In Europe, the camera and I were inseparable. I’d bought this Olympus OM-1D, a compact, fifty-year old tank of an SLR, only two weeks before we sold our house and got on a plane. It seemed “for” beautiful places. Desired places. Setting aside all theories on cameras as the American’s “job” while on vacation1, the idea of spending film abroad is a frictionless one: There are “things to see” in France and Italy and Portugal.

With 35mm, pictures cost money — around 94¢ per frame. In so-called flyover country, there is no ROI — no reason, the math argues, to carry around such a tactile object. This is what I’d felt since returning home in October2, and I went about my days, for a variety of reasons, in deep resentment of elsewheres.

Save for a long essay about the increasingly deadly domestic front in America’s “war on terror,” I haven’t had much to say in 2026. Nothing feels “worth it,” in our haggler’s idiom. The truth is that I’ve had to reinvent my life (again). In January, we finally found an apartment and took our stuff out of storage. I’ve since cobbled together a freelance and consulting income that hoovers up as much as sixty hours a week. My living space is brand new, bone white, underfurnished, a little sterile; and I don’t know if I mind — at least not yet. Seven months ago, I was tan and thin and very lonely, writing essays in a laughably unaffordable apartment in the bougiest part of Lisbon. Today, for the first time in two decades, I live in the suburbs. I’m someone who drives twenty-nine miles to an office, who eats too much Chinese food, who listens to podcasts3, who lifts weights once or twice a week, who cooks dinner for friends, and who reads for about three and a half minutes every evening before falling asleep. The situation is both blissful and dire; it feels like living in cellophane, shimmer and all.

To try to recalibrate, I reached for a favorite novel. In Light Years, Salter damns a minor character with ruthless efficiency: “His eyes were spent, they had nothing in them.” Later, after the couple at the center of the novel has divorced, Viri moves to Rome and meets another woman. What starts as romance — an architect, after all, here to devour the Eternal City, falling in love anew — soon “hardens to intractable life.” Living in Rome, Viri realizes, is not like living alongside the Hudson: “He stood beside [Lia] as she turned the key two, three, four times, driving the bolt ever deeper. There was also a key for downstairs, and two for the car. He remembered how once they had never locked anything except when they went to the city. He remembered the river, the dry lawns of autumn warmed by the sun.”

Among all the beauty in Italy, Viri too risks spending his eyes, depleting their capacity. Like the famous monuments that show up in tourist photographs, the idea of Rome occludes Viri’s view of it. He wants to see it, but can’t, which recalls or rhymes with something Lia tells him — in one of my favorite passages from the novel — about happiness:

But happiness is not so easy to find, is it? It’s very difficult to find. It’s like money. It comes only once. If you are lucky, it comes once, and the worst part is there’s nothing you can do. You can hope, you can search, anger, prayers. Nothing. How frightening to be without it, to wait for happiness, to be patient, to be ready, to have your face upturned and luminous like girls at communion. Yes, you are saying to yourself, me, me, I am ready.

One sunny, listless afternoon, my husband turned to look at me. His eye, normally what people call “liquid brown,” met the light and wagon-wheeled with color: splinters of mahogany, tatters of aspen leaf, emerald shards, sandstone flecks, the sullied marble of petrified wood. It was over in a second, of course — it’s too painful for anyone to be lit up so nakedly — but I couldn’t forget it. Later, I recalled Hervé Guibert’s intimation of what a photograph is: “an event of light.” The eye was waiting for me to see it, which gave me a strange, triangulating thought: I am justified in noticing this.

Part of what makes photography a surrealist enterprise is its democratization; there’s nothing elitist or aristocratic in a camera’s attention. In Image Control, I wrote about this in relation to Francesca Woodman’s photographs, in which objects,

human and not, get spilled on by light; a rectangle from a window stretches across the floor, bisecting warped and wrinkled leaves of wallpaper that have curled onto the floorboards. A little pane of glass intensifies the light upon Woodman’s fingers, visually slicing them at the knuckle. These objects, bodies included, remind us just how dramatically light can change a thing, how it bestows another side, another use, even another meaning. All objects are treated the same, given the same importance; all are worthy of, or deprived of, the gift of light.

If anything, objects of great, undisputed beauty — cathedrals and paintings, the art nouveau Metropolitain signs in Paris, crates of produce in French markets, the Palace at Sintra, St. Mark’s — can easily occlude or disrupt the event of light; instead of objects, they become subjects. They reframe the photograph as a document or as evidence, which is largely the imperialist project of Instagram: I was here, I saw this, I took this, it’s mine.

Let me tell you a secret about the most beautiful city in the world. Paris is wet. Even in summer it rains often, and the cobblestone streets and sidewalks funnel it, channel it, entrap it; it sits cupped there, handful after handful held out to you on every block. The Haussmann buildings sit shrunken in it, creased and off kilter. Light trembles at each diagonal corner; at night, the Place Pigalle is a black pool of incandescent eels. I have a hard time believing that Impressionism would have happened without all this water, not to mention the city’s long lineage of street photography. Puddles literally invite reflection, and in thousands of paintings and photographs we see Paris looking at itself, thinking about itself. It’s an intimate way of looking at a city, as if on every corner we catch it in this moment of self regard, and that is what makes Paris’s beauty feel so personal — as opposed to monumental. Like Salter’s girls at communion, its face is forever upturned, ready for light.

Since returning to the Midwest, I’ve had difficulty justifying anything I do — a utilitarian attitude it’s hard not to have when everything’s so sensible, so pragmatic, so minimal. Why take notes for another book? Why haul the paints and brushes out of storage? Why bring the camera to dinner? These things cost in ways I can’t account for. I’d internalized a lot of what people say about the Midwest: that it’s ugly, that it’s flat, that it’s boring, that nothing happens here, that it’s uncultured, that it’s utilitarian. And while all these things are true, they are not complete.

In February, I spent some time thinking about the next state over, at least as rendered in Glenway Wescott’s marvelous, unique, textured fiction. In October, Belt Publishing is reissuing Wescott’s 1927 collection of stories, Goodbye, Wisconsin (which you can preorder, and which will include my introductory essay — thank you to for the opportunity!). Wescott too fell in love with French food and French culture and French morals, but he also knew the Midwest’s beauty — a beauty that isn’t so much unsolicited but unsoliciting: “green, sumptuous, tedious, both rich and poor at once, with little sad houses and no night-life. What was odious in it was identical with what was dear.” The landscape here doesn’t want you to know it’s beautiful; you have to catch it in moments of surprise, which is perhaps an appropriately Protestant antipode to Paris, staring in its million little mirrors.

Wescott’s delicate brush reminded me of another Midwestern writer’s fastidious attention to detail, humming in this glimpse of a field alongside a highway in an industrial office park, that stereotypically hideous anywhere:

An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadows. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you.4

There’s something autonomous in this: not caring if anyone can see you, letting the light fall where it falls. It doesn’t ask for justification because it knows it’ll never get it. As with Gerald Murnane’s grasslands, there will never be a craze or a trend for selfie backdrops like these, for images of furrowed fields and aluminum pole barns and old willows brushing their fingers in a creek gone foamy with runoff.

And this disregard is why you take the camera.

Like a storm sweeping in, you never know, here in the Midwest, when you’ll witness an event of light. This is not frivolous. Instead, it’s the most elemental preparation a photographer or a painter or a poet or a writer can make. The only justification is that you want to be ready to see. You want to train yourself to be ready to see. This is the eye people talk about when they say one “has an eye” — wandering, capacious, patient, ravenous; all when everyone says there’s nothing to see.

Thank you for reading. I know it’s been a while, but with this new stability I’m finally approaching something like a rhythm and a schedule. As always, please don’t hesitate to check out my books, if you feel so inclined, or support my work with a paid subscription. But really I’m just grateful to have you here.

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I say coin as if it were currency, but it’s not from the same mint as “say her name” or “abolish ICE,” which is to say it’s not the kind of slogan you bleat whenever a cop murders a human being or the paramilitary arrests another kindergartener. The latter invite a specific situation into a general pattern, a way to sandblast the complex and individual for mass appeal — that is, mass consumption. The slogan’s purpose, in reducing complexity, is to solicit action; everyone knows how to spend a dollar.

But Sharif, instead of blurring or airbrushing meaning, calls to enhance it. In “Safe House,” for instance, she reconstructs a memory of home around words found in the United States Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, all beginning with S:

My father is not afraid of

SEDITION. He can

SEIZE a wild pigeon of a Santa Monica Street or watch

SEIZURES unfold in his sister’s bedroom — the FBI storming through. He
said use wood sticks to hold up your protest signs then use them in

SELF-DEFENSE when the horses come, his eyes

SENSITIVE when he passes advice to me, like I’m his

SEQUEL, like we’re all a

SERIAL caught on Iranian satellite TV.

Sharif’s reassignment (or reclamation) of context reveals the uncanniness of these terms when deployed (let’s say) in imperialistic usage. Not only does she re-situate them among their more familiar connotations, but in casting them in a domestic scene she corrects their denotations — as if to ward off an invasion or occupation of everyday language.

She gives a counterexample in the notes at the end of her collection. Comparing different versions of the military dictionary, she observes how “the term ‘drone’ appeared in the 2007 version, but no longer appears in the 2015 version. It is likely ‘drone’ was removed from the dictionary since understanding of the term has fully entered English vernacular; in other words, the military definition is no longer a supplement to the English language, but the English language itself.” The absence of “drone” in a specialized dictionary meant to help the casual reader understand military context represents a kind of ceded or uncontested ground, another taken acre settled and lost.

If there’s one word whose accretion of connotations have overburdened it with real-world consequences in this century, it is terrorism. No other “thing,” in Sharif’s lexicon, comes close in the extent of its misuse, its mis-calling. Certainly no other word carries its death count. The majority of Americans got their first genuine taste of this, I think — despite a quarter century of abusing the word since September 11, 2001 — when the president and his henchmen labeled Renée Good a “terrorist” prior to any investigation. I’d say they reached for the word before watching the footage of her murder, but that affords them too much credit; they knew ICE would eventually murder an American citizen — in fact one has to assume they wanted this to happen — and they’d already loaded “terrorist” into their press cannon and fired it gleefully, the first chance they got. When they did it again, after Alex Pretti’s murder just over two weeks later, the intent was obvious: In the United States, any attempt to surveil or hold abuse of power to account was now terrorist activity.

This is of course a logical extrapolation of Trump’s policy. After labeling “antifa” a domestic terrorist organization last summer, no one should be shocked to see “terrorism” applied to general protest and dissent — or even to scrutiny, as his sanctioning of ICC judges has revealed.

Last month, the Guardian profiled Kimberly Prost, who for years “has sat as a judge at the international criminal court, weighing accusations of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity,” but who is now “on the same list as terrorists and those involved in organised crime.” American corporations doing business with Prost are subject to criminal prosecution; which means she has lost access to her credit cards, her Google and Amazon accounts, her bank, and countless other services. And she is not an anomaly: “Since Trump returned to power last year, his administration has worked steadily to hobble the Hague-based court. To date, 11 of the court’s officials — including the chief prosecutor and eight judges — have been placed under sanctions, subjecting them to measures that include bans on travel to the US and fines and prison sentences for American companies who provide them services.”

The sanctions arose from an executive order after the ICC had opened investigations into Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Generally, the court has been ineffectual in its efforts to punish wealthy nations for human rights abuses or war crimes, which is to say the court carries no real threat for the world’s deadliest autocrats. But for Trump to sanction the judges personally indicates that to suggest the mere possibility of holding violence to account is now beyond the bounds of acceptability. Like many other civil liberties rescinded since 2001, it is no longer a freedom America can take for granted.

With Trump’s return to the White House, the Republican Party has adopted a remarkably degrading vocabulary not only for “radical leftists,” but for anyone who didn’t vote for them. And they certainly tried after Good’s death, and again after Pretti’s, to label these protestors who lost their lives as deranged or violent, as “victim[s] of left-wing ideology.” What’s remarkable is that it didn’t work. It was, however, a kind of test or experiment — to gauge just how dehumanized protestors had become, in the eye of the rightwing spectator. And I don’t think it will be the last. To associate protest, dissent, criticism, and resistance with terror — an “illegitimate” political activity — is to discredit any political opposition to the Trump regime as violent and extremist. It is to bring the War on Terror home and adopt its tactics domestically, all to maintain one-party rule.

The next big step, of course, is to label the entire Democratic Party and anyone associated with it as a terrorist sect — and I suspect he’ll try it before November.

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The Vulnerable Part

Some years are larger than others. In 2024, I published a novel and did the usual writer-with-a-new-novel things. I even earned out for the first time, and had a profile in the LA Times. But in 2025, I blew up my life altogether.

After living in one place for twelve-and-a-half years, we sold our house and most of our furniture, put fifty-five boxes of books in storage, gave away thirty-some plants, and got on a plane to Paris. My novel came out in paperback and, somehow, I signed copies at Smith & Son and Shakespeare and Company. I saw Cézannes at the d’Orsay. We went to Dijon, Lyon, Les Causses, Toulouse, Villefranche-sur-Mer, Nice, and finally Marseille. I read Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse on a nude beach near Eze and road a fucking bicycle through a vineyard in the Bourgogne. I took Ripley Underwater to San Remo, Italy — the town where Dickie Greenleaf takes his last boat ride. I finished William Maxwell’s The Château at an actual château, dropped in a canyon in the mountains of southern France. In Marseille, when I wasn’t sneaking out for €2 Pastis, I hid in an apartment across the street from Saint Charles, where I began rewriting a novel that’d been torturing me for years.

After six weeks in France, we got on a plane and went to Lisbon, where we had an apartment lined up for a visa we were still waiting for, and began living — or a kind of living. We joined a gym. We went grocery shopping. I wrote a handful of essays. We strolled through parks. We slunk through the bureaucratic maze of applying for a Navegante card, which allows you to get anywhere in the metro for only €40/month. We met some neighbors and joined them for drinks. A close friend invited me to Venice for her fiftieth birthday, so we went to Venice. We went to Venice. We visited the Peggy Guggenheim collection, which is second only to MoMA in its riches of American painters. We saw Titians and Tintorettos. I visited a monastery, all by itself on some island, and saw Lord Byron’s bedroom.

But back in Lisbon, the visa never came. We ran out of time. We packed up our things and got on a plane and returned to the United States, where I was so desperate for smalltalk I chatted with TSA agents and bartenders at Newark airport.

Thankfully, I had a writing residency lined up — generously offered to me early in the year — and ended up at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, on the Oregon coast. I essentially lived here, since I had nowhere else to live, and in two weeks I finished rewriting that cursed novel after thirteen years of carrying it around like a block of lead. When it was over, I returned to Minnesota.

Now I’m living in a family member’s basement, an hour outside of the city I thought I’d left. I sold my home and left a terrible situation to try to remember who I was, what I cared about; but, after all those months of living in a fantasy, hemorrhaging money and thinking it would get me somewhere, I feel mutilated. I still get emails from people who congratulate me on my move to Paris or to Lisbon or the south of France, wherever they imagine I am; and meanwhile, on our way to the gym, I read the bible verses the local Chevy dealership off Highway 10 shares on its billboard in between sales offers. Nothing prepares you for this kind of whiplash. Everything after this moment is blank.1

The Literary Part

Books, though — for when you can’t look at paintings or sit in real restaurants. It was another year of rereading, starting with a return to the second volume of Sontag’s journals (which I wrote a little about here). I picked up Denis Johnson’s Largesse of the Sea Maiden for the third or fourth time — and was astonished for the third or fourth time. I did my annual reread of The Waste Land, which I wrote about in April; and to note its hundredth anniversary I talked about my reread of The Great Gatsby with . I reread Nabokov’s absolutely insane novel, Ada, or Ardor, for the first time in nearly twenty years; it might be part of what gave me permission to finish the ridiculous novel I was working on, since the ideal (and maybe only) reader for Ada is clearly Vladimir Nabokov. When Martin Amis died, I cracked open The War Against Cliché, which is maybe the best book of literary criticism ever put together (and which I wrote about here). While I made coffee every morning, I reread all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and while puffing on Gauloises at a French dive I reread Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems and Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony & God. On my return to the United States, I returned to Wilde’s De Profundis, which I hadn’t revisited since my own trip through the abyss two decades ago.

I continued on my DeLillo adventure (I was embarrassingly late to the greatest living American novelist) with his debut, Americana, which — like Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine — made me feel like there should be another word for when a legit genius publishes a first novel. As though preparing myself for other cities, I read Lesley Chamberlain’s Nietzsche in Turin and Enrique Vila-Matas’ Never Any End to Paris. I read James Purdy’s Narrow Rooms, which, along with the Basilica in Lyon, outed me as an agnostic catholic. Thanks to , I read Tezer Özlü’s Cold Nights of Childhood and Journey to the Edge of Life; the latter was one of my favorites of the year. I read all of Denis Johnson’s poetry, which is surprisingly hit and miss, as well as all of George Oppen and Wisława Szymborska. I spent time in Diane Arbus’s hideous mind with Arthur Lubow’s wonderful biography, as well as Elizabeth Hardwick’s wonderful mind with Cathy Curtis’s just-okay A Splendid Intelligence. Speaking of intelligence, I finally got around to Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which was stunning, as well as Alfred Kazin’s On Native Grounds. It turns out I’m a sucker for intellectual history. After it sat around for a decade and a half on my shelves, I finally picked up Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, and about fell over when he makes the claim that Emma dies because she’s a bad reader. In a bathtub, I luxuriated in Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room is Empty, and have photos to prove it. Don’t ask.

For the first time, I read Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned, which is about a hundred pages too long and definitely a minor work. I exhausted myself with Thomas McGuane’s The Bushwhacked Piano, which should’ve received a coauthor credit from Cocaine. As much as I love Joy Williams, my encounter — at long last — with The Changeling was a disappointing one; it’s just long enough to run out of dazzle, and beyond the dazzle and the alien there isn’t much. In Venice, I picked up Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees, which I began reading on my way back from Oregon, and all I’ll say is that there’s bad, self-parodic Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea) and then there’s atrocious, can’t-write-his-way-out-of-a-tumbler Hemingway. Later, I picked up Saul D. Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals, which has an astounding, almost clairvoyant prologue, followed by a hundred-and-some pages of nonsense.

On the plane to Paris (and in several other places) I tried Madame Bovary en français but it was far beyond my abilities, so I gave it up for Sagan (see above). On a rocky beach near Niolon, an hour outside Marseille, I read Gertrude Stein’s Paris France, and it’s impossible to imagine A Movable Feast even existing without it. At a terrace table across from the Basilique Saint-Sernin in Toulouse, I read Sue Roe’s In Montparnasse, a tepid but enjoyable history of early surrealism. Between the Lisbon metro and a handful of beaches, I read Adam Zagajewski’s Slight Exaggerations, Zena Hitz’s Lost in Thought, and, one of my favorites of the year, Philip Glass’s Words Without Music — a name– and jaw-dropping memoir I’m surprised more people don’t include on those “New York was so great” reading lists we always see. I was also working through my first book in Portuguese — a collection of essays about the Portuguese temperament by José Gil — but only made it about thirty or forty pages before our clock ran out, and aside from a few emails I haven’t read or written in Portuguese since. Back home, I finally finished The Mill on the Floss, which I’d picked up in the little bookstore literally around the corner from our apartment off the Avenida Mârques de Tomar. And most recently, in preparation for a surprise project, I finished Jerry Rosco’s Glenway Wescott Personally.

Not including some wonderful manuscripts (a record year! thank you, clients <3), I also read a fair amount of new and newish books, including some new translations or reissues:

Katie Kitamura, Audition

Ever since Gone to the Forest, which I picked up on a Teju Cole recommendation, I’ve relished the spookiness in Kitamura’s singular novels. While not my favorite, Audition is maybe her most uncanny and uncomfortable, pushing the form itself to debatable limits.

Ada Calhoun, Crush

In this romp, a husband accidentally ruins his marriage by telling his wife how hot it would be if she kissed another man. Throughout, I kept thinking this is what a Jane Austen novel would be if she’d read Benjamin and Barthes — and it turns out to be a true delight.

Hal Ebbot, Among Friends

In this little-discussed debut, two childhood friends bring their families together for a long weekend, leading to a terrible betrayal that they waspishly refuse to acknowledge. It’s beautifully written, but impossible to imagine without James Salter, and its refusal to pinpoint any version of technology (we have the vague “car,” and “phone”; there are newspapers, of course, and airplanes) makes the setting almost disingenuously “anytime,” even though the aforementioned betrayal has very different connotations depending on the decade. Throughout, I kept wondering if you could really get away with writing what amounts to midcentury drag, and I’m still not sure I’ve answered myself.

Ayşegül Savaş, The Anthropologists

A couple that can no longer get away with calling themselves young must decide whether to settle (a.k.a. purchase an apartment) in their unnamed adoptive city that is certainly Paris. I don’t know how she does it, but Savaş takes this simple tale and turns it into a magnetic portrait of loneliness abroad and the nature of home.

Matteo Bianchi, The Life of Those Left Behind (trans. Michael F. Moore)

It was fine.

Isa Arsén, The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf

Another undersung sophomore novel that deserves a lot more love, Arsén’s beautiful, Fitzgeraldian novel about talent, independence, and friendship is marvelously written and often very funny.

Andrew Porter, The Imagined Life

As a kind of unsolvable anti-mystery, openly taking its obscurant cues from Antonioni’s L’Avventura, Porter’s novel is a solid portrait of a grieving mind, though I don’t really buy all the Fleetwood Mac stuff, no matter how much I love Fleetwood Mac. But in its treatment of a friendship between two middle-school boys, it’s a kind of contemporary Separate Peace, and one of the tenderest novels I’ve read in years.

David Wojnarowicz, Memories that Smell Like Gasoline

In a beautiful rerelease from Nightboat Books, Gasoline is another invigorating line of Wojnarowicz’s impeccable style and intensity for anyone in need of a new bump, but it deserved a much more thoughtful and relevant foreword.

Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book 1 (trans. Barbara J. Haveland)

Balle’s take on the time loop is at least a little fresh, and I mostly enjoyed reading it, but once it was over I saw absolutely no reason to continue with subsequent volumes.

Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (trans. Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp)

Sometimes you can only admire the fierce and confident beliefs of early twentieth century artists, despite their naïveté and error. Still, Kandinsky excels at reminding artists just what’s at stake in what they create, and what they owe a polysemic version of human consciousness fragmented by Modernism.

Mathias Énard, The Deserters (trans. Charlotte Mandell)

A minor and forgettable novel from one of the world’s greatest writers of fiction.

Elias Canetti, The Book Against Death (trans. Peter Filkins)

You can only read the word “death” so many times before it starts to sound like a guy lying around in a gutter asking for change, but as with any experience with Canetti the fragments of brilliance are nonetheless worth it.

, The Ten Year Affair

A novel so good I had to write about it at length, Somers takes one of the most banal fantasies not only in literature, but in all of humankind, and reinvents it. As a bonus, it’s also one of the funniest books I’ve read in years.

