Category Archives: literary lint

The clone wars come home

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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

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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.

The Great Unfinished

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As I get older, I abandon more books than I finish. I grow increasingly less interested as the pages pile up. I surrender to distraction. I grow bored. I feel guilty about this, but I still do it, with a willingness that’s beginning to flirt with the cavalier.

I need two ingredients to stay in love enough with a book to keep reading. I am mostly talking about novels. The first is that I need there to be enough plot to pull me through. I respect postmodern metafictional hijinks. I respect the modernist fracturing of linear narrative to better reflect the multifarious and diffuse nature of consciousness, our “reality,” etc. But still I need a little bit of that what-happens-next razzle-dazzle to keep me going. I feel cheap admitting it, but it’s true. 

The second ingredient, perhaps even more important than the first, is I must enjoy the sound of the writer’s voice. This is both hard to define or defend. In theory the greatest of novelists could also be the greatest of actors, channeling multiple characters’ voices within one work. Do I have to like all of them equally? No. I just have to like the general grain of the voice, the beat of it, the pulse, the groove. I am grasping toward musical analogies. Perhaps I should switch to radio. I have to pick up their frequency. The signal they’re putting out into the world has to be retrievable by my readerly antenna. I can get through a novel with a strong plot where I don’t like the prose, but it’s difficult.

While my need for plot makes me feel cheap, my need for a certain radio frequency in the prose makes me feel like a snob. Does it have to be “good writing,” beautiful sentences? Well, I mean, it helps, but that’s not it precisely. Good writing is hopelessly contextual. The writing has to have a singular voice that I can hear. I have a friend who won’t listen to certain artists because he doesn’t like their guitar tone, and I think: is it really that important? But to some people, the sound is as important as the substance, is inextricable from the substance, the overall gestalt. This makes me feel slightly better about being a prose snob, if that’s what I am.

I know it’s potentially good for me to finish novels, but if it feels like a chore while not actually being a chore, then I don’t care enough — even if everyone on Substack is talking about it. Perhaps what I am missing in my reading is sufficient peer group pressure to finish that big new novel. Maybe I really should join a book group. I try to give a book a sufficient amount of time to woo me. I try for 100 pages. That feels like enough to get the gist, the vibe, the overall type of radio station that we’re dealing with. But sometimes I just don’t dig it. I can recognize the contours of its ambition, and quite often respect that ambition, but it’s just not for me, not my thing, and there are only so many hours in the day, so many years left in this life. There are books that are a slog but their sloggyness feels worthwhile because of some combination of voice and plot and, on a much more tertiary level, literary importance. Yes, I am obliquely referring to the oeuvre of Uncle Hank. 

When I do find a novel where I love the voice and the plot is snapping, and I am fully immersed in the book, it forms a congruent and beneficial atmosphere above my life that nourishes me the handful of days it takes me to finish it. There is almost no better feeling. It’s like a heightened form of being alive, while still secluded within one’s ongoing active life, carrying one’s own private Narnia around town. 

Part of this is simply personal idiosyncrasy. I don’t enjoy certain flavors of ice cream. Who cares? And yet it feels reckless to express that level of personal taste with respect to literature. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler: annoying as hell. The Violent Bear it Away: I prefer her stories. Paul Auster’s City of Glass: interminable. Perhaps this is all just residual collegiate guilt. I never did get that Ph.D. I never did become that Full Professor, in part because I can’t stand reading stuff I don’t actually like. I realize that part of adult life is making oneself do activities that one doesn’t actually want to do but which one needs to do for some reason. Paradoxically, my early adult failure to succeed in the career I daydreamed about has saved me from having to read a) books I don’t actually want to read and b) student writing. I accidentally freed myself from those two curses. I am no doubt more ignorant because of that refusal/loss of opportunity, but I’ve also read almost strictly for pleasure in the meantime, however I delude myself about my literariness along the way. This means that I’ve read scads of not immediately relevant prose, in terms of the floating decal that we call the Canon, or books that are currently in the discourse, or that otherwise would make me look cool to someone somewhere. For example, I’ve read almost all of the essay collections of David Mamet. Mamet is of course appropriately celebrated for his plays. Does anyone on the planet care about his essays besides me? (This is pre-Right Wing Mamet, mind you. And the plays are great, sure, but give me an obscure collection of miscellany like The Cabin and I’m in pig city.) 

Sure there are books I try to read because I feel like I should read them or I am expected to have read them or they represent a blind spot in my education. Or simply books I would like to express an opinion about but feel obligated to read beforehand. I have a paperback copy of Ulysses that I visit every now and then. I do a little recreational paragraph-climbing. World enough and time I will finish it before retirement, but I’m not pushing myself. It delights me for a page, wears out its welcome by page two, bores me senseless by page three. As a sustained reading experience, it seems deliberately anti-pleasureable. 

I also don’t review books anymore either. I certainly have thoughts about books, but after a while one loses the patience for homework, much less the clamor of one’s  own opinions, much less fitting within the “conversation.” The intuitive reaction to a work of art can give way to the categorical impulse, which is much easier to feed than the creative impulse. All that ranking and filing. Strongly held aesthetic opinions, rigorously expressed, can become a kind of trap. One’s taste can become so refined no first draft can sift through it.

Forcing oneself to finish books that one is not really enjoying is a weird type of personal masochism. Reading becomes just another arena of shame, of wondering what the neighbors think, of — yes — even performative literacy. For the record I have never been approached by anyone as a consequence of my public reading. Just who am I performing for? I guess it’s the thesis committee that lives permanently in my head.  

Currently on the nightstand, half-finished, sits Great Expectations.  What kind of redneck jerkface won’t finish Great Expectations? Me, perhaps. I don’t know. It’s enjoyable enough. Pip’s relationship with Joe Gargery is terribly moving, though I’ve previously confessed I am a total wimp when it comes to that theme. But otherwise, I feel like I kind of get the outer perimeter of the experience. Do I have to sit through the whole concert? Do I have to eat this entire steak? 

Maybe I’m just a hick? Or maybe my capacity for sustained attention has been degraded so much by the internet and the stupid phones that I really can’t hack it anymore. I am the tired and fat soldier of literature, needing to be kicked out of the army by some beardless, tattooed groyper, sent to clean up the house of literature. See, I am too online to even adequately condemn myself for being too online. 

But then, what do I know? These thoughts too lie unfinished.

Later Capitalism: A note on Miranda July’s ‘All Fours’

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This is not a review. Please go elsewhere for more rigorous evaluation. Instead, I am still struck by two problems a year and a half after reading and enjoying All Fours.

