This is an excellent piece. You're a good writer. It's really hard to write with this kind of honesty and I really appreciate your sharing it here.
A few thoughts:
- You tend to write as if you're at the end of something, like it didn't work out for you. My suspicion is that you're actually at the beginning of your writing life.
- I've had a lot of the same kinds of thoughts that you've had, about these hard-and-fixed literary statuses ("deep in the lower third tier," that kind of thing), and I know how immutable all that can seem, but there's a point where if you're really putting a lot of time into writing and enjoying the writing, that goes away - and it's very interesting how it goes away. In the end, writing is interesting. The politics of writing is not.
- I know a lot of the kinds of people you seem to know and, in the end, they're lightweights with warped values. Yes, they manage to maneuver their way through the system, and they get opportunities and they get accolades and they may even be remembered (because the gatekeepers can also control posterity), but their books are bad....and necessarily bad because they're based in cowardice, because they didn't do the actual Thing of accessing and trusting the deep part of themselves. Good readers can always tell. And I've read enough of what's come out of this era of literary work to see how little any of it is based in actual interest or desire.
- When you look back at your various career flubs, what I think you'll at some point discover is that it likely was something in your system letting you know that that wasn't really for you, that that wasn't the right path for your spirit. Hopefully, the real path is something that allows you to write with all of yourself and all of your courage.
- I know you're a bit skeptical of Substack (as in the paragraph that you deleted lol!). I would say that the actual Substack platform isn't so important - it's just what happens to be available to writers at this moment in time. The important point is the ability to write infinitely and also to reach actual readers - although without necessarily passing through the gates of status to do so. My favorite analogy about writing is that it's like sea travel. Lit mags, reviews, scenes, status, readers for that matter are all just the coast. The actual Thing is when you set your sails and you're out in the deep sea. You may well never reach the other side, you may well never see land again, but that's not so important. What's important is doing the Thing. And, in the end, that's what everybody, at a deep intuitive level, respects.
Thank you for the comments, Sam. I'm always glad to read your work and I'm very impressed by Inner Life, I think it is a prototype for a new type of journal, and very soon here Inner Life-style mags are going to start popping up like toadstools. Agree with you on all your points, but I think this kind of writing sometimes involves turning yourself into a kind of character/caricature. And hahaha, yeah, I deleted that paragraph. The beauty of Substack is you can make these kind of after-the-fact stealth edits, just like the real magazines do. :-)
“By that point in my life I had been through enough squats and "temporary autonomous zones" and punk houses to know there was no such thing as utopia, there were just people destroying each other in new and innovative ways.” - This is a hell of a line!
So you go up there and go through the rituals of entry into a career and these almost suffocate you. So you come back here to clear your lungs on a more open trail. Let them have their writing-as-career. Like all artists in any medium, you aren't writing for career, you are writing because you have something to say. And you are doing that. I know it's romantic, but a hand to mouth attitude is fundamental to art no matter how successful. Hard, vexing, blessed.
These dinky little memoir essays are excellent. They get to the heart of something that’s under all the discourse — ambition. In popular feminism there is a lot of talk about “career ambition vs kids”, and that zero-sum for writers seems to be “career ambition vs. inner values”. But you kind of need both as a writer; no exposure without the former, no quality or uniqueness without the latter. This axis is just fascinating, and so relevant in relation to all the Sally Rooney talk (imo), because she is kind of like Don De Lillo as described here, someone who can just write novels and not wade into the messy worlds of journalism, online writing, criticizing other writers, etc. Which writer wouldn’t envy that? The problem is that it can only be achieved if you reach an extremely rare level of celebrity. The closest you can get to that is write a hit piece or any piece on it, and maybe some of that celebrity will rub off on you. If we were beholden to the tastes of editors before, we are now beholden to the algorithm, choosing subject matter / “beats” that will be more palatable to it. As if ambition wasn’t exhausting enough in 2013… Thanks as always for sharing!
Aaron, this is really, really good. I will rewrite more substantively -- important dinner calls -- but you should be proud. Really.
Ok, as promised, more serious thoughts. First, this was really moving. Sam Kahn is right. This sort of honesty is hard. I would add tough mindedness, if politely expressed. Bravo.