Sally Mann, Art Work

Despite the “hoist up your trousers and get to work” attitude, Mann’s memoir is an enjoyable “how I did it” about her artistic career, with one insane chapter in the middle involving a trailer and the most horrific tenants I’ve ever encountered in a book. If you’re looking for a way to procrastinate and underline stuff like “Work hard,” a great read.

That’s it. Thank you for reading. I wish you all luck, safety, and happiness in the new year.

The previous century belonged to Anna stories — Cheever, Updike, and Salter are the most obvious examples — but our own is an Emma era: Franzen’s Joey Berglund digging through his own shit to retrieve a wedding ring; or, more recently, Ada Calhoun’s Crush, in which a husband’s forthright “wouldn’t it be hot if you kissed other men” unwittingly unravels their marriage.

Both Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary are about fantasy: a secure but listless wife seeks a more passionate, fulfilling life, and she does so — as Nabokov points out specifically in regard to Emma — by “clinging to conventional ideas or committing this or that conventional violation of the conventional, adultery being a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.” In Anna novels, that conventionality is exalted. Salter’s Light Years is probably the most beautiful, moving, and humorless novel written about conventional people undoing their marriage with conventional transgressions; their mediocrity, showered with precious attention, is reverential, even sacred. Transgression is here an education; it is these characters’ acts which ruin them, and that ruination then solicits wisdom. But in Emma novels, conventionality is a joke — the author winking at the reader.1 That wink can be superior or nihilistic, but rarely is it compassionate. Flaubert’s genius was to combine scorn and compassion. Real life, he intimates, isn’t so sublime as all those novels and romances would have Emma Bovary believe. In fact, life is entirely undignified — and that is its tragedy.

In the Emma novel, acts are superfluous; it is a character’s thoughts that destroy them. In this, Emma novels are almost academically comic: experience teaches their heroes and heroines nothing. This is what I tend to anticipate when approaching any kind of contemporary fiction that depicts or subverts conventional transgressions. But in reading ’ The Ten Year Affair, I was delighted to have this anticipation knocked aside. Neither an Emma nor an Anna novel, The Ten Year Affair is a temperance and synthesis of both — and in truth not about an affair at all, or even a marriage, so much as about fantasy itself, and how to live with fantasy untragically in an undignified, if not outright humiliating, world.

In brief, The Ten Year Affair is about Cora’s ten year affair with Sam. Seven of those years are imagined and three are real — which is more of a legal distinction than it is of any moral importance. They meet at a “baby group” when both are on parental leave. Sam is married to Jules and Cora is married to Eliot, who insists that she spend time with Sam; she needs a friend, he reasons. Hanging out becomes, in her mind, having a drink — “She didn’t know why she’d said it; she and Sam hadn’t discussed it” — and Eliot teases her: “Get hammered at noon if you want. It’s fine.” She protests: “I’m not going to get hammered. I’m going to have one drink.” It doesn’t bother him, he insists: “Do what you want.”

It’s this “do what you want” that becomes, in a way, the invitation for Cora to imagine another life altogether — the same kindling Alice provides in Eyes Wide Shut when she describes her fantasy to Bill, who then sets out to fulfill a fantasy of his own. So they do go out for a drink, Cora and Sam, and that drink gets sloppy as she leans in to whisper something:

They stayed like that for a second, a couple inches apart. His face smelled like hops and the cinnamon of his toothpicks. It seemed like they were going to kiss, but no, that couldn’t be, could it? Then they did kiss, quickly, spontaneously, almost like a joke. He briefly bit her lower lip. They sat back and looked at each other. She found herself out of breath. There was a moment of mute surprise: they had not meant to do it.

Cora suggests they fuck, just to get it out of their system, but Sam declines — which she finds wise: “It would not be good for their families, she admitted. It was not the right thing to do by any standard you might introduce. She didn’t consider herself a cheater; she hadn’t done it in the past. To begin thinking of herself this way would represent a big shift.” And it’s this shift that opens a portal to a parallel timeline in which Cora is having an affair with Sam, a timeline that unfolds in her mind alongside her real life:

The affair was there now. It was between them. Somewhere in the multiverse their alternates checked into a hotel room where the afternoon light came in at a slant and hit a champagne bucket just so. It was a cliché, but wild and enjoyable because it was happening to them, this mythic thing they’d heard about, this thing in quotes: ‘an affair.’

This, as Somers told , was an intentional choice from the beginning — using this imagined affair as another way to say Cora thought: “The way I conceptualized the second timeline was as an extension of Cora’s interiority. So whereas in a book with a more typical structure, you might have a long section of reflection, in this novel, that’s where we jump to the other world. The reflection takes place in the form of prolonged fantasy and we learn what she is thinking and feeling through what she wishes she was doing instead.” Part of the novel’s joke is that an “affair” is old-fashioned, even unnecessary — “like a cigarette or an adman or a chaise lounge,” which invites the novel to play with this anachronism structurally. It’s this retro appeal that helps build Cora’s fantasy alongside her reality, which Somers often entwines in the same paragraph, rooting around through all the clichés of adulterous novels and films:

Cora sat in a mind-numbing meeting as she met Sam in a darkened steakhouse. She made a suggestion about SEO while they each drank an ice-cold martini. There was coffee in the meeting at least, a big bitter carafe of it, and she refilled her cup as she reached for his cock under the table. Sam brushed back her hair from her ear, whispered something, and her boss rapped his knuckles on the conference table.

Finally, after seven years, Cora and Sam fuck at a party. The scene isn’t sexy so much as sad, but not in the pathetic way many contemporary sex scenes are sad — sex as abject failure, sex as rolling around in shame like a pig in shit.2 Instead, Somers conjures the genuine, inevitable sadness of living your life — the exact sadness that invites someone to ask, at forty, what’s this body for if not for using while I still have the chance to use it:

They had met in early parenthood and their older children were now preteens. In that time, restaurants had opened and closed. The overpriced children’s clothing store had been turned into a florist’s shop, then back into an overpriced children’s clothing store. Lines had appeared around her eyes and on either side of her mouth. Time softened you, but it also made things more urgent. They would really and truly die one day, Eliot had said. Cora and Sam sat on the bed. The years pressed down.

Suddenly, the timelines switch. With the affair now a reality, a legal transgression, it is the mundane everyday world of marriage that becomes Cora’s fantasy:

In the one you might call reality, she was now having an affair with Sam. In the other, technically fictional, she was a happily married woman, had never strayed, had never betrayed the vows […] So she ate with Eliot in a nice restaurant while she and Sam whispered on the phone. He tore the dress off her body as she picked Eliot up from the train station. She and Sam showered together, which became sex, and Eliot wondered aloud if he should resubscribe to the New York Times or let it lapse because it had become a little expensive, hadn’t it?

In this new imaginary timeline, Cora takes a trip to France with Eliot, where Eliot suggests another child. What about my body? Cora wonders. They meet an older woman in a bar — this is still Cora’s fantasy — who tells Cora that her body is going to a grave anyway, to a landfill. “You might as well wreck it,” this imaginary woman tells her. As long as you’re married, she says, “You’ll never be free. Relinquish hope of freedom.” In a lesser novel, this would be Cora’s anachronistic tragedy, the guilt over her transgression teaching her to sacrifice her desire for the stability of her marriage — to give up, in a phrase, on her dreams. Instead, Cora just invents new domestic dreams while she navigates the tedious and humiliating clichés of actually cheating on your actual husband: meeting up in cars and seedy locales, the casual disdain in jokes from your friends who certainly know, and having your lover scoff at you for reading Henry James, of all authors, “at the sex hotel.” I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say that Cora and Sam approach their affair as though in living in two very different novels, and Sam is greatly impoverished by his lack of imagination — or perhaps his overabundance of it, depending on how you look at it.

Literature of infidelity is fantasy literature. I include films here too: Eyes Wide Shut is, again, a wonderful example (and a Christmas movie, if you’re feeling festive), in which the thought of sexual transgression becomes as powerful as the transgression itself. Even more extreme is Godard’s Le Mépris, where it isn’t quite fantasy but a moment of paranoia that undoes a marriage, and with lethal results. Literature aside, a real-life affair is categorically born of fantasy: that sex with this other person will be more exciting, more fulfilling, and more rewarding than sex with your partner; and the problem with affairs is that, when the fantasy does become reality, all those suspicions are initially correct: it really is better sex. But only initially. That reward of hot sex quickly lapses into liability, even ruin. Again, in Anna novels, the affair offers a tragic wisdom; but in Emma novels the affair offers no lessons at all, inviting instead a fugue of mistakes. In one, the tragedy is knowledge; in the other, it’s ignorance.

The genius of The Ten Year Affair is that Cora’s fantasy teaches her not about marriage or fidelity but about fantasy itself. Another way to say this is that Cora’s affair, both in its imagined and real incarnations, teaches her the importance of having an inner life, or what she calls “the persistent other world, which could not be exploded, or denied, or satisfied. Which slid away when you thought you had it in your hand.” Somers has been up front about this: “I think that our inner worlds are as real and as sacred as our real lives,” she told Elle earlier this year. “I think it’s that important, what’s going on in one’s mind, and we should protect it at all costs.”

At one point, when Cora pushes Sam out of her life, she offers herself “a radical thought: to reside in a single time line. To do only what she was doing and not a second activity as well. To respect the laws of time and space.” Obviously this does not work because the human brain has no respect for the laws of time and space. Without this specific disrespect, culture — and not only the usual suspects like art and literature, but so too the more elemental structures like language and mathematics — would not exist. A bird gathering worms to barf into her chicks’ beaks respects the laws of time and space; a human mother asking herself how to raise a human daughter in the twenty-first century can only hold time and space in contempt.

On the day of the party at which Cora and Sam make the imagined affair a reality, Cora notices how “the neighborhood smelled like other people’s fireplaces” — a one-off example of Somers’ precise talent in conjuring the longing one feels for another life, another house. It reminded me of trick-or-treating as a kid, those brief glances in other people’s living rooms, the wonderful lives they must have.3 This banal fantasy seems one of the fundamental conditions of life — and not contemporary life, but human life. It’s why people spend hours on Zillow looking at houses they can’t afford. The house, more than any other medium, is the vector of mundane fantasy — it’s where we would arrange our ideal lives if given the freedom to do so. The smell of someone else’s fire is an invitation to imagine someone else’s house, and how that house, if it was yours, could solve all your problems.

But that kind of thinking is naïve — and even Cora knows it’s naïve. The Sam she imagines is not pornographically perfect; and the first time she imagines him sending a nude, she scripts a croc into the background to puncture her own fantasy with absurdity. In this way, it’s almost as though Cora herself is writing the Emma novel we’ve come to expect from twenty-first century fiction of infidelity — she is both author and reader of this romance-for-one, and she winks at herself as she subjects her fictional alter ego to minor humiliations. It’s these details that underscore Cora’s wisdom; even she knows that it isn’t her best friend’s cock she’s craving, per se, but some way to feel creative or in control of her life among all its demands.

At one point, in the real timeline, Sam confronts her over her daughter’s treatment of his son, and Cora is offended — not by the confrontation itself, but by how boring it is: “The social lives of children: sorry, but who cared?” Repeatedly, Somers employs this kind of humor (it’s one of the funniest novels I’ve read in years) to deflate not only Cora but everyone in the novel. Sam, when she meets him, is “the chief storytelling officer at a start-up that wanted to disrupt mortgages.”4 At a restaurant together, trying to conjure a clandestine tryst, the waiter interrupts them “to explain the restaurant’s modus operandi. This took ten minutes […] Every restaurant these days explained the concept of a restaurant to you.” Even Sam’s wife, Jules, is scorned by her own here-and-gone affair: the man she cheats on her husband with quickly abandons her for a twenty-five-year-old: “There was nothing to do about men liking younger women […] Everyone was aging and a lot of people were frightened by that, and returned to the fountain, drank greedily, made fools of themselves.”

Over and over, simply showing up to life every day is the ultimate humiliation: “The world could not recognize gravitas. Every serious exchange was undermined by its particulars.” Not only is there no grand romance, there is scarcely an element of control — you just have to hang on and do your best to pretend that what’s happening to you, as you age, wouldn’t happen if circumstances were slightly different. It’s like what Canetti says of love: what you are truly asking of another, when you love them, is to never die. What we ask of ourselves, when we imagine our perfect life in our perfect living room and its perfect fireplace, is to never age — or really, to never suffer.

Somers gives Cora a lot of power in that she resists the narrative pitfalls that typically befall the adulterous wife. Ultimately, it isn’t Sam’s adolescent behavior or cowardice that undermines her control, nor any kind of communal element of shame and suspicion, but her husband Eliot’s opacity. The person closest to her is the one she finds most difficult to rewrite, as fiction:

Eliot had fallen asleep already. His ability to fall asleep quickly was uncanny. It gave the impression of a clean conscience, like a puppy or a child. But of course everyone had regrets. Things ate at him, probably. Remarks he’d made that still bothered him. Choices from the deep past he relived over and over. It was difficult, but one had to try to imagine an inner life for one’s husband.

The sneaky thing about husbands is that they’re always around, which means that they’ve watched you for years; they’ve paid you painstaking attention; they know your habits and your tics, your tastes and your aversions. They know what you won’t eat, as well as what you’ll eat when no one’s watching. What makes husbands impossible to imagine is precisely this wealth of knowledge — their knowledge about you. More than anyone, they have the definitive account of how you lived, but they still lack your secrets; just as “one ha[s] to try to imagine an inner life” for them, they know nothing of your own inner life. And that is maybe the hardest thing to accept, to have been watched and studied so closely and to still be so half known. But that doesn’t mean you have to get rid of him: “It was so nice, so good, to have sex with the person you were supposed to have sex with. Why had no one ever thought of this? He was right there. In many cases, he lived in your own home.” Sometimes his is the only reality you want, the one welcome stick in the spokes of the life you thought you could control: your husband is the one person who can still surprise you because he shows you just how much you can still surprise yourself.

Thank you for reading, and sorry for the long silence. I’m barely alive right now but hanging in there. In the meantime, if you enjoyed reading, please consider a paid subscription, or at least telling your friends. And if you know anyone looking for manuscript consultation or some copy work, please don’t hesitate to put us in touch. Thank you!

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I saw Peter Hujar’s Day as part of the Queer Lisboa film festival, back in September — a double feature that also included Harry Lighton’s goofy (and much more entertaining) BDSM romance, Pillion. Leaving the theater for a break in between the films, I overheard someone call Hujar “a practical joke” — on the audience, he meant. And while I enjoyed it — doing the DiCaprio point whenever Hujar referenced someone like Max Kozloff or Chris Makos — I did wonder if, from this homosexual’s perspective, it wasn’t indeed a practical joke. Why, after all, would anyone who wasn’t a writer or artist or otherwise creative individual have anything to do with a film like Peter Hujar’s Day? I’ve wondered the same about Sally Mann’s new and much-discussed Art Work. People love it, of course, but so far “people” means a specific type of person. Thinking of it this way, I wonder if Peter Hujar’s Day is a “film” at all, or if it’s more of a dramatized “Art of the Camera” interview. I did, after all, leave the theater with the same kind of energy I feel reading an issue of the Paris Review in the bathtub: witnessing an artist at work and feeling an aspiration toward solidarity. Another way to say this is that I left the encounter wanting to understand the artist’s struggle because I too want to be an artist. And if you don’t want to be an artist, well, what a boring joke it must be.

An interview is a special interaction. Its format invites more spontaneity than the notebook or the letter, those other private glimpses into the creative life. But while notebooks and letters, however candid, always carry a kind of intent — an eye toward completion, toward a whole — the interview is a car the artist isn’t driving. They admit or realize things they might have edited out in a more purposeful format, which lends these conversations a certain honesty and vulnerability, or even credibility, but deprives them of stylistic control. It’s this looseness, I think, that solicits such memorable responses, and even helps the artists themselves reach minor epiphanies during the conversation.

Because I’m a writer, most of what comes to mind as “memorable responses” are quotes from writers: the famous clips of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison that regularly make the rounds on the internet, the Elizabeth Bishop and William Faulkner quips that come and go on Instagram, the Sontag sass from that disastrous Christopher Lydon interview (which has even made its way into a strange drag routine), and of course Didion’s affectless “What” to Warhol’s “Why can’t it just be magic all the time?” These are all a kind of collaborative work that’s ended up in the larger creative consciousness. It’s the same energy we get from reading biographies or watching documentaries of the writers and artists we admire, even if they aren’t good biographies or documentaries.1

What Sachs has done is combine, strangely, the documentary and the biopic. We get candid words of wisdom from Peter Hujar because they are words he provided personally to Linda Rosenkrantz in 1974. But we get them from an actor pretending to be Peter Hujar, a gifted actor whose inward gaze, as he talks about his day — which means talking about his work and his relationships and his aspirations and fears — adds an emotional depth to this conversation that a transcript lacks. But this is not the extent of our confrontation with such artifice. Throughout this performance, we get abrasive, metafictional interludes: Whishaw and Hall relocating their marks as a boom mic wavers in and out of the frame, or the two looking into the camera as Mozart’s Requiem segues between scenes. From start to finish, Peter Hujar’s Day, a 2025 film about a day in 1974, insists upon reminding you that the day is not real, that all of this is staged, and that Peter Hujar is dead. This seems to be the film’s attempt to create friction with itself, or even conflict — a conflict familiar to any sensitive working artist: Do I have the right to create this? Do I have the right to use this likeness or these words? That Hujar was a photographer makes these questions even more pertinent, I think, to the film’s confrontation with art’s sense of “offense,” to use ’s apt word for it. A photograph is the most evident example of art’s inherent reliance upon borrowed or stolen life.

It’s this unasked but extant question that excuses, in some sense, having paid to see a dramatized version of an interview I could have otherwise read on my own time — an interview I’d have underlined and annotated and filed away in my greedy little archive of lives2. Almost every artist or writer has an archive like this, even if it’s only in their minds. We go to letters and journals and interviews and biographies not to spend time with the artist, per se, nor the artist’s work (else we’d just go back to the work), but to simulate a kind of being-in-the-presence of the work’s creation. As if to validate that such things are still possible, we want a glimpse at the creative act itself, and this act almost always has an ugly or unrefined or embarrassing aspect. If art is superhuman or divine, these rough or raw documentations show us the human dimension behind or beneath the divine; they show us that being human is a precursor to creating the divine. This invites us, I suppose, to forgive ourselves our humanity in our attempts to surpass it.

To add another dimension to this, as Sachs does with Hujar’s screen of artifice, is to question the ethics of such a desire: Is it immoral or monstrous to aspire to these heights? And of course the answer is yes. It’s a hubristic endeavor, or even Satanic, in the Miltonian sense. But that’s not really the answer anyone wants. No one, or no one serious, is waiting in line to condemn the hubristic artist for their immorality or monstrousness. They’re looking instead for the work, which is the only answer anyone trusts. They want to see that reach toward the heavens, along with the inevitable fall.

Thank you for reading Entertainment, Weakly. Stay tuned for letters on the way about the antifascist possibilities in UX design, unwanted revolutions, stolen homes, the histories of used books, camera rolls, criminalizing the public, and more. These letters are always free, but please consider a paid subscription, if you can, as it helps me live my life.

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Early this year, I received an invitation to a writing residency at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. Two weeks in October to do absolutely anything I wanted, with no expectations — no talks, no classes, no lectures, no contributions. I didn’t even have to write, if I didn’t want to, as my generous host informed me. After a long summer in Europe, and approaching the end of my tourist visa with still no word on what to expect after that, I landed in the United States on the first, arrived here on the Oregon coast on the sixth, and immediately resumed work on a novel I’ve been carrying around with me for thirteen years. I finished it in eight days, sent it to my agent, and now arrive at an increasingly familiar feeling — that freedom is an abyss. I learned this after six weeks in France and another six in Portugal, where I was no one and every day could be any day. I don’t regret it, of course; sometimes you do want to glide through it, the abyss, and fathom just how deep it gets.

It’s not as if I’m one of those people who doesn’t know the next project. I have at least four lined up. And it’s not as if I don’t have other obligations (a deadline later today, in fact). But I do have terrible work habits. This novel is a testament to weeks and months and years of inactivity at a time, but always thinking about it, and then bursts like these of seven– and eight– and even ten–thousand-word days, getting up at five and writing all day long in nothing but sweats, eating peanut butter out of a jar.

Of course, the novel is a place to hide. Inexplicably, your goal is to take that hiding place away from yourself — to reveal yourself to the world all over again, once the work is done. For certain stretches of time, you go every day into this room you’ve built against the world. Its rules make sense to you, its sensuousness appeals to you, its characters even, in small, fragmentary ways, resemble you or parts of you. All of this is to say it’s a world that coheres, a world you can’t help but belong to. As I’ve written elsewhere, this is part of why I wrote The Future Was Color, an enormously sensual novel, during the pandemic.1 With this enormous and ambitious and draining project behind me, I now have nowhere to go — nowhere but the real world, the one that doesn’t cohere, the one I don’t feel like I belong to, that doesn’t look anything like me.

Somewhere in Canetti’s Book Against Death, he casts writing as a kind of chess game with the universe: “With every hour spent alone, with every sentence that you draft, you win back a piece of your life.” It’s an adversarial imagination of the writing process, not against anyone, per se, but against your silence or absence — against yourself. Elsewhere in the same book, he quips, “I have constructed a library that will last for a good three hundred years, all I need now are those years.” It’s a romantic notion, of course, since even Canetti knows that a good three hundred years would still involve around two-hundred-and-ninety of fucking around, and ten of work.

A few days ago, in an attempt to remember what I care about, I was listening to a conversation between Susan Sontag and Elizabeth Hardwick, generously archived by the 92nd Street Y. Trying to arrive at a distinction between the essay and the article, or the essay and an academic endeavor, Hardwick says, in her glorious drawl, “Everything you know, everything you are, goes into this writing — just as it is writing first of all — and all of your information is, I think, very important. Otherwise, it would be just a flat thing that no one would want to read.” It’s the authority, in other words, of a writer that gives the essay its strength, an authority earned, Hardwick adds, “by learning how to write.” Always this tautology — if you want to write “well-written work,” write well. Ah, of course — why didn’t I think of that?

Here in the cool rainforest on the north bank of the Salmon River, I’m in a bit of shock. For months I felt shoulder to shoulder with strangers, most of whom I couldn’t understand, in cities with jackhammers and car horns and the braking of trains. Last night, I sat outside and listened to an owl for twenty or thirty minutes, an owl whose hoot was the hoot from movies and television, a real Hollywood hoot. On Monday, I left my cabin at nine in the morning, after working for several hours, and hiked out to Cascade Head. There was nobody around. I said nothing to anyone. For a while, I followed two small birds as they led me down a trail, and wondered if they knew something I didn’t; and then they flew away, afraid. I sat down and took out my notebook and wrote how everything had fallen apart, I didn’t know where I’d go once I returned to Minnesota, I knew nothing about the future, everything was uncertain. But no one knows anything about the future. You can make inductions based on patterns and information, but nothing’s ever certain. And anyway, I was looking at the ocean to my right and a river valley to my left, and I was here because someone had loved and admired my work — what was there to be so afraid of? Probably that love itself, I realize now, that admiration of something I’d already done; and now I was nearly done with the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do, and afraid no one would love it, no would would understand it.