First, background: All Fours is the second novel by writer, artist, filmmaker Miranda July, which was published in 2024. I had been aware of July for years but never read her work or seen her films. Aside from her multimedia proficiency, she retains a genius for publicity. However, I never got around to doing the reading in part because of my allergy to wide-eyed whimsy, which seemed to me at the time to be the primary mode of July’s work.

Time passed and then I bought All Fours in an airport bookstore in Orlando, Florida, of all places. I found it quite good: funny, persuasive in its protagonist’s artistic and marital desperation, and productively frank in sexual matters that actually explored new metaphorical ground. Is it the first great, serious novel of perimenopause?

Parasocial note: since publication, July has begun a Substack where she chronicles her life as a newly non-married mother and sexual free agent, much in the way of the narrator of All Fours. I am hopelessly bored by ferreting out autobiographical connections between works of purported fiction and an author’s real life. However, post publication there were several trend pieces hailing the novel as an inspiration for perimenopausal women in various stages of bourgeois coupledom to “blow up their marriages.” The Substack functions as a coda to this parasocial connection and trend, which seems a bit cringe, as the kids say.

But back to the work. My first problem is money. How does the narrator make money? I know that she takes her trip, which ends at the motel where the first half of the novel takes place, using twenty grand she earns licensing a snippet of her writing to a whiskey company. But what about for the rest of the novel before she sells the book within the book at the end? I know that she’s married to Harris, a record producer, and while the decoupling from Harris is clear on the sexual consequences of the loosening of their marital obligations, it’s blurry on the economic consequences. Basically, who’s paying for what? I don’t disagree with the narrator’s groovy lifestyle. As mentioned above, I found her desperation, her frustration, her hunger entirely believable. But the novel ignores the money question as the plot progresses and is weaker for it. It never talks about the mortgage.

I’m not trying to be hopelessly middle-aged here, but it seems to me that modern marriage is a thick stew of interdependent obligations; it ain’t just about the libido. There is the mutual care-taking aspect, which of course accelerates as partners age. But even in a healthy middle-aged marriage, there is a division of labor, even if it’s not as rigidly gendered as in previous eras. What also strikes me is how un-jealous the narrator seems to be when Harris quickly and efficiently couples with a new lady and replicates a type of bourgeois hetero stability. I realize that the narrator’s desires have changed, but I don’t think that precludes becoming insanely jealous and wildly lonely — suddenly sentenced to one’s own self-reliance. The break up is very, very clean. And I just don’t quite believe it, even in liberated Berkley, California.

And then still the money, the mutual financial support, the who’s-paying-for-the-school-field-trip, the itemized deductions of family life. What’s Harris still paying for? And what does Harris’s new long-term girlfriend think of what Harris is still paying for?

To be sure, all of this mess would result in a wildly different novel, but it’s these amputated tentacles of complication that send out phantom questions through the second half of the book. No novel can be about everything, but the vision can sometimes narrow too aggressively and become too rosy.

Which brings me to the ending. The book goes on too long. We witness the narrator’s liberation and artistic rebirth, and then after that circle is completed, we accompany her on a trip to New York for her book tour, where she sees Davey one last time performing a duo dance performance, evidence of his artistic rebirth. I don’t think we need this in terms of feeling like the story has been completed. (Its true ending is on p. 310.) Also, it leads to a long descriptive scene of the dance performance, which seems to represent in movement the dual rebirth of both Davey and the narrator as artists, which is neat metaphorically, but is unconvincing to read. Or at least it was unconvincing to this reader. It’s hard to make a long passage of dance interesting in prose. I admit that I think dance, as an artform, is mostly overrated. (Sorry, dancers! I know y’all are working hard.) But trying to capture the import of this moment for Davey and the narrator is supremely difficult. July’s least persuasive scene is the one at the very end of the novel.

And then, our narrator walks out of the venue and strolls off into the sunset. Here is the ending:

“Gratitude came like a punch in the gut and because it’s always such a relief not to be an asshole after all, tears streamed down my cheeks. The person sitting net to me was also wet-faced and we smiled a little bashfully at each other because ecstasy has a kind of built-in ridiculousness. And it wasn’t just us. I looked out at the the circle of faces and saw that every single audience member was going through some version of my revelation, some reckoning with the self they had been carrying around until now. I had not even been the only one knotted in miserly pain; that was part of the ride. Resistance, then giving in. [Davey] was no longer ascending; he reached the apex and quickly fell.

Outside it was early evening. There was plenty of time. I decided to walk.

The sun was just beginning to set.

Golden light everywhere.”

The golden light imagery echoes the color in the room during the dance performance, which itself harkens back to the re-designed motel room that was the site of the narrator and Davey’s almost affair, and more important, the site of the womb-like cave she created and guards and is reborn within. The discovery, here at the end of the novel during Davey’s performance, is that the womb-room can be expanded, and its feeling of innocence and potential can spread everywhere — “gilding the whole neighborhood, the whole city.”

So the narrator is walking off into the sunset, yes, but also into this multiplied potential universal benevolence, and my problem is that life is not like that. At some point wishful thinking slides into delusion. This is one of those lapses in taste or authorial judgment that calls into question the entire aesthetic success of the proceeding 321 pages. Even the writing goes slack here: “punch in the gut”? “Tears streamed”? And everyone in the room is having some kind of dance-triggered epiphany? It’s really that good? Really? Far be it from me to suggest that man’s fundamental nature is one of intractable misunderstanding and loneliness, broken only briefly via found moments of harmony, but I could use a little more adult-level irony here. Cue the “there’s nothing like New York in the spring” clip from 30 Rock.

What actually happens next in the world of the novel is that the narrator has to keep on living, and living — as this novel has successfully taught us — only grows exponentially more complicated. The sunset is a bankrupt gesture that turns the novel into a fantasy, turns it into a cartoon. And the rest of the novel is many things, but despite July’s own sometimes too-wide eyes, it isn’t a cartoon.

On William Langewiesche

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I suppose hearing about your heroes dying is just a part of growing older, but I don’t like it one goddamned bit. 

This feeling is prompted by news of the recent death of William Langewiesche at 70 from prostate cancer. Langewiesche was known for his reportage in The Atlantic Monthly beginning in the 90s. As a former pilot he wrote frequently about airplane crashes, and more generally about disasters that were somehow the result of human ingenuity, technology, and hubris. I don’t know how to pronounce his name either. 

I first read Langewiesche in a graduate school creative nonfiction workshop. The book was Sahara Unveiled. The bit that got me was when Langewiesche is stranded in the Sahara, and slowly interweaves his predicament with a methodical explanation of how people die in the desert. At what point do they start drinking their own urine? Etc. The prose is in the Hemingway vein, focused on concrete and physical particulars, withheld emotion, friction and complexity created by juxtaposition. We aren’t ever directly informed of Langewiesche’s feelings, but we still have feelings reading him. He invokes them rather than performs them. 

