writing

Bubbling Thoughts

By in books, bricolage, eric hoffer, writing

Every so often he had to skim off his bubbling thoughts.

— Jules Renard, Journal 1887-1910

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One ruins the mind with too much writing. One rusts it by not writing at all.

— Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert

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With thinking too there is a time for ploughing & a time for harvesting. It gives me satisfaction to write a lot every day. This is childish but that’s how it is.

— Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

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One would like to write just so much that the words give life to another, and just so little that one can still take them seriously oneself.

— Elias Canetti, The Human Province

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Language is an ocean of words. As for me, either I almost drown in it or, when the tide goes out, I look around, walking on what’s left behind. Holes, puddles. Fragmentary writing means these puddles, these marine remnants, these shells, these wet pieces of evidence.

— Georges Perros, Paper Collage

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I must write for the simple reason that writing is vital for any feeling of well-being. I have no marked desire to see my name in print, and I certainly do not owe anything to anybody. I can go on thinking and writing at a steady pace, and let the resulting material take care of itself.

— Eric Hoffer, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront

Meep Meep!

By in aphorisms, books, nietzsche, writing

Sigh— I caught this insight on the way and quickly seized the rather poor words that were closest to hand to pin it down lest it fly away again. And now it has died of these arid words and shakes and flaps in them—and I hardly know any more when I look at it how I could ever have felt so happy when I caught this bird.

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Words are the seducers of philosophers; they struggle in the nets of language.

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Human, All Too Human I (Winter 1874/75–Winter 1877/78)

My own case is less flattering. Words may be nets, but I am as likely to be found hanging upside down in one of them as to have captured anything. If I am a hunter of insights, I am closer to Elmer Fudd or Wile E. Coyote: forever creeping after the same prey with some new weapon of language, only to have the trap close on my own foot, or the shotgun blast rearrange the quarry’s beak for three seconds before it snaps back into place. Perhaps I have never been chasing separate insights at all. Perhaps there is only one insight, endlessly escaping over the horizon, tongue out, legs spinning, leaving me behind in a small puff of dust with another notebook full of arid words.

Ye Cannot Serve Blog and Mammon

By in media/propaganda, writing

Stephen L. Miller:

Substack can no longer lay claim to being “New Media” when they have turned their platform over to the most prominent partisan voices of old media personalities from the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC. If Substack wants to become the platform of the media it helped destroy in the first place, that’s certainly their choice.

However, what made Substack special in the beginning, and what made it thrive, was that it was a model that stood up to those very same institutions, which have largely been discredited by dwindling audiences and a lack of credibility. It didn’t cave to pressure and accusations of being a transphobic platform that also gladly hosted Neo Nazis. Now, Substack is throwing lavish invite-only parties for those very same people.

The frontier is attractive precisely because it is rough, disreputable, under-monetized, and therefore not yet swarmed by credentialed strivers. Once it becomes viable as a career ladder, the ladder-climbers arrive. They bring their audiences, their habits, their jargon, their little status games, and soon enough the “independent” space starts looking suspiciously like the thing people fled. Put enough institutional people in a room, and before long they will rebuild the institution they just left.

If you want to write like a blogger and be paid like a professional writer, you have created a honeypot for professional writers, many of whom spent years inside the very prestige system that made blogging feel necessary in the first place. Success invites imitation; monetization invites management; management invites hierarchy; hierarchy invites the old court culture back in through a side door. The more a platform wants legitimacy, the less it can preserve the amateur freedom that made it lively.

You wish to be paid. You wish to be read by thousands. Then you are already lost. For the man who writes with one eye on his income and the other on his audience will soon have no eye left for the truth. Again, I say unto thee: if any aspiring writer hate not his paymaster, and editor, and audience, and reputation, yea, and his very hope of influence also, he cannot be a worthy blogger.

Fiction Affliction

By in books, writing

Of course, it is not quite fair to use Ms. Oates as the representative figure of the novelist, despite the high regard in which she is held by eminent book-bloggers. Still, I have to admit that novels and I have never been especially intimate. I’ve made a good-faith effort, but I just find most fiction boring. I understand the case for it in theory: life, with all its muddle, can be clarified and heightened through imagined scenes, characters, and dilemmas. Some people are reached most deeply by dramatization. They need to see a conflict embodied in characters, stretched across time. But in practice, others get more out of Montaigne, Hazlitt, Lamb, Epstein, journals, letters, and conversation than they ever will from a shelf of novels. They may even get more from paying close attention to actual people over the years than from reading three hundred pages about an invented family in decline.