The strange thing is that I do know what Hardwick means — and what a lot of writers mean when they say “write well” or “learn how to write” (even though most evidently lack the authority). To want to write well: sometimes you can feel the need for it or urge toward it, like running your tongue along your teeth. It’s physical, maybe in the hand but not completely in the hand — a translation of the way a painter, I imagine, feels about the texture a brushstroke might create, with a certain viscosity of paint; or the way a pianist might crave the vibration of a certain chord, or a cellist the ring of a low note in her teeth.

This compulsion is strongest before the work is begun, and has always left me feeling like the first sentence, of an essay, should be its strongest, its most imperious. It made me realize that, despite the care and curiosity I’ve put into them, I haven’t really thought of these newsletters as essays, and that my recent lack of effort in shaping my ideas into essays, my avoidance of trying to place them with an ever diminishing handful of magazines, has left me feeling clumsy — physically clumsy. One thing Hardwick notices has vanished in her contemporary mediascape is the “familiar essay” of a certain quality: “When you think of Lamb, or even Montaigne, to some extent, that is now the sort of province of hacks, I would say, writing a little bit of advice or writing on marriage or in a rather shallow and quick journalistic way.” With their reliance upon the personal, upon the voice, upon the familiar — “Hey, it’s me” — maybe these newsletters have become the province of hacks, or at least of one hack.

This isn’t to say I don’t find them useful, these newsletters, or that I don’t enjoy writing them. Hack writing has a form to it, and like any form can take you places you don’t expect. A hack thing to do, for example, is open the dictionary when you get stuck, where you can learn that “hack” (c. 1700s to denote a drudge worker) derives from hackney, an ordinary, every-day horse for general service.2 To hack also used to mean to ride such a horse for pleasure or exercise. What fun, to open a document and type what’s on your mind at four in the morning (it’s now half past seven; I’m a slow writer), but it isn’t going to win us any races.

This is maybe what underlies my suspicion of writers with the access and the network and the influence who loudly leave their editorial support behind and venture into the familiar pastures of Substack, who replace their more rigorous work with missives like these. It’s not that you have to choose, one or the other, but — to continue in horse parlance — keeping your eye on the race is important. Otherwise you get clumsy and tired. You forget how to hold energy in your hand (or your voice, if you dictate), and you lose the craving to make that first mark — a mark that, categorically, is supposed to last. That’s the point of the brushstroke, after all, the point of the sustained chord, and the point, even, at the tip of the pen: to leave a real mark in the rainbow black of drying ink. I’ve missed the mark.

Thank you for reading, and thanks for sticking with me. Before I go, I want to share this incredible essay from Chris Campanioni, who wrote about The Future Was Color for the Brooklyn Rail:

One cannot behold a work of art without gazing upon the violence that may also be obscured by it. Perhaps this is also Nathan’s disquieting assessment, by linking an undercurrent of queer art in New York City with popcorn Hollywood production through the figure of George and his aspiration for cinema to reorganize the coordinates of the possible… Nathan’s novel shows us how, in George’s alternative vision for cinema and his promiscuous version of a heretofore hidden postwar culture, the “work” of art is to in fact destabilize the aesthetic regime that it depends upon for its very identity.

Finally, while I do plan to write more “real essays,” now that work on my novel is behind me, I’m not quitting Entertainment, Weakly: I still have letters on the way about the antifascist possibilities in UX design, unwanted revolutions, stolen homes, the histories of used books, camera rolls, criminalizing the public, and more. The letters are always free but please consider a paid subscription, if you can, as it helps me live my life.

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Thanks again, and more soon <3

~ Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration

VENICE — Sometime during the pandemic, I noticed that nine out of ten new “classical” albums Apple Music were indistinguishable. Not only was the artwork for each some bland imitation of a Sugimoto photograph, a grey ocean meeting a grey sky whose horizon you’d miss if you didn’t squint; and not only was each named Crows or Walking or Pond; but each offered sixty minutes of some pianist mournfully sinking their feeble fingers into the same muted chords, as though they too had bored themselves to an early death. But boredom, as their titles suggest, seemed to be the point; here was something unimaginative, even unnoticeable, to comfort you while you worked — Satie’s “furniture music” reimagined for the frictionless era.

You can’t eat beauty, but you can starve without it — a revelation only a sudden feast can deliver. But beauty is also lethal, as the late Adam Zagajewski points out in Slight Exaggeration. It’s what kills Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach, for example, on his sojourn in Venice. Catching his first glimpse of Tadzio, the great and distinguished writer “loses his mind completely, and the capacious world of intellectual discipline that had hitherto offered him daily refuge and inspiration loses all its charm.” As with most advice, it seems fatally simple: don’t bite into the wrong fruit, and you live.

Last week, at the Fundação Gulbenkian, I watched Tamara Stefanovich perform Sonata para Piano no. 2 by Pierre Boulez. Written between 1947 and 1948, the Sonata is true to classical form, but — as Stefanovich pointed out — it’s a form Boulez pushes to its limits. From its first notes, it rolls toward you like a frothy Atlantic tide, ice-blue and white-capped. Stefanovich, to her credit, demonstrated for anyone who’d forgotten that the piano is indeed a percussion instrument; she struck the keys savagely, as though she wanted to crack open the casing and hammer the strings herself.

In its twin ambitions, to pay fealty to classical tradition and to grind that tradition into dust, Boulez’s sonata felt blasphemous in the way all great Modernist works feel blasphemous. I was maybe influenced by the shattering effect of her trills, but it felt like watching the beautiful dome of an atrium rain its broken glass over the flowers below. I hadn’t been so thrilled by a performance since watching Kari Kriikku play Kaija Saariaho’s D’Om le Vrai Sens with the Minnesota Orchestra in 2023 — that howling clarinet pacing up and down the aisles in the dark.

A work such as Boulez’s Sonata or Saariaho’s concerto — unlike the furniture music of pandemic-era pianists, but also unlike a pleasurably bombastic symphony of Tchaikovsky’s — combines the nourishing and poisonous aspects of beauty, a beauty you can call terrible.

I’ve mentioned before my long love of Modernism — this is usually what I think of as terrible beauty, even if it’s an artistic movement that tends to get oversimplified by Ezra Pound’s workshopping slogan, “make it new.” If anything, Modernism contains a bulwark against novelty for its own sake. It is not, for example, the novelty-hunger of the Futurists, who accelerated Italy’s descent into Fascism (and which Pound himself admired). Nor even is Surrealism, whose banal novelty springs entirely from the programmatic estrangement of dissociated juxtapositions — e.g. from its form — a Modernist endeavor.

Mrs. Dalloway, on the other hand, is novelty in a familiar, even bourgeois form. Same with Stravinsky; Rite of Spring is “just” a ballet.1 Instead of the monster we’ve never seen, Modernism is the monster wearing a tux, here to speak and dance as well as we’ve trained it. Instead of “make it new,” it would be better to understand the Modernist canon as “make it uncanny”: we are meant to be unsettled, not confused.

The key to this, I think, is contradiction — a duality Zagajewski identifies in thinking of our “ecstatic” encounters between long stretches of life: “We live, by necessity, in two registers, not just in one, we live both in the moment and in duration.” These two registers are what one hears in Sonata para Piano no. 2, whose predictable form offers alienating content — to be played like a hive full of agitated bees, as Boulez once instructed Stefanovich. They are what one reads in Ulysses, a novel that turns one Irishman’s day into a roving epic adventure.

Obviously, Modernism takes its cues from the early twentieth-century revelations in psychology, science, and war.2 Its artistic contradictions are parallel to the “enormity” of the atom, for instance, or the infinitesimal earth drifting alone in the universe. As it develops, so too does the consciousness that everything is malleable: not only the earth but the human personality, which can both transcend itself in meditation or change forever with a tiny, errant shard of metal.

The Modernist respect for form, then, seems an acknowledgment of the gravity of such malleability, of the weight that style can have. Compared to the more cavalier, adolescent, and nihilistic adventures to follow — once again, I’m looking at Surrealism, the artistic sensibility most suited to international consumerism — the Modernist works believed in their own accountability or responsibility, even culpability. If you go around monkeying with the universe, you should understand what you’re doing, not thrash around like a brat.

To make it more contemporary — and to bring it within my wheelhouse — this is precisely the responsibility I find lacking in most anglophone autofiction. It’s why I cringe when Rachel Cusk, for example, tells the Paris Review about “the problem” of “the ‘setup’ for the fictional situation,” and how it “takes you straight into the politics of identity and the difficulty of establishing enough of a shared basis for identity for the objective disclosure of information to become possible”; or when one writer tells another that they had “no choice” as a marginalized individual but to write about their “inherited trauma.”

There’s something fetishistic in this self confinement, in shirking the pleasure of playing with language, in rejecting characterization, in over-crediting oppression, in stylizing nothing but one’s own powerlessness. Admittedly, it’s very, very hard to engage with this sense of history sickness in an aesthetically exciting way.3 But the contemporary work of autofiction seems in thrall to its self-professed inability to engage. What’s fetishized in a lot of these books is powerlessness itself, a sense of paralyzed doom you can get just as easily from reading the news or scrolling through social media. Many, in fact, feel indistinguishable from watching friends and strangers perform their “stand up depression” online as the world seems to fall apart in real time.

These fictions’ suspicion of fiction isn’t incidental: their lack of faith in artifice is their lack of faith in a future, one and the same — as the future itself is a fiction we have to construct. To call fiction “fantasy” in a world in crisis comes across like a childish resignation; the game is too hard, so you just walk away, offended. Style, as I’ve said before, is how the artist wields their agency; writing without style, or rejecting it as false or dishonest, is to surrender agency altogether.

Why are you writing about Modernism when an idiot like Ezra Klein is defending a propagandist’s reputation?

Who cares about the way a piano is played when democracy is racing the Antarctic ice shelf to see which gets to collapse first?

How can you talk of “eating” beauty when Israel is starving Gazans to death?

Believe me, I asked myself these same questions. Like most people who write for the internet, I imagine all the ways they might crop up, as there’s always someone ready to end your moment of pleasure by reminding you of some emergency underway, some awful thing to spectate. And I don’t mean to belittle them, these emergencies; I too spend most of my days sick with worry and horrified by what my country, for which I am nominally accountable, is doing to itself and the rest of the world.

But fear, as Zagajewski says, can be “like a migraine — it disappears and leaves no trace.” This is his conclusion when asking himself “what it must have been like to live through World War Two, the Holocaust, or during Stain’s purges, the years of the greatest terror, and it seems impossible, inconceivable, to survive even an hour in such a nightmare.” However, “for those who weren’t that day’s direct victims of persecution, there was always more reality, always some kind of weather, they were either hungry or well fed, a dog was barking somewhere, a plane flew overhead, Mother was making pierogi in the kitchen, you had to think about buying winter boots...” With all of this reality in their daily lives, “they forgot for a moment.”

Often, on the day after a tragedy, you wake up without it — at least at first. There was no horrific letter in the mail, no unexpected death; you don’t have that diagnosis; that person you love didn’t hurt you more than you thought they ever could. It’s a brief gift, to wake up to any other day — at least until it comes back to you, until you realize today is the day after that day. An encounter with beauty can give us this same lapse in memory. For a little while, the migraine disappears.

Living with the internet is living with a memory machine. This is really what that anticipated comment is about, that someone out there remembers and won’t let you forget — that people are starving while you’re posting about food, that democracy is collapsing while you’re praising literary critics, that this writer you love said a horrible thing a half-century ago. It would be a genuine loss if these things were truly, irreversibly forgotten, but that doesn’t mean we need to hold them in our heads at all times.

Yes, these comments have always been around, but the internet institutionalizes them; it trains its users to make them, to interrupt until every moment is in observance of tragedy, and no part of life is left unclaimed. It’s as if someone has left a note by your bed and the first thing you see, every morning, is that the world is ending and it’s futile to believe otherwise. I don’t find this helpful or motivating; it doesn’t give me any sense of agency, and neither do the novels and other works of art that seek to mirror it, to intimate it. Perhaps it’s naïve of me, but I prefer those works, even of terrible and chilling beauty, which show me what a human being can do, when they focus their powers, not what a human being cannot do, stuck like a butterfly to a board — because if they did it, whatever it was, maybe I can too. And so can everyone else.

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Also, if you’re new here, please don’t hesitate to check out my book about images and fascism, or either of my two novels.

As with any conversation about “the future” in a given industry, the organizers seem to have felt compelled to talk about “AI” as a partner in creativity and marketing, a move I’ve been told is pretty rote at these international book conferences — where indeed presenters and participants are invited to take photos and videos during sessions, upload them to social media, and tag the associations involved, ensuring that all of this activity is available on Instagram and TikTok, on which, after all, new books are discovered by readers every day. As in many other industries, the tech sector — which has undermined the ability of most writers, editors, and production workers to make a living — is greedily rolled into publishing’s citadel again and again as an irresistible and unquestioned gift.

As an example of this disconnect, APEL invited Gvantsa Jobava, the president of the International Publishers Association, to talk about the serious global threats to freedom of expression and of growing copyright infringement, and how publishers — by communicating across borders, sharing resources, and by helping one another translate each other’s literatures — can strengthen one another’s ability to withstand these threats. People (rightly) applauded her defense of democratic ideals, freedom of expression, and resistance to the tech sector’s plundering of intellectual property. Immediately afterward, they invited Nadim Sadek, the founder and CEO of Shimmr, to talk about how “AI” can be a “collaborative partner” in creativity, and how publishers should embrace the technology as inevitable. As an example, Sadek noted how he’d used this software to translate his own books into countless languages, as well as record his audiobooks, saving him from the prohibitive costs of paying translators and voice actors. Sadek gave a charming presentation1 about his “discussions” with chatbots and how they sparked his creativity, and the publishers and booksellers in the audience laughed at his jokes. They applauded his speech.

As usual, the people in the room were offered a fantasy product that creates something from nothing, that hurts no one, and comes with zero cost — aside from its price, of course. Still, I found myself surprised at Sadek’s audacity in referring to “AI” as “the sum of all human knowledge, skill, and experience,” which he wraps up in a searchable neologism he calls “panthropism.”2 When you speak with a chatbot, Sadek told us, you are speaking with everything humanity has ever thought and created, distilled into a single voice. The panthropic consciousness, in this logic, is therefore not only the “voice” of the author of Survival in Auschwitz, but also the voice of the author of Mein Kampf, and presumably offers the “combined wisdom” of both. Obviously, this kind of compartmentalized vision isn’t new; it takes only a glance at the opinion pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post to know how easy it is to pretend that mutually exclusive ideas can harmlessly coexist in a unified neoliberal marketplace. But the extent to which Sadek celebrates this kind of homogenized consciousness, as opposed to the fragmented, disparate, and diverse plurality of human voices, makes me wonder if he didn’t watch The Next Generation as a teenager and mistake the Borg3 for the storyline’s hero. Sadek’s focus on the unified simplicity of “AI” reveals the technology as a simple, unimaginative advancement of the principles already laid in place by Meta,4 Twitter (now X), ByteDance, Apple, Substack, Amazon, and many other corporations that have sought to remove sensitivity and conflict (which they call “friction”) from day-to-day life, including our day-to-day interactions with artistic endeavors in whatever form we tend to encounter them. As with so many of the tech sector’s utopian fantasies, “panthropism” is shockingly but familiarly misanthropic: without asking for it, we are to be given our salvation (or “solution”) by someone who despises our complexity, our plurality, our ongoing irreconcilability — by someone, in a word, who hates humanity, and wants to edit it out of the code.

For the record, I’m not a technophobe — not completely anyway. I will admit that after the age of 35 or so I stopped wondering why my phone wasn’t working and just accepted it as broken, in some way, for the rest of my life. But I am, I guess, a kind of totalphobe — someone who fears the totalitarian ends to which most contemporary consumer technology aspires. That publishers and booksellers all over the world are interested in the capabilities of technology to reach more readers, to grow literature’s audience, and to hone the literacy5 of the general population, is an unambiguously positive and noble goal. But I don’t think many people will challenge me when I say that the kind of reading activity that Instagram or Goodreads fosters is not literacy, at least not as conceived of by the Book 2.0 conference, and that publishers perhaps misunderstand, purposefully or not, their own “products” in these kinds of marketplaces. But this doesn’t mean that the audience itself doesn’t exist, nor that it’s incapable of becoming far more sophisticated than most people in the literary industry give it credit for.6

Right before the conference, I’d read ’s incredible celebration of literary criticism and how, contrary to the popular and gloomy narrative, it has the potential to reach and to affect more readers, viewers, and listeners than ever. “If STEM disciplines have,” she asks, “won the war against the arts and humanities, why are so many of the software people I know suddenly obsessed with literature and films? Why is it that my groupchats full of programmers and product managers and designers light up whenever there’s a new Andrea Long Chu review? Why are tech people starting Robert Caro and Roberto Bolaño book clubs? Why are they getting NYRB Classics mailed to them every week?” It isn’t that people are indifferent to art, Nguyen says, nor that they wish to engage with it on the simplistic level the broader market currently encourages. But there is a lingering distrust of the critic as a kind of elitist, and of criticism as an outmoded or even “parasitic” activity when consumers themselves can record and share their experiences directly with other consumers. But a critic, Nguyen implies, is not the man in the Ivory Tower damning or sanctifying specific works of literature based on his own taste: instead, criticism “comes from a deep fascination with the medium (literature, art, fashion, design, architecture, &c) and an overwhelming urge to discuss it, as deeply and as rigorously as possible, in public.” It isn’t scorn, then, that drives the critic, but enthusiasm — a wish to empower you, as the potential reader of a given text, for example, with the same tools the critic has cultivated over many pleasurable years spent reading and thinking about reading.

Crucial to criticism is the “public” aspect that Nguyen highlights. In its very existence, literary criticism proposes such a public: Critics7 write with the faith that there will be varying reactions to specific works of literature, and that one of the many pleasures of reading a book is to discuss it with others who’ve read it, and for that discussion to perhaps change or enrich each reader’s experience with the book. What’s more, as anyone who’s ever argued about anything can tell you, part of all of this pleasure is the argument itself, in trying to persuade someone that your way of reading the book is the way they should read it too — which is another way of saying that you crave recognition for the work you’ve done in reading the book reverentially. All criticism, by the way, is reverential; not with regard to specific books, necessarily, but reverential to each book’s potential aspiration toward literature.

This level of discussion in literary criticism, and of argument, means there is no unifying consciousness in literature. Even the proposition of a “canon” (an intrinsically fluid and perpetually contested category) is not a unity of great books, but a plurality of them. Literature as an activity is not a distillation or compilation of human consciousness. Instead, it’s a fragmentation of it. The great pleasure of the novel, specifically, is that it’s the deepest dive we have into sharing or simulating the unique and contradictory idiosyncrasies of human consciousness, and how varied those consciousnesses can be.

This fragmentation continues today, despite enormous efforts to suppress it. To return to Nguyen’s proposed audience, she puts it “somewhat frivolously, somewhat seriously,” and concludes that the “total addressable market for criticism is everyone who has a Goodreads or Letterboxd account.” With these two examples, she captures important traits that users of these sites tend to share, including an “appetite for consuming cultural works in a vaguely organized, strategic and intentional fashion” and “a more-than-passing interest in having more, and better, aesthetic encounters in their everyday life,” not to mention a curiosity “about their own judgments of the works that induce those aesthetic experiences.” This is, after all, a form of social activity. Why else, Nguyen wonders, “would they read reviews or post their own, complete with ratings?” Why would they “seek out recommendations on what to read/watch next,” or “have a specialized app for keeping track of what they’ve read/watched?” But as social media has proven, “social” doesn’t necessarily mean “public.” Instead, Goodreads and Letterboxd foreclose a public, replacing it with a marketplace of consumers; and the consumer, like the customer before him, is always right, regardless of what anyone else may say. It’s because of this attitude that the critic becomes a bogeyman, someone who wants to override your taste and replace it with his own — someone who wants to boss you around, as a reader, and deprive you of your democratic right to read whatever you want.

The curious thing about Goodreads, to stick with only one example, is how it seems to have helped shape the publishing industry’s drive toward likable characters and fiction rooted in identity — usually by “trauma mining” the author’s own experience. Many readers on the platform fault books that deviate from this formula, as they don’t immediately recognize the book’s patterns or structures, and are generally repelled by any stylistic flourishes. But if this were truly all readers cared about — if seeking out likable characters and drooling over the ways Black writers experience racism or queer writers experience sexual violence are the only reasons to continue purchasing and reading books — it seems odd to read books at all when there are many other forms of entertainment that offer these same kinds of narratives, and that require less effort to access them. Television is the obvious example, but so too is social media a readily available and barrier-free alternative.8 Despite what people say, on these platforms, they seem nonetheless to seek out books not because of character or plot, but because of artistry: there is a reason to pick up a book and spend several hours of your life with it, and that reason goes beyond hanging out with a character or attempting some kind of catharsis with a victim narrative, or even “seeking representation.” Even the most “anti-elitist” reviewer on Goodreads is in truth reading for artistry: for the way an author phrases a sentence or captures a feeling, for the way a story leaps from one chapter to the next, for the little pleasure of seeing how an author connects one plot point to another or moves a character around a room. But the narrative of a website like Goodreads is the opposite: these artistic concerns are “artsy,” and therefore elitist — the kinds of things critics want to rub in your face to make you feel stupid and inferior, and which aren’t present at all, coincidentally, in the kind of AI slop novels a company like Amazon, which owns Goodreads, could easily produce and sell at 100% profit.

This is what I mean by a suppression of the public: using a massive platform owned by one of the largest and most insidious technology companies in the world to make people think they don’t care about art when they actually care quite deeply, when they love it so much they spend hours of their life looking for the shimmer of it in every book they read. These are people who’d love nothing more than to sharpen the tools they already have to appreciate and celebrate the art that they love, and don’t seem to realize that Goodreads is there specifically to blunt and break those tools, to convince them that the tools are elitist — or colonial, or racist, or sexist, or any shade of oppressive — when in fact it’s the platform itself that demeans and insults their intelligence.

The phrase “let people enjoy things” has justifiably become a kind of whipping post for this kind of oversimplification, this so-called democratization of taste by the annihilation of discussing or cultivating it. You still see it crop up sincerely now and then, but for the most part anyone who’s serious about the longevity of reading and writing, or of any kind of artistic activity and engagement, can no longer take its false promise of equity seriously. What’s missing here is the alternative: Let people judge things. If the technocratic approach to art is to disempower viewers and readers, to blunt their judgment while promising democracy, critics are here to empower them, all while actually participating in the republic of literacy. Nor is the longform essay intrinsic to this activity; the critic can participate via any variety of technological means, ideally without the structural subversion of social media platforms.9 In print or onscreen or over the airwaves or on camera, the critic’s enthusiasm bestows not just the passion to read more, read deeper, and read wider, but offers the gift of judgment — a gift, of course, whose propensity for growth can’t help but tempt it to direct its gaze outside the discipline of a specific medium and toward culture at large: toward society and politics, where words carry their greatest and gravest weight.