Langewiesche became one of those writers whose essays I’d stalk in the newstands, and a summer or so later, when his long articles about the post-9/11 cleanup of the World Trade Center appeared, I would greedily consume each installment as soon as it became available. That was one of those fortuitous intersections of modern journalism and my tastes at the time. I didn’t know I wanted to read thousands of words about how to clean up the destruction from that event, but once Langewiesche’s first article came out, I couldn’t envision anyone better for the task.

I still have those Atlantic issues somewhere in my files. Those essays, which eventually became the book American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center, were some of the key texts for me in those grad-school years after 9/11 — bits of nonfiction that were written almost immediately after the attacks and stuck with me. The others were “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” by David Foster Wallace, which appeared in Rolling Stone, and a paragraph from Susan Sontag, which appeared in a round robin of regular writers in the New Yorker immediately after the attacks. Sontag notoriously wrote, “Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together.” 

She was vilified for this paragraph, and this game of mutual provocation, the endless pickle ball tournament of statement and mock outrage counterstatement, was my introduction to the world of American discourse. It’s been downhill ever since for mutual understanding and my mental health. I’d read Against Interpretation the year before and felt like a gigantic redneck, but not an uninterested redneck. That is, I didn’t feel stupid, like I did whenever I tried to read, for instance, Foucault or Derrida; I just felt uncultured, like I was living way out in the sticks. The next book of hers I read was On Photography, which I adored, and from which I quoted sloppily for the rest of grad school. I did not get invited to many parties. 

I admired Wallace’s writing so much that I now regard his influence as a kind of persistent infection, latent but always ready to strike if I don’t watch my diet. I still have his issue of the Atlantic, too.

Obviously these three writers are quite different. I can only imagine their awkward dinner conversation, or the MFA thesis defense where they all sit stiffly on the same couch. They would never hang out together. They would smirk at the mention of the others’ names. And yet they each presented viable modes, worthy models. Langewiesche was exemplary of a certain tradition. He presented a way to be a masculine writer that wasn’t chauvinistic or corny or deliberately retrograde. It feels weird talking about this in hyper-enlightened 2025, but these feelings existed then. One could argue that the Hemingway mode, both the prose and the attitude it embodied, moved from American short fiction into nonfiction reportage — the male figure caught in extremis, a kind of staged adventure. The masculine tendency to get oneself into physical scrapes, often involving the wilderness or complex machinery, or if one’s lucky both, moved almost entirely into the journalism-adjacent slick magazine-financed world in the 1990s and 2000s. In the 80s you had your Raymond Carvers, your Richard Fords. Then came your Tom Bissells, your Wells Towers. Your Hampton Sides and your John Jeremiah Sullivans. All these dudes had great names. This manly short story to slick magazine reportage crossover enabled not just some financial stability, but also an escape hatch from the self-awareness constraints that plagued ambitious contemporary American fiction. That is, everyone knew fiction was artificial, a barker tent full of scams and devices and tricks. It was clearly emotionally and intellectually manipulative. But that conceptual baggage did not exist for narrative nonfiction, at least not back then. Postscript: these dudes now just write for TV. Man’s gotta eat. 

All of which is to say that Langewiesche represented a distinct path, clearly allied with a tradition while not trapped inside its castle. He discovered new places, and drug them back to us with his sentences. I will miss them. 

Does the short story live in disguise?

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The Republic of Letters published two pieces this week about the short story. In the first, Clancy Steadwell argues that Substack is the perfect environment for the short story to thrive and even grow in popularity. I appreciate his optimism but I found it naive. Writers have been arguing my whole life that “now” is the true moment for the short story because of shorter attention spans. This seems to be wishful thinking.

In the second, Naomi Kanakia argues that the short story is a dead form, and if you see any leftover zombie tales wandering around the internet or your bookshelf, you should promptly kill them. Her essay bothered me so much I spat out a little contradictory Substack note:

Everyone’s worried about AI, but this right here is actual artificial intelligence: trolling in place of argument, “vibes” instead of thinking. At least B.R. Myers, in his Atlantic screeds of yesteryear, had the decency to quote from the writing he was disparaging. The corrosive populist spite on display here is stunning. It seeps into the argumentative gears, and the whole engine of coherence breaks down.

It’s essentially arguing that the only art forms that should exist are the ones that are currently popular and can fund themselves. In effect, there should be no more ballet classes for the kiddos out there, because ballet isn’t a popular activity anymore and I don’t like it. And it shouldn’t be included in university education anymore either because that’s a waste of good old taxpayer money. God forbid the institutions that were built to study and preserve all the valuable stuff that the dead people made actually devote one little basement office somewhere to let the currently alive students make art themselves.

There’s an interesting idea in here — that the short story lives in disguise, that we are surrounded by short narratives but they are presented without the costuming of the traditional short story, whatever that actually is. But along the way Kanakia walks around the block to kick the shins of The Missouri Review. What? Yeah, Speer Morgan was just cackling to himself on his way to the bank for all those years. Fleecing the American people with short fiction! Those rubes, who thought they were supporting art. And those chump kids, who believed in it.

There’s more to say here, but in a calmer register. Kanakia recommends the advice letters in Slate as more rewarding literature than the “literary short story.” Her argument is that these letters are most likely actually fictional, and that we are surrounded by short narratives that are truly popular and are not shackled by the chains of tradition and obsolescent gesture.

I agree with her that we are surrounded by short narratives, but it’s much more complicated than she lets on. I take her point that many of them are likely fictional or at least highly embellished. I think there’s an important distinction between writing that is presented to be rigorously factual, writing that is presented to be completely fictional, and a sort of gray area, a demilitarized zone of Tall Tales, which all the adults can admit that there’s a perhaps a little bit of editorial fibbing occurring. I’m not totally naive. Also, it’s worth noting that Slate, as a going concern, seems to survive on this chum-like content, faux-confession exploitation. At some point it turned into a site that primarily consists of advice letters and sex tips.

I would argue that the reader approaches a non-fictional piece differently than a fictional piece. For instance, you watch a movie to empathize with the characters; you watch a reality show in order to judge the characters. Even if you understand that a reality show is highly edited and manipulated, there is something about the people presenting themselves as themselves that invites judgment rather than empathy. I don’t know why that is. Phoebe Maltz Bovy has written eloquently on this question.