I guess my mind is drawn less to simulated lives than to clarified perception. I’m not especially interested in the machinery of plot, scene, and character; I want the point, the insight itself. Not abstraction, exactly — I’m not trying to come off as an autistic logical positivist — but thought compressed into memorable form. A good aphorism, fragment, or familiar essay does not ask you to submit to a whole invented apparatus. It says: here, look at this. Have you noticed it too? Give me a mind in direct contact with life, observing and reflecting, over an invented world any day.

I Have a Precursor!

By in books, writing

Perhaps what disappeared with the familiar essay was not merely a form, not merely even an attitude, but a whole subject matter. For the familiar essay affords what is probably the bets method of discussing those subjects which are neither obviously momentous nor merely silly. And, since no really good life is composed exclusively of problems and farce, either the reading of most people today does not actually concern itself with some of the most important aspects of their lives or those lives are impoverished to a degree which the members of any really civilized society would find it difficult to understand. Just as genuine conversation—by which I mean something distinguishable from disputation, lamentation, and joke-telling—has tended to disappear from social gatherings, so anything comparable to it has tended to disappear from the printed page.

— Joseph Wood Krutch, If You Don’t Mind My Saying So: Essays on Man and Nature

In a postcard to his friend Franz Overbeck, Nietzsche excitedly told him of his discovery of Spinoza: “I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor!” I feel similarly upon reading the essays of Krutch. It’s as if I took a literary 23andMe test and discovered a surprising ancestor up the family tree: “Ah! So this is where I got the compact-reflective gene, the mild irony, the distrust of windy prose, the urge to extract a general truth from some small domestic scene.”

I already knew the appeal of the familiar essay, but if I ever encountered Krutch’s name in connection with it, I don’t remember it. This excerpt is from “No Essays, Please!” from 1951, decades before my parents had ever contrived to publish the first edition of me. Even then, he saw the form being displaced by prose that wanted to look objective, topical, expert, and journalistically “real,” rather than reflective, personal, and literary — the exact complaint I’ve recently made myself about nonfiction. Robert Atwan, in the introduction to The Best American Essays 2012, levels the same charge, saying that the “memoir, autobiographical essay, and confessional narrative” had become the major compositional models. “The nineteenth-century essayist could ruminate on jealousy by citing Othello and other relevant literary or historical works and sprinkling personal observations on human behavior into the mix. The modern essayist covering the same topic would be obligated to include findings and research from the latest journals of psychology and psychoanalysis, along with interview quotations from mental health professionals.” It’s no different in 2026. That’s why the form is left to lowly bloggers; there’s no money or prestige in it.

It’s rather reassuring to be reminded that the things we love have been “dying” for decades, if not longer. If near-death is itself a kind of stasis, we can just go on doing what we do. Of course, “dying” is often just the ceremonial status announcement made by people who have stopped paying attention.  A form can be socially marginal, commercially unfashionable, institutionally unsupported, and still very much alive in the only sense that matters: people still doing it well, other people still recognizing the spark when they see it. Some poor devil in 2074 will probably be sighing over the lost age when people still wrote real posts on strange little personal websites, with blogrolls and comment sections inhabited by twelve faithful eccentrics. He will lament the disappearance of authentic longform in an age of neural mood-casts or whatever hellish nonsense they have by then. Meanwhile, the thing itself will still be going on somewhere, half-buried, as usual.

A Small Lighted Space

By in books, writing

Discovering once again how small the world is. Clever young monkeys can jeer their heads off, but the rest of us, who know that the world is full of howling dark wildernesses and so want to feel cozy for a while, rightly persist in being delighted by this discovery. The man in the smoke room visited the same specialist that we did. The widow we met in Egypt is the cousin of the woman at the next table. Our boys must have gone to the same school. We must have been in San Francisco about the same time. What—do you know him? Why, of course, they used to live next door to us. Not old Billy Smith? How disgusted the young are at this kind of talk, and how delighted we old codgers are! And quite right too. For we know that just beyond the curtains, shaking a little no doubt with all our triumphant cries, are night, black as the grave, and the east wind and Siberia and the Okhotsk Sea and the endless wastes of the North Pacific; that in East Asia alone are a thousand million strangers and idols with three eyes and eight arms; that half a mile from the banks of the Amazon is the jungle nobody knows, probably with spiders the size of kittens; that any small lighted space, loud with friendly talk, is almost a miracle; and that we grow old and our wounds ache and too often when we cannot sleep we remember the dead… Why then, your brother must have been there when my uncle was there. How extraordinary! It just shows one, doesn’t it, what a small place….

