Hello,
My plan was to start this in the New Year when I had tied up my book edits and also because the New Year is a good time to start something. You’re drinking less, exercising more, feeling like it might really be time to turn your life around. It doesn’t usually work, but this year….
Well anyway, then everyone on Twitter was posting threads about how the site is ending and they got a lot of good things out of it but they’ll be glad to have a fully operational brain back, and I thought: Probably not true, seems like sort of thing that might be rectified by a different, less chaotic billionaire. But, then, at the same time, does also seem like the sort of thing that happens now.
Either way, it seemed like the right time to start this alternative means to share work.
This week I wrote about Joan Didion’s estate sale, and the value of substance in a world where everything feels cheap and fleeting, for The Guardian.
There are never enough words in these Guardian pieces to say everything I would like to about the thing I am writing about, but I like working that way. A friend recently said I have a tabloid sensibility. That’s very true. I want things to be fun to read, and funny, and enticing to people who wouldn’t usually read about a certain topic, as well as those who would. That’s what I hope for, and brevity is one route to this.
The downside is that many interesting digressions and expansions must be collapsed, so here I will talk a little more about one of them. (Really *a little* more. I didn’t intend to write something this week.)
There is a phenomenon I referred to briefly in the piece that I keep going back to in small ways in my writing: this tendency in the present moment for people (especially highly visible people) to advertise themselves as unfrivolous, as well as culturally and politically discerning. I call it “millennials of substance”. It’s not just millennials doing it, but I think millennials are the source.
I see it everywhere: vanity project essay collections about capitalism by figures who could as easily have written a juicy, glitzy memoir; the celebrity book stylist; the fact that a film like “Blonde” has to be all about trauma; the hurried missives issued by celebrities, and everyone else, whenever a geopolitical disaster happens; the fact that a film like Triangle of Sadness gets an 8 minute clap at Cannes from the precise demographic of people it was purportedly skewering; the number of influencers who have a podcast where they recommend books. The fact that there is now even a type of influencer who could basically be described as “high profile book stan”, who seems to exist just to recommend books. When did that start? Why is there now a job orientated around publicly liking books?
It’s not interesting or surprising that an influencer reads. But it is interesting that they feel the need to advertise and promote the fact they do so. And, to me, none of the screechingly obvious satire of Triangle of Sadness said as much about the way we live now as that 8 minute clap.
Sometime in the recent past, sitting apart from vapidness and performing the role of “someone who gets it” became important. I don’t think this is totally unique to now. But look back to the 00s and the heyday of, say, Paris Hilton and you see the vast tonal difference.
Social media is part of it, I think. Not knowing about things became, not just clueless, but also sort of negligent. Because, if you know about things, you can post about them, spread awareness and so on. And, if you don’t, well, you should educate yourself.
But I think there’s more in this to explore. I’ll keep circling around it.
Till next week.
Some Things I Liked Lately:
This profile of Bob Dylan when he was 23. I liked this bit.
“No.” Wilson shook his head. “With Dylan, you have to take what you can get.”
Out in the studio, Dylan, his slight form bent forward, was standing just outside the screen and listening to a playback through earphones. He began to take the earphones off during an instrumental passage, but then his voice came on, and he grinned and replaced them.
The engineer muttered again that he might get a better take if Dylan ran through the number once more.
“Forget it,” Wilson said. “You don’t think in terms of orthodox recording techniques when you’re dealing with Dylan. You have to learn to be as free on this side of the glass as he is out there.”
It got me thinking about how we define perfection in music production now. It’s all very slick, albums made up of the best and most varnished versions of thousands of takes. It’s almost the way science works, where research has to be repeatable in such a way that you get the same results. A different definition of perfection could be capturing a certain, unrepeatable energy. A laugh on a track. One wrong note. Something you can never quite make again.
I read this in a piece I am reluctant to share because I didn’t rate it overall. But this definition of forgiveness as it relates to an apology stuck with me:
Forgiveness, for Matthew Ichihashi Potts, is not an exchange, but a promise not to retaliate.
This essay on the film Aftersun, and the writer’s own experiences of an alcoholic parent by Jack King. I thought this dealt with the concept of forgiveness very subtly, without explicitly referencing it.
This album, which I have been listening to A LOT lately:
I have read a few brilliant proofs lately but I will write about them closer to their publication.
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