So while the advice letters in Slate or the AITA posts on Reddit are shaped as first-person narratives, they are presented as real, not as fictional, even though their veracity is unprovable and highly suspect. Since they are presented as factual, readers don’t approach them as art as Kanakia claims to do. They approach them as entertainment. This is not a bad thing. It’s just a different mode. Perhaps, decades hence, Houghton Mifflin will publish a Best American collection of AITA posts. Perhaps their artistic merit will be discovered by the scholars of the future.

So if the short story lives in disguise, it’s disguised so well that it’s become something entirely different. And perhaps that’s the way it should be. Perhaps it’s impossible to know what will be worth preserving in the future, so writing to some old masterwork criteria is a lost cause. What we call literature is a library of exceptions, the texts that persisted.

Kanakia ends her post making a point about Chekhov and how he published some 300 humorous pieces before he wrote his famous short stories. It’s a useful reminder, but still, we don’t read those. We read his short stories.

Forty years in the Phish cult

literary lint, Music,

I stayed up late the other night reading the long profile of Phish in the New Yorker by Amanda Petrusich. I’d been anticipating this piece. It had been mentioned in a podcast interview with the author and she had posted photographs of attending a couple of Phish concerts on her Instagram. I have been listening to Phish off and on with fluctuating levels of enthusiasm myself for 30 years, so I was primed.

But I went to bed disappointed. It was long, it was detailed, it was exhaustively researched, but there wasn’t enough matter there, not enough new information to warrant the length, not enough analysis of why the band and its fanbase has persisted so relentlessly through the decades. It wasn’t the definitive New Yorker analysis I craved. I am not a Phish super fan by any means, but even I knew about 95% of the information already: their scrappy beginnings in college towns in Vermont; their gradual creation of / flourishing in the “jam band” scene in the 90s; their succession in the travelling hippie consciousness and budget after the death of Jerry Garcia and the restructuring of the organization formerly known at The Grateful Dead; their leadership through the manic productivity and vision of their singer, guitar player, and boyish frontman, Trey Anastasio; their early millennial interruptions brought on by band exhaustion in general and Anastasio’s drug use in particular; their rebirth post-Anastasio sobriety and their flourishing as corporate fun machine in the two decades since.

What it told me I didn’t know: that they played an early show with fIREHOSE, Fishbone, and the Beastie Boys; that Ian MacKaye of Fugazi gives them props; that they have a full time archivist, though that last detail is not surprising; that “Fluffhead” is the quintessential Phish song. I didn’t know that Phans shushed one another for talking during the jams or “chomping.” You can’t make this stuff up.

I already knew that they never had a hit but stumbled upon something greater, the impassioned fans who not only support them with their repeated attendance, but actually attend to the band, somehow create the energy requisite for the full Phish experience. They don’t just enjoy Phish. They believe in Phish. There is a religious element to being a Phish fan, a parallel that Petrusich explicitly brings up several times but doesn’t (for my taste) do enough with. The title of her piece is “The Portal Opens,” and she writes about how band and audience alike enter a trance-like state of symbiotic consciousness during these long musical improvisations (i.e., jams). The band stumbles upon a kind of shared intuition that the audience partakes in. It’s a little woo woo, but I am here for it.

I myself have only been to one Phish concert (Mid-South Coliseum, Memphis, TN, November 18, 1996), a so-so show. I have watched lots of live clips and have several bootlegs, somehow. But I am not a Phan. I am not part of the cult. I find the attendance at multi-day outdoor concerts to be too much like camping. I don’t begrudge my fellow citizens their innocent pleasure, but I don’t understand the appeal. Plus, I don’t want my live musical entertainment attendance to be turned into an extreme sporting event. A lot of the fandom strikes me as like sports for music nerds. Kids who used to collect baseball cards now collect setlists. But also, I have never been to a multi-day Phish fest, so I am not completely sure on just what I am missing.

Just what am I missing? I kept think-screaming at the article. There are many details on all the various activities and installations and artifacts at a festival such as Mondegreen, which Petrusich attended, but again, How is it fun? Make me feel the fun. There is a curious lack of commitment in this piece of reportage. There is neither enough stench from the crowd nor is there enough chin stroking about what it all means. It doesn’t push hard enough on the subject.

There have been a raft of articles about the band as it has approached and now surpasses the forty year mark. Justin Taylor’s piece in The Baffler is to me the best thus far, getting close to the actual experience of attendance. There was also a good article in GQ. It’s becoming the music journalist version of the “cruise ship essay,” a totalizing experience that seemingly requires immersive reportage but about which basically everything has already been said. There was gold in them thar hills.

Did I imagine other, previous music critics harrumphing in the margins? I did. I envisioned a pre-sobriety Sasha Frere-Jones, dressed in all black, sweating terribly, and frowning. One wonders what that sensibility would have made of this subject. Or Geoff Dyer: someone send that man to a Phish fest.

Is it a cult? It sure seems like a cult. I understand the collaborative moment of musical transcendence idea, but what about all of the supportive paraphernalia, the way some people devote their lives to the band, the way they are analyzed and dissected. When she visits the archives and gets to see Anastasio’s undergraduate honors thesis, a sort of C.S. Lewis-ian tale that created several early and enduring Phish songs, she jokes that it feels like she’s looking at the Gutenberg Bible. And the archivist says, “You are.” She’s opening the Ark of the Covenant, but no one’s face gets melted off.

What happens when one of the members dies? What happens when Anastasio dies? Where does the energy go? Is the Phish cult sui generis or is it a manifestation of a larger American impulse to congregate but separate, dance around the maypole and grab a burrito? What would Hawthorne make of all this?

And what of Anastasio’s insane work ethic? I remember reading somewhere about Anastasio’s preternatural ability to tune out distraction and get his work done, and I wanted more insight into that, into the relentless efficiency of the fun machine. There is a fleeting glimpse of his personality when something is off at soundcheck and he is momentarily critical — “Whatever was just in my ears was not remotely the mix, and that is sad” — but this hyper-management of the band experience is left mostly unexplored. Am I wrong in thinking that Anastasio has a Steve Jobs-ian power to realize his vision? I already learned about his sobriety journey on the CBS Sunday Morning show years ago. Give me something new. But now I am yearning, a close cousin to whining, but such are the feelings of a fan, even one who sticks to the shallows.

Links:
– Petrusich’s article in the New Yorker. Interestingly, in the time it took me to write this post, it seems that the title of the piece has changed online to “After Forty Years, Phish Isn’t Seeking Resolution.” I guess they regularly change the names of the articles online?