— J.B. Priestley, Delight: Taking Pleasure in the Small Things in Life

This book was, well, a delight. It is personal without being confessional, thoughtful without being academic, and elevated without becoming windy. This essay, one of my favorites, has a complete internal architecture. Here, he starts with something utterly ordinary — small talk about what a small world it is. Then, without strain, we drift into the grand and faintly ominous: night, distance, wilderness, the dead, the unknowable vastness outside the lamplit room. Just as quickly, we’re back again: friendly talk in a small lit space becomes a fragile human achievement against forbidding immensity.

It is compressed without feeling compressed. A lot of short prose feels pinched, as if the writer has been aggressively pruning. This does not. It feels like something that grew to exactly the right size. He gives you social observation, generational comedy, metaphysical backdrop, and a humane conclusion in barely more space than many people now waste clearing their throats. Nothing is labored. Nothing is announced. The thought unfolds as though it were simply the most natural thing in the world, and still includes some poetic flourishes.

I often wonder why such a seemingly-perfect genre ever fell out of fashion, leaving aside the nature of fashion itself being the pursuit of novelty for its own sake. My guess is that a few things worked against it. First, the professionalization of nonfiction. More and more prose came to justify itself either as scholarship, journalism, or expertise. That pushes writing toward citations, studies, frameworks, credentials, methodology, documented exhaustiveness. That’s hostile to the familiar essay, which depends on a cultivated person being allowed to say, in effect, “Here is a human observation; see whether it rings true.” Second, the collapse of the old generalist middlebrow audience. A writer like Priestley could assume a fairly broad common world: educated but non-specialist readers, patient enough for reflection, not yet broken into a thousand subcultures and algorithmic niches. Once that world fades, the prose either migrates upward into academia or downward into more marketable forms.

The modern cult of identity has also hurt it. The older familiar essay often says, “Here is something one notices about life”; the newer mode often says, “Here is what it is like to be me, specifically, under my conditions.” It is clear, for example, just from context, that Priestley is a white Englishman of a certain generation, but he is not really the star of his own show. If he mentions his own characteristics, it’s often in a self-deprecating manner. His personal details are only like a finger pointing to the moon of his larger theme. The older essayist says, “Come look at this with me.” The newer one too often says, “Come look at me looking at this.”

The older style depends on tact. It leaves things implicit. It trusts the reader to make the second and third inference. Our culture increasingly distrusts implication. Writers are prodded to explain, label, position, caveat, and signal their framework, lest anyone miss the point or misread the moral valence. Of course, I’m sure there was plenty of windy, pompous, dead mid-century prose too. What survives is the good stuff. But the good stuff really does represent a lost norm: the belief that a civilized person, writing clearly out of ordinary experience, could illuminate something general without turning the piece into either a dissertation or a confession.

I Know You’re Out There Somewhere, Somewhere You Can Hear My Voice

By in aphorisms, books, writing

To capture readers, one must write novels. To lose them, one must write well.

On this: “More and more, I have had to convince myself that a writer’s importance is proportional to his ability to disregard the reader, to possess an unshakeable confidence—since nothing exists without the social context—that he will nonetheless have a reader and a wonderful one at that.”

— Ludwig Hohl, The Notes: or On Non-premature Reconciliation

Shortly after reading this, I was amused to read Patrick Kurp mention being mildly scolded by a reader for referring in passing to Spinoza, thereby forcing this wounded party to consult Wikipedia, as if he had been sentenced to hard labor in the salt mines. One tries to be sympathetic. Life is busy. Time is short. Fingers grow weary. And yet I have always supposed that readers of a certain sort could be trusted to survive the strain of encountering an unfamiliar name without demanding that the writer provide hyperlinks. Thankfully, I have never been rebuked for my own obscure references or inside jokes, though I confess I have proceeded on the sanguine assumption that you fine folks are fully capable of using the search functions on your fancy internetting machines.

I was surprised to recognize myself in Hohl’s aphorism. I am not by nature a swaggering or headstrong person. In most areas of life I can second-guess, hesitate, revise, and doubt myself into a standstill. But for whatever reason, the uncertainty stops at the edge of the page. There, and perhaps only there, I have always felt an almost unreasonable assurance: that I know what I am doing, that I can do it well, and that there are people who will appreciate it. It is not a moral virtue, and certainly not an achievement of character. It feels more like an unearned gift or a quirk of temperament; a peculiar form of self-command bestowed in one narrow province and withheld everywhere else.