One of the most ignorant things certain artists like to say is that “They don’t build statues of critics,” which seems to me the equivalent of saying there’s no reason to celebrate our greatest teachers. A critic, in their boundless enthusiasm for an artistic medium and their wish to welcome you aboard as a fellow maniac, is a teacher for those of us who’ve left school behind. And in Champagne, Illinois, there’s a statue of one of the most influential critics who ever lived — a man who taught millions not only why they should love the movies, but how to love them, how to appreciate them, how to think about them, how to write about them, and how to talk about them with your friends. Roger Ebert, more than any other reviewer, made loving the movies a shared public activity — and he wasn’t shy about using technology to do it, right up to his death. Even if you’ve never read one of his reviews or watched him argue about a film with Gene Siskel, you nonetheless know more about the movies — about how they work and what you should expect, what you should demand — because of the standards he set. These standards comprise the judgment he gave to the moviegoing public. That is the kind of power a critic can have: not to make or break a film, not to laud or pan a book, but to hand that power to you so you can judge for yourself.

Thank you for reading! As I wrote on Friday, Entertainment, Weakly is “back,” and I’ve reopened paid subscriptions. Upcoming topics include the antifascist potential of UX design, reading Anne Carson’s The Glass Essay as a novel, the televised revolution, why I’m still obsessed with Modernism, food on Star Trek, and more. If you enjoyed this essay, please consider showing your support with a monthly or annual subscription:

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Friends,

This is just a quick note to say that Entertainment, Weakly is “back.” Starting Tuesday, September 9 — with a lengthy piece about critics in response to ’s wonderfully optimistic essay, which you can read here — we’ll resume our regular rotation of essays on books, movies, culture, politics, technology, and human behavior. Most importantly, this means I am reactivating paid subscriptions, and if you have a paid subscription (thank you!), you may receive a charge on your account in the next few days. Please do not call the police.

What’s in store for Season Two? Here’s a peek at the pipeline:

• The pan-criminal society of the US

• UX design as potential for resistance via friction

• The revolution was televised, as it turned out

• Don’t wait for the rich to privatize everything

• Anne Carson’s poem The Glass Essay has much to teach us, as a novel

• Sometimes we need a charm

• Food on Star Trek

• Can a novelist write mid-century drag?

• And more <3

Happy September, and happy autumn. We all know the fruit is ripest before it rots and I won’t pretend otherwise, so let’s eat.

-P

Sure, spring is about rebirth — but of the body, of the senses. Things thaw, things drip. They unfurl and swell. Then there’s summer, the body’s harvest. I don’t need to elaborate. And then there’s autumn, the rebirth of the mind. I never realized it before, but this is why it’s always felt like a beginning, to me, when things start to die: it’s the mind coming back, getting interested, growing restless. It wants us to walk and look around. It wants us to sit down to a long meal with friends, to talk for hours. It wants music and movies. My list, every year, is a list of things I’ve enjoyed in years past. It’s a list that’s fundamentally nostalgic; in a kind of panic, I try to create the same autumn every autumn. And while there’s nothing wrong with tradition — at least one visit, say, to an orchard, or at least one batch of coq au vin (the Balthazar recipe is worth the effort) — a series of them feels less like pleasure and more like denial. That is, denying that things have changed.

A genre that used to annoy me but that I now find somewhat charming is the why-I-left-New-York essay. As with most annoying essays, this is all Joan Didion’s fault.1 And as usual, Didion nailed it: Yes, New York is tiring — because people get tired. People get old. The habits we don’t change as we change start to burden us, not support us. One day, it’s unbearable to look around and find your youth — the bars you went to, the lights that dazzled you, the food you relished — not only harder to recognize, but worse: unwilling to delight you, console you, or even welcome you. Unwilling to want you. Going on unchangedly in a city that’s changed, trying to live as you once did with a body that’s changed, is to set yourself up for rejection. That city, that past, that youth — none of it can be recaptured, at least not in life, not in the things you do from day to day. Either you contend with that, consciously, or you leave. Most people leave.

Nostalgia isn’t homesickness, in this understanding — not quite. With its overtone of loss, of irrevocability, and of yearning for the impossible, it’s something closer to time sickness: one can feel, one can see, that youth is gone. This is the core around which Proust builds his Search: an entire past springs out of sensory associations — a cup of tea, a little bell on a gate, an uneven stone outside of a familiar house — a mercurial and fleeting past that can only exist, that can only be recaptured or regained, through its transmutation into art. Throughout the novel, life evades the narrator (Albertine’s escape being the central, and admittedly most tedious, example), but art does not. Art is always there to console “Marcel” when life turns fugitive. It’s a delusion to think that one can capture and hold living moments or relive times past; time only runs backward in our minds, in our memories. But we can evoke those memories for others in our works — whatever those are. The Search is, in its own way, the testament of what the narrator, a self-professed invalid, has learned about time sickness, and how to endure it. It’s also why the Search still feels like the most complete and comprehensive artistic rendering of how it feels to have a life. As Brodsky said of art, one could also say of life: There are only two subjects, language and time.

In Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (trans. Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp), he digs into the sensory associations of certain colors, shapes, and sounds — how a color can precede an understanding, depending on the experiences that our “soul” has had with that color. He explains this by the ease with which we record our first encounters with colors and objects, shapes and sounds:

Objects which we encounter for the first time immediately exert a spiritual impression on us. This is how the world is experienced by young children, for whom every object is new . . . This is how, as we grow older, the world gradually loses its magic. We know that trees give us shade, that horses are fast, motorcars faster, that dogs bite, that the moon is far away, that the person in the mirror is not real.

He likens a person’s sensory apparatus to a piano: “‘Nature,’ that is, the person’s ever-changing external environment, is constantly activating the strings of the piano (the soul) by pressing the keys (the objects we see).” These notes, and even chords (combinations of sensory input), can grow familiar; it begins to require effort to notice them, the way meditation, for example, is effort. But an artist, Kandinsky says, brings their own intent to this combination of elements — sounds, colors, shapes, words, and so on — which means that the “human soul is moved in a deliberate and purposeful way.” Rather than Kandinsky’s piano, I find it easier to imagine, here, an old church organ: the wind can idly, even hauntingly, play the pipes, but only human hands can play a progression of stirring chords. This, I think, is the most important distinction between life and art.

My craving for fall, for the rebirth of my mind, was born from a sensory experience — a combination of instant coffee (which I take camping) and cool air over a body of water (where I tend to enjoy camping). Like Proust’s madeleine dipped in tisane, the formula evoked an impression that superseded understanding; it made me want before I understood, entirely, what I wanted. My autumn list tends to be a litany of sensory experiences — specific foods, fabrics, scents, liquors, locales, sounds. These are senses I associate, yes, with times of great pleasure; they are experiences I had when I was happy — most of them from the same pitifully brief period in my life, at this point a long time ago. In countless ways, I’ve been trying to recapture it ever since, and have depressed myself, over and over, with my failure to do so.2

Not to introduce another musical metaphor, but Kandinsky’s evocation of early sensory experiences, of seeing or hearing or feeling things for the first time — and of how those experiences, in some way, tend to take deep root in our memory — made me think of cassettes or VHS tapes. The initial impression, on virgin, magnetized plastic, sounds and looks pristine, but when you tape over it with a similar impression, and another, and another, you lose fidelity. This is, I think, why the “coming of age” novel is still so popular (rebranded and repackaged, for the most part, as YA fiction): readers enjoy a protagonist whose tape is still blank,3 whose ability to register new impressions is at its deepest, its most vivid.

The distinction I find most fascinating here is that, while the tape that records life grows thinner and duller, ever more brittle, the one that records art seems new nearly every time. A novel or poem you truly love doesn’t lose its brilliance; it only gets brighter. A movie you’ve watched nine times isn’t going to let you down on the tenth. The turn of phrase in a song or symphony — it’s going to get you every time, maybe even deeper, this time, than it ever has. A lot of this, yes, is the artist’s intent, but just as important is the audience’s intent — your intent, when you seek out these favorite compositions. Art is consensual by design — we choose to read, choose to watch, choose to hear. You open your soul to artworks, and deliberately, if for no other reason than to remind yourself, or verify, that you have such a thing, a soul. And for periods of time sickness, when you can’t recognize your life or feel welcome in it, there’s maybe no better cure than this reminder, that you can still feel as intensely, as colorfully, as you once did after all.

Thank you for reading, and thank you all for sticking with Entertainment, Weakly. This week’s essay isn’t exactly a sequel or an expansion of one I wrote last year, but maybe it’s a reincarnation.

I still haven’t turned paid subscriptions back on, as I don’t feel like I can be accountable to anything like a regular schedule as long as I decide to work on the road. Once I get settled I’ll give paid subscribers a heads-up. In the meantime, I am still working, and still available if you have any work you’d like to do together. Until then, <3

I haven’t written in a month because my husband and I decided to throw most of our old life in the trash and begin again. We’ve since sold nearly all of our furniture, put fifty-five boxes of books in storage, and sold our house. When we talked about this with acquaintances (friends know us better), they’d say, “You’re doing this because of Trump.” First, we don’t actually know what we’re doing — part of our jaunt is to figure out who we are, as people, after having gone through what we’ve gone through (more on that some other time). Second, while the current administration hasn’t exactly dissuaded us from making this decision, a President Harris, even if she desired it (she wouldn’t), would have been powerless to change this country’s narcissistic and vicious downward spiral. Genuinely, I don’t know where we’ll end up, or when, or how, but right now we owe ourselves a bit of wandering, and above all beauty — which a Midwestern city, I’m sorry to say, has starved us of more than any other aspect of life.

And the cliché, it turns out, is true: Paris is (probably) the most beautiful city in the world. It's a city of details — details which make it a city of the public. And it’s still very, very public. The civility with which one addresses and interacts with strangers is remarkable, especially since Americans are socialized to believe Parisians are rude.2 The metro runs every three minutes (the longest I had to wait was ten, after the fête on the 14th) and can take you anywhere in twenty or thirty. There’s a multitude of free public restrooms — since human beings tend to need to pee now and then, and don’t necessarily want to purchase anything just to do it. And the parks and squares are full of people actually enjoying the parks and squares, people reading and playing cards and talking to one another (and yes, gazing into their phones). I don’t want to over-romanticize one of the most romantic places on earth — I know about Paris’s problems, its prices, its housing, its militarized police, its constant flirtation with a rightward shift — but I did come here on a little vacation looking for something like society, and I’m grateful to have found more of it here than anywhere I’ve been in seven years.

Now, about those disappointments. Here’s the big one: A while ago, there was a news story about a man who’d been ticketed for having a speakerphone conversation on the metro. If you’ve read my essay on noise, you know this made the endorphins flow for me. It conjured a city where people were vicious to strangers about this kind of noise. But in reality, Paris is full of it — not on par with my own wild-west hometown, certainly, but definitely on par with New York or Los Angeles. Uncharacteristically — especially for a city on the forefront of taking noise pollution seriously — Parisians don’t seem to mind this version of it.

The next day, I bought an edition of Le Monde, in which Michel Guerrin had written a column about the transformation, over the years, of the annual Fête de la musique. What began in 1982 as a cultural indulgence to welcome summer — those who could sing or play an instrument were invited into the streets to share their talent, their voice — has become, he writes, just another excuse for people to have a rave in a town square, turning French cities into open-air trashcans.3 Conjuring Yves Michaud, Guerrin observes how, in the replacement of the performer with the spectator — the artist with the consumer — the festival has become another instance where “I feel” has replaced “I think.” What’s more, these events — pumping international music into public spaces — typically take place in the “grand centre et les quartiers touristiques” rather than marginal or unknown neighborhoods, by which Guerrin indicates neighborhoods where you’re likely to see your neighbors rather than adults who’ve come to treat your town as another disposable playground.

Admittedly, I read Guerrin’s article (it takes a lot of effort for me to read French) because I assumed it was a complaint about noise, and I’m a sucker for anyone pointing out the most omnipresent and masochistically tolerated pollution we all deal with on a day to day basis (pollution which does have adverse health effects, I never hesitate to point out — and which affects poor families far more severely than wealthy ones). But Guerrin’s article is really a complaint about values — and a public is predicated on values. For a French tradition, which celebrates French talent, to be replaced with a xeroxed spectacle full of international artists — many of whom perform in English, or simply perform in computer — is for an aspect of French culture to be occluded or erased by the banality of consumerism, which still rules its imperium from the United States, and specifically from California (the America of America, as Joan Didion called it). That people in one of the proudest cities in Europe watch thirty-second TV shows on their cellphones in the metro is another example of this same phenomenon — American ideals replacing the values of a society where the subway system is full of ads not for superhero movies or dating apps (there are some, I admit), but for museums, novels, and plays.4

In January 1898, Le Cri de Paris — a Dreyfusard weekly — published a cover designed by Félix Vallotton. The Age of Paper depicts a café full of readers, each holding a different newspaper reporting on Zola’s J’Accuse. Vallotton’s design illustrates the power of the French press, whether conservative or liberal, royalist or socialist, antisemitic or pluralistic, to inform and influence a society.

This is, of course, my niche obsession — the way media can shape society, yes; but, in the case of smartphones as a specific form of media, the way corporations use technology to replace culture and community with a serializing consumerism.5 One of the more interesting contrarian responses I received to Image Control was someone asking me how social media is any different from television, if I’m so concerned by the effect that profiteering has on information and behavior — on social cohesion. And my answer is that, scale aside, it isn’t: Television, as it grew in influence and affluence in from the fifties to the oughts, was instrumental in taking America apart; and the more nakedly aligned with advertising, the more nefarious its effects. I don’t think it’s a big jump, either, from reality TV in the late nineties to the social media of the early oughts. The former brought viewers closer than ever to the fantasy that had always been there — What if I could be on television? — and social media is what gave us all the tools, however crude and rudimentary, to realize it. As far as any key differences are concerned with the rise of social media after seventy years of television, I don’t think you can underestimate scale and speed. TV simply has too many constraints (including legal ones) to be anywhere near as socially corrosive as a tweet — as the current president was happy to demonstrate during his previous term.

Right now, the United States is probably the ur-example of what happens to a country when you use technology, guided by neoliberal policy, to take society apart. It is also, from a corporate standpoint, an enormous success, and a model blueprint — to the point where Trump has threatened sanctions against countries which propose “discriminatory” measures against American tech companies by trying to regulate algorithmic learning models branded as “AI.” These models, of course, are the next exponential step in the corporate-driven individuation and isolation of human beings, an even more efficient and effective way to transform them from citizens to consumers. The EU, with its penchant for regulations and its 450 million people, is by far the largest obstacle to American tech companies (and American business generally). Therefore, the American right continues to use the language of rights, discrimination, abuse, and minority protections to clothe its predatory policies — which of course extend to turning European citizens, including Parisians, into mindless consumers of US-made content, or at least content linked to US-based advertisers. This kind of consumer-level tech is the avant-garde of imperialism in the twenty-first century, and almost all of its riches flow to American billionaires, who are more adept than ever at using the most powerful federal apparatus in the world the way gangsters use goons to muscle honest shopkeepers into extortion.

I doubt the French will see this; and it’s my hope that, in the next few months or years, there’s some movement or reaction against this kind of behavior in public — because if this is a public the French want to keep, the acceptable norms around smartphone behavior, and consumer technology in general, are a crucial boundary. I know this because I come from a city in which all norms and boundaries have been abandoned, where people bring speakers on public transit and leave scooters in front of accessible entrances, where the only place to find quiet is not a library (the place people go to watch YouTube, apparently) or a public park (too many aspirational and talentless DJs), but a private home — and only then, thanks to the un-mufflered and subwoofered cars racing around town, a luxury living space with soundproofed windows. The place I used to live in has no public left to speak of, and it feels less like a city, these days, than living in a hundred thousand different mediocre movies that everyone’s trying to star in but that nobody’s actually watching. I can confirm for you: this is not a spectacle anyone wants to witness, and, like so much else in American life, your tolerance for ignoring it only correlates with how much you’re willing to spend.

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Thank you for reading, and thank you all for sticking with Entertainment, Weakly. I still haven’t turned paid subscriptions back on, as I don’t feel like I can be accountable to anything like a regular schedule as long as I decide to work on the road. Once I get settled I’ll give paid subscribers a heads-up. In the meantime, I am still working, and still available if you have any work you’d like to do together. Until then, <3

To celebrate, I thought I’d share an excerpt involving a bar, a drive-in screening of The Ten Commandments, and a little fellatio. At this part of the story, George (né György), a screenwriter and homosexual, is living with his friend Madeline at her beach house in Malibu. His colleague, Jack, has taken an active interest in his new social life, and invited him out for a drink — alone. Nobody knows who the narrator is.

If you haven’t yet read the novel, these paragraphs won’t spoil anything. If you enjoy them, please consider ordering a fresh paperback copy of the book from your local indie bookstore, or from the least problematic online retailer of your choice (Bookshop is always a great option). And of course, if you want a signed copy, feel free to order from SubText Books in St. Paul, and I’ll write whatever you want me to write on the title page.

At a piano bar on Sunset — the kind you sank down into like a dugout or foxhole — they drank bourbon and laughed at poor Madeline, poor Walt. What ridiculous lives they’d created for themselves, right George? Poor rich people, you had to pity them.

They shared the elbow of the bar and from there could see most of the long, narrow room — from its booths to its doorway, open to the street above. It wasn’t a walker’s city but there were, gliding across the golden lace of sunlight and junipers, a few passersby whose shoes and boots suggested, George thought, a realm that would never pay them any attention, no matter how loud or how talented the pianist. Down here the drinkers were mostly men; it wasn’t the kind of place anyone brought a wife or a date. George did not say this, but I’d like to make it clear that, in such environments, men like George feel fraudulent and anxious. They become imposters. It’s not simply a matter of belonging or not belonging but of confronting what is supposed to be “authenticity” with an even greater degree of artifice; where everyone else in the room — at last able to relax, to speak his mind — sets down his mask, ours is made heavier. To be alone with men is, for men like us, the call to give the performance of a lifetime. And we are called far too often, if you want my opinion.

But Jack, too, was an imposter here, and, while he couldn’t say it, George certainly knew it. Or he hoped it and called that knowledge. If one’s ears can’t help but hear, one’s eyes can’t help but say. It was them against everyone else, he imagined, and for the first time in a bar full of jazz and cigar smoke and the vilest jokes imaginable, George was relaxed; he could enjoy, he told me, his drink, his chat with an old and close friend.

So he drank perhaps more than he should’ve.

“She’ll never admit it,” he told Jack, “but Madeline was born without a personality. It’s tragic but she manages, she gets along, as you say.” He smiled at his own cleverness, pleased even before the analogy left his lips: “She resembles one of those birds who build everything out of refuse. A nest full of other people’s things, their stolen jewelry and discarded keepsakes.”

“But Georgie, she can’t help it. She just finds you so interesting.”

Georgie. So close he could almost hear his real name knocking around in Jack’s throat. He leaned into the drunkenness in his smile, which wasn’t as severe as he made it seem; he just wanted to be liked, to be enjoyed.

“Seems hard to believe all they do is drink and eat and go to parties,” Jack said. “Well, and act, I suppose. In fact Walt especially seems to do a lot of acting. I imagine he and that — that kid that was with us, what was his name?”

“Jack.”

“Hmmm?”

“No, his name is also Jack. We call him Jacques.”

“Cousteau.”

“Oui, comme ça.” George saw the vulnerability — where, after all, did Jacques come from? — and he lifted his glass to hold open the thought, the space, until he found something innocuous to fill it. “Madeline” — he forced a laugh — “she says this all the time, ‘I collect people.’ As if we are just things? Things, Jack.” His Madeline voice, a little higher and geographically ambiguous, as if he weren’t sure if he were making fun of an American or a Brit, made him blush. He’d never used it in front of another person.

Jack signaled the bartender. “What kind of people?”

“Oh,” George said. He was unprepared, grateful to earn a question from the one man whose questions were, right then, the most valuable in the world. The bourbon had coated his memories like spilled-on photographs and papers, and he thumbed frantically for something he could recognize, something not blurred into abstraction. “You know . . . collectible people, I suppose. Artists, actors and filmmakers, scientists, ex-convicts, émigrés, journalists, musicians, dancers, men who ride in boxcars . . . There’s a farmer, I believe. Once, a circus woman, I don’t remember her affliction.” The bartender filled their glasses another two fingers and Jack thanked him with a nod. George, with no lack of awkwardness, held his glass until Jack realized he wanted to clink them again in celebration. “Writers,” he added. Clink. A trembling sip.

“What kind of scientists?”

Had there really been a scientist? Had he said scientists? He supposed he must have, George told me. There are regions of the brain dark as forest gullies that send out warnings. He looked there. It took all his concentration and the look of it must have resembled pain. Jack touched his shoulder.

“It’s all right, George. I guess I’ve just been paranoid since I saw that car parked outside their beach house.” He reached over and moved George’s glass out of the way like a captured chess piece. There was a certainty in his hands; they never wondered where they did and didn’t belong, and George watched them with awe. “Maybe it’s time for a bite. Something to soak this up, hmm?”

As they gathered their coats and hats, Jack said, “It’s strange, about Ellman.” George must have looked confused, because Jack went on: “He disappeared the same time you did. I mean, you didn’t disappear. But he hasn’t been to work these last two days. Nobody knows where he is. Couldn’t get him on the phone, either. Not that anyone’ll miss him, but a man loves a good puzzle. Anyway, watch your step. Here we go.”

George remembered something Jack had said. “What car?” he asked as they arrived in the street. “Someone at the beach house?” But Jack didn’t hear.

Palms, billboards, stoplights. Everywhere losing that color like seaside rust as it flaked away into a deep, dark purple. They could’ve eaten anywhere, George told me — a restaurant, a diner, a burger stand, a Mexican food cart — he couldn’t remember. Nor did he remember the opening of the movie, only fading into it somewhere in the middle, Heston demanding the freedom of his people — the Jews, George thought as he watched this profoundly un-Jewish performance — but there was something even stranger. The film played on the windshield, and he wondered if there weren’t something else in that drink and that he was hallucinating it now, from memory, as Jack drove him home. But they weren’t moving.

He’d never, he explained to me, been to a drive-in movie, but he had heard about them. It was maybe the most American thing in America, that people drove out to these deserted stretches along highways and parked their cars and asked for snacks and craned their necks to watch a film they could see much better, and hear much better, from the comfort of a cinema. It felt like watching something happen here on earth through a telescope on another planet. Shadows swept back and forth across the bottom of the screen. In some cars, teenagers kissed furiously, their hands clasped on one another’s cheeks as if they didn’t know, or were too afraid, to let them travel elsewhere. Children ran up and down the gravelly walkways between the cars, screaming over the dialogue and the music that rattled the little speaker on Jack’s dashboard. When there was a gust of wind, the screen bowed as if it were breathing, and the film bulged with it — the actors shrinking or expanding, the sets distorted as if they were underwater. Cousteau, he remembered then, and turned to see Jacques — no, Jack — sitting there in the driver’s seat. He had one hand on a Coke that he held between his thighs, and the other, George only just noticed, resting along the top of the seat. If it were to fall forward, George realized, Jack would be embracing him. It was enough, with the liquor and the atmosphere and the incredible solitude — they were parked far, he noticed, from the other cars — for him to sweat, for his pulse to race.