– Justin Taylor in The Baffler

– The GQ Phish article

– The setlist for the Phish concert I saw back in college

Art contests are a scam

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All of them. Everything from the Booker prize on down to the Scholastic awards for high schoolers. They purport to measure and reward excellence and they do no such thing. They can’t do any such thing, because artistic excellence is not measurable, can only be measured by approximation, by appreciation. It cannot be ranked. The judges are compromised, the evaluation metrics are compromised, and the purported value of the awards are compromised, and I don’t mean compromised in some kind of “foetry,” Jorie Graham, nepotism-baby, back-scratching way; I mean intellectually compromised, as in they’re lying to themselves, and they’re lying to you, the audience.

Today’s gripe is brought to you by a promotional email I received from a local concert venue. A bluegrassy, Nashville group is coming to town, and they seemed interesting. It’s basically your standard bluegrass quintet, but with tattoos. Lots of beards and denim and the no-longer-ironic trucker hats. In their bio it noted that their fiddler has won several state championship fiddle contests. I immediately opened a tab to write this rant. I don’t know why one would enter a fiddling contest, but why would you remark upon it, and your winning of it, for any length of time past the day of the contest? Who cares who won a fiddle contest?

Prizes are fine, I guess. A group of people wants to get together and award a prize. Good for them. All judgments are essentially autobiographical. They are always more about the judger than the judged. But contests are where it gets icky. You have to apply for the contest. You have to pay for the contest. You have to submit to the contest.

The problem with contests is that they purport to adjudicate who or what is best, when that designation is artificial, ambiguous, constantly on the move. It’s the roadrunner of adjectives. In a soccer game, you know who scored the most goals. In a 100-meter race, you know who ran the fastest. These are determinable facts. But art is not an athletic event. It might make sense if we had contests for the year’s longest novel. It would be much easier, like judging the year’s largest pumpkin. But best?

To continue with my previous gripe, it costs about $3 to submit to a literary magazine via Submittable. I will save the ethical thumb wrestling about submission fees for another day. (For earlier thoughts on this, see here.) But contests are where the costs increase. Typical contest is $25 to submit with the prospect of getting a $1,500 prize, publication, perpetual acknowledgement that you were the winner, etc. Have I submitted to contests in the past? You betcha. Will I do so in the future? Look, I’m only human.

These have been around seemingly forever, and they quite clearly are a way for literary magazines to make enough money to fund themselves. That is, they can’t sell enough issues of the magazine to fund the magazine, so they sell the chance of being in the magazine, “winning” a prize, in order to fund the magazine. I know that there are lots of ways that literary magazines can fund themselves, such as support from the affiliated institution of higher learning, etc., though in these strange times who knows the future prospects of that funding. I am not saying that lit mags are evil or wrong to do this. They are behaving as rational actors. That ship sailed way back.

The problem for the writer is that these expenses quickly add up, and it creates a tiered system for the table of contents within a magazine. You have the “regular submissions,” those contributors who paid the nominal electronic submission fee, or maybe even just paid for old-fashioned postage. And then you have the contest winners, who paid more for better placement, who paid to get a better seat at the show, paid for premium parking, paid for the Fast Pass. It corrupts the editorial vision of the magazine with a gimmick to gin up money and attention. (I am not against gimmicks. I am just against this gimmick.) But the difference for the writer is that when you pay for the Fast Pass, it’s clear what the exchange is. You are paying more money to skip the line. Simple, straightforward. But for the contests, you are paying more money for the ever-dim prospect of winning and having that dubious distinction put upon you. You are paying for the chance to have your name in slightly larger type. And also the prize money, large enough to be nice, not large enough to change your life. The problem is that you’re trading a collaborative editorial endeavor for a chance to sit at the Craps table. At least when you gamble, they bring you free drinks.

It’s a weird admission for a journal or a book publisher because it says, in essence, Hey, we don’t know how to sell enough copies of this print artifact that we’re making, so we need you to fund it. That would seem to be the very reason one would go to a publisher or a lit magazine. They know where the readers are and how to find them, how to marshal them for a party, how to find a space and rent a keg. I don’t know how to do these things. If I strong-armed all my friends into reading my latest story I’d have, what, four readers? The whole predominant reason to submit to a magazine is — I apologize for using this loaded phrase — its network effects, which as far as I can tell actually means “ability to get people to the party.” You can see this with the teens. Some of them have strong network effects. They will often throw parties. Some can throw parties but no one is driving way the hell out there. Some of them don’t even try. (This was me.) Some of them throw parties and can get people to the parties. And we may not like them as individuals, but we know a good party when we see one, and we want our short story to be at that party.

All that’s bad enough, but then the audience is told, “this is a contest winner!” as if I care one bit about who won a fiddle contest. Great, I guess? I don’t know what goes into winning a fiddle contest. Speed? Ability to boot-scoot while fiddling? What I want to know: will the show next week be any good? Is it worth the ticket and the logistical hurdles I will have to lurch myself over? Will I dig the music? Will I go home and save the album to my Spotify library, text it to my friends, contemplate a vinyl? The annual fiddle awards won’t tell me this. The prize-winning poetry collection won’t tell me this. It’s embarrassing for you to have to put this in your bio. I am embarrassed on your behalf. This is not T-ball, and we are no longer children.

We need to grow culture and stop making lists. I propose that other people are like me and don’t actually care about the false fire of contest-winners. The story, the poem, the Americana fiddle performance needs to enchant on its own without the artificial scaffolding. We need culture that can get people to show up to the party, get people excited to party. Culture happens at the party, not at the casino.

Full disclosure: I have never won a contest, except for the watermelon seed-spitting contest I won when I was eight. I killed it! And remember: all judgement is autobiographical.

Close reading my rejections

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Not too long ago, Ross Barkan posted a terrifying essay on his Substack, which I have read more than once through slitted fingers. It’s called “Pity the Short Story Writer.” The gist is that submitting short stories to literary magazines in the Year of our Lord 2025 is a loser’s game, both in that you will lose by being rejected and you will lose by throwing your work out into the void while you wait for months for a form rejection, if you are lucky. “The void, when you play the short story game, is what you get.” His point is that it’s no way to develop a career, to spend a life.1

Who on earth is submitting their short fiction to lit journals now? Well, I am. Though my diligence has certainly waxed and waned over the years, I have been semi-regularly sending out short fiction to journals, both print and online, for over twenty years. (My genius in the form is currently unrecognized.) I have no idea if this is a wise strategy, a foolish practice, a waste of my time and theirs (whoever they are), or really what I am even doing. I finished undergrad in 2000, my MFA in 2004, and though I started reading blogs right away, the winds of change that altered the aerodynamics of short form publishing in the past twenty-five years have been slow to ruffle my hair, if by “hair” we mean how I think about my work, and if by “think about” we really mean commit to one plan of action in an inspired burst on a Sunday only to completely recant into paralysis by Tuesday. Don’t even talk to me on Thursday. Although AI might indeed be able to replicate my prose style, I doubt it will ever be able to sufficiently duplicate my capacity for corrosive self-doubt.2

Anyway, I don’t read my rejection letters that closely anymore. The best rejection to my mind would be, “Thanks, but no thanks.” There are forms of rejections, forms within the forms. There is the slightly encouraging reject. The best one of these I ever got said, essentially, “Hey, I like this, but we don’t have room.” And it was on actual letterhead! More often they say, “we’d like to see something from you again.” One can dine out for months, nay years, on such oblique encouragement. 