I have no illusions of my importance, but truth is, I have never considered the reader’s interest. I take it for granted and write to my own self-imposed standard for anyone who cares to read along. This is not contempt for the reader. It is a form of respect. In any event, I have no desire to “capture” readers. It’s enough to occasionally see them as glowing eyes in the darkness, reflecting the campfire, or to find their tracks in the site stats.

Fit Audience Though Few

By in ai, technology, the geist of the zeit, writing

A journalist who isn’t running around like Chicken Little clucking over AI and the end of literacy? Well, if that don’t beat all.

Alan Jacobs noted last year, with regard to the doomsaying over declining readership, that a lot of our panic is covert nostalgia for an unusually favorable moment we mistook for normal. For most of literary history, the definition of “literacy” was merely the ability to sign your name. Virgil, Augustine, Dante: none of them expected wide readership, because serious literacy, as we define it now, was never common. So when people moan about a “post-literate age,” Jacobs says the phrase is basically nonsense: literacy is more widespread globally now than at any point in human history. What’s shrinking, at least in the American context, is not “literacy” as such, but a particular postwar distribution of it.

That postwar distribution is what I think of as the mid-century middlebrow: a brief, flattering climate where reading felt more democratic than it had ever been. The G.I. Bill and mass higher education expanded the literate public; print culture was cheap and widespread; television hadn’t yet monopolized every idle minute. Will and Ariel Durant spent forty years producing an eleven-volume history of civilization written for a non-academic audience. Earl Nightingale, a radio speaker and author, produced short common-sense exhortations on motivation and personal development with epigraphs from Wordsworth, Goethe, and Samuel Johnson, on the clear assumption that the average reader would know and care who they were. The Book-of-the-Month Club featured authors like Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Winston Churchill, E.B. White, and Graham Greene. In that window, it was possible to entertain the pleasing illusion that “everybody” was at least casually acquainted with the great books, or with their respectable, middlebrow cousins. Then history resumed.

What resumed, exactly? Competition. First on the demand side: TV, then the internet, then social media, then streaming; each a better-engineered rival for attention than the book ever had to face at scale. And now we’re getting the new pressure on the supply side: AI can manufacture endless “good-enough” text — serviceable summaries, plausible op-eds, competent product copy, adequate homework, infinite sludge, all at negligible marginal cost. Journalists, authors, academics, librarians, teachers, grad-school adjacent types, and hardcore readers — the very people reacting like Chicken Little — form a dense, self-referential ecology online. Unusually verbal, unusually literate, and unusually invested in the status of the written word, they quote each other, react to each other, and amplify each other’s anxieties. It can feel like “the public square,” but it’s mostly just a professional subculture dominating the stage, assigning themselves all the starring roles. The numerous readers of Stephen King, devotional literature, or celebrity tell-alls are “excluded” from the conversation, in the idiotic parlance of our time. Look, I personally know enough intelligent women who mostly read “romantasy” by the truckload, enough so that I’ve started reconsidering whether women should have ever been allowed to learn to read in the first place if this is all they’re going to do with it.

We can debate that another time. Either way, the point is, many if not most people simply don’t give a damn about literature or the self-important conceit of the writer-as-seer, communing with the soul of the world and the spirit of the age. Reading for pleasure and cultivation may well go the way of horsemanship, which was an essential skill for middle and upper classes for millennia; now reduced to a niche interest. In the world that exists, you can either lament, moan, and propose protectionist policies to keep a certain class of writer in business, or accept that “excellent prose” is an acquired taste, maybe even a minority taste, and write something worth reading for whoever still has the appetite. Not everyone will. But the existence of a minority has always been enough to keep real literature alive. At the very least, face our fate with dignity and stop whining.

The Bees Plunder the Flowers, But Afterward They Make of Them Honey

By in ai, technology, writing

Jesus, what a bunch of knock-kneed, lily-livered chickenhearts. This fast-growing genre of AI-lament has the whiny tone of Hudson in Aliens: “Game over, man, game over!” Calm your asses down. Writers have survived printing presses, typewriters, radio, TV, the internet, Twitter, and the death of attention itself. I’ve never thought of myself as an optimist, but I seem to have a little more faith in the resilience of human creativity than most. If “AI style” becomes too prevalent the way “2010’s newsletter-style” did, or even the “single-sentence/paragraph clickbait” style that Muni (unwittingly?) reproduces here, those allergic to it will find a new way to express themselves.