“Hell of a thing, isn’t it, George? Supposedly the most expensive film ever made.”

And it was long. At two hours, there was an intermission; others left their cars to relieve themselves and seek out more beverages and snacks and stretch their legs. The less innocent stood and neatened their skirts and sweaters. Jack and George stayed put. It wasn’t until the film began to roll again that George noticed how hot the human body was, how it radiated heat. Ellman had disappeared. What did that mean — to “disappear” in a country like this one? The car grew warmer and warmer yet neither of them cracked a window. Jack shucked off his jacket and loosened his tie. George did the same. Jack unbuttoned the top buttons of his shirt. This George did not do. The windows had fogged — including the windshield, which blurred and softened the garish film. Did Edwards know? Is that why he’d called? At some point Jack had finished his Coke and set the bottle on the floor, his legs spread wide. His hand still rested in his lap and — just as he’d done at the office in what seemed a lifetime ago, another planet ago — began to run his thumb along a great, magnificent length that slept not so soundly in the shadow of his thigh. Had Ellman really left, that day, for a meeting? On-screen there were screams and there was music and there were great melodramatic speeches but George saw none of it. When a man is in heat, he told me, there is only one commandment. It never quite does us any good, but right then it seems our only salvation. Jack took it out and George moaned at the sight of it, and from there the rules were broken. It really was a hell of a thing, George told me. The film, of course — however it ended.

Thank you for reading! As I said last week, I’ve temporarily paused all paid subscriptions while I pack up my entire life and put it in storage for a few weeks. In the meantime, please consider ordering a copy of The Future Was Color; or, if you’re able, please spread the word that I’m looking for new clients — both for manuscript services and for copy work. Thank you for your patience. Entertainment, Weakly will be back soon with regularly scheduled essays and interviews.

Because I’ll be separated, for a while, from this “retrieval system” (Sontag’s term for her own library), I’m forced to be judicious in what I take with me. Another way to say this is that I’m thinking about what I want to think about, and what I want to care about. But when my eyes landed on Martin Amis’s collection, The War Against Cliché, I realized I’ve always known what I wanted to think about, what I wanted to care about. I’ve always known, in a sense, my point of departure.

I hadn’t read Cliché since I first bought it as a college student, in 2006 or 2007. I was taking a class with David Treuer at the time — one of those authors and teachers who compel you, even if you’re not much of a notetaker, to write down everything they say and pursue everything they recommend. He suggested I read Amis’s Time’s Arrow, a novel in which Josef Mengele “reassembles” and “resurrects” his patients by virtue of time running backward. After that, I bought what I didn’t know was Amis’s best book. A seemingly innocuous and esoteric collection of essays and reviews spanning 1971 – 2000, The War Against Cliché is a primer, maybe the primer, on how to write about books — and not books as ideas, books as documents, books as reactions, books as symptoms, books as insufficient evidence of the popular Irish author’s Marxism, but books as books. “While literary criticism is not essential to literature,” he writes in his introduction, “both are essential to civilization.” Literature, he says, reflecting on his university days, “was the core discipline; criticism explored and popularized the significance of that centrality, creating a space around literature and thereby further exalting it.” What was unique about that era, he admits thirty years later, was that, in the cliché of Art versus Science, “Art seemed to be winning.”

He admits, too, that this has the tinge of nostalgia: “It is the summit of idleness to deplore the present, to deplore actuality. Say whatever else you like about it, the present is unavoidable.” The democratic, university-led movements of the eighties and nineties may have tried to overturn literature’s hierarchy — the tacit understanding that some books, frankly, are better than others, and other books are even better than those — but literature, he believes, “will resist leveling and revert to hierarchy. This isn’t the decision of some snob of a belletrist. It is the decision of Judge Time, who constantly separates those who last from those who don’t.” It’s not hard to return to some of the more lauded novels of five years ago — Jenny Offill’s Weather is one that sticks out in my mind, since I just read it last year — to know just how severe of a judge time can be.

Rereading Amis now, I’m struck by how exhilarating it is to read. The War Against Cliché does double duty in this respect: not only is criticism thrilling to read again, but so are the novelists and poets under review, under discussion. It made me realize that what I want to think about, these next few months, is literature and art — and a good way to think about literature and art is to read those who engage with it, passionately. What I want from my shelves, as I pack them up, is criticism. And in that spirit, I thought I’d share a few of my favorites.

I excluded anthologies here, because that doesn’t seem fair — otherwise Art in America: 1945 – 1970, edited by Jed Perl, would be at the top of everyone’s list (it’s great, look it up). I also tried to stick to books that are primarily essays about other works of art. Some of them include other essays — Teju Cole’s travelogues, Sontag’s foray in Vietnam, Brodsky on canned food — but most respond, above all, to style. In one of the (many) pieces on Nabokov, Amis reflects on the “unifying intensity and extravagance” in his novels, “an absolute trust in style.” He then quotes Nabokov himself: “For me, ‘style’ is matter.” Reading and rereading these books, I’m reminded of the agency art can offer: to borrow the world, as a character of mine once put it, make an alteration, and give it back. The list, in chronological order (sort of), is below.

But first, a brief note. Like I said, I am packing my library — and everything else. Because of this, I’ve paused all paid subscriptions, and will let you all know once I decide to turn them back on. It probably won’t be before the end of summer. That said, if you’re interested in supporting me and my work, please consider ordering a paperback copy of The Future Was Color, which publishes June 10, or help me spread the word about looking for new freelance projects — both manuscript consultations and copy work.

Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin

A compulsory inclusion, since it’s the genesis, more or less, for all the other books below. It’s hard to overstate Benjamin’s influence on the modern essay.1 While “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” basically created media studies, the essays here on translation and Proust and storytelling are equally, unprecedentedly remarkable.

The Tradition of the New, by Harold Rosenberg

Aside from writing about action painters, Rosenberg has, unsurprisingly, a lot to say about class and painting. In “Everyman a Professional,” he observes how, “Outside each profession there is no social body to talk to, and apart from the forms in which the thought of the profession is embodied there is nothing to say.” It’s an essay on jargon, essentially, which foresees the “professionalization” of all activities, including leisure, in the form of constant neologisms, trends, and images as shorthand for banal, formerly private activities.

Renderings, by Max Kozloff

If you’ve read the notes in The Future Was Color you’ll recall that Kozloff’s ideas on paint and relationality made it into the novel. In “Venetian Art and Florentine Criticism,” he argues that, with color, “one is dealing, at the very least, with the enzymic and metabolic, the temperature and pulse rate of art — set into unique governing and governed ratios with all other elements.” Color resists the usual critical binaries. It isn’t darker or lighter, harder or softer, or even necessarily warmer or colder. Color, he says, “forces us to learn the difference between the visible and the far more exclusive category of the visual. The latter is something that can only be held in the eye’s memory, as it were, and not thought’s [memory].”

Under the Sign of Saturn + Styles of Radical Will, by Susan Sontag

No, I couldn’t pick just one. Saturn has “Fascinating Fascism,” probably one of the most important texts for understanding the relationship between art, entertainment, and fascist aesthetics; while Styles of Radical Will opens with two of Sontag’s best, and most under discussed, ideas: the pursuit of silence as an act of will in resistance to a loudly willful world; and the religious intensity of the pornographic imagination in comparison with the general failure of other aspects of consumerist life to offer similar “selfless” intensities.

On Grief and Reason, by Joseph Brodsky

Even more at home in the essay than in a poem, Brodsky’s fearlessness — and indifference to the opinions of others — was unmatched. My favorite here is the title essay, a forty-page close reading of a single Robert Frost poem (“Home Burial”): “So what was it that he was after in this, his very own poem? He was, I think, after grief and reason, which, while poison to each other, are language’s most efficient fuel — or, if you will, poetry’s indelible ink… The more one dips into it, the more it brims with this black essence of existence, and the more one’s mind, like one’s fingers, gets soiled by this liquid. For the more there is of grief, the more there is of reason.”

American Fictions, by Elizabeth Hardwick

She compares Gertrude Stein’s prose to the music of Philip Glass — “its loquacity and verbosity the curious paradox of the minimalist form.” Zelda Fitzgerald, who could not find “the hope of release through the practice of art,” yearns, we understand, for the “confidence of society” that artists themselves, with something to show for it, “do not require.” Sylvia Plath, in the last months of her life, “was visited, like some waiting stigmatist, by an almost hallucinating creativity.” Stigmatist! You can’t help but wonder how long it took for a word like that to arrive.

Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace

Aside from the brilliant performance of “Authority and American Usage” — a sixty-page review of a dictionary — Wallace’s essay on the near hypnotic banality of sports memoirs changed how I catch glimpses of television in a bar forever. Later, in an essay on Dostoevsky, Wallace conjures the aesthetic bogeyman all novelists, in some way, have to face: “Serious Novels after Joyce tend to be valued and studied mainly for their formal ingenuity. Such is the modernist legacy that we now presume as matter of course that ‘serious’ literature will be aesthetically distanced from real lived life. Add to this the requirement of textual self-consciousness imposed by postmodernism and literary theory, and it’s probably fair to say that Dostoevsky et. al. were free of certain cultural expectations that several constrain our own novelists’ ability to be ‘serious.’”

The Selected Works of Edward Said (edited by Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin)

This one’s a bit of a cheat, as any Selected Works is a writer’s greatest hits, but its breadth and depth is so formidable, and so exhilarating, that I can’t help it. Besides, it’s my list. Perhaps more than any other writer in the last fifty years, Said understood both the pleasures of literature and its political implications. Applying this dialectic to Palestine, he writes, in 1984, that “terrorism has come to signify ‘our’ view of everything in the world that seems inimical to our interests, army, policy, or values,” and that this designation — that any act of resisting Israel or the United States is a terrorist act — amounts to a denial of the Palestinians’ “permission to narrate.”

Known and Strange Things, by Teju Cole

Writing of Kieslowski’s trilogy (Blue, White, Red), Cole notes how “unforeseen encounters can subtly pile up and determine the course of a person’s life. In any narrative, there is the material that moves the story forward. But the storyteller also includes objects or events that hint at a pattern of signification swirling above the surface, part of the story’s logic but just out of reach.” This, I think, is the deus ex machina we’ve been told is bad storytelling, but is, in truth, the way life works; it acts upon you with the same force we gather to push back. But Cole is a skeptic as much as he is an evangelist. In “Reader’s War,” he juxtaposes Obama’s middlebrow literary taste with the “heartbreaking stories of mistaken identity, grisly tales of sudden death from a machine in the sky” and the “plain fact” that “our leaders have been killing at will.” What happened, Cole asks, to “literature’s vaunted power to inspire empathy?”

Vile Days, by Gary Indiana

“There is a short story here,” I wrote in the margin of Indiana’s “Shadows of a Summer Night,” a review of The International Shadow Project 1985 that was so detailed, so evocative, that it wouldn’t leave me.2 Each of Indiana’s reviews — collected here from his art column in the Village Voice — is a testament to why you should pay writers to show up and look at things. Of a series of paintings by John Wilkins, on display at the Cash/Newhouse Gallery in 1985, Indiana detects “an environment of image bombardment” that invites “a sophisticated syntax of visual cues.” As pictures, Wilkins’ paintings “simulate a highly modern fear of the inorganic assuming autonomy, of representation replacing the real.” In a nation ruled by a small handful of small men who own the internet — and the President along with it — it’s hard not to feel, in our own vile days, the sting of Indiana’s observation.

Last week, I teared up as I sold a chair I’d had for ten years. It wasn’t even comfortable and I’d never been able to sit in it for more than an hour, and in truth I was glad to finally be rid of it. At the same time, it was something I’d had with me in the house for a decade. And the house itself — I know this is going to hurt most of all, once we sign over the keys: we’ve lived here almost thirteen years. But we’re finally moving. I’m selling furniture and books and knickknacks. I’m donating whatever I’m too lazy to list and throwing out old clothes. Soon will come the hobbies: Am I ever going to paint again? Do I keep the guitar I bought with my first paycheck when I was sixteen, even though I haven’t played in years? After that, the indescribable attachments: an empty bottle of cologne I’ve had since I was eight; a piggy bank I haven’t used since my voice dropped; a beat-up silver teapot my husband and I bought when we first moved in together, and that actually makes tea taste metallic. Earlier this year, when he snuck a planter into a box of donations once the plant inside it had died, I felt what I can only call panic and snatched it back out and put it on a shelf in my office. I couldn’t let it go. It was something I’d lived with. It was something I’d had in my life when I was happy.

Obviously, you can’t live with everything. You can’t take it all with you. Throughout this process, I’ve been confronted with the extreme manifestation of this attachment to objects — a kind of funhouse mirror of my own neurosis. When I announced that we would sell, my mother decided it was time to “go through” her storage unit — a 9’ x 16’ closet packed about twelve feet to the ceiling, untouched for years. Here is the same problem in a much more desperate register: How could I even think of getting rid of those old hair clips? Someone will buy them. How could I just throw away a musty comforter that’s been in and out of storage units since 2015, even though she replaced it a long time ago? Under the hard deadline of a terminated lease, an entire truckload of her life is teetering on a cliff — a life she’s kept all these years because of the fantasy of starting over, of finding a larger apartment, of decorating again, of cooking. But also because, like me and my little empty bottle of Hermès, these are her memories. In my impatience and frustration, I am trying to throw away her past. Who wouldn’t cling to that?

The enlightened among us, in America, are supposed to make fun of our peers for their attachment to things — to stuff, as George Carlin spat. A former friend of mine (this isn’t why we broke up), in advance of Dune’s release in 2021, wanted to borrow my copy of the novel — a junky hardcover reprint from the eighties. I said no; it was special to me. When I was fifteen or sixteen and spending all my time making music or chatting with internet strangers, my mother came home with it one day — a find in the used annex at Barnes & Noble — and handed it over. It was a novel my dad had loved and she thought I’d like it too. I didn’t read at the time — nothing but assignments — but I sat down that night and started reading and couldn’t stop. I bought the rest of them and read them all. It’s the book, the physical copy, that brought me back to reading — which is to say it’s the book that changed my life. I’d never let anyone touch it, least of all someone who treated all objects like disposable junk, who misplaced and spilled on things every day. I didn’t say this but my friend seemed to intuit it, and grew angry with me: “It’s just a book. You’re too attached to things.” To make amends, I bought him a new copy of Dune. As far as I know, he never read it.

It’s just a book, it’s just stuff, it’s all just things — objects with which we burden ourselves and which require space, maintenance, cleaning. This is the supposed revelation behind the Kondo Method or millennial minimalism: the bare shelves and blond wood and eggshell walls of the Instagram-primed apartment. In Longing for Less, examines the role the internet itself plays in this movement:

Minimalism entails blocks of solid color, organic textures, desaturated hues, and a lack of patterns. Minimalist imagery has only a few discrete subjects or focal points, often centered. The style seems adapted for the internet and social media, where every image must either compete with or match the vacuum of white website backgrounds. It looks good on the screens that contain so much of our visual experiences because the abundance of blank space makes otherwise subtle qualities stand out.

A living space (and ergo a workspace, since for most white collar workers these are one and the same) with recognizable patterns and identifiable décor, is in effect purged of mementos, of the strange objects only time can give us. Your space — the backdrop for your content and conversations — becomes as interchangeable, as neutral, as that of anyone else in your socioeconomic class.

When I was growing up, the zeitgeist said to fear and despise the office cubicle. Today, most people live in them.

This aesthetic, of course, spills out of apartments and into commercial corridors. In his second book, Filterworld, Chayka recounts his fascination at finding what is essentially the same “authentic” coffee shop in every city he visits: “The twenty-first-century generic cafés were remarkable in the specificity of their matching details as well as the sense that each had emerged organically from its location… What I eventually concluded was that they were all authentically connected to the new network of digital geography, wired together in real time by social networks.” In an interview with Sarita Pillay Gonzalez, she tells him how she began to notice, all over Cape Town, the same “long wooden tables, wrought-iron finishings, those [Edison] lightbulbs that hang, hanging plants.” This aesthetic, Chayka says, “was propagating into different venues as well: beer halls, gastropubs, art galleries, Airbnbs.” Unmentioned here is another bonus for the business world: Not only does every space look alike and seamlessly “network” on a homogenous internet full of homogenous people; but the aesthetic’s popularity ensures that this décor can be manufactured en masse by laborers overseas and, until just recently, imported for a song.2

It’s hard to take seriously this criticism of being materialistic from people whose apartments and neighborhoods all look alike, mass manufactured for a kind of mass personality — nor from those who engage in the digital equivalent of this consumptive lifestyle. While social media has guided the offscreen world to reproduce the aesthetics of the internet, this still costs money; and even beige trinkets and particle board furniture remain out of reach for many who, to paraphrase Chayka, nonetheless seek to identify with the void:

I felt that I fit into these non-places. They reflected my tastes and aspirations, in a way, as someone who traveled a lot and took a cosmopolitan pride in working all over. But identifying with a literally empty symbol was a strange exercise.

Years ago, I wrote an essay about silence in art and silence on social media — how cultivating deletion as an aesthetic by constantly erasing oneself can be digital self harm. Usually, people hurt themselves to manage trauma or PTSD; it displaces stress and pain in the same way a poem or a visual composition, by altering the register of attention, can subvert our expectations. It’s a cliché at this point, but neurotically trying to create a perfect persona — a likable brand — entails hiding or deleting the complexity all of us bring to our lives. To be visually appealing on the internet, as Chayka implies, we must be minimal to be able to circulate — to inflate our value as currency. Driven to succeed by this logic, it’s a liability to bring your whole self, your whole life, along with you. Social media’s collapse of the past into the present — strangers treating something you did twenty years ago as equally representative of your personality, of your values, as something you posted earlier that morning — makes the past itself a danger to your livelihood. Economically, memories are toxic assets.3 It simply doesn’t make financial sense to cling to who you were, to what you cared about.

Social media, of course, is not the only factor here. In American life, we tend not to have ancestral homes. There aren’t country houses passed down and shared among siblings. There aren’t parcels of woods to return to every year. In our real estate, we prioritize the building of wealth by buying and selling every few years — mostly because, up until 2008, it was the only way the majority of Americans had any chance at class mobility. In our vacations, we prioritize novelty. Our families tend to be small and nuclear; and, post-Trump, they are more fractured than they’ve ever been. With no place to go and remember, and with fewer people around to reminisce, objects are where we tend to store our memories. However, after the Great Recession, that American system — the life in things — is much harder to maintain. Things require space, and as my mother’s life can illustrate, space is a luxury. In fact, as any realtor fluent in square footage can tell you, space is money. In this sense, the vogue for minimalism4 among millennial Americans seems like a trauma response to the mass theft of our wealth. We lack the adequate space to populate our lives with memories, with things we love, and so we throw them away. We delete them. We diminish ourselves to curtail harm without realizing the harm is in our diminishment. These are dehumanizing conditions, and it doesn’t surprise me when people adapt to them by dulling the vibrance of their humanity.

And that’s the root question, I suppose: How do you remain human under dehumanizing conditions? As a parallel example, the fantasy of computers that seem human has played out, in reality, in reverse; anyone who’s interviewed for a job in the last five years can tell you just how robotic technology has made us. It’s extremely difficult to cling to humanity under conditions like these, is what I mean. But my answer hasn’t changed. If you want to resist your diminishment, you have to know what or who is willing you to change, and why. You have to know why deleting photos of yourself brings a strange pleasure, or why it’s a sinister relief to divest yourself of a lifetime of objects. You have to know, as ever, why you think what you think, and why you want to remain human, despite the cost.

Thank you for reading. Sorry it’s been so long. Thank you for sticking with me. You know how moving can be, but I’m grateful to have been able to write this, and hope to write again soon.

Strangely, Fitzgerald has the Second World War to thank for the novel’s posthumous popularity. As Louis Menand III wrote in The Free World, “the so-called paperback revolution is misnamed.” Paperback books had existed since the sixteenth century. What most people refer to as the “paperback revolution” was not about production, but about distribution:

Before the Second World War the biggest problem in the book business was bookstores. There were not enough of them. Bookstores were clustered in big cities and college towns, and many were really gift shops with a few volumes for sale. Publishers sold much more of their product by mail order and through book clubs, distribution systems that provide pretty much the opposite of what most people consider a fun shopping experience

But in 1939, Robert de Graff launched Pocket Books, “the first American mass-market paperback line,” which “transformed the industry.” Key to “mass-market” was having access to a mass market, and with “only 2,800 bookstores,” the prospects of selling around “180 million books” were pretty grim. But, Menand goes on, there were “more than 7,000 newsstands, 18,000 cigar stores, 58,000 drugstores, and 62,000 lunch counters — not to mention train and bus stations.” The enormous success of this model — “Paperbacks increased the market for serious literature by a factor of a hundred. They increased the market for popular fiction by a factor of a thousand” — encouraged publishers to collaborate on “Armed Services Editions of popular titles — paperbound double-columned books, trimmed to a size that slipped easily into the pocket of a uniform and could be thrown away after use.” These were “distributed free of charge to the sixteen million men and women who served during the war.” Gatsby was one of these titles, and during the war over 150,000 copies were sent to soldiers on duty. The novel’s popularity among military personnel prompted a critical revival, which helped turn Gatsby into what it is today: in terms of sales, the fourth2 most commercially successful work of American literature.

Since we’re in “great American novel” territory whenever Gatsby comes up — it is, alongside Moby-Dick, the eternal contender — I wanted to roll around in it for a while. I reread it earlier this year, relishing nearly every page. As it turns out, The Great Gatsby is a pretty good fucking book. But I’m only a reader, and Gatsby is so at the heart of American literature that it’s on more or less every high school syllabus (for now). Because of his essay, “The Great American Bummer,” I decided to reach out to Danny Maloney, a former teacher at a high school in Philadelphia, to talk about, as it turns out, one of his favorite books.

PN: Returning to Gatsby for the first time since 2006, I was struck by how many of the characters’ relationships are determined or shadowed by war — and not only the war, but war as a general concept. On the second page or so, Nick, the novel’s narrator, reflects on his desire for a prolonged world “in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever.” His service in France seems to have elevated or heightened or sharpened his understanding of the world, and only Gatsby, he realizes, had the same “extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.” It reminded me of something Erich Fromm points out in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, that wartime is a suspension of capitalist nihilism, that soldiers on the same side can be brothers and care for one another instead of compete with one another. Do you think this is something Fitzgerald was going for, this idea of war as a suspension of or relief from normal relationships? Particularly at one of the nation’s most famously “business friendly” periods?