But the one I got today was a real winner, a real punch in old dunlap. It read in part, “We’d like to thank you, sincerely, for giving us the opportunity to read your work. Though it doesn’t meet our needs at this time, we’re so thankful for it; now more than ever, the arts feel as necessary as they are fragile, and it’s up to each of us to keep them going.” 

Let’s take this one sentence at a time. “We’d like to thank you, sincerely, for giving us the opportunity to read your work.” I think it’s the “sincerely,” fenced off by commas, that grates so. “Like to thank” is linguistic phlegm. “I’d like to thank the Academy.” They’d “like to thank” me. Well I’d like to be 6’3” and drive a G Wagon, thanks. I’d like you to accept my novella.3 I’d like to quit paying three dollars to Submittable every time I want to send a story out. The world is full of actions I would like to do. The most direct way to say thank you is just to say it: “thank you, name, for doing X.” “I’d like to thank” is a performative thanks, a thanks with a smirk and a blink, eyeing for extra credit. Just because people say it in their award show acceptance speeches doesn’t mean you should say it, too. In fact, that’s the reason you shouldn’t say it.4

Now, were their previous expressions of gratitude for reading my work insincere? Do they really mean it now, since they’re saying “sincerely”? I hate cloying language. Do me the honor of directly telling me you don’t like me. Dump me to my face. 

The second half of the next sentence reads: “Now more than ever, the arts feel as necessary as they are fragile, and it’s up to each of us to keep them going.”

Really it’s this portion after the semi-colon that bothers me. Some people don’t like semi-colons; I myself don’t mind them. I do realize they are pretentious. As I’ve already confessed, I was technically an adult when 9/11 occurred so the phrase “now more than ever” has been filed in my memory as a reflex — a kind of moral gravitas mantra, uttered unto meaninglessness. Could “now more than ever” signify anything at this point aside from a Warholian series of Dick Cheney snarls? Do they really think that me writing stories is important now more than ever? Really? I mean, I think I’m moderately decent, but even this strains the elastic of my ego. Is this second sentence about He Who Will Go Unnamed? Look, I don’t like him either, but this makes me feel like we’re glass blowing or something. I don’t think literature is fragile. I just think it’s unread and unappreciated, because reading is harder than 99% of the other activities we could be doing. The period of mass literacy that lead to a mass literary culture seems to be a temporary accident of education and technology. 

“Necessary” here, like in other literary contexts, strikes me as one of those trendy gesture words or phrases, like “he understood the assignment,” or “so-and-so is doing the work.” They evoke adolescent-level in-group signaling. Are poems and short stories “necessary”? I mean, they’re great, but food and shelter they are not. Remember: poetry makes nothing happen, and thank God for it. We should quit pushing stories and poems through some kind of utilization review. Just let them be free to delight and instruct.

Also, I am not writing short stories to keep the arts going. I am doing it because it’s fun, and I’m good at it. It’s pleasurable on a deep intellectual level that’s somehow not entirely intellectual. I don’t want to get all woo woo on you, but it provides the pleasure of artistic craft, an iterative practice of exploratory variation, with the pleasure of discovery of meaning, the feeling of stumbling over what you yourself are going on about. Writing is an act of thinking, of a kind, that is then presented after the fact as a form of thought, like lava cooling. 

Should I just throw these stories up on Substack and pester my few subscribers? I think about it a lot, which means I change my mind about eight times a week. It’s exhausting. I have been trying to figure out my hesitancy in posting my stories online the same way I occasionally post these little grumbles. Part of it is that I want to be accepted. You submit. They accept. They reject. You re-submit. BDSM echoes, etc. I want to be chosen. I think I am good, but my belief in myself is flimsy, worth nothing, a currency in a failed country. I need those crisp dollars of approval from somewhere better, some new world. Look, all I want is an unending string of praise from strangers. Surely that will make me feel whole. 

Part of it is the context. Max Read wrote something interesting in his Substack when he talked about what makes successful writing on that platform different. He writes: “. . . while what I do resembles journalistic writing in the specific, the actual job is in most ways closer to that of a YouTuber or a streamer or even a hang-out-type podcaster than it is to that of most types of working journalist. (The one exception being: Weekly op-ed columnist.) What most successful Substacks offer to subscribers is less a series of discrete and self-supporting pieces of writing — or, for that matter, a specific and tightly delimited subject or concept — and more a particular attitude or perspective, a set of passions and interests, and even an ongoing process of ‘thinking through,’ to which subscribers are invited.”

This makes sense to me, as I listen to my favorite podcasts more for the voices of the hosts than any guests or topics. But what are short pieces of fiction if not discrete textual artifacts? They are by definition not me, not perpetuations of a single authorial persona.5 It’s difficult enough getting people to separate the fiction from the author without that fiction being surrounded by other bits of more directly personal essayish grumbling. We’re not Within the Context of No Context but rather in the Context of Too Much Context. Emily Gould had the right idea way back when she named her own website/blog “Emily Magazine.” Each site is a Marvel Cinematic Universe of one.

The final problem is one of audience. Outside of school, reading short stories is a minority pursuit. It ain’t where the fish are. I could probably post TikTok dances and get more viewers/readers than I could publishing short stories, and I’ve got a body built for radio. Why do I keep working in this form where there is so little audience and I have had so little success?6 Is it delusion? Compulsion? An inherent lack of creativity? Is my notion of “good writing” hopelessly narrow and stuck in 1994? Do I just not know what to do with myself otherwise? Am I lying to myself in that I haven’t actually been that diligent in my submitting and really what do I expect from such meager effort? These are questions both rhetorical and real. 

Maybe these blog posts are just failed short stories. 

1. Of course the word “career” has layers upon layers of implied scare-quotes around it. Perhaps a better way to say it is that it’s not a wise method, under current conditions, to publish a body of work. 

2. Just to be clear, I am not whining about being rejected. I expect to be rejected. I welcome being rejected. I just want to be rejected more swiftly and thoroughly and unambiguously. The whole endeavor of short story publication has a slight BDSM whiff about it. 