Yes, yes, I know — the romantic “writer-as-shaman” conceit. The artisanal mystique. The sacred cave of the soul where the author spelunks for phrases and ideas only he could have formed, unaided by anything but suffering and candlelight. I mean, sure, make it a luxury signal if you want. Put NO BOTS on the dust jacket the way rock bands used to announce NO SYNTHESIZERS in the liner notes. But synthesizers didn’t go away; they won. And AI will too, because this isn’t (X) a moral debate — it’s (Y) an incentives problem. People tend to find their way to the path of least resistance. The tool saves time, smooths friction, and does a serviceable, affordable job at multiple tasks: amanuensis, research assistant, brainstorming-partner, proofreader, editor. People will use it. If you turn that into a sin, you won’t (X) reduce usage; you’ll just (Y) make everyone lie about it. Until, inevitably, some loud anti-clanker crusader gets caught with his pants down in a hotel room with Claude, Gemini, and a bag of white powder and does the full Jimmy Swaggart tear-bath: I have sinned; I have fallen; please forgive me.

You’re not a shaman. You’re a scavenger. So am I. We’re all raccoons, opossums, and vultures with pretensions to artistry. We’ve always worked by conversation, overheard remarks, half-remembered books, accidental plagiarism, and imitation-bad-enough-to-look-original. We steal rhythm from a sentence we loved ten years ago. We borrow a metaphor from a friend and forget where it came from. We build mosaics out of whatever the world coughs up. AI is not the end of writing; it’s just another pile of material in the landscape — another junkyard where you can find a useful hinge, a bright shard of glass, a piece of wire you can turn into something that actually holds its shape. The only real question is whether you can still make it yours.

Relligiosi

By in ai, conspicuous crusading, moralizing, technology, the geist of the zeit, the madness of crowds, writing

Relligiosi

That’s what I call those who take it upon themselves to convince others and make them similar to themselves, make them think in the same way.
I abhor this kind of mental usurping, the great task of political parties and confessions.
What matters for you, doesn’t matter for me. Because it matters for you, it doesn’t matter for me.
To understand oneself, it’s essential (in my eyes) to think differently.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 1

Via Paul Kingsnorth. And what does this pledge entail, you may ask?

Do you support the campaign? Go rape yourself, that’s my response. Even answering that question concedes too much to the commissar asking it. It’s none of your goddamned business how I feel about AI use. I don’t owe you a pledge, a badge, a logo in my sidebar, or an affidavit about my writing process. If I read something and it feels synthetic, I’m free to close the tab and avoid that writer in the future. That’s how grown-ups handle taste, without forming a militia and a blacklist.

What I can’t stand, as always, is the missionary spirit animating this entire self-appointed class of jumped-up hall monitors: the righteous salesmanship, the demand for public alignment, the insinuation that silence is complicity. This “download a free logo and join us” routine is a ritual with no barrier to entry for people who like the feeling of conscience without the burden of thought. Once the ritual exists, the next stage is guaranteed: bot-sniffing as sport, comment-section inquisitions, and purity audits, as though the only point of reading is to detect the Devil’s watermark.

This is the online HOA, or the Concerned Citizens Council, coming to the door with clipboards and smiles, asking you to sign. And underneath the smile is the implied threat: Do you want us to make it known that you refused? Because that’s how these things work. There is no neutral ground in a holy war. The whole point of the ritual is to sort the righteous from the wicked, and to make “I decline” sound like a confession. Even if you happen to agree with this particular campaign, the same petty functionaries will be back knocking on your door next week, with clipboards and smiles, expecting your participation in the next loyalty test. Whenever you finally decline, the smiles will vanish, and you’ll see them for what they really are.

The most a campaign like this can do is create another platform for virtue-signaling (as if we needed more) and another excuse for resentful mediocrities to claw at higher-status targets under a banner of public morality. Watch how quickly “protecting the craft” turns into guilty-until-proven-innocent accusations. It invites the exact type Valéry despised: the mental usurper, the person who can’t just choose their own life, but must conscript yours into their crusade. No thanks. Read what you want. Write what you want, how you want. And leave me out of your religion.