And I concur with his hope/suspicion that you might be at the beginning of something. Surely you've spent enough time out of the room to avoid being merely "a literary person," doomed to endless jostling in the politics of publication. (Yeah, he's write to dis that, too.)
Yes, the line about your experience of "utopia" and innovative ways people destroy each other is great. And I gather your heart has moved on. But I still think it is a very good idea for a book. Right here on Substack you have written compellingly about the appeal of the punk, vagrant, DIY, artsy, usw life. I'm confident you have great insight into the appeal of utopias in other times and places, and I think there would be some intellectual drama, of interest to readers, in playing your lived experience off against your scholarship.
Finally, I think you are struggling with what Yeats called "the perfection of the life" or "the perfection of the work." He overstates, of course, but he's Irish and a poet and it does make the point. More importantly, the problem abides. Yesterday my wife and I went on a walk, observing our 32nd anniversary. And we talked about this, specifically, what I had, and had not, gotten done as a writer and in other regards and at what costs. As you say, we make choices, choices are made for us, luck, etc. And still we wonder. It doesn't go away.
I have much more to say on this, but this is not the place for an apology for my own choices, accomplishments and failures, such as they may be. Hang in there.
Again, you are a very good writer. You will write works of which you are rightfully proud, and that we will justly admire.
I grew up in a literary family that was the first gen of successful intellectuals to be poor and unsuccessful. Because of this I was reading Bellow and Roth and Didion and Jong as a teen but without exposure to the “conversation “. For all my life until mid 20’s, I read and wrote without feedback or instruction, and it was the best thing that could have happened to me as a writer. I wrote freelance successfully for years and one day I realized I hated it, and quit. The salacious headlines and people who get hurt - like your story- and the repetitive thought regurgitation, etc. and the money chasing! I loved blogging as I now love it here, writing what I want when I want. I don’t write here for any goal or reason other than the writing itself. I blogged for years in almost silence before the community grew, and although I definitely prefer to be read and discussed, it’s not the motivation. Not that I’m so smart to know all my motivation lol
You’ve failed at levels I never came close to achieving. If you can believe it, I moved to NYC in ‘95 to be a writer and made similar gaffes and strikeouts, but at even dumber parties and lamer jobs. I’ve concluded that writing is not a career, it’s an affliction, and it can only be treated with more writing.
I discovered Dishwasher the zine in a little anarchist collective's storefront in Berkeley that had a rack of zines. Dishwasher later turned up in Comic Relief, a comics store that stocked weird indie stuff alongside superheroes. I bought Dishwasher the book at an author event in Oakland and met Dishwasher Pete. I enthused to him about his zine. He got a confused, suspicious look on his face and said, "Why didn't you write to me?" Did the book sell poorly? By NYC publisher standards I have little doubt. But I love it.
Oomph, now I feel bad for telling you to go write a novel in my comment on the previous part haha!
I share Sam Kahn's view below that you're a good writer and an honest writer and shouldn't let yourself fall into a spiral thinking you're washed up. Not least because this stuff seems to be an older person's game anyway -- a lot of big books aren't written until people's forties and fifties, if not later -- but also because I fear it's too bound up in more or less literary world's ideas of success. And yes, I know that sounds like cope, but I mean it sincerely: do you *really* want to be the sort of person that all the asinine idiots at the various loft parties pretend knowingly to each other to have read, or who gets positive buzzy reviews from intellectual half-pints like the NYT book reviewers or the LitHub product pushers? Or would you rather be the perhaps underrated, perhaps little known gem of a writer whose literary friends understand them and support them, who acquires a modest following of readers who write in genuinely engaging with the work, and who occasionally gets long thoughtful essays written by also-obscure writers in the little mags that genuinely engage with the work and push back on it while taking inspiration from it? The latter is very much within your reach, and it's the one that's actually virtuous to desire imho because it means you're devoting yourself to work that does for others what the most inspiring and interesting things you've ever read once did for you.