3. I know, I know, what did I expect? If there is any form more hopeless than a short story, it’s the novella. I will spare you any attempts to define the novella. Yes, I have always had a soft, hairy spot for the novella. I refer to it as my Jim Harrison Spot. I think poetry actually has a larger audience, because poetry still lives in mutant form, both high and low. You’ve got Hallmark cards, still. And what were Tweets but poems of rage? For a while there, the Tweet was the perfect poem because it was birthed from an actual technological constraint. And then once that fence was lifted, people kept the 140 character limit. The formal properties persisted! People actually like formal poetry. They just don’t like school.

4. Whoever writes those speeches for the celebrities should be banned from the profession for life. It’s like watching someone pat themselves on the back while giving themselves a hand job. 

5. Read also writes insightfully about self-publishing on the internet as a vector for shame. 

6. I acknowledge that this isn’t the best word here. Is it a form? A mode? A genre? What is a short story? Just a prose narrative subject to an artificial length constraint.

Author profiles are bunk

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There was a fascinating profile of writer Lauren Groff in last weekend’s New York Times, “How Lauren Groff, One of ‘Our Finest Living Writers,’ Does Her Work.” Groff is an excellent writer in the middle of an already distinguished career. Though I prefer her stories to her novels mostly for idiosyncratic personal reasons, she is on my mental list of people to always read. Even if it’s just a little bit of the latest novel, I will read some of it to see what she is up to now.

First, a tenet: profiles are a hoax. I realize that there are some profiles that are “good,” both good journalism and good writing, perceptive, useful, aesthetically pleasing, not completely dishonest and fraudulent. But most profiles are fraudulent. All celebrity profiles are fraudulent, and the New York Times profiles of writers are a specific breed of fraudulent. One could say there’s a long tradition of fraudulence with respect to this category at the New York Times. The fraudulence comes from the two-step conspiracy between profile writer (in this case journalist Elizabeth A. Harris) and profiled subject. You have a journalist desperate for a story, any kind of story, any kind of angle toward something interesting, combined with a writer who by necessity must spend the majority of his or her time inside, alone, listening to voices inside their head. Not the most fertile ground for interesting journalism. Combine this fraught set up with the need to do some myth maintenance. Who can forget David Foster Wallace asking Frank Bruni, “Do you have my saliva?” in that very same august publication? That profile also had Bruni going through Wallace’s medicine cabinet. On the one hand this seems like a creepy invasion of privacy. On the other, this seems like a desperate young journalist looking for anything they can find to hang a paragraph upon. (Upon reread, that old profile has a heroic amount of persona-building from both journalist and subject.)

That’s a long way of saying that profiles of writers are the softest of soft journalism and are usually filled with gargantuan mounds of self-aggrandizing BS, and the Groff profile does not disappoint. In fact, it might win a medal for the highest frequency of raised eyebrows from this humble reader. I realize that profiles like these are basically commercials for the writer and commercials for the sensitivity of the reporters. But even so, this one is an everlasting gobstopper of weirdness.1

“The outing was unusual for an author interview — and, given the pace of the hike, not an insignificant amount of exercise. Typically, these conversations take place over coffee or lunch, at a publisher’s office or maybe in a writer’s living room. But Groff had chosen something different: a five-mile hike through the woods and a swim in a pond, followed by a lunch of chickpea salad and a beet slaw with pistachio butter, all of which she made herself.” 

Where to even begin? What a disappointing lunch. Why would you do that to those poor pistachios? And she “made it herself”? What is this, the Ladies Home Journal from 1983? 

Groff knows exactly what she is doing, taking your lazy ass on a five-mile hike and swim. She’s giving you the Hook, which simultaneously frames her as a flattering combination of writer/athlete. It’s like something out of Veep. She’s not like these other writers, etc. She is not just accomplished and talented but also athletic and cool with her “goofy sense of humor” and she knows her way around the kitchen when necessary and above all seems like someone you would want to hang with, or barring that someone you would at least look up to. 

“A former college athlete who still runs, swims and plays tennis regularly, Groff, 45, has a physicality about her that is central to how she lives and writes.” We also learn that Groff’s sister was an Olympic triathlete, so the jock is strong with this one. One can only imagine how intensely competitive the holiday sessions of Pictionary are up in New Hampshire. 

“Groff and her family remain close. Though she lives in Gainesville, where Kallman (her husband) owns and operates off-campus housing for University of Florida students, she spends every summer in New Hampshire, close to where her sister and her brother live, and where her parents have a house.”

First thought: that’s a good job. Second thought: that’s an excellent job for the spouse of a writer. Solidly remunerative and filled with interesting stories. I can only imagine the horrors that greet her spouse daily as he deals with the living consequences of the standard male UF undergraduate. Just think what has been done to all that carpet. 

“When Groff starts something new, she writes it out longhand in large spiral notebooks. After she completes a first draft, she puts it in a banker’s box — and never reads it again. Then she’ll start the book over, still in longhand, working from memory. The idea is that this way, only the best, most vital bits survive.” 

Really, Lauren. Really?

“It’s not even the words on the page that accumulate, because I never look at them again, really, but the ideas and the characters start to take on gravity and density,” she says.

Her “really” is doing a lot of work in that quotation. Seems like the hardest way to climb that mountain but what do I know? 

“When Groff agreed to move to Florida 17 years ago, she did so conditionally. She’d relocate, she said, only if she could travel as needed — for writers’ retreats, for book tours — and if Kallman agreed to reassess periodically. There’s a physical contract stating those terms, signed by her and Kallman, somewhere in her files. The document also delineates some of their child care plans — an arrangement that allows her to wake up at 5 a.m. and disappear into her writing for hours, without having to manage the routine of getting two children fed and out the door.

“Groff and Kallman wake up together, they said, but the morning is not a time to chat.

“‘I get so mad at him if he tries to talk to me,’ Groff joked about her husband.”

Here’s where the profile goes from strange to fascinating. First, I bet the “getting mad at” is not actually a joke, no matter how jokingly described it was to the reporter. You don’t have to be Derrida to detect the undulating reservoirs of resentment at being drug down to north Florida to live out her adulthood, a compromise that in all likelihood also financially allows her to write full time. Now, I don’t know that for a fact. I don’t know how much money she makes from her writing. It is not my business and I don’t care. However, I am fascinated by “literary writers,” that is people who write novels and stories that attempt to be art, rather than say genre stuff or TV stuff, and how those people also make enough money to live. It’s the age-old double question: how do you pay the rent? And who takes care of the kids? 

To be clear, I don’t care who does what in any kind of gender-role sense. Please. Every family is its own island. A Dr. Moreau-like island, to be sure, but still an island. My hands are too full of grocery bags to throw stones. But one does want to know (per the headline) how the work gets done; one wants details. This profile has the depth of nail polish. Who packs the lunches? Etc.