This Land Is My Land

By in writing

In the 1989 hillbilly-revenge movie Next of Kin, Briar Gates, played by Liam Neeson (I know; I was surprised too when I looked it up) is defending his scruffy patch of rural life: “This land’s mine!… I can go out and take a piss on it in the middle of the night if I want to!” That’s how I feel about my humble little blog-property. It may not be glamorous. It doesn’t have “creator tools” or “discovery” or a TV app. But it’s mine: I can piss post whatever I want, whenever I want, in whatever awkward, unfashionable format I want — and I don’t have to audition for an algorithm or comply with a platform’s latest reinvention of “community.” A blog is land; Substack is a nice apartment in someone else’s building. Now you’ve got journalists moving in to try to recreate their glory days, and it looks like the latest renaissance of blogging will have to pick up stakes and move on again.

See, this wouldn’t keep happening if you didn’t keep chasing after “engagement” and “relevance.” To paraphrase Lt. Ronald Speirs, “You went to Substack because you think there’s still hope. But the only hope you have is to accept the fact that you’re already irrelevant. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you’ll be able to function as a blogger is supposed to function.”

The Soft Hum of Suspicion

By in ai, technology, the geist of the zeit, the statusphere, writing

Sam Kriss:

If you’re anything like me, you did not enjoy reading that paragraph. Everything about it puts me on alert: Something is wrong here; this text is not what it says it is. It’s one of them. Entirely ordinary words, like “tapestry,” which has been innocently describing a kind of vertical carpet for more than 500 years, make me suddenly tense. I’m driven to the point of fury by any sentence following the pattern “It’s not X, it’s Y,” even though this totally normal construction appears in such generally well-received bodies of literature as the Bible and Shakespeare. But whatever these little quirks of language used to mean, that’s not what they mean any more. All of these are now telltale signs that what you’re reading was churned out by an A.I.

A specter is haunting the severely-educated — the specter of AI usage in writing. All the powers of old media have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter; the NYT Magazine and the Atlantic, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and Turnitin, university integrity offices and Reddit bot-sniffers. And so here we have Sam Kriss, yet another spoiled-rich-kid communist who wants to burn down the system that gave him his rarefied aesthetic education (and who nonetheless still harbors bourgeois dreams of inheriting his parents’ “massive house“) swirling a vintage line from Virginia Woolf under his nostrils as he informs you plebs that he was already bored with ChatGPT in 2022, before you even knew it existed.

Seriously, though, the people most likely to see AI text as contamination are the people whose social identity is bound up with text: the literary humanities set, the professional writers, the custodians of taste. For everyone else, it’s just a convenience. An appliance. Maybe that’s part of the outrage: automation was supposed to take the warehouse and the assembly line, not saunter into the poetry workshop and start doing an impression of “voice.” The machines are stealing the wrong jobs.

Most people have never treated everyday writing as sacred in the first place. We flatter ourselves that Christmas wishes “come from the heart,” but come on: normal people use templates because they have lives. Mass-produced holiday cards work for their intended purpose, and no one regards them as a civilizational threat. If anything, the sincere and authentic are the ones who refuse the template and send a detailed, self-important “year in review” that makes everyone vaguely regret having an inbox. Before chatbots, the socially-striving could always reach for Bartlett’s book of quotations; AI just makes the rhetorical prosthetics cheaper and faster. And of course, anything that steals fire from Olympus and gives it to the masses is, by definition, sacrilege.

We are changed by what we change. Good ol’ Auden. It’s the best description I know of what’s happening to public language right now. People imitate their peers constantly. So of course we’re going to imitate the newest voice that surrounds us, even when it isn’t a person. If the environment becomes saturated with AI phrasing, we will begin to speak it the way you catch an accent. From a strictly evolutionary angle, that’s neither good nor bad. It’s adaptation. It’s the social animal looking for a snugger fit.

But there’s always a counter-movement. A stock phrase can be useful right up until the moment it starts to sound insipid from overuse. Then we drop it and reach for something else, not because we’re heroes of authenticity but because we’re bored. “AI voice” will eventually become a class marker the way corporate-speak already is: safe, competent, emotionally pre-chewed. And as that dialect hardens into “middlebrow, typical, mediocre,” anyone who wants to sound alive will have to push harder for distinction — more particularity, more risk, more texture. So it goes: the mass adopts a style because it’s easy, and then a minority flees it because it’s everywhere.

These pieces about AI writing all share the same undertone: suspicion. A kind of low-grade paranoia that turns reading into auditing. You can’t just take in a paragraph anymore; you have to scrutinize it for tells, like a customs agent checking passports. “Tapestry,” “delve,” the syrupy uplift, the eager sincerity. ChatGPT, like Kilroy, was here. Maybe that’s justified, maybe not. But it’s corrosive either way. Even when you’re right to be wary, living in that posture constantly makes you meaner, narrower, less amused.

