Category Archives: literary lint

Dear Aliens

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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.

Artistic publishing

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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

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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. 

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

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.

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

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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