DM: I wonder how much of it he looked at the war as this actual suspension of certain conditions, or this condition that affects perspective and maybe suspends — perhaps permanently — certain beliefs. “Relief” doesn’t feel like the right emotional response to that regardless. On one hand, the war (and its temporarily equalizing effects) certainly affects Gatsby’s worldview. The equalizing effect of the uniform enables Gatsby not only to meet Daisy, but also Nick (who can introduce him to Daisy for round two). So yes, war does briefly suspend the social rigidity (or at least the belief in its power) that would have likely made intimacy impossible. However, can we say that the suspension of beliefs in the power of class (something  that might have kept Gatsby from Daisy apart in 1913) creates relief? I don’t think so. I think most of my former students would be able to say that Fitzgerald comes down pretty harshly on a conservative American society that doesn’t want to change at the rate some of the strivers in the novel desire or believe possible. But that critique doesn’t change the reality of the belief that society has changed is not only false, it’s dangerously delusional. For that, I’d turn to the Valley of Ash described in Chapter 2, which I’ve always read (and used to teach) as an allusion to the trenches.

PN: Yes! Queens as “the wastes” of Belgium.

DM: Right, this place filled with “the ash-grey men” who “swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight,” and defined by a harsh monotony (interrupted only by incredible acts of violence — Myrtle's death in a ditch on the side of the road). And Fitzgerald’s use of dust and vision in this space, I think, can lead us to think about how spaces of war/poverty can affect us. I used to tell students to think about the “impenetrable clouds” that obscure certain characters.

But it’s also clear that Fitzgerald thinks that some of the shifted vision of the war isn’t necessarily always bad. For what it’s worth, I think one of the initial hints of Nick’s unreliability is that a few paragraphs after claim about desiring “moral attention” and uniform stability, he admits that the “delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War” created this restlessness in him that leads him, among other things, to abandon home and a somewhat ambiguous engagement for a profession he knows nothing about. But in a novel that really celebrates movement and migration, I think Fitzgerald looks at this as a net positive. Splashy Lost Generation Writers iconically go to Paris, but Fitzgerald’s characters go to the east coast. In this case, suspending a belief about the superiority of home might be a relief to Fitzgerald. But the difference between necessary relief and dangerous delusion is obviously one of the ways the novel demarcates between classes.

PN: On that subject — the migration of Fitzgerald’s characters — the Midwest is there in a lot of his work. It serves as a kind of witness, or even a stern figure of authority, shaking its head at the characters’ — and maybe the author’s — ambitions. It’s easy to forget that, in the final pages of Gatsby, Wisconsin and Minnesota take up a lopsided amount of space. Here, Nick sees “the real snow, our snow, [which] began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows… We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour.” That, he says, is “my Middle West.” Shortly afterward, he realizes that “this has been a story of the West, after all — Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” There are allusions here to costume or disguise — one that nonetheless won’t fool the easterners for long. What do you think is going on here?

DM: So, in that passage, Fitzgerald frames the Middle West is a place where you can be unaware of identity, which is very interesting in a novel all about new identities and fake personas and changed names. The East is hyperconscious of identity and differentiating identity, particularly in regard to new people — and especially when whiteness is on the line. Think of the Queensboro Bridge scene where, as Gatsby and Nick drive into New York, Fitzgerald is offering these very specific descriptions of the appearances and performances of minority groups driving into New York. I think in Fitzgerald’s mythological Middle West, whiteness and class are pretty easy to defend. You can be careless in ensuring your power is maintained and threats to it are excluded from your circle. But, that type of carelessness doesn’t work in the urban East where there’s not just more people but more types of people. The East Coast elites have to be vigilant and categorical in your level of identity — those south-eastern Europeans are not white; the wealth you see from the chauffeured car of rich Black Americans is not real wealth, and so on.

PN: At the end of chapter six, Gatsby tells Nick about the origin of his obsession with Daisy — a “love” that began five years prior to the events of the novel, and which culminates in a kiss. Then Nick tells us something strange — another of the novel’s mysteries: “I was reminded of something — an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of started air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.” What do you make of this? What is the rhythm in Gatsby’s story? — in his voice? What’s so fugitive about it?

DM: Can I just say, how gorgeous is that line? I remember reading that line out loud to students because I thought it was so perfect, and I wouldn’t want them to miss a single word of it. There are actually a lot of lost words in Gatsby. At the end, Nick scratches out some foul words on Gatsby’s stoop (but we never know what). One of my favorite details of the novel is that Daisy mumbles so much to make people lean in, out of fear of missing a single intoxicating comment. I used to ask students what it said about a person who deliberately talks low like that, or what it says that Nick focuses on it. Sometimes, I’ve always wondered if that was Fitzgerald’s nudge to ensure we’re reading his baby closely.

Rereading it now, that passages seems like one more way to pair the sacred with the profane. When I started teaching this novel, I was working at a Catholic school, and there’s a Catholic reading of Gatsby that’s not totally uncompelling (Gatsby as Christ figure (a term paper warhorse), an obsession with color iconography, a type of strident morality), and there are many readings of Fitzgerald as a lapsed catholic. And in that story which Nick recounts, where Gatsby literally ascends the staircase of the sidewalk to kiss Daisy’s white face — something that Fitzgerald calls an incarnation — I don’t think it’s inappropriate to think of the real spiritual power of language that Catholicism preaches, the Word made flesh and all that.

There’s a sense in the novel that, unless we have the language for something, it’s not real and it has no future. Consider the shock Gatsby has when he’s forced to confront the realities of Daisy’s marriage — that is, when her daughter comes up and starts speaking to her. What else seems so dependent on the right language? Well, the past for one — not just of individuals but of whole societies. There’s a sense that the metaphysical also depends on the right words — and I think this is just as powerful and potent today. If we lose the language to capture our most profound qualities (or even if that language is atrophied to our most immature concepts of love, self, the spirit), we really do lose something. I think this is part of the genuine moral panic around our addiction to the digital world where language is shallow, poor, or nonexistent, and whether our fragmented attention takes us away from something deep. Once certain things are lost, will they be incommunicable forever?

PN: I love that — language as confirmation, as reifying. To elaborate on its power in the novel, can we talk about its prose for a second? Fitzgerald’s style cuts like there are fleurs-de-lis hammered into the blade. Of a summer evening, he says, “The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life.” A townhouse in Manhattan is “one slice in a long white cake.” There’s a brief shift to the present tense at one point to describe the shifting actions of a city afternoon as it blurs into evening, quick is strikingly contemporary. And then of course there’s the ending, which is hard to beat in American fiction:

I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

DM: I think one of the fascinating things about Gatsby’s sacrosanct place in the American curriculum is that, for such a widely taught book, its prose is very modern. It’s not the most Modernist thing you’ll encounter, but there are lines of real poetry and even experimentation. It’s got so much depth. I’m often startled by how such a beautiful novel is so casually taught — maybe because I was never taught Gatsby. I read it in high school and then later in college but I really never paid attention to the novel until I had to teach it, which is always a fascinating exercise. First, because I think this novel — which has a lot to do with aging and maturity (or the lack of maturity that accompanies aging) — really benefits from perspective. But it’s also because when I taught something, it was a matter of reading it multiple times, and seeking for a bunch of little “theses” that I could find in it. My annotated Gatsby copies (plural) are written all over in these unintelligible scrawls of what I find interesting or how I thought I would capture students’ imaginations. I thought of planning a unit like writing a multi-part critical essay in which I would “argue” for my students (something to fight against always works well in a class). And fortunately, I was able to shift and change things because every time I read the novel (at least once a year) I find something new. And sometimes, it’s as simple as a crazily gorgeous line I missed.

There’s an airiness that perfumes the novel. I think of that image of Daisy floating on the couch in Chapter 1. So much of the prose is that way — central to the success of the novel as a work of art, but so effervescent. The problem with talking about Gatsby is so much of discussion seems cliché. Most of us get a half-baked high-school version of something that’s actually remarkably complex. Here’s an easy example: the way Fitzgerald uses color is staggering, synesthetic and confusing and wonderful all at once. But because you remember the Green Light, talking about how colorful Fitzgerald’s prose is feels childish — literally. But then you get to a line like “yellow cocktail music,” and somehow I have no idea what that means but I know precisely how it sounds.

I loved teaching Gatsby in part for these stylistic reasons. It does all these complex structural things not only artfully, but approachably — in a way that can be understood. It’s not that it’s basic or stupid, but it allows you to access it on whatever level you want. You can choose not to think much at all, and you’ll probably be like that corporate lawyer I spoke to a few weeks ago who just talked about it as “a novel about rich people.” But Fitzgerald’s prose creates these layers that readers (and students) can delve deeper and deeper depending on how much they want from the novel. And I don’t think Fitzgerald did that intentionally, but it’s unique for a popular text to have so many levels of access. I think that’s why it’s so gratifying to teach. It lends itself to certain levels of accessibility that students can genuinely and independently identify how motif works. Most people want to feel smart (I think), and the novel allows people to access smart literary things for a wide range of readers.

PN: That’s something I’ve been curious about, especially lately. How, in your experience, did students respond to Gatsby? If you read the Atlantic you know that the youngs are morons who can’t read without keeping a moral score, but it would shock me if that’s actually the case out in the wild. So — particularly with Fitzgerald’s antisemitism — what does that look like in the classroom?

DM: First of all, I think the dirtiest word in English education is “relatable.” If the literature we are teaching is aligned and relatable to teenagers — whose minds were addled long before they became addicted to algorithmic social media and discouraged by toxic national politics, by the way — then we are offering so little. I understood my job as a way to offer students something beyond. That’s why I learned to love reading — not because I saw myself3 as I was, but precisely because I saw adult possibilities that were like nothing I saw in life. It helped me realize I could escape or aspire or consider as much as I wanted.

An unintentional benefit of our current political moment is that students are increasingly well versed in the implications of an unfairly wealthy and irresponsible elite class. I don’t think we were thinking that way when I was in high school. So I think this has made understanding “old money and new money” a little easier. Class is not always the easiest thing to explain when you have to get more complex than just “how much money is in your checking account,” but, to our credit, I think we’re talking about it a lot more, so teachers are better equipped to think about it and define it and students have more a scaffold for it. But here’s the thing: that understanding of elitism is often shallow because it comes from infographics and Instagram carousels and TikToks, which — shockingly, I know — cannot provide you with a sophisticated sense of class consciousness. I think the same thing can be said for their ability to decipher some of the more sinister bigotry and racism and antisemitism in the novel. I think to a more sophisticated reader (or an older reader with a larger vocabulary of slurs and biases), you read through the Wolfsheim passages or depictions of any non-rich WASP and you’re slightly horrified. But more horrifying is trying to explain what it means to a room of teenagers who might ask an innocuous question. Their moral outrage is, for the most part, only equipped to deal with the obvious and the contemporary.

However, a brief word in defense of the young and their moralizing reading: The moral outrage (or mere unwillingness to accommodate certain things in literature) did occasionally pop up toward the last years of my career, but never to the point where a student wouldn’t engage with a text. They just might become unwilling to defend it or “like” it. And often, they had a point. I think we’ve sometimes become accustomed to dealing with some biases so long that even when we don’t condone them, we’ve lost an appreciation for their edge, and it’s helpful for adolescent outrage to remind you of some perspective, even if it’s misplaced and sometimes ill-informed, or just reactionary.

PN: I want to chase that a little — the sinister part anyway. Tom, too, is bored with money and success: his ventures into white supremacy seem, to Nick, “pathetic” — “as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more.” Later, “Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.” The contemporary parallels here — men like Musk and Zuckerberg whose incomprehensible fortunes are no longer enough, and who demand to be adored as well as feared — are almost too easy to point out. Fitzgerald himself craved the security of money. Do you think Gatsby was a kind of conversation he had with himself about the potential folly of this kind of craving? Is Jay Gatsby a warning?

DM: I think Gatsby is obviously a warning, but I think it’s ultimately a warning against the simplistic ways we understand wealth (and the performance of wealth). And I think that’s one way the novel is timely — as wealth becomes more concentrated and our ways of understanding it (the “one percent,” the economic “elites”) become flattened and memeified, I think the novel really suggests we need to ensure our understanding of wealth to be as complex as the systems of capital that enable them. It’s too simple and maybe even silly to suggest that Fitzgerald looks at money as this evil thing that serves no purpose, perhaps because he can’t let himself look at his own pursuit of it in that same way.

As an (ex-) teacher I think this also really helpful because I think it demands that we ask our students to consider the ways they understand the system are incomplete, and that we must work to get beyond our simplistic notions. Money performs a valuable role in the novel — and not just greasing the justice system to get Tom and Daisy off scot-free. Money can also be fun and comfortable and pleasurable, and that seems like a worthy end — with some caveats. If we just suggest Gatsby is some sort of party flapper novel, we’ve lost our minds to a Baz Luhrmann fantasy, but I think these details of money enabling luxurious pleasures should be taken seriously.

The clearest warning I see in the novel is admittedly a tepid cliché (though that doesn’t make it untrue; perhaps it’s cliché because it’s in Gatsby). Fitzgerald seems harshest when people look at money as something that it’s not: emotionally fulfilling, proof of a fictional meritocracy, an easy solution. His problem seems to be when money’s pleasure or ease gets conflated into something else, particularly as something that gives and/or reflects value. And although the trope that “money doesn’t buy happiness” is played out, I think the novel does stand the test of time because American society is constantly evolving its language and ideas about what money can do (or even what money is — cf. Citizens United). After all, most outside the far right wouldn’t explicitly state some sort of Protestant Work Ethic proof of redemption, but I think finding people to argue with over what we consider a meritocracy is far more complicated. Most high schoolers would say yeah, money won’t buy happiness, but they also think that achieving a level of success at “influencing” would be proof of their taste (which is often used to moralize), would give them freedom (power), and would connect them to a real social network of people who admire them (love).

Similarly, I think Musk and Zuckerberg genuinely view their money (they would probably call it their “success”) as legitimate proof of deserving of our emotional adulation, and also that they are well equipped to meddle in government. We’re already seeing the consequences of that hubris. To believe money is more than it is can be a swaggering, even adolescently narcissistic mindset.

I believe this is related to one of the reasons the book gets an unfair rap as English class fodder. Fitzgerald explicitly casts these desires for wealth and beliefs around money as not only simplistic, but as adolescent (both Tom and Gatsby are introduced in terms of their college years), and so when we teach it to adolescents, they don’t see always see the clear critique — that certain beliefs (true love, social mobility, the infinite capacity of self-performance) are maybe unavoidable in your teens, but pathetic once you still hold them at thirty (or older). Are we still doing this? They’re too close to it. It’s similar to how young men respond to adults performing an adolescent masculinity. To them, it’s not a pathetic attempt to stoop to their level in order to gain their favor, but an egotistical recognition (something they’ve been trained to do by the very apps Musk and Zuckerberg own). Tom and Gatsby are pathetic when they genuinely believe this simplistic/adolescent view — and so are our technocrats.

PN: On that subject, the new exposé about Facebook is called Careless People — a phrase you can’t hear without thinking of Tom and Daisy, who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Careless People is a fitting title for a book about the “move fast and break things” company, especially one whose greatest impact, so far, has been to foment a genocide in Myanmar simply because that’s what the algorithms calculated as most profitable. Framing it this way, I realized there’s a third careless person in the novel: Jay Gatsby. It’s his desperation and vulnerability, his need to not only be liked, but loved, that lead him to ruin. His dream — to be with Daisy — is shockingly dull and boring. As a character, all the vitality drains right out of him whenever Daisy is around; he falls quiet and his charisma disappears. Do you think Jordan Baker is correct? Does it really take two to make a car accident?

DM: Oh, Jordan’s absolutely right, and we should take heed. This is obvious, but important, so I’ll spell it out: The wealthy have the privilege of carelessness due to the fact that their wealth insulates them from legal or social recourse. The fact that this remains so relevant and basic should be crushing to us. One imagines that it’s not merely that Daisy is able to avoid the law, but she’s also able to remain ignorant or uncaring of her actions (think of Elon and DOGE and their lack of interaction with the public they’re harming, the lives they’re ruining). But I think the carelessness angle goes so much further. Because I think the extension of your line of thought about Gatsby and Daisy (or Nick and Jordan) as mutually or symbiotically careless, is that the accidents borne from carelessness take two: Meta, for example, and us. We are careless in our use of these technologies, enabling them to take over our lives — especially as we continue to engage despite knowing so much. I don’t know one person who would tell me Meta is good, and yet nearly every person I know has some excuse for continuing to engage with its products, including me. If that’s not careless, what is?

You already discussed the idea of wealth as this complicated aspiration — something that we criticize even as we want it. This gets mirrored on so many levels — Gatsby’s disdain for Tom but his attempt to become him, Fitzgerald’s disdain for his characters but his shameless mining of his own embarrassed desires, and our criticism of them all. And that seems fairly base level. Similarly base level seems the Sparknotable critique of the wealthy as these apathetic agents of disaster. Fitzgerald makes that explicit. But isn’t it interesting how we don’t necessarily give the novel credit for connecting these ideas — how the careless admiration or attention to careless wealthy individuals is leading us to thoughtlessly pursue lives that we understand are fraught, but somehow uncritically think we’ll be immune from?

I think your identification of his dream and his personality as, well, pathetic, is also important. If wealth yields carelessness, what does that carelessness lead to beyond violence and apathy toward the working class? Well, it leads to an emptiness of emotional connection (again, see Jordan and Nick). But it also leads to this total flattening of a personality and potential. When we thoughtlessly offer admiration to certain people, that can yield consequences — particularly if we don’t pay attention. This is one of the ways that social media is most damaging: the people it directs our attention toward are obviously those most in line with its empty ethos; it rewards those who play by its rules.

PN: Right, the ones who conform most frictionlessly to its style.

DM: Exactly. But the influencer is profoundly unworthy not just because they’ve flattened themselves to a godless media, but because they can in fact successfully influence us to be as flat to them, and to lessen our “capacity for wonder.” I’m so often struck by how dull and empty and just sad most influencers I’ve met in the wild are. If we allow algorithms or our own laziness to flatten our lives, that invites a spiritual consequence. But of course, algorithmic social media benefits from us developing this lessened capacity and careless following, so it does everything in its power to use these influencers to continue fostering its ideas in us.

Like so many things in the novel, I think there’s this reminder that the rules don’t evenly apply to everyone. The rich can have poor models of admiration or carelessly create violence, but the system protects them. If the system is not properly structured (which is inevitable with a massively careless public), then those protections can be extended to those who conform to its values. I think that’s what we’ve already started to see with MAGA elites, who can be as careless as they want. Their violence (and literal insurrections) go unpunished. Not so much for the grassroots folks.

I think this is important to reflect to students particularly as the performance of lifestyle, or “self branding,” grows more and more intrinsic to economic mobility (or mere survival). All attitudes are not created equal, and what benefits one will not necessarily benefit others. Gatsby lives in this world of pure performance where certain elements of identity just don’t matter. The fact is, he’s a criminal masquerading as a rich man, but his performance of wealth doesn’t seem all that different from Tom’s reality. Nick, on the other hand, could never be Gatsby; he simply doesn’t have the temperament. Is this why he flees the East? Depressingly, the novel shows how, when we engage in a society that is all flash and no substance, the attempt itself becomes hard to avoid; the society’s values begin to replace our own. Not everyone has the will to resist.

From the very beginning I fell for Modernism — probably because it was what everyone around me feared or lamented. Ulysses, they hissed, as though reading it were punishment. Conrad, they yawned. With the same certainty, they waved off Woolf and balked at Faulkner. From the way they rolled their eyes, The Waste Land seemed at the top of this particular pyramid, a pleasureless poem “no one” would ever want to read — which of course meant I wanted to read it. And reading it was extraordinarily difficult, particularly for a rather stupid young student who nonetheless knew what he didn’t know, and knew he wanted to know it. I guess Eliot and I have at least one thing in common: Some people never get over being raised in the Midwest.

Oddly, this dynamic — of knowing what you don’t know — is something Eliot alludes to in “The Function of Criticism,” distinguishing between a reductive simplification of the Classic and the Romantic1, or the outer and the inner voice. In a Classic attitude, “men cannot get on without giving allegiance to something outside themselves”; there are rules or laws by which we comport ourselves, or at least orient ourselves, as readers and writers. The Romantic attitude, on the other hand, Eliot ridicules as a kind of nihilistic egalitarianism: “If I like a thing, that is all I want; and if enough of us, shouting all together, like it, that should be all that you (who don’t like it) ought to want.” If everything is preference — if we’re to just let people enjoy things, as Disney-watching adults are always threatening — then criticism itself is irrelevant, and a difficult or experimental poem only aspires to pretension, not to literature. Conversely, to aspire toward literature would be to suppose some form of Eliot’s “outside allegiance” or “devotion” to which an artist “must surrender and sacrifice himself.”

A simpler way to say this is that I wanted to read The Waste Land, when I was young, because I believed in it more than I believed in myself. And I believed in The Waste Land because I believed in poetry, in literature. More importantly, it never occurred to me not to believe in literature; I’d simply accepted it the way some kids never get around to rejecting their familial dogma of Christ and shame — or margarine and Mrs. Butterworth's, for that matter.

Every time you read it, The Waste Land is an axis of departure. If Joyce once joked2 with one of his translators that he’d “put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant,” Eliot seems to have had the same idea. The Waste Land is a 434-line poem; my edition (Barnes & Noble Classics!) has 85 footnotes — these in addition to the 51 that Eliot originally included with the poem (mostly to boost the page count of the 1922 edition). His own notes run from the referential — “Cf. Ecclesiastes XII, v” — to the strangely personal, including several observations on the “hermit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec Province… Its ‘water-dripping song’ is justly celebrated.” Added together, they function less like footnotes and more like auto-criticism, especially as he defines it in “The Function of Criticism”:

We must ourselves decide what is useful to us and what is not; and it is quite likely that we are not competent to decide. But it is fairly certain that “interpretation” (I am not touching upon the acrostic element in literature) is only legitimate when it is not interpretation at all, but merely putting the reader in possession of facts which he would otherwise have missed.

The Waste Land, then, seems to be “at risk” of failing to offer certain facts to the reader — facts Eliot clearly wanted the reader to know.

This time around, I was caught off guard by his note on Tiresias, which opens this passage about the tryst between the typist and some “young man carbuncular” (a phrase I say to myself sometimes when its rhythm caterpillars into my head):

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

Tiresias, Eliot pointedly underlines, “although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character,’ is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest.” All the men in the poem are Tiresias, and all the women too: “The two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.” This is a bizarre “fact” to include — especially among notes that mostly resemble citations or definitions. It would also imply that Tiresias is Madame Sosostris, the “famous clairvoyante” who deals out the fortune at the beginning of the poem:

Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are the pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see.

Who, I wonder, can see what’s on the merchant’s back? If what Tiresias sees is the substance of the poem, it intrigues me what he — in the form of Madame Sosostris — cannot see.3

Eliot, of course, loathed personal or biographical criticism. His most circulated essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” demands that the poet “develop or procure the consciousness of the past… What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” Poetry, in his realm, “is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” Coyly — if it doesn’t feel too icky to call Eliot coy — he adds a caveat: “Only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

Not among Eliot’s notes is his allusion to Psalm 137: “By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept.” Leman is his substitute for “the rivers of Babylon,” where the Jews, in exile, “wept, when we remembered Zion.” Later in the same section, an unspecified voice (there are a lot of them) says:

On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.

