I find writing to be shameful. I find writing to be impotent.
I find writing to be the plaything of a certain class of people, and that disgusts me. (broad strokes here. there are many exceptions.)
And no matter how many booky-books I’ve read, I’m not a particularly smart or forward-thinking person so I didn’t cultivate any other trade or marketable skills or implement 10-year-plans in the prime working years of my life, so here I am, me and writing, a familiar old companion that I’m ashamed of.
Academics write for other academics, Harper’s writers write to please the remaining literary-world prestige milieu huddled around remaining prestige literary print magazines, midbrow NY/LA novelists write for post-MFA midbrow NY/LA milieu, anti-woke substack writers write for all the (heavily skewing male) goblins and misfits festering under the surface, Matt Yglesias writes for geeky white collar nerds, people who voted Bernie but are also pragmatic and love IPAs. We live in fragmented literary hell. The only people who haven’t been writing for a niche are like J.K Rowling, Stig Larsson, and dear-old-dead-Pat Conroy, writing for the masses not a highly-irritating little group is nearly dead, nigh impossible.
When I was in art classes in high school, the teacher would let me skip out on my paintings and drawings and I’d go and bask in the sunlight on top of my car in the Barnes and Noble parking lot across the street, sometimes venturing inside through those big whooshing wooden doors and marveling at all the collected wisdom, the books, the magazines.
Then I went to the art college and art felt even more pointless there. Why make art? So that rich people with nothing to do can maybe, possibly, if you’re lucky, pay for it and the fuckheads that show up to art galleries can consume it? To please the art professor who made us labor over our plaster blobs for eight hours at a time? I dropped out and moved back home to North Carolina, the first of what was going to be many regressions to my safe warm Lancashire home.
Then I started playing music. Of all the art forms, music was the most direct and visceral and least shameful, because music is inherently populist and penetrates all social stratum. It can be for everybody, it can be for anybody. I don’t know much about making music alone, but when you make music with others, you communicate without words in real time through your instruments and through trial and error and experimentation, you can build something greater than your individual selves. Then you take it out to an audience and the response comes back immediately—none of it is lonely—you can feel the response, you can feel whether the audience responds to the music and the vibe, and after the show if they thank you and seem enthused—or seem abashed and shuffle out quickly— you KNOW. If they buy merch and CDs and hang about to mingle, you did good. You made chemistry. Alchemy beyond individual elements.
Then I started making zines. A perfect art form for a perfectionist. You could labor over the zine for days, hours, weeks, alone—fueled by coffee, adderall and candy—and make as close to Platonically perfect a print object and then send it out. I got a response. I got some negative responses but mostly good. I forged some lifelong friendships and penpals.
But I never felt really or wrote about anything truly shameful in the zines, any true wounds, I just wrote about things that were slightly revealing/embarassing or little stories and anecdotes that were all well within the aesthetic and thematic bounds of the niche medium of the personal zine, within the tiny milieu that I valued at that time (an aesthetic bounds built by the previous generation of zine writers, who I imagine, were responding to the previous generation of writers that they saw ad-infinitum, ad-infinitum). I look back at my zines and feel shame for all the thesaurus words and the fancy overwrought paragraphs about alienation and being lost, because all of it amounted to a kind of literary smokescreen or masque for what was really going on with me at the time. But is a zine truly “personal” if you’re just wearing a mask? At the same time, many other zines overshared to the point of cringe-worthiness, people recoil. I don’t know. I do know it’s usually not good to expose fresh wounds to strangers, as Brene Brown writes in Daring Greatly.
Brene Brown made me question, what is the point of exposing wounds and shames and humiliations at all? Why do people do it? She writes that one should be cautious always of motives and reasoning behind sharing with others (because it is often oversharing) and believes the only good reason to tell personal stories is if they are instructive, if they offer a teaching moment. I tend to agree with her, but where does that leave literature? I’ve read dozens or hundreds of deeply personal and revealing books, some of them transcendent, and a lot of them don’t offer a “teaching moment.” Do Philip Roth’s novels and Knausgaard’s endless diary or Cather’s wonderful-pseudo-autobiography offer “teaching moments” or “moral lessons”? I don’t know. I admire people with these grand sweeping imaginations like Ursula Leguin and Borges and J.R.R Tolkien who don’t resort to mining and framing their private lives for literary material. Private lives are best enjoyed privately.
