I feel like this used to be a thing historically.) If people can hear you converse from your booth, then they should stare at you and you should feel shame. If you have a problem with your flight that cannot be resolved via text, there should be slightly larger booths where you and an airline official can discuss the matter, far, far away from everyone else.

Part of my beef is that it there are too many sounds. To begin, there is the modern American compulsion to blast pop music from every restaurant, bar, and kiosk, as if we were all trapped in an endless music video directed by Satan. (His theme song is “Mambo No. 5.”) Second, the public announcements don’t work. They’re too difficult to hear and they don’t inform. Airport terminals are too close together for any of the individual terminal announcement systems not to get hopelessly muddled. And then these announcements get preempted by the larger terminal-wide announcements. I’m always trying to parse the noise, trying to figure out what is relevant information. It’s like trying to unweave a rug with my teeth. They should instead install those digital highway signs, those boondoggles that purportedly announce upcoming traffic accidents and road closures but which in the Land of Progress mostly sport bad puns related to safe driving. It’s like a modern WPA program for poets. There are worse uses of federal funds, but still.

The announcements that are given at the gate and then on the airplane itself are so rote that many airlines or flight attendants use the occasion to work on their stand-up material. We’ve all witnessed the “humorous flight safety video.” We’ve all been accosted by the flight-attendant doing a bit. It feels like being trapped with an overly enthusiastic football mascot with slightly less fur. I like it when people are funny. I am not a monster. But this is not funny. It’s annoying and desperate. I know the lawyers require the pinned-back-eyelids transmission of the safety video though it seems like this sphere is ripe for innovation. Perhaps take a clue from the endless, unreadable and unread Terms of Service agreements. Let’s get Apple to work on those flight videos. Perhaps travelers can agree to the terms at the same time they agree not to make a peep as soon as they enter the jetbridge, or whatever we’re calling the entrance to the airport now.

While I’m being picky, the planes themselves should be quieter. These machines are too loud inside. All that groaning and gear-shifting. I shouldn’t have to wear my cubicle-grade headphones to shield myself from the Lynchian industrial keening. Perhaps Delta could explore some better insulation technologies or phase cancellation possibilities. Perhaps a collaboration with some outfit like Yeti coolers. I realize that’s a different technology entirely, but man, those coolers really do work. I feel like this could be a mutually beneficial synergistic collab.

And then finally there is my fellow American traveler, equipped now for 18 years at least with a smart phone and yet none the wiser about using it, or at least none the more subtle. The prevalence of taking phone calls on speaker in public shocks me, as if I’m some spinster witnessing white pants after Labor Day. I am not a monster. But honestly, take that call somewhere else and in a way where no one else can hear it, where no one else is subjected to it. It’s a kind of aggressive rudeness, forcing a private conversation into the public sphere. Of course I have heard middle-aged professionals instigate calls while urinating in the public restroom in my office building, so there are really no limits to a lack of decorum. (Perhaps they are calling the mayor of Atlanta.) Video calls on speaker are just a declension of the same psychosis. I admit to not understanding the appeal of video calls in general, much less while I’m walking between terminals. (I’m pretty sure Short Form Video is one of the Seven Seals, but I’ll save that rant for another day.)

Instead, hear it with me. See it. Feel it. Completely quiet. Just the sound of people walking. I don’t want to put anyone in jail or anything. I just think some strategic social shaming is in order. I don’t think people should be cancelled or whatever we’re calling it now. But I do think that the people who take video calls on speaker should be politely led off the premises and banned for six months. I’m not a monster. It’s just that silence is golden. Or if not golden, then a pleasant ocher. And something we should strive to paint together. No one likes travelling. I mean, maybe the super rich do. But I’m talking about actual human beings here.

I’m of course writing this from an airport. I’ve got my ear plugs in but I can still hear the kids shrieking from one direction and the vacuuming from another. I can’t hear the announcements, but I can hear that emergency door alarm, the kind that goes off intermittently and seems engineered to loosen bowels and yet which effectuates no change in behavior from anyone. The door just makes that sound every now and then like some dispeptic animal. I don’t think my prohibition should apply to small children. I’m not a monster. Toddlers are going to be toddlers. But as the kids get older we should teach them that the proper approach to air travel is a funereal respect. A holy silence so that can people can watch their ipad movies in peace. Air travel is an absurd privilege, one we should accept while minimizing human suffering.

Also, grownups: no traveling with a blanket. Have some self-respect.

The clone wars come home

literary lint, plague journal, Publicity, ,

A couple of weeks ago I received a friendly email from a fellow who lavished me with praise for my one published book, a collection of stories called The Portable Son, published by a small press many moons ago. He wanted to present the book to his book club. 

I of course was thrilled to receive any positive commentary from a reader. That’s all I really ever want: unending praise from total strangers. This alone will finally make me feel whole. So I wrote him back and said thank you, but that I was a little confused as to what he needed me to do to effectuate him sharing the book with his book group. It was indeed published moons ago, but it is still purchasable, in handy paperback or ebook form, and if you have trouble with that, you can always email me and I will sell you a copy the old-fashioned way. (That is, PayPal.) He said that he needed my permission and a digital copy of the book, and if that went well, we could discuss further procedures.

And here is where my ears went to a point. I am ripe for random praise from strangers but I am also wary of scams. And I’ve reached the point in my life and in my experience with the internet where I think everything is a scam. The internet itself: one giant, networked scam. I two-factor authenticate my kids when they call, just to be sure they’re who they say they are, the little rascals. And so despite the enormous sinkhole of my own ego, this little email exchange seemed too good to be true. 