From the point of view of shooting for *that* thing, where you are in the Great Chain of Literary Being is pretty irrelevant. If you "fail" to attain bestseller status and buzz, who cares -- that's not the game you were playing anyway. And if you do attain those things despite yourself, great, whatever, but the real question is: will it provide the financial security that lets you do the work more comfortably, or be a corrupting influence on the work that causes you to write to spec for the illiterate gatekeepers or get lost in the buzz, the cocktail parties, and the narcissism bred by your public image? Either way, it doesn't really matter in itself. It's just a thing that happens, or doesn't. The work is what counts.
Maybe this is moralizing and deluded, I don't know. But I think it's sincere, not just a cover for careerist striving under the hood. And I think I've put my money where my mouth is. I actually scored an agent once through an essay I wrote, who wanted me to write a book, and I may take poor Toby up on it one day (my long-suffering agent, I call him when I tell this story over beers), but at the time I felt what I needed to do was start a magazine that could push a certain line on political and aesthetic questions that was missing in the Brooklyn milieu, and so despite my agent's loud protestations to the contrary ("don't do that! you won't get to writing your book for years!"), I did whatever the fuck I wanted and went my own way. Not sure this is *great* advice from a literary-career point of view, but my point is that it proves one *can* choose to just do this sort of thing, and simply treat the career like it doesn't matter as much as the art. And regardless for what it may or may not mean for my chances of being in the Canon one day or whatever, it's gotten me out of a years-long writer's block and actually unlocked something in me to be collaborating on such a project. Despite the heavy load of editing and business work that comes with it, it's actually put my accidental-friendships-for-life of the sort you discuss to *work* in helping me forward my own writing (and our shared vision of what writing ought to be) via teamwork, and I'm more proud of the stuff I've written in the years since taking this path than anything I did when I was striving alone in the responsible careerist way. Not to say you should go start a magazine, necessarily -- that's been my path; everybody has a different path -- but I think in its general contours, that's what one has to do to be able to live with oneself as a writer. Or an artist of any kind. The gatekeepers are always slow and late to the party, being illiterates. Let them catch up eventually.
So my two cents is, look into yourself and ask -- if money and career were no object, if knowing for certain there's a place that'll take it were no object, what would I be most excited to write right now? What project could I fall in love with? What would make me feel like I could live with myself if I devoted some years to it? And if no answer comes right away, ask yourself: who do I admire right now, whose artistic sensibility makes the most sense, who do I want to spend time around and collaborate on projects with, among my existing friends or ones that I could reasonably make, and what kind of thing could I start with them, to the tune of once a week sitting down with them and working on something together? Because that sort of practice can knock you out of your stupor and help answer the first, individually directed questions about what kind of project you would fall in love with doing. Then, idk, just do it. The DIY stuff was always correct in its attitude, it just needs more ambition and learning and higher production values, which aren't really capital-intensive anymore to be honest. That's the kind of avant-garde that produced modernism, and you'll never do better than modernism, just if you're very lucky as good.
I suppose there's a risk of coming off as sanctimonious when you just say things like this, so I hope you don't take any of this as artier-than-thou posturing or an attempt to rub salt in the wounds of what is clearly your pain and disappointment in literary world. I think your feelings are incredibly valid, and everything I say is coming from my having been in a similar enough place emotionally -- not to mention having known tons of people, your age and my age and younger, who feel the same way right now. (And hell, as a younger writer who tried and couldn''t even get into the staff writer/factchecker job racket, you in all your disappointment were "living the dream" of my 20-year-old self haha!) Instead, it's very much coming from a place of trying to communicate how I feel I got myself out of the rut you're describing so eloquently, and defrayed some of the risk of giving up on art entirely. Take that for whatever it's worth, which may or may not be much.
Anyway, please keep writing, as you do write so beautifully and honestly, it's a real merit. I am a terrible friend and owe you feedback on the Scandinavian piece you sent me ages ago, I got about halfway through but haven't had time to properly finish it. But don't give up! Your heart is a muscle the size of your fist, etc etc!
Aaron,
This is an excellent piece. You're a good writer. It's really hard to write with this kind of honesty and I really appreciate your sharing it here.
A few thoughts:
- You tend to write as if you're at the end of something, like it didn't work out for you. My suspicion is that you're actually at the beginning of your writing life.