And it isn’t just AI. It’s a broader collapse of trust in cheap signals. I don’t have any grand analysis or conclusion; I’m just observing what appears to be the prevalent mood. A sincere paragraph used to be a mild indicator of effort. Now it might be a one-click artifact. So the audience becomes forensic, and the writer becomes defensive, and both sides grow touchy. It reminds me of the obsession with PEDs in sports: post a physique photo or a lift total and you’ll be swarmed by amateur detectives hunting for signs of steroid use. Enhancement spreads (or the suspicion of it spreads), and suddenly every impressive result is presumed guilty until proven otherwise. The honest have to perform extra authenticity; the dishonest learn to fake the performance; and the spectators get to feel clever for “catching” someone.

We are changed by what we change. We built machines that can produce endless fluent prose, and now we’re building a world in which fluent prose is no longer evidence of a mind behind it, only evidence that a machine exists. Reading starts to feel like border control.

Bartleby the Scribbler

By in books, identity, work, writing

There’s nothing like the book section at Goodwill to serve as memento mori for literary ambition. Shelf after shelf of novels and memoirs you’ve never heard of, each one the culmination of somebody’s dream. Years of work, an agent, a contract, launch parties, reviews; and now, a buck and change on a thrift-store shelf, moldering away after the original owner stuck it in a box with unwanted Christmas gifts and old sweatshirts and dropped it off in the donation bin like Rousseau leaving an infant on the orphanage stoop.

And that’s the ordinary outcome. At the more spectacular end, you get something like Olivia Nuzzi’s recent memoir, American Canto. A wall-to-wall media circus, months of scandal coverage, an affair with a cabinet secretary, her ex-fiancé serializing his side of the tawdry story on Substack — and after all that, the book moves a little over a thousand print copies in its first week. Imagine whoring away your privacy and integrity for an audience smaller than a mid-tier YouTube channel’s Tuesday upload.

Rob Henderson has a post about what it takes to be a writer now: not just writing, but running a one-person media operation. Newsletter, social feeds, a constant stream of “content,” and enough personal disclosure that readers feel like they “know” you — so that occasionally you can step in and say, “By the way, here’s where you can buy my book.”

On paper, I look like the sort of person a publisher might get ideas about. I’ve been blogging regularly for years. There’s an archive, a recognizable voice, recurring obsessions, a small audience that keeps wandering back. If you’re a literary marketer, this is the kind of thing you point at and say, “Look, a platform.”

This is not to say I could have a career as an Author if I wanted. If I ever published a book, odds are it would sink without a ripple, like most books do. The only point I’m making is narrower and more boring: the visible behavior the publishers and marketers want — regular posting, a sense of personality, a trickle of readers — is already there. What interests me is how the meaning of that behavior would flip the moment it became someone else’s plan. Right now, when I write a post, I’m just following an itch from inside. Something bothers me, or amuses me, or catches my attention, and I want to see what it looks like in sentences. That’s the whole story. If I don’t post for a few days, no one is waiting with a spreadsheet and a frown. The activity begins and ends with my own curiosity. Now imagine the same surface routine, but add a publisher, a publicist, or a boss.

“Time to produce some topical content; your recent posts haven’t really done numbers.”
“You really need an Instagram account; the marketing data are clear.”
“Could you say something a bit provocative on Twitter to juice interest before the launch?”

Nothing material has changed. I’d still be typing words on a screen. But suddenly the internal itch is secondary. The primary thing is fulfilling an obligation someone else has defined: keep the graph pointing up and to the right. The exact same habit becomes part of a strategy deck.

I don’t think obligations are bad. It’s normal to have them. Civilization more or less depends on people doing things they wouldn’t spontaneously choose at 7 a.m. on a Monday. You can even take pride in meeting your obligations, whether you resent them or cheerfully accept them. But obligations have a way of draining some of the spontaneous joy out of an activity. The more something is tied to money, status, or other people’s expectations, the less it feels like play and the more it feels like work, even if you’re doing precisely what you “love.” Which is why I’ve always preferred to keep writing in the hobby column. I’ve heard it said, “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” For me, this gets it precisely backwards. The surest way to ruin something you love is to make it responsible for your mortgage and your self-worth at the same time.