I didn’t grow up in what you might call a cultural and literary family. To this day, my mother says, what use are too many books, what good are big bookshelves, are these books “weird”? I don’t blame my family or childhood, and no matter how offended I might be at what I perceive to be Philistinism, she’s right. What use are all these books? It’s a good question. How have they served me actually to build the life I would like to have, how has reading so many books improved my life concretely? I have the three black hardcover volumes of Maxim Gorky’s Life of Klim Samghin trilogy…wow, Gorky…rare and obscure black lotus writer…and I don’t read just regular workaday cool-college-professor My Life and Mother Gorky, but his most obscure work. But did these musty black hardcovers change my life, make my life in any way better? No, absolutely not.
There are two layers of shame with writing. The first and most important layer is that writing is not real work—it is not raising children, fixing roofing, repairing vehicles, making real money, helping people feel less alone, helping the disabled go about their daily needs—it is fiddling with words via the brain on the page, the goal being for these pages at some point be published or shown to others. And reading, similarly, is wasted time, time not spent with family or children or work. But say you’re a writer. The problem is that the “others” that these pages will be shown to are more than likely to be people of a certain type and certain class, liberal or leftist people, people who value culture above money, who value politics concurrent with culture, the kind of people who find books and articles and essays important and meaningful. There are exceptions: Pat Conroy, JK Rowling, Cheryl Strayed…but those who penetrate beyond the artificial bounds of politics and class and culture are exceedingly rare.
If you’re really lucky, you can penetrate into the average consumer of these kinds of things, a liberal-type in transit who picks up a random paperback at the airport store, but for most of us, the readers are hyper-educated, hyper-aware, hyper-politicized, hyper-insider thinking types, mostly 30-50, working in the cultural spheres, at-sea academics, agents, editors, other writers, aspiring writers, bloggers, political types, self-styled people who follow and care about these types of things. In other words, another subculture.
On my dad’s side, grandma couldn’t really read. Struggled to read basic words. On my mom’s side, my family was by no means unintelligent, but it didn’t value books so much, it valued business and family. When my dad got laid off from Western Union and was casting about for what to do next, he briefly wanted to start a used bookstore. It wasn’t like there was a lot of books or culture in our house, but it was a brief little dream. He was not a big reader, but he liked Watership Down (still never read it, don’t like fiction about rabbit adventures), he liked the Bible. But with two needy sons, one of them disabled, this was impractical, so he got a job at the fax company, and he died right as the technology of the career he had chosen was starting to become obsolete, replaced by email. My mom worked at Xerox. Sold big printers to big companies. I grew up surrounded by the whirring and rasterizing of printing machines. Then I went to the Kinko’s and made my rare-pearl-punk zines, surrounded by the whirring and rasterizing of the old black-and-white machines, the ones with the manipulatable plug-in copy counters.
Journalism and book reviewing should be, on the face of it, the least shameful of the literary crafts, since the journalist or critic self-styles as a craftsperson not an artist—they hide themselves behind the subject, peeking out from behind the curtain only to provide a little color and perspective—but for me it is some of the worst and most shameful. The journalist reveals nothing about themselves or their history, they are safe and hidden and get paid to conceal themselves to make the content come off as neutral. But to satisfy the supposedly neutral audience and the editors and fact-checkers, they have to repeatedly pretend that they don’t know what they already know. They have an agenda. It’s just framed in such a way that it doesn’t seem like an agenda, because if they’re successful, the “I” is only invoked for color, not to tell their true history.
Of all my work I’m most ashamed of my journalistic work because its compromised work where I had to pretend I don’t know what I knew at the time, I’m acting and pretending to be naive, when in fact, I had strong opinions, and I thought if I just layer enough facts and other characters on top of these strong opinions I have these strong opinions won’t be so objectionable and will be more easily digested by the body politic. Sometimes the edits were good and helpful, sometimes the editors made everything look like a graduate school paper, sometimes the editors cut out the juiciest parts, this is just how it works, but underlying it all, the journalist knows they are writing not for their peers exactly but for a faceless liberal person with a few minutes on their hands and everything has to be framed in such a way to reach that faceless person.
And then we come to Substack, this medium I have fallen into so half-heartedly (like every other medium)—we all know that Substack is the new Medium or Tumblr blog, but a little bit more fancy and sophisticated and reactionary—I am ashamed that the New York literary people are laughing at me, and the zine people are laughing at me for not falling in enough with the New York literary people who convey status—ah a Substack—because I am not participating in the traditional structure which is Harpers-or-N+1-article-gets-a-deal-expanded-often-unnecessarily-into-a-book-which-turns-into-Contributing-editor-turns-into-Book-reviews-in-NYRB-turns-into-Grants-and-Guggenheims, a world and a pathway I am well familiar with.
But having spent my life among sinners (like myself) and social-climbers and aspirants, loving sinners and social-climbers and aspirants, I know goddamn well by now how sausage gets made.