- I've had a lot of the same kinds of thoughts that you've had, about these hard-and-fixed literary statuses ("deep in the lower third tier," that kind of thing), and I know how immutable all that can seem, but there's a point where if you're really putting a lot of time into writing and enjoying the writing, that goes away - and it's very interesting how it goes away. In the end, writing is interesting. The politics of writing is not.
- I know a lot of the kinds of people you seem to know and, in the end, they're lightweights with warped values. Yes, they manage to maneuver their way through the system, and they get opportunities and they get accolades and they may even be remembered (because the gatekeepers can also control posterity), but their books are bad....and necessarily bad because they're based in cowardice, because they didn't do the actual Thing of accessing and trusting the deep part of themselves. Good readers can always tell. And I've read enough of what's come out of this era of literary work to see how little any of it is based in actual interest or desire.
- When you look back at your various career flubs, what I think you'll at some point discover is that it likely was something in your system letting you know that that wasn't really for you, that that wasn't the right path for your spirit. Hopefully, the real path is something that allows you to write with all of yourself and all of your courage.
- I know you're a bit skeptical of Substack (as in the paragraph that you deleted lol!). I would say that the actual Substack platform isn't so important - it's just what happens to be available to writers at this moment in time. The important point is the ability to write infinitely and also to reach actual readers - although without necessarily passing through the gates of status to do so. My favorite analogy about writing is that it's like sea travel. Lit mags, reviews, scenes, status, readers for that matter are all just the coast. The actual Thing is when you set your sails and you're out in the deep sea. You may well never reach the other side, you may well never see land again, but that's not so important. What's important is doing the Thing. And, in the end, that's what everybody, at a deep intuitive level, respects.
All best,
Sam
Thank you for the comments, Sam. I'm always glad to read your work and I'm very impressed by Inner Life, I think it is a prototype for a new type of journal, and very soon here Inner Life-style mags are going to start popping up like toadstools. Agree with you on all your points, but I think this kind of writing sometimes involves turning yourself into a kind of character/caricature. And hahaha, yeah, I deleted that paragraph. The beauty of Substack is you can make these kind of after-the-fact stealth edits, just like the real magazines do. :-)
“By that point in my life I had been through enough squats and "temporary autonomous zones" and punk houses to know there was no such thing as utopia, there were just people destroying each other in new and innovative ways.” - This is a hell of a line!
Fantastic piece! I strongly relate to this grim stories about artistic failure. Appreciate your honesty here.
Thank you. I hope to read INCEL sometime soon.
So you go up there and go through the rituals of entry into a career and these almost suffocate you. So you come back here to clear your lungs on a more open trail. Let them have their writing-as-career. Like all artists in any medium, you aren't writing for career, you are writing because you have something to say. And you are doing that. I know it's romantic, but a hand to mouth attitude is fundamental to art no matter how successful. Hard, vexing, blessed.
These dinky little memoir essays are excellent. They get to the heart of something that’s under all the discourse — ambition. In popular feminism there is a lot of talk about “career ambition vs kids”, and that zero-sum for writers seems to be “career ambition vs. inner values”. But you kind of need both as a writer; no exposure without the former, no quality or uniqueness without the latter. This axis is just fascinating, and so relevant in relation to all the Sally Rooney talk (imo), because she is kind of like Don De Lillo as described here, someone who can just write novels and not wade into the messy worlds of journalism, online writing, criticizing other writers, etc. Which writer wouldn’t envy that? The problem is that it can only be achieved if you reach an extremely rare level of celebrity. The closest you can get to that is write a hit piece or any piece on it, and maybe some of that celebrity will rub off on you. If we were beholden to the tastes of editors before, we are now beholden to the algorithm, choosing subject matter / “beats” that will be more palatable to it. As if ambition wasn’t exhausting enough in 2013… Thanks as always for sharing!
Thank you for reading, Nikkitha! :-)
Aaron, this is really, really good. I will rewrite more substantively -- important dinner calls -- but you should be proud. Really.
Ok, as promised, more serious thoughts. First, this was really moving. Sam Kahn is right. This sort of honesty is hard. I would add tough mindedness, if politely expressed. Bravo.