Second, a good journalist would have asked to see that contract. This is the most provocative part of the profile.  She is a mother of two kids and doesn’t have to deal with getting them out to school every morning? I’m a middle-aged father of two kids and I can attest that getting people to school in the morning is a scene, a daily steeplechase of bad yogurt, missing laundry, and rolled-through stop signs. 

I wonder if she has hired help around the house. No judgment. Strictly a logistical financial curiosity. Is there a nanny figure? 

“‘I like the morning because it’s empty of people and ideas and you’re still sort of in a dream state until the caffeine kicks in. It’s the best time of day, for sure. It’s a very gentle time of day.’” 

It’s only a gentle time of day if you’ve got a contract saying that your husband will deal with all that crap so that you can write! It’s not a gentle time of day! It’s a nightmare time of the day! It’s like Wes Craven’s Busytown! If you think morning’s are calm, you’re either medicated or isolated or childless. Just think of the routine caffeine-doped gridlock on the interstate loop of a mid-sized US city. Those people are driving to work — fortunate enough to drive to work. It’s a lot of things but it ain’t gentle. 

“She estimates she reads about 300 books a year.” 

Don’t believe it. Sorry. And I’ve read press releases with a more developed sense of skepticism. 

“Her editor . . . said that Groff reread all of Shakespeare so she could write a version of The Vaster Wilds in iambic pentameter ‘just for fun,’ as a way for her to master Elizabethan rhythms.” 

Lauren, honey. Sweetie. You’ve got all morning. Every morning. Please don’t waste it on crap like this. Want to write 30 pages of iambic pentameter, 50 pages, okay fine. But the whole novel? Come now. 

Then, the reporter gets a quotation from Hernan Diaz, one of Groff’s friends who she provided a blurb for and who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. His bit that praises Groff is hyperbolic and cliched, overwritten and underthought (“to make the syntactical edifice as sound and capacious and beautiful as possible”) and shares many of the same problems outlined in my ranting against blurbs. First, Groff should not be spending the valuable remaining hours of her life writing blurbs. (She writes them in the afternoons when “Groff deals with the business of being an author.”) No one should be writing blurbs, but we can be hierarchical about it. If Obama wrote you a letter saying how much he dug your novel, you don’t have to write blurbs any more. They are beneath you. And you shouldn’t have to give logrolling quotations to publications about your writer friends either. Jesus. What are we doing here, people? 

Groff’s not any good at this either. In a Lorrie Moore profile from earlier this year (I know I know, stop reading them if they make you so mad) by Dan Kois, a writer who should know better, Gross says of Moore’s famous kid cancer short story, “It’s so complicated and brutal. . . . You feel her great reserve is gone, and she’s bearing down with all her might.”2

“Bearing down with all her might”? What is she cracking walnuts? I realize we can’t grade all of a writer’s language output with the same eye we might take to her novels, but level up a smidge.3 & 4

But back to the praise of Groff by Diaz. What else is he going to say? He’s certainly not going to say anything critical, but the larger disappointment is that he’s not going to say anything interesting. I’ve seen more hard hitting reportage from the CBS Sunday Morning Show, in segments about, like, birds. This is embarrassing just in terms of journalism. (Harris, pay attention, I am talking to you.) 

Well you’re just jealous, one might say. You’re goddamned right I’m jealous! Granted, I don’t know who the intended audience for these profiles is if it’s not mildly embittered, middle-aged failed novelists. But yes, I am jealous. I’m also jealous of Heidi Julavits’s life, as cataloged in both The Folded Clock and Directions to Myself.5 She summers in Maine! People, I live in Mississippi, the very seam of Satan’s jockstrap. Do you know how much I would give to summer in New Hampshire or Maine? I’d even take up hiking if necessary. When summer arrives I just do what I do during the entire rest of the year except a) the structure provided by school vanishes completely, and b) it’s so hot even the lizards are frightened.6

So yes, I am jealous, but not just of the success and the talent. I am envious of the relentlessness and the discipline and the ruthless vision. To have those oceans of time to focus on your writing. And to actually get it done. The profile is correct in its Hook. Groff does approach writing like an athlete: regular, intense training, and religious routine. Let’s do some math. She’s 45. She made this contract 17 years ago when she was 28. 2006. Her first novel, The Monsters of Templeton, came out in 2008. She already knew, before that book came out. Or what’s more likely, she had the faith. She had the belief in herself to say this is what I’m going to do and you’re going to help me. You’re going to deal with the kids. And I’m not going to have another job. It’s this confidence in one’s own abilities, this self-validation that impresses me. And then the follow-through, actually getting the work done. Making the time for yourself and then using that hard-won time. Think of the arguments. Think of the familial judgment. Think of the clucking that happens at their kids’ school. Think of the strain of having to hack out that path over twenty years and then having to maintain it. People are always talking about how books are “brave” and “necessary,” literary criticism made of styrofoam. But Groff actually did what was brave and necessary. You want to see actual bravery by a writer? That’s bravery. Saying I am good at this and I deserve this time, this freedom. 

All of which is to say that I suppose this profile works, because I do admire Lauren Groff, novelist. Props are due. 

  1. The most honest writer profile I have ever read was written by Boris Kachka, published in New York magazine, of novelist Claire Messud. It’s a collaboration in frankness.
  2. Kois, a sophisticated journalist for Slate and a novelist in his own right, has all the guile of Bambi in that profile. But then again, it’s Lorrie Moore!
  3. She does drop the valuable intel that Moore is “very, very good with [men],” which totally tracks. 
  4. The story, “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” was devastating when I read it as a 20-year-old childless idiot, and the story was devastating when I read it as a 30-year-old father of a baby, and now that I am a mid-40s parent of two teen-ish kids, you could not pay me enough money to reread that story. I can’t handle it. It’s like an emotional Gatling Gun. Just give me another 20 years to recover. Jesus. Leave me alone. 
  5. I know these footnotes are annoying, but I have a lot to say. In both Groff’s story collection Florida and in Julavits’s memoir Directions to Myself, there is much metaphoric soup made from tide pools and the young boys who play in them. There is a nature/nurture, maternal presence metaphor in both, and both lean into the idea that “my boy won’t be like that.” The that in this case is the predatory adult male, the bully, the chauvinist, the rapist, the assaulter, the vicious threatening male presence that we all know and love. There is much forced wishing and hoping going on in these passages. A mildly unnerving parallel thread of parental paranoia. 
  6. To have the financial and logistical wherewithal to summer in New Hampshire? To have the imagination to even begin to think of summering in New Hampshire? I didn’t even conceive that was something you could do until I was 40. Talk about a failure of imagination.