I’ll send it to my good friend Jim, I thought. He’s good at sniffing out scam behavior. But before I could forward the correspondence onto Jim, I received another email, from another extremely friendly stranger, extolling the virtues of my lonely little short story collection, and wondering if we could collaborate on further promotional ventures and sharing it with his group of readers. So this must be the new scam, I thought. 

Then a few days later I received another email from another would-be enthusiast. And this morning I received another. Is this what being famous feels like? Being approached by overly friendly scammers, or what’s more likely, scam robots? The prose in these emails seems real; it has the Sabrina Carpenter effect: it’s almost convincingly lifelike. Is my ego being exploited by artificial intelligence? Well, sure, but see above re: the internet. Isn’t that essentially what has always been happening since I logged on sometime in the late 90s? 

I would quote from the emails, but I feel queasy quoting from private correspondence without permission, even correspondence with robots. Yes, I am that old-fashioned. By this point in revising this post, I’ve received nearly ten solicitations from the bots. They’re all remarkably lifelike. They are all just this side of scammy. After the first I have refrained from responding. Apparently I’m on some list, the sucker list. 

I am old enough and cynical enough to be unimpressed by artificial intelligence talk. Remember when virtual reality was going to change the world? All world-ending or world-revolutionizing talk seems to spring from some existential insecurity, a longing for the apocalypse. The internet rewards exaggeration. What’s more, I’m embarrassed by my peers who use it for little tasks. I’m not against using technology to save time and effort. I am after all typing this on a laptop. I revere Excel. But asking ChatGPT therapy-adjacent questions feels embarrassing. Using AI to remix old songs for you with new, robot-played instruments is a waste of computing power and your one theoretically precious life. It’s playing in the funhouse mirror. Look how weird my face gets, etc. We must move past the mirror, move through the mirror. Tools must become mundane to become useful.

The internet is a factory of cliches. What are memes but the congealing of a culture’s sensibility. Turns of phrase quickly become commodified. It’s difficult to be online and think for oneself, articulate for oneself. Let’s briefly table whether or not this is ever possible. Being too online makes it well-nigh impossible. What are you asking ChatGPT when you ask it a question? “Give me the average response for everything.” Not the best of what has been thought and said but the normal distribution of what has been thought and said. We came for Orson Welles, and we went home with Mr. Beast. 

Anyway, I’ve just decided to let the robot spam sales pitches wash over me. If you are a real live breathing person and want to read my book, you can find it here. Or you can email me and I will sell it to you the old-fashioned way (PayPal). Or even if you are a non-human who wants to read my book. I am capitalist enough to not be completely prejudiced against the robots. But I’m not comping them a copy either. And I’m not going to send $89.99 to some robot to theoretically persuade some invisible robot readership out there to read my delicate little story collection. There’s something that only AI could invent, an audience for my short stories. 

I may be desperate for attention, but I’m still redneck enough to fundamentally distrust too much loose praise. 

Writing is a form of thinking

literary lint,

No, I don’t want help writing that email.

An artificial intelligence bot has come alive within my Gmail, and I am not inclined to use it. I might be inclined to use the summary function if it’s an email I don’t want to read, that is a text created by an institution rather than a friend. But then, if it’s not an email I want to read, then I just don’t read it. For example, did you know that you don’t have to read all the emails that your child’s school sends you? I learned this just last year when my forever partner told me. (“Duh.”) And while I still feel the slight effervescent breeze of guilt, instant deletion feels even better.

But to actually get help with writing the emails? But I actually like writing — even the tedious stuff. I enjoy writing sentences, and then fitting them together. Even if the revision turns into a kind of endless mental Tetris, and even if the end result has all the charm of re-translated stereo instructions, it’s still me in there, thinking.

And really that’s my main beef, and my main belief: writing is a form of thinking. Are there other forms? Sure. But writing is one of them. What I mean is that when I write, I don’t simply get my thoughts down as a transference mechanism. There is some of that, sure. But what’s more is that in the process of transferring those already thought-through thoughts, I discover more thoughts, or figure out what I really think through the actual process of finding the words and the order they should go in. It’s weird, alchemical, seems tautological, or slightly voodoo-y. By writing down what I think, I actually discover what I think. And then when the act is accomplished, I can go back later and re(a)discover what I thought at that moment.* Have I changed my mind since then? Most likely. But there, however impermanently, is a little word sculpture of my thought process for that day on that subject.

But then also there are the unseen thoughts, the unknown unknowns that one discovers when reading, where you find meaning perhaps where the author didn’t intend. Or you see their gaps, their mistakes, their blind spots, their noise within their signal. This too is part of writing and is part of your own writing. No one writes absolutely cleanly with no room for ambiguity or misinterpretation, except for maybe lawyers, but even lawyers make mistakes, which is why we have so many of them. Lawyering is a type of weaponized literary criticism. They are busily arguing over the latent ambiguities that their colleagues have created, recently or historically. It’s a great racket.

What happens when you reread yourself is that you see what you thought back then but also what you were wrong about. You’re able, however slightly, to see yourself as a stranger might, to see your own bald spot, your own exhausted presumptions, and that too is a kind of thought, thought’s echo, thought’s reverb, a reconsideration, perhaps even a regret. So writing becomes thought in stereo, moving through time, a moment generated into being that can be reviewed skeptically for as long as the page lasts or the wifi stays strong.

Why would I want to give that up? Sure, I need help with my spelling and my typing, which seems only to get worse. But the little corrective squiggles is one layer of robot intrusion. When you let the robot take over the structure of the syntax, then you have forfeited the chance to figure out what you really thought about something, and to be reminded of it later. You’ve robbed yourself of the pleasure of thinking for yourself.

*Sorry! Grad school trick.