And I concur with his hope/suspicion that you might be at the beginning of something. Surely you've spent enough time out of the room to avoid being merely "a literary person," doomed to endless jostling in the politics of publication. (Yeah, he's write to dis that, too.)
Yes, the line about your experience of "utopia" and innovative ways people destroy each other is great. And I gather your heart has moved on. But I still think it is a very good idea for a book. Right here on Substack you have written compellingly about the appeal of the punk, vagrant, DIY, artsy, usw life. I'm confident you have great insight into the appeal of utopias in other times and places, and I think there would be some intellectual drama, of interest to readers, in playing your lived experience off against your scholarship.
Finally, I think you are struggling with what Yeats called "the perfection of the life" or "the perfection of the work." He overstates, of course, but he's Irish and a poet and it does make the point. More importantly, the problem abides. Yesterday my wife and I went on a walk, observing our 32nd anniversary. And we talked about this, specifically, what I had, and had not, gotten done as a writer and in other regards and at what costs. As you say, we make choices, choices are made for us, luck, etc. And still we wonder. It doesn't go away.
I have much more to say on this, but this is not the place for an apology for my own choices, accomplishments and failures, such as they may be. Hang in there.
Again, you are a very good writer. You will write works of which you are rightfully proud, and that we will justly admire.
I grew up in a literary family that was the first gen of successful intellectuals to be poor and unsuccessful. Because of this I was reading Bellow and Roth and Didion and Jong as a teen but without exposure to the “conversation “. For all my life until mid 20’s, I read and wrote without feedback or instruction, and it was the best thing that could have happened to me as a writer. I wrote freelance successfully for years and one day I realized I hated it, and quit. The salacious headlines and people who get hurt - like your story- and the repetitive thought regurgitation, etc. and the money chasing! I loved blogging as I now love it here, writing what I want when I want. I don’t write here for any goal or reason other than the writing itself. I blogged for years in almost silence before the community grew, and although I definitely prefer to be read and discussed, it’s not the motivation. Not that I’m so smart to know all my motivation lol
You’ve failed at levels I never came close to achieving. If you can believe it, I moved to NYC in ‘95 to be a writer and made similar gaffes and strikeouts, but at even dumber parties and lamer jobs. I’ve concluded that writing is not a career, it’s an affliction, and it can only be treated with more writing.
I discovered Dishwasher the zine in a little anarchist collective's storefront in Berkeley that had a rack of zines. Dishwasher later turned up in Comic Relief, a comics store that stocked weird indie stuff alongside superheroes. I bought Dishwasher the book at an author event in Oakland and met Dishwasher Pete. I enthused to him about his zine. He got a confused, suspicious look on his face and said, "Why didn't you write to me?" Did the book sell poorly? By NYC publisher standards I have little doubt. But I love it.
No concrete idea if it sold poorly or not, slightly before my time, just a vibe I felt when I saw it in stores.
Oomph, now I feel bad for telling you to go write a novel in my comment on the previous part haha!
I share Sam Kahn's view below that you're a good writer and an honest writer and shouldn't let yourself fall into a spiral thinking you're washed up. Not least because this stuff seems to be an older person's game anyway -- a lot of big books aren't written until people's forties and fifties, if not later -- but also because I fear it's too bound up in more or less literary world's ideas of success. And yes, I know that sounds like cope, but I mean it sincerely: do you *really* want to be the sort of person that all the asinine idiots at the various loft parties pretend knowingly to each other to have read, or who gets positive buzzy reviews from intellectual half-pints like the NYT book reviewers or the LitHub product pushers? Or would you rather be the perhaps underrated, perhaps little known gem of a writer whose literary friends understand them and support them, who acquires a modest following of readers who write in genuinely engaging with the work, and who occasionally gets long thoughtful essays written by also-obscure writers in the little mags that genuinely engage with the work and push back on it while taking inspiration from it? The latter is very much within your reach, and it's the one that's actually virtuous to desire imho because it means you're devoting yourself to work that does for others what the most inspiring and interesting things you've ever read once did for you.