Margate is coastal resort in Kent, where Eliot and his wife, Vivienne, traveled in 1921 to rest from an ambiguous “nervous disorder.” It’s also where he began writing The Waste Land. The waters of Leman, in turn, refer to Lac Léman, the French name for Lake Geneva, where Eliot traveled alone after Margate to continue recuperating — and to finish the poem. Their marriage, famously, was not a happy one, and it’s hard, despite the poet’s insistence, not to read the poem’s fear of sex as its author’s fear of sex, especially as the poem revels not in self-sacrifice, exactly, but in ascetic self-denial. Just after the Margate line, Eliot concludes his “Fire Sermon” by braiding the Buddha with St. Augustine:

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest

burning

In another footnote, he offers more facts: “The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism, as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not an accident.” This phrasing is absurd. Are there parts of the poem, then, that are accidental? The lengths to which Eliot depersonalizes himself, disguises himself, starts to seem like a fetish or fantasy, not a critical stance. He’s the man who wants to be erased while leaving footprints across the “arid lands” behind him. He wants you to see that he’s not there.

Early in The Waste Land, a voice offers a veiled threat or warning: “Son of man, / You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images.” I don’t remember when over the years that I underlined it, but it’s hard not to link “A heap of broken images” with Madame Sosostris’s cards, which Eliot himself occludes or blurs (or “obnubilates,” as he writes elsewhere) by fabricating an imaginary deck of his own: “I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience,” as he admits in another footnote — a relatively colloquial and personal footnote, I’d like to point out.

Last week, while writing about art and algorithmically generated slop, I came across Harold Rosenberg’s “The Cubist Epoch,” originally published in the New Yorker in 1971. The Cubists, he wrote, in attempting to fully and stylistically render three dimensions on a flat surface, “made art esoteric by projecting into the mind of the spectator the secrets and problems of the studio.” As a kind of stylistic but less agnostic precursor to Surrealism, Cubism “provided a new pictorial language superbly suited to dealing with modern experience.” Through collage,

it blended images with objects and made objects into images. Collage is this century’s outstanding contribution to mystification — it holds the seeds of events fabricated for the purpose of being described in the mass media, and of political personages reshaped by professionals to capture votes through matching other people’s faces and temperaments. The decentralized composition of Cubist painting and the derivation of its forms from geometry and from random objects — for example, Picasso’s Absinthe Glass, Bottle Pipe, and Musical Instruments on a Piano — resulted in the “democratization” of data and asserted that the identity of things lies not in the things themselves but in their placement and function. Cubist paintings and collages could contain anything — matchbooks, menus, wine bottles, contents of the artist’s pocket — and this caused the everyday world to feel at home in art. Cubist disintegration of the object emphasizes that an apple in a painting may in actuality be the result of a hundred acts of looking and applying paint. In addition to the solution it offered to the problem of transporting objects from deep space to a flat surface, Cubism’s replacement of linear perspective by two-dimensionality provided a metaphor of the psychic condition of modern man. Twentieth-century philosophers talk of the “flattening out” of the individual, and aspects of Cubism have reappeared in literature — Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Marianne Moore make use of collage, parody, and verbal “faceting” — and in music and the theatre. In sum, there is a Cubist epoch, and it is impossible to grasp the full dimensions of present-day experience without the Cubist reformulation of the sensibility.

Cubism, as emblematic of the Modernist sensibility, communicates “surface” as three dimensional. A vase on a table is a vase enclosed within a surface. A guitar player is wrapped in a guitar player’s skin and clothing. A pair of naked bathers wear the look of naked bathers. Eliot alludes to this kind of opacity himself in a rather dense dialectic between poem and footnote. In the poem’s final section, as the thunder sounds, someone says:

I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

“Cf.,” he adds in a footnote, “Inferno, XXXIII, 46.” In Henry F. Cary’s translation (Eliot didn’t need one), the lines are: “I / Heard, at its outlet underneath, lock’d up / The horrible tower.” Earlier, when Eliot professes his modest, passing knowledge of the tarot, he notes that “The Hanged Man,” is a “member of the traditional4 pack.” Given this familiarity — whatever he said, Eliot certainly knew his way around a tarot deck — it’s hard not to overlook the tower (torre) in Dante’s passage. The final section of The Waste Land depicts a dry thunderstorm. In the Rider-Waite deck, The Tower — symbol of hubris and shattered illusions, a great ambition erected in the wrong place — is struck by lightning, its occupants suspended in midair as they fall, halfway between the living and the dead.

Each in his tower, each in his prison. Here Eliot adds another note — a note to a note — to further complicate the turn of this key. He quotes the British idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley, whose Appearance and Reality conjures its own metaphor for subjectivity, for the isolated soul:

My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround in… In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.

Here, buried at the end of the poem, is a cliché so simple, so elemental, it’s hard to believe it could possibly conclude one of the most infamously difficult poems ever written: that each of us is opaque, wrapped in a façade, alone and unknowable. It’s Eliot’s version of Dorothy and her friends in Oz finding out they had what they wanted most all along. Yet in many ways this is the poem’s greatest gesture, to give what you’ve already been given. Shantih shantih shantih: “the Peace which passeth understanding.” That you will live and die is inconsequential, and it’s all there is to know. You don’t have to see it to feel it walking beside you every step of the way, but whether it haunts or comforts is up to you.

Thank you for reading. The title for this piece comes from the lolcats translation of The Waste Land, which serves as a kind of terminally online millennial SparkNotes, if you need it to.

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one talking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?

— the New York Times, July 14, 2019

On Thursday, the Atlantic revealed to millions of writers that Meta Platforms, Inc., had pirated their books and used them to train its “artificial intelligence” model, Llama 3. Presumably, it’s these books — alongside thousands of films and trillions of photographs — that enable Instagram, for example, to spit out a mealy paragraph or repugnant image, should you ask it to do so. In fact, Instagram is constantly suggesting that you ask; whenever you type the word “imagine” anywhere on the platform, a pop up invites you to prompt “Meta AI” to generate more content.1 Since all three of my published books have been pirated by LibGen, the “library” Meta used to illegally obtain its “dataset,” this means that Instagram is constantly soliciting me to induce it to digitally vomit up slop formulated on years of my own hard work — not to mention millennia of cumulative hard work from other artists.

This information, as Alex Reisner reports, has only been made available because several high-profile writers are suing Meta for copyright infringement. While I’m not a lawyer, nothing could be clearer to me than Meta’s culpability2 in this particular case, and I hope these writers have the resources to avoid a precedent-evading settlement. As with previous lawsuits, the court records reveal that Meta has meticulously documented its own crimes.3 As Reisner writes, “Meta employees spoke with multiple companies about licensing books and research papers, but they weren’t thrilled with their options.” Acquiring rights, it turns out, was not only expensive and slow, but potentially damning: “A director of engineering noted another downside to this approach: ‘The problem is that people don’t realize that if we license one single book, we won’t be able to lean into fair use strategy,’ a reference to a possible legal defense for using copyrighted books to train AI.” Right now, that “fair use” defense is entirely speculative, and technically irrelevant in court: “Generative-AI companies say that their chatbots will themselves make scientific advancements, but those claims are purely hypothetical.” But it may not matter anyway, as Reisner points out:

Bulk downloading is often done with BitTorrent, the file-sharing protocol popular with pirates for its anonymity, and downloading with BitTorrent typically involves uploading to other users simultaneously. Internal communications show employees saying that Meta did indeed torrent LibGen, which means that Meta could have not only accessed pirated material but also distributed it to others — well established as illegal under copyright law, regardless of what the courts determine about the use of copyrighted material.

As we on the internet love to say, this kind of art theft is a “labor issue.” And it’s true: I’ve written three books and I deserve to be paid if people read them, profit from them, use them, quote from them, whatever. This labor issue is what the courts hope to resolve. What’s more, a company like Meta has demonstrated in court case after court case that it knows what it’s doing. Any judge worthy of the title can see that it’s time to obliterate and dissolve the company with insurmountable financial damages.

It’s a mistake, however, to think that intellectual property is the only victim of these enormous and pervasive “AI” models. Just because Meta is training its models illegally doesn’t mean that doing so legally would skirt around this more existential problem. Because I’ve already written at length about the ecocidal aspects of Silicon Valley content pollution, I want to focus here on the ramifications for art itself — on the social and individual activity of art, and how art made by human beings mediates our relationships with each other and with ourselves.

Art theft has a rich history, none more famous than its most heinous thieves — who also, as it turned out, kept meticulous records.

In June of 1939, 126 paintings and sculptures went up for auction at the Grand Hotel National in Lucerne, Switzerland. This is the set piece that opens Lynn Nicholas’s The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War. These works, which included “Braque, van Gogh, Picasso, Klee, Matisse, Kokoschka, and thirty-one others,” as Nicholas writes, “came from Germany’s leading public museums.” All had been “banished from Germany as ‘degenerate art,’ but the Nazi authorities were well aware of their usefulness as a convenient means of raising urgently needed foreign currency for the Reich.” The atmosphere was bleak: “It was widely felt that the proceeds would be used to finance the Nazi party. The auctioneer had been so worried about this perception that he had sent letters to leading dealers assuring them that all profits would be used for German museums.” The proceeds, ultimately, “were converted to, of all things, pounds sterling, and deposited in German-controlled accounts in London” — still the banking capital of the world. “The museums,” Nicholas adds, “did not receive a penny.”

The Nazis went to enormous expense to fetishize art while denigrating artists, severing the art object — part of the culture or “the race” — from the intellectual and creative work that led to its existence. And in a Germany without artists, art must be stolen. This was one of Hitler’s many reasons for invading France. Art, for the Nazis, was a treasure or a status symbol; artists were liabilities — or simply Jews.

In Duty Free Art, Hito Steyerl writes acidly about the modern equivalent of this appropriation, particularly w/r/t the way pundits and politicians often suggest that artists are somehow “enemies of the people” in their “ivory towers,” unable to relate to the day-to-day activities of “normal” or average people: “The ‘anti-elitist’ discourse in culture is at present mainly deployed by conservative elites, who hope to deflect attention from their own economic privileges by relaunching stereotypes of ‘degenerate art.’”

The intent here, obviously, is to decouple the artist from the art, the labor from the product. The problem with these strategies, and what rich people — or the ruling class, or Hitler, or tech execs, or neo-Nazis like Elon Musk — never seem to see, is that art without an artist does not exist. This, in my view, is what the “labor issue” argument neglects. While I understand the instinct to cry foul when artists’ work is stolen to create slop intended to enrich a corporation, art is much more than labor — despite what a lot of artists themselves have proposed. Art has a signature that a manufactured item does not.

Writing of Duchamp, Harold Rosenberg recalled that “he had always been drawn to the notion of the artist as a craftsman — a term more venerable than ‘artist’… The modern artist fabricates not for individuals he knows but for an anonymous and ever-changing public.” In a later essay, on Dubuffet this time, Rosenberg reveals his personal scorn of this particular attitude:

As a champion of art by anybody, [Dubuffet] has directed his fire against art by somebody; that is to say, the figure of the artist… Dubuffet’s exaltation of ordinariness, and sub-ordinariness, fits him — as it does Warhol, who has also expressed the ideal of being like everybody else — into the pseudo-radical philosophies of anti-elitism which have been bringing art into accord with the aesthetics of big business and the mass media.

While Rosenberg sounds, here, like something of an aristocrat, he was a champion of workers’ rights. The problem is that he didn’t quite consider the artist to be a laborer in the same category as, say, an autoworker. Writing of the federal government’s enormous WPA Art Project, he recounts how, during the Depression, “‘income’ became translated into ‘job,’ and the artist was no longer a gentleman or bohemian pseudo-gentleman, but a socially employed expert.” With federal funds, the WPA commissioned approximately 10,000 artists, including Abstract Expressionist painters like De Kooning and Pollock, as well as socialist-realist muralists like Diego Rivera. When it ended, Rosenberg writes, it welcomed back to American consciousness “an essential dimension of art — I mean art as a vocation practiced for its own sake.” Losing the illusion of the artist as laborer, art “for the sake of the inner development of the artist came to the fore… Out of a job, American art forgot its mirage of a respectable social status and dedicated itself to greatness.”

“Greatness” is, admittedly, a lofty ideal — the kind of thing you scoff at when you have bills to pay or a day job keeping you away from your work. It’s the opposite of a rather pervasive contemporary sense of the artist — particularly the writer — in American life: the somehow psychologically well-adjusted fellow who pours himself a cup of coffee and puts his “butt in the chair” for a number of hours, then clocks out. This laboring writer, a kind of “craftsman,” is the expert that Richard Hofstadter foresaw in his 1964 book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life: “Today knowledge and power are differentiated functions. When power resorts to knowledge, as it increasingly must, it looks not for intellect, considered as a freely speculative and critical function, but for expertise, for something that will serve its needs.” His professionalism, Hofstadter implies, is precisely what places the craftsman in service to power, or at least neutralizes his dissent: “The amenities and demands of academic life do not accord well with imaginative genius, and they make the truly creative temperament ill at ease… It is painful to imagine what our literature would be like if it were written by academic teachers of ‘creative writing’ courses, whose main experience was to have been themselves trained in such courses.”

While writing can be artisanal; and while there is an element of craftsmanship to assembling written works, literature is decidedly not a craft. Art always has a duality: a material object and something greater, something evasive. Pretending otherwise — simplifying the artist’s role to that of a laborer who puts in their hours and clocks out — reduces art to another manufactured product; and this transformation, which some might see as a justly Marxist analysis of the literary industry, functions quite differently and severely in the capitalist country we live in. If novels — even our most treasured works of national literature — are manufactured by laborers, they are fair game for the same revolutionary automations that have “disrupted” other industries over the last three hundred years.

Framing the theft of artistic intellectual property solely as a labor issue conforms to the capitalist’s logic — that labor can always be stolen or replaced. Workers may be able to seize the means of production, but not if the capitalist invents a means that no longer needs workers to produce. Alongside administrative assistants and factory workers, the writer as laborer becomes just another victim of “progress.”

There is a style of art ever on the run from technological advancement, which in the arts usually takes the form of reproduction and mass distribution. One (admittedly simplistic) way to read French Impressionism’s intensity of color is as a rebuttal against the dutiful realism of black-and-white photography’s “replacement” of portraiture. Once Kodachrome arrived in 1935, the heavy impasto of Abstract Expressionism and, still later, Fluxus, happenings, and conceptual art — all work of movement, evasion, dimension — asserted itself as the new unphotographable, the new unreproducible. Literary Modernism, in turn, went where cinema could not. Orchestral work tried atonality when radio and records gave way to pop. Call it — for its perpetual evasion, its refusal to submit to arrest — the fugitive style. In Benjamin’s terminology, it’s art that refuses to relinquish its aura, that resists or reacts against new “mode[s] of human sense perception” which are determined as much by “historical circumstances” as by nature. This is art that says, “I’m still here despite it all” and “Come find me if you can.” In soulless times, it clings to its soul.

This fugitive style of course has its corollary. While Duchamp articulated its philosophy (or, really, its indifference to having one), its most famous practitioner is Andy Warhol, the last celebrity Surrealist — not to mention the prophet of the surrealist consumer environment we now live in. A warholian surrealism of infinite copies, infinite blandness, and infinite cliché is the dominant style in every nation plugged into the neoliberal network, a network that categorically rejects friction of any kind. This is the style I’ve taken to calling bureaucratic. If bureaucracy, as Arendt put it, is “rule by Nobody,” a bureaucratic style is no one’s style. Rather than abrade or resist the connective apparatus of neoliberalism, works in the bureaucratic style embrace it: they are primed for immediate understanding and circulation. They aren’t works that have lost their souls, but works born soulless. Even as originals, they are copies.

Personally — and maybe arrogantly — I do not see myself in competition with Mark Zuckerberg’s computer. Despite stealing my work and turning it into data, there is nothing that man can do, not with all the servers in the world, to write on my level. That’s just a fact. Nor am I alone. In this sense, the tech industry is unable to replace or reinvent literature, nor the aspiration toward it. There will always be a fugitive style. But what these men can do is “disrupt” literature’s audience by strengthening the influence of the bureaucratic style, which makes it harder for fugitive works to exist. This bureaucratic function is what websites like Goodreads and Amazon and Instagram provide, a way to confuse the fugitive for the “problematic” or — that favorite of American anti-intellectuals — the “weird.” As Steyerl writes, this kind of “disruptive innovation” causes “social polarization through the decimation of jobs, mass surveillance, and algorithmic confusion.” An example she cites is the “noise” that digital slop or pollution can create: “If one wants not to take someone else seriously, or to limit their rights and status, one pretends that their speech is just noise.” Looking at Twitter in particular (Duty Free Art was published in 2017), Steyerl concludes that “Bot armies distort discussions on Twitter hashtags by spamming them with advertisements, tourist pictures, or whatever. They basically add noise… A bot army is a contemporary vox populi, the voice of the people according to social networks.” I would add that one doesn’t even need bots to create a “bot army,” just a sophisticated algorithm that slowly alters what users value and what concerns them. That most newspapers and cable news networks now report on Trump’s policies as though they’re the will of the people — the “vibes,” after all, have “shifted” — shows to what extent this kind of digital minority can bureaucratize the will of the people against the people. This register of subversion is at the heart of the bureaucratic style: Cynical and nihilistic by design, it disempowers those who’ve gone looking for meaning or authority in art by reinforcing the illusion that there is no agency, no resistance. You are invited to embrace your own subjugation and call this act of diminishment “relatable.”

The bureaucratic style — the self-nihilating oxymoron of “art by no one” — is precisely what the corporations training and pushing these generative algorithms hope to create. “AI” art is the digital reincarnation of the Nazi dream of art with no artists, of literature without writers. The danger here is not in its success, which is impossible, but in its sheer overwhelming and omnipresent volume — an incomprehensible content glut that introduces a new kind of perception or sensibility to human consciousness, and which further estranges art and literature from its potential audience. In thoughtlessly manufacturing so much noise, Mark Zuckerberg and his contemporaries will never harmonize that noise into music, but they will give real music, fugitive music, something to drown in.

These are sensitive times, which is probably why this sudden shift in values felt like such a punch in the chest. What was supposed to bring the truth, or a kind of recognition, had become another form of language meant to abstract — a received gibberish of clichés that doesn’t relate so much as alienate. It reminded me of the previous decade, when queer books were reduced to an algebra of representation, but only if their characters were transgression free; or when novelists like Rachel Cusk gave interview after interview about the “inauthenticity” of making up characters or plots. These are only two examples of many, but both — to take them in good faith — make the claim that writing outside one’s experience is somehow fraudulent; both — taken in bad faith — are a solipsistic fetishization of powerlessness. How can there be political agency when we can’t even assert our books into the world? Attending this event, I thought, Here’s one more thing I trusted that’s lost its credibility. It felt like hearing Chuck Schumer talk about resisting Trump’s agenda, or like reading about Israel’s “right to defend itself” in the paper of record. At the same time, it felt as banal as logging into LinkedIn and reading about the kind of skills and qualifications I should consider cultivating if I want to be an espresso machine operator or hamburger technician. Like most of what comprises the discourse, it had all the sincerity of “Your call is important to us.” It felt, in short, simply like trying to be alive in a terminally consumerist society.

I don’t blame these writers. It’s easier to talk about bullshit than it is about fiction (and easier, from the publisher’s perspective, to market them as bullshit than as books). And as anyone who’s interviewed for a job in the last ten years can tell you, it’s easier to speak gibberish than it is to tell the truth. You can’t open social media without seeing an ad that’s lying to you, nor watch even ten seconds of most televised interviews — especially the serious ones — without immediately sensing this pervasive bullshit. But nothing quite tops electoral copy and political press releases — writing so awful you could call it analog slop. And everyone knows it.1 Just a few days ago, (not that one) posed a casual question on this platform: “Do people who work in political comms think their language is effective? ‘Minister is committed to… priority areas… leading an ambitious plan… wider sector consultation…’. Not being snide, I am genuinely curious.” My answer is that this language is effective if you reconsider its goal, which is not to invite political participation but to dissociate constituents from politics, to reduce their involvement to a vote every two to four years. Encountering this particular dialect of bullshit, we’re meant to lose faith in the possibility of politics altogether.

Culture is reiterative. This is what Edward Said gets at in Culture and Imperialism, that empire is not so much established as continuously reestablished; and resistance to empire must be just as continuous. Speaking of the ideological confrontation between Kurtz and Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, he points out that Marlow, in showing how London is as “dark” as Africa,

unsettles the reader’s sense not only of the very idea of empire, but of something more basic, reality itself. For if Conrad can show that all human activity depends on controlling a radically unstable reality to which words approximate only by will or convention, the same is true of empire, of venerating the idea, and so forth. With Conrad, then, we are in a world being made and unmade more or less all the time. What appears stable and secure — the policeman at the corner, for instance — is only slightly more secure than the white men in the jungle, and requires the same continuous (but precarious) triumph over an all-pervading darkness.

Of course, Said goes on, “Marlow and Kurtz are also creatures of their time and cannot take the next step, which would be to recognize that what they saw, disablingly and disparagingly, as a non-European ‘darkness’ was in fact a non-European world resisting imperialism so as one day to regain sovereignty and independence.” Marlow and Kurtz, like their creator, cannot imagine a social arrangement that does not rely on imperial centralization and exploitation; like neoliberal theorists today, there is “no story” outside of empire.

Part of Said’s definition of culture includes “all those practices, like the arts of description, communication, and representation, that have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and political realms and that often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principal aims is pleasure.” Part of pleasure is admiring and, in some cases, questioning the aesthetic choices made in specific forms of communication, even in everyday language. Said’s thesis — that culture and imperialism operate contrapuntally, and that resistance to imperialism also operates contrapuntally, allowing, even, for the decolonized nation’s tentative embrace of certain aspects of the former imperialist or colonialist culture — is one of the most unorthodox conclusions in postcolonial criticism.2 Tracing the history of postcolonial nations and the oligarchic bourgeoisie that often seized power in the collapsing empire’s vacuum, he cites Fanon as “the first major theorist of anti-imperialism to realize that orthodox nationalism followed along the same track hewn out by imperialism… To tell a simple national story therefore is to repeat, extend, and also to engender new forms of imperialism.” Orthodoxy, after all, is just another lexicon of clichés, and the disenfranchised recognize in its drone another version of the same bullshit. There is no pleasure in this kind of language, and it offers no questions.

The function of a cliché — particularly in “official” speech — is to protect language from critical examination, to excuse it from responsibility. A cliché is bullshit’s permission slip. This is what Hannah Arendt picked up on as Adolf Eichmann testified at his trial in Jerusalem: “Officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.” Whatever came out of his mouth, someone else had thought of it first. But Eichmann, crucially,

was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness — something by no means identical with stupidity — that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is ‘banal’ and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace. It surely cannot be so common that a man facing death, and, moreover, standing beneath the gallows, should be able to think of nothing but what he has heard at funerals all his life, and that these ‘lofty words’ should completely becloud the reality of his own death.