From the point of view of shooting for *that* thing, where you are in the Great Chain of Literary Being is pretty irrelevant. If you "fail" to attain bestseller status and buzz, who cares -- that's not the game you were playing anyway. And if you do attain those things despite yourself, great, whatever, but the real question is: will it provide the financial security that lets you do the work more comfortably, or be a corrupting influence on the work that causes you to write to spec for the illiterate gatekeepers or get lost in the buzz, the cocktail parties, and the narcissism bred by your public image? Either way, it doesn't really matter in itself. It's just a thing that happens, or doesn't. The work is what counts.
Maybe this is moralizing and deluded, I don't know. But I think it's sincere, not just a cover for careerist striving under the hood. And I think I've put my money where my mouth is. I actually scored an agent once through an essay I wrote, who wanted me to write a book, and I may take poor Toby up on it one day (my long-suffering agent, I call him when I tell this story over beers), but at the time I felt what I needed to do was start a magazine that could push a certain line on political and aesthetic questions that was missing in the Brooklyn milieu, and so despite my agent's loud protestations to the contrary ("don't do that! you won't get to writing your book for years!"), I did whatever the fuck I wanted and went my own way. Not sure this is *great* advice from a literary-career point of view, but my point is that it proves one *can* choose to just do this sort of thing, and simply treat the career like it doesn't matter as much as the art. And regardless for what it may or may not mean for my chances of being in the Canon one day or whatever, it's gotten me out of a years-long writer's block and actually unlocked something in me to be collaborating on such a project. Despite the heavy load of editing and business work that comes with it, it's actually put my accidental-friendships-for-life of the sort you discuss to *work* in helping me forward my own writing (and our shared vision of what writing ought to be) via teamwork, and I'm more proud of the stuff I've written in the years since taking this path than anything I did when I was striving alone in the responsible careerist way. Not to say you should go start a magazine, necessarily -- that's been my path; everybody has a different path -- but I think in its general contours, that's what one has to do to be able to live with oneself as a writer. Or an artist of any kind. The gatekeepers are always slow and late to the party, being illiterates. Let them catch up eventually.
So my two cents is, look into yourself and ask -- if money and career were no object, if knowing for certain there's a place that'll take it were no object, what would I be most excited to write right now? What project could I fall in love with? What would make me feel like I could live with myself if I devoted some years to it? And if no answer comes right away, ask yourself: who do I admire right now, whose artistic sensibility makes the most sense, who do I want to spend time around and collaborate on projects with, among my existing friends or ones that I could reasonably make, and what kind of thing could I start with them, to the tune of once a week sitting down with them and working on something together? Because that sort of practice can knock you out of your stupor and help answer the first, individually directed questions about what kind of project you would fall in love with doing. Then, idk, just do it. The DIY stuff was always correct in its attitude, it just needs more ambition and learning and higher production values, which aren't really capital-intensive anymore to be honest. That's the kind of avant-garde that produced modernism, and you'll never do better than modernism, just if you're very lucky as good.
I suppose there's a risk of coming off as sanctimonious when you just say things like this, so I hope you don't take any of this as artier-than-thou posturing or an attempt to rub salt in the wounds of what is clearly your pain and disappointment in literary world. I think your feelings are incredibly valid, and everything I say is coming from my having been in a similar enough place emotionally -- not to mention having known tons of people, your age and my age and younger, who feel the same way right now. (And hell, as a younger writer who tried and couldn''t even get into the staff writer/factchecker job racket, you in all your disappointment were "living the dream" of my 20-year-old self haha!) Instead, it's very much coming from a place of trying to communicate how I feel I got myself out of the rut you're describing so eloquently, and defrayed some of the risk of giving up on art entirely. Take that for whatever it's worth, which may or may not be much.
Anyway, please keep writing, as you do write so beautifully and honestly, it's a real merit. I am a terrible friend and owe you feedback on the Scandinavian piece you sent me ages ago, I got about halfway through but haven't had time to properly finish it. But don't give up! Your heart is a muscle the size of your fist, etc etc!
Was waiting for this! Thank you 🙏🏽
Here it is!
Gerry Howard! Fellow Bay Ridge native