Eichmann wanted so badly to be liked that he could not imagine life without being told what to do. When Germany was defeated, he said, “I sensed I would have to live a leaderless and difficult individual life, I would receive no directives from anybody, no orders and commands would any longer be issued to me.” His repertoire of clichés was his announcement to whoever was listening that he would follow them, obey them, and look up to them. Eichmann’s language laid bare that he had no judgment.

To speak and write (and ultimately to think) in clichés, especially w/r/t how we think about and agree to organize our lives, is to prop up and empower obscenely dis-credible systems and relationships; it reiterates that an illegitimate power is nonetheless who pays the bills, who monopolizes violence, who doles out rewards, and so on. It’s meant to be continuously and demoralizingly provocative, to illustrate that power and violence can be just as arbitrary as words.

It’s impossible to use Arendt’s officialese without thinking of bureaucracy — to which all bullshit or gibberish aspires. To fetishize the idea that a novelist cannot imagine life outside their own experience is bureaucratic. To believe that one “cannot avoid” writing another novel about one’s “inherited trauma” is bureaucratic. There are legitimate criticisms here, primarily about the literary market — which is quite bureaucratic in its logic: Identities are often exploited according to a formula to extract a maximum amount of publicity, sometimes to great psychological expense on behalf of the author. And so too, of course, does the criticism of this market fit neatly into the bureaucratic apparatus: All the men whining about how their novels can’t get published because they’re men, because they’re white, because they’re straight — another cadence of bullshit. Nobody with a shred of sense believes it, just as nobody with a shred of sense believes that it’s fraudulent or “inauthentic,” when writing a work of fiction, to make something up. At some point it feels like everyone is gaslighting you in their own way, and you can’t help but want to believe their lies.

Who cares what writers say about their work? What does it matter if some novelist believes their identity or their trauma is their assigned topic? It’s the function of a bureaucracy to disempower everyone who comes into contact with it, and to repeat its prescriptions only strengthens and expands its influence. These and other countless clichés, which one finds — largely thanks to the homogenizing efforts of Silicon Valley,3 but also to American media more generally — in nearly every aspect of contemporary life, comprise a language that delegitimizes institutions and authority until both are arbitrary; and from arbitrary to superfluous is a short trip. Equally adaptable to fascist pomp, liberal handwringing, white supremacist fantasies, leftist identitarian policing, libertarian power grabs, and everything in between, bullshit is the lingua bianca of the neoliberal subversion of all collective action on this planet, a kind of white language that erases its own footsteps to remain entirely unaccountable to lived reality. To further degrade language until even its most basic function of communication is unreliable is precisely its purpose. As with all neoliberal aesthetics, this lingua bianca seeks to separate you from me, us from them; it precludes relation by reducing language to noise. And most troublingly, like Eichmann’s officialese it offers no sense of judgment because it cannot recognize the human experience.

There has never been a better time to know why you think what you think. This, in a word, is judgment; and without judgment, there is no justice. As Arendt concludes, it’s in “the essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy” to turn men into machines, “and thus to dehumanize them.” Bureaucracy, to which totalitarianism aspires, is really “the rule of Nobody… When Hitler said that a day would come in Germany when it would be considered a ‘disgrace’ to be a jurist, he was speaking with utter consistency of his dream of a perfect bureaucracy.”

Thank you for reading! Sorry this is a week late. Thanks for being here and thanks for all your help.

Note: Because I don’t want to start a fight, the facts in the opening example have shifted. Think of it as a knight’s move to another topic and genre.

I also thought it would be a good time to offer some recommendations, as I’ve been reading a lot of wonderful stuff lately. Maybe the most encouraging difference between 2017 and 2025 is that so many writers’ tolerance for bullshit has vanished. It’s a dark time, but that doesn’t mean our paths forward aren’t clear.

The Personal Part (skip if you’re ruthless)

But first, I wanted to say that it’s March 4th, and The Future Was Color has been on shelves for nine months. I’m grateful to have written a novel that’s connected with so many readers. I guess historical fiction about making a life and finding pleasure while the world numbly awaits its destruction turned out to be even more relevant than I’d planned — or hoped.

Some news about the novel: the paperback edition arrives in stores on June 10th. If you were to preorder a copy, the demand would help stores determine how many to order for stock. At the same time, if you still want a hardcover, there’s no moment like the present for an impulse purchase. And as a bonus, if you want a personalized and signed first edition, order it from SubText Books, where I work. Just add a note to your order and I’ll write whatever you want, including a big thank you, and ship it myself. <3

One last thing about me, then the fun part. As I said in another newsletter, I’m preparing for a big and ambiguous life change and expanding my client list accordingly. If you’re interested in working together on a manuscript or you’re looking for something more commercial, please let me know! Or just spread the word if you can. I also have a new website which makes contacting me about these things a lot easier than it was before.

Now —

The Fun Part

What is everyone else writing? A lot of good shit, as it turns out. Ada Calhoun’s Crush, which came out last week, is like if Jane Austen had read Walter Benjamin — a breezy, sharp, and incredibly intelligent take on a marriage’s overextension and dissolution, as well as its replacement with a passionate new affair. It’ll be one of my 2025 favs, I’m afraid. I read it right after Katie Kitamura’s spooky and unsettling new novel, Audition, which comes out in April. The only thing I can compare the latter to is David Lynch’s Inland Empire, but I won’t elaborate on that. You’ll just have to read it.

Later this year, Riverhead will publish Hal Ebbott’s debut novel, Among Friends — which is beautifully written and incredibly strange. I hope to write about it more at length. It’s as though a mid-century Salter novel got trapped in a freezer and suddenly awoken, but with enough of a canny understanding of contemporary relationships to hold your attention — and to upset you. It’s bothered me ever since I read it, in interesting ways.

I also just finished Ayşegül Savaş enthralling novel, The Anthropologists, which came out last summer. Set in an unnamed city that is absolutely Paris, Savaş introduces us to a couple, each of whom is from a different country, on the eve of setting down more permanent roots by buying an apartment. I can’t think of another novel that’s so effortlessly captured how it feels to be in a city in which, up until now, you’ve been young — and now, suddenly, you’re not.

Outside of books, there’s a lot of thinking going on — and the thoughts are strong and clear. In an essay that just lit me up, raised what in my view is the core issue for what passes as leftist struggle and resistance: agency. “I am tired of the sad, yearning, droopy mentality that pervades so much of the language of ‘discourse,’” he says, then adds how important it is for

reasonable people to reclaim the concepts of will, and power, and take them permanently away from the far-right and the fascists. I would like if we immediately cultivated a culture of friction, tension, strong disagreements, and struggle. Because Christ almighty, will we need it. We have to be messy. We have to break the fascists, and then rebuild the world. We need to be honest about the world we want, and we have to fight for it.

In the theme of “connective” verses sensitive discourse (which I touched on last week), published a wonderful essay about the false friend that is “relatability,” especially in terms of art: “Relatability is the bottom of the barrel in terms of building a just, functional society. Relatability doesn’t build solidarity; it makes for bland replication and cliques.” It’s a marvelous read for those tired of talking about books as lifestyle objects. And just yesterday, Alicia wrote a brief but cutting piece about an encounter in a coffee shop with a man whose “interest in real estate” betrayed his unfortunate intentions. The “gentrifier” is someone whose purchase of property convinces him that he’s entitled, in some way, to the entire neighborhood. This gets at a key concept in contemporary American consumerism — something the tech industry is especially gleeful to push onto its user base — which is the idea that culture can be bought or subscribed to, rather than worked toward, supported, or cultivated. One “tours” beauty by being “adjacent” to it, as Alicia says:

It’s always interesting to me how much these guys love food and restaurants, and they love meeting my husband, the historian, who can tell them everything about different types of balconies — which century, which style. They love to be adjacent to beauty, to consume it, without seeming to fully comprehend that their money, their tax breaks, their real estate dreams mean the artists and working people are pushed out.

In maybe the most motivating, life-affirming ten words I’ve seen anywhere in the last few years, reminded me of why I’m still alive and still trying to find out what I think in this era of absolute nonsense, and that is to “live to see their downfall; live to see them die.” But really, you have to just roll around in the whole paragraph. It feels like picking up a brick:

Clench your fucking fist and remember who the fuck you are. Live well and defiantly and by your values. Personally I’m interested in being — and being around people who are — brave, honorable, unfragile, capable, thoughtful, and in possession of style, humor, and moral nerve. Maybe you are too. Defiance, once you’ve tapped into it, is useful. It can give you an animating energy, it can remind you of your own aliveness and stamina. Anger is better, always, than despair. Take in what they’re doing, what it means. Tell yourself you want to live past this. Live to see their downfall; live to see them die.

After Trump posted that awful algorithmically generated genocidal propaganda video, I read ’s sharp and strident essay about the shift in the world’s Hegelian order. While I’m not sure I agree with the inevitability of this shift in values based on technological advancement, I did appreciate his insight into the relationship between politics and language going forward, something that Trump has continually disintegrated since 2015:

The AI-slop video of the Gaza Riviera is to my mind a far more destabilizing piece of propaganda than Trump’s claim to be above the law, which, for all its disdain for our old regime’s Constitution and for all the hard work those good Founding Fathers put into it, at least had the virtue of being expressed in human language, and therefore of being open to refutation. I suspect we will be seeing ever fewer instances of politics-through-language in the coming years, and ever more politics-through-slop, the cumulative effect of which will be a widespread and constant experience of alienation (whether gleeful or despondent), a general and persistent epistemic fog. The most common reaction will be not: “How dare they?” but rather: “WTF am I even seeing?” This is all by design — the purpose is to outsource the exercise of power to automated systems we are not even in principle capable of understanding.

In her ongoing series about gender roles and their political manifestations, raised the specter of the inevitable “childless cat guy,” now that more and more men are single and, frankly, unfuckable:

The difference between the childless cat ladies who defined the prior paradigm we’ve come to know and the childless cat men of the future is that the childless cat ladies often became such as an intentional shirking of expectations — avoiding the “what happens” that has long pushed women toward marriage and motherhood. The childless cat men will become such as a matter of ease. They are not defying expectations, but existing exactly according to the structural isolation and anomie society is bending toward.

In a brief exploration of the political or ethical self-reflection that so many leftists have performed publicly after Trump’s win, gets at the distinction between the maligned aesthetics of DEI and “wokeness” versus its overlooked (and relatively undiscussed) real-world benefits:

I am sad when people say anarchists have immature political analysis, because it feels far more immature to keep naming the problems and then returning to the same things that have never worked. No president (and certainly no DEI program) has ever reduced the reality of this kind of violence because the nation state requires it.

Lastly, wrote a beautiful essay about meditation, illness, and death, which brought up what seems to me the most important question about “health” in the world we live in, the world we’ve let happen:

But of course, the self and the world keep happening, keep unfolding as aspects of reality to love, to live in, to endure, to suffer. I’m able to achieve higher consciousness, and peace, and experiences of/with God, every day on my mat briefly. But what does that mean? And what does it do?

If you enjoy any of these essays, please don’t hesitate to subscribe. I can vouch for them all.

That’s all for this week. Coming soon from Entertainment, Weakly: the fascist as gamer in a world of non-player characters; the revolution was televised, actually; the antifascist potential in UX design; the imaginative geometry in the work of Sophie Calle; and a conversation about reading The Great Gatsby in its hundredth year.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for paying, if you’ve paid, and thank you for considering it, if you haven’t. Thank you for reading for free if that’s all you can afford. And thank you for hanging in there. As Mathews said, let’s live to see their downfall. Let’s live to read those obits.

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Last week, I re-deactivated my Bluesky account. Like the time before, it rushed through me and ran its course in only five or six days, and stopped working. I don’t know if it’s the platform itself or my many years of learning to play the game of Twitter — which the creators simply xeroxed — but it’s by far the easiest way for something I type to “do numbers.” But I quickly realized, or remembered, that I don’t enjoy the platform. Watching people I respect modulate their personalities to go viral fills me with a certain disgust, like watching your former drinking buddies go on stumbling around now that you’re sober. A little distance, and you see the illusions for what they are. Suddenly the whole thing gets repulsive.

Because I’m writing this on Substack, I want to focus on one particular refrain I saw again and again, which was people threatening to mute you or block you if you shared links to anything written on Substack. Others were “begging you” to delete your Substack account and migrate it to some other platform. Still others insisted that posting on Substack made you a Nazi, which is to say that what started as legitimate criticism — that Substack tolerates some hate speech under the guise of fostering open discussion — had arrived at the bottom of a familiar drain, puddled there with the rest of the sludge of the fatally online left’s fascist sloganeering.

The fatally online left’s fascist sloganeering! What a statement! What nonsense! What are you even talking about! Unfortunately, the history of social media leaves me with few better descriptors. I’ll unpack that shortly. First, I think it’s worth making some simple comparisons between the two platforms — one of which, obviously, I continue to use, and the other I keep deleting after embarrassing benders.

Bluesky, as I’ve said, is an unimaginative copy of pre-Musk Twitter. Despite some genuine interface improvements1 Bluesky looks and functions identically to one of the most dangerous and consequential websites ever created. While its creators seem to view it as a haven or a sanctuary for liberal users in self-imposed Twitter2 exile, users are nonetheless invited to become petty aristocrats, theatrically dismissing and disqualifying whoever doesn’t fit neatly into their coterie of sycophants. Obviously you don’t have to use the platform this way, but it’s how the platform, architecturally, wants you to use it. Eventually the platform wins. This is more or less a rule, by the way: a platform will always trump you. Its will is stronger than yours.

Substack, on the other hand, is the only major platform outside of OnlyFans that invites users to pay creators for their content.3 Since relaunching this newsletter in July, I’ve made about a thousand dollars just from emailing vaguely organized thoughts to subscribers. For someone living on food stamps, this is a big deal. Yes, it troubles me deeply that Substack, Inc. is so committed to the techno-libertarian ideal of “free speech” — which is just a way of redirecting consequences from those who speak onto those who get spoken about — that they’ve formally invited fascist idiots like Bari Weiss to contribute. It also bothers me that Substack, like any online platform, has “disrupted” more traditional forms of media. While legacy media’s list of failures is very, very long, it’s nonetheless an industry that didn’t deserve to get destroyed by a handful of naïve dopes in California — which began long before Substack came around, but which Substack seems to have taken to a more systemic level. Even New York Times columnists, not exactly known for their struggles to find money and attention, have departed the Grey Lady for the Orange Bro. And of course Substack eclipses, or simply eliminates, the role of the most important people in the writing world: editors. As wonderful as it is to read fresh, unique, and daring essays on this platform, almost all of them betray the absence of an editor. Part of what makes writing work is that moment when the editor asks a question that makes you want to die. An editor’s discipline and provocation is indispensable to good writing.

Despite all of this, Substack is where I, personally, have found writers who’ve challenged me, who’ve subverted my expectations, who’ve framed familiar arguments and conflicts in helpful new ways — ways that leave me feeling as though I can do something. Bluesky — and again, this is my experience — has the opposite effect. It makes me want to disengage, unfollow, and shut down. Its manipulation of all personalities leaves me with contempt for those I want to support. What’s worse, the insistence that many users have on being able to control the behavior and tastes of others (e.g. by blocking you or bullying you if you don’t delete one of your revenue streams) is such a callback to one of the left’s most spectacular mistakes that it’s difficult to believe they were awake these last five years.

A helpful concept I often return to is Franco Berardi’s distinction between connectivity and sensitivity, which Jenny Odell explores in How to Do Nothing. Connectivity “is the rapid circulation of information among compatible units… In this transmission of information, the units don’t change, nor does the information.” Sensitivity “involves a difficult, awkward, ambiguous encounter… [that] requires and takes place in time” and risks leaving the units or entities changed in some way, “a bit different than they went in.”

On social media, a connective architecture uses people as a means to an end; a sensitive one uses what people say or write to serve its readership or customer base. As “problematic” as Substack is, a platform where you can risk changing your mind about a complex topic is hardly a Nazi hangout. Yes, fascists do make money on the platform. But so do antifascists. While neither is likely to change the other’s mind; and while the fascists are still publishing the same blithering stupidity that they’ve been able to publish in many centrist or right-wing publications, I’ve seen many Substack writers and readers express relief at getting away from the dogmatic, sloganeering nonsense that dominates — and atomizes — most leftist online circles. Even though Substack pays a handful of right-wing extremists to write, it seems to me far more harmful to disappear into a self-congratulatory “resistance” bubble and look for reasons to disqualify your allies. In this way, Bluesky resembles a sort of permanent 2017, where everyone who doesn’t get on board with your niche agenda is somehow causing you harm or trauma — an ethos that, at the time, I admittedly bought into. It conforms to the victimography I wrote about in Image Control: a map where any transgression, even if only imagined, is permanently fixed to identity, both unforgivable and insurmountable. As I joked with a friend, if “X” is the Matrix for fascists who want to believe they’re winning this shitty video game they’ve made out of our reality, Bluesky is the Matrix for liberals who want to exempt themselves from any action whatsoever. The promised “blue sky” of another microblog is the same lie from the film: an illusion to pacify us while our political crisis continues to scorch the earth.

While not unique, social media is exemplary of how a leftist slogan or aesthetic can become a fascist tool, weakening solidarity and driving people who should be working together into vastly different camps. It’s basically a mirror version of the way centrists don’t understand the difference between tactics and ethics — that it may not be polite or “civil” to punch a Nazi in the face or make a CEO afraid of violence, but it’s certainly the right thing to do. This is also why the left has so few leaders: the near total adoption of social media aesthetics means that no one is un-problematic enough for any kind of mass movement. Taken together, it’s hard not to conclude that connective platforms, in their cooptation of leftist ethics by fascist aesthetics, are a kind of libertarian psy-op meant to root out and eliminate solidarity among leftist movements or coalitions. The logical endpoint of all these platforms is an ideological silo where no one is pure enough to help you, which leaves you defenseless against the grand libertarian project: a tech autocracy where all your choices are made for you.

In 2022, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd released a “cover” of one of the band’s signature songs. Dropping the key to A-minor and removing the guitar solos (a predictably shitty move; David Gilmour fought to include them on The Wall), Waters’ “Comfortably Numb 2022,” with its pulsing bass and droning organ, seems uncomfortably suited to our time. If that weren’t enough, the video depicts a wasted city under a dry, stormy sky. People-shaped shadows stoop over little black rectangles in their palms. The only building with power is a strange, spidery complex that rises in the distance — revealed when Shanay Johnson’s chilling vocal solo shifts into a plea: “Hear me, hear me, hear me when I call.” It’s simple and banal, but these are rather simple times: We know what to resist, and we aren’t resisting it.

I know I’ve been beating this drum pretty hard lately — and doing all the plugging that comes with it, since I wrote a book about social media’s subversion of leftist politics. This will be the last piece I write about this particular topic for a while, I promise. But the matter seems increasingly urgent. With this administration4 we seem to be at an inflection point or a crossroads. The stakes are the highest they’ve ever been.

The purpose of dismantling the federal government is to privatize every aspect of our relationships and interactions with one another, up to and including, one has to suppose, “surge pricing” for potable water. The goal is to annihilate the public altogether, replacing it with individual, isolated consumers. The easiest way to do this — and to enforce it — will be through apps. Amy Webb has written about this extensively (if speculatively — and a touch sinophobically) in The Big Nine, a book in which she extrapolates a banal dystopia based on trends in the tech industry. Refrigerators that monitor what kind of groceries you buy in order to keep your insurance premiums affordable. Windows that play translucent ads unless you pay them not to. Movements monitored and restricted to specific zones (for this one they can probably thank Israel more than Silicon Valley). An “AI” health assistant that narcs to your insurance company and advertises healthy choices throughout the day. Amazon housing. All the usual things one would expect of corporations intent on harvesting more and more money from of a vulnerable population, especially with no laws or regulations — and certainly no DOJ — to intervene. Logically, anyone who can’t afford this kind of lifestyle is simply eliminated through disease, starvation, or “detention.” There are already too few resources, and it’s the job of Silicon Valley technology to make sure the bulk of it flows uninterruptedly to the country’s new owners.

This vision may sound paranoid, if not outright hysterical, but it’s simply the neoliberal society we live under today taken to its logical terminus. With the dissolution of the government, all that stands between us and these corporations is the public’s will to reject it — while there’s still a public to do so. Sure, we have a handful of states willing to sue, but I’m still not clear what anyone thinks is going to happen once these cases arrive at Trump’s Supreme Court.

The fact is, right-wing ideologues have manufactured the platforms on which most of us have embraced our own subjugation — and they’re only going to refine them. They’re only going to improve them. Celebrating a version of Twitter that caters exclusively to people who think like you doesn’t exactly seem like an antifascist endeavor. Nor does spectating the (intentionally theatrical) collapse of the federal government and tweeting at your representatives to do something seem like an empowering way to spend your days. I’m not saying that writing newsletters is any better, believe me. If you find out what works, tell me, but I know for a fact what doesn’t. Social media is precisely what got us all here, and I can guarantee that doubling down on it — that continuing to treat it like a political town hall — is an apocalyptically bad idea.

Maybe what fascinates me about the will, in all my writing, is that I don’t have one. It’s what I’m always trying to cultivate, to solicit. It’s what style is, in every sentence, and what structure is, from the first line to the last. I write to convince myself of what’s possible. Fiction in particular — but also a well written essay — feels like an alteration; something in the world has changed, and it’s because I added to it. Which tells me, as a writer, that the world is alterable. It can change because we can change it.

Here’s one way I define style: The moral arc of the universe doesn’t bend; it gets bent. Right now, that arc is bent almost unrecognizably by the willful greed of a handful of “visionaries” who’ve convinced us to turn away from the world and experience it through a screen. Their style is data-driven, quantifiable, reliable, and logical; there is almost nothing Musk or Zuckerberg or Bezos or any of their peers can do or create5 that is in any way surprising, innovative, or unpredictable. There is no reason to be shocked at their encroachment into totalitarianism because their logic, their philosophy, was always totalitarian; all neoliberal endeavors are totalitarian. But this predictability is their weakness. This lack of imagination is their blind spot, and the only adversity they’ve come to anticipate is rejection — which is what fuels them. They can’t fathom a way of being in the world that doesn’t align or network with their values, that doesn’t base itself on some arbitrary scoring system. In a word, they are pathetic.

Most significantly, they think life is something to control. Illness, death, disaster, protest, violence, refusal, sabotage, creativity, revelation — they may think about these things in the abstract, but they do not understand them. Yet most of us do. It’s very human to know what illness can do to you and your family, what violence can do. Most of us understand death as inevitable, not a technological dilemma. Most people are creative, whether they realize it or not (this is something social media has illustrated — how so many millions have a relentless instinct to play with language). And of course, most people on the planet know that life cannot be controlled, as we’ve never had the gift of such delusions.

As much as I hate slogans, I do have to say that “become ungovernable” has a certain ring to it — and seems especially apt for the tech autocracy that’s about to wrap its clammy hands around the public’s throat. One can’t say too much in an online newsletter hosted by a corporation that has one’s personal information on file, so I’ll just say that to be ungovernable carries many, many possibilities, from the simplicity of rejecting cookies or blocking Instagram’s access to your microphone and camera, all the way to what can only be imagined. And there are far more people here to imagine a better world than there are people trying to control this one.

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