I already have a job. I treat it as a task: something I do competently in exchange for a paycheck. It doesn’t need to express my deepest self. It just needs to keep the lights on. Writing is the thing I do for its own sake, the place where a stray thought can turn into an afternoon’s entertainment. No deliverables, no targets, no sense that I’m failing if it doesn’t lead to anything. No one has to care. No one has to pay. If I never earn a cent from it, nothing is “wrong.” In my view, something in your life needs to work like that, something that is allowed to be pointless in the best sense. Hobbies are ideally placed to fill that role. For me, writing is a hobby.

Maybe there’s something quintessentially Gen-X about it after all. I’ve never dreamed of being an author, but I do find it amusing to imagine practicing passive resistance against a publishing house and a publicist. “But you like blogging! You’ve already been doing it for decades! Why can’t you just keep doing it with a link at the bottom of every post to the sales page at Amazon?!”

“I would prefer not to,” I’d say. “That’s all.”

Borrowing and Lending

By in books, montaigne, writing

Montaigne and Burton were both fascinated with the same impulse to collect quotations that had inspired Erasmus. They also developed Erasmus’s insight that one could make a literary work out of quotations, a kind of patchwork interesting both as a reference work and as a special kind of creation all its own.

…Far from being antithetical to borrowing, personality depends on it. Montaigne could not have disagreed more with those who regard quotation as a failure of originality and a surrender of individuality.

— Gary Saul Morson, The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture

When I was a teenager, I used to cover my school notebooks in song lyrics. It was the easiest way I knew to say something about myself: not by coming up with original lines, but by surrounding myself with other people’s words that felt right. Looking back, that habit never really went away. It just migrated from ballpoint scrawl on Trapper Keepers to block quotes and hyperlinks on a blog.

Some of my favorite posts to “write” are still the ones where I mostly arrange quotations — sometimes in agreement, sometimes in argument — and let the sparks fly in the gaps between them. The old blogosphere made an art out of this: you’d pull a passage, react to it, set it alongside something else, and see what new shape appeared. My bricolage posts are just a continuation of that practice, formalized a bit. I don’t feel any embarrassment about “hiding behind” other people’s eloquence. Quite the opposite: if Morson has already said something cleanly, why would I insult both of us by trying to paraphrase it in clumsier prose?

I like to think there’s a bit of humility in starting a post with someone else’s paragraph and a link to their essay or book. It’s an admission that I’m a reader first and a commentator second, and that part of the fun is simply pointing and saying, “Look at this.” But it’s also where whatever “personality” I have on the page actually lives: not in manufacturing original thoughts on command, but in choosing which voices to invite in, which lines to underline, and how to arrange them so they say a little more together than they did alone.

Distinct Observations

By in aphorisms, books, nietzsche, writing

This difficulty is compounded by the fact that, while a good many of the numbered sections in which most of his books consist have the compactness and epigrammatic quality supposedly characteristic of aphorisms, a good many others do not. They instead are paragraph-length or even page-length reflections of a frequently related but also relatively self-contained nature. Yet even these longer reflections share with genuine aphorisms the characteristic of being distinct observations, rather than clearly connected sequential paragraphs in a sustained line of thought. They typically make (and sometimes elaborate) a point of some sort on some topic, but need (and are intended) to be thought about in conjunction with other points on the topic, both in the same book parts and elsewhere. This makes reading most of Nietzsche’s books a very different experience — and challenge — from reading chapters in a typical philosophical monograph. And what makes understanding both his kind of philosophy and his philosophical thinking even more challenging is that he wrote no definitive treatises, and instead gives us almost nothing more than these bits and pieces, leaving it to us to try to figure out what to make of them collectively.

— Richard Schacht, Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy: Finding His Way

Nietzsche was my first experience of “aphorisms,” so I’m afraid I’ve imprinted on him to the extent that it’s hard to read other, more traditional versions without seeing them as lacking. The ones that are brief often seem too shallow to me, little more than quips. Others rely on rhetorical symmetry, like a tweet I saw at random this morning: “The left wing view of human nature is rosy and idealized while left wing art is grim and ugly. The right wing view of human nature is grim and ugly while right wing art is rosy and idealized.” The effect relies on the neat inversion of chiasmus, which can lull the reader into accepting the premise without thinking, “Wait a minute; is that really accurate in most cases?” It seems to me that many of Nietzsche’s best aphorisms are too long to be rhetorically tidy like that (while still displaying genuine rhetorical skill), but not so long as to outgrow the “aphorism” designation.

In his book The Long and Short of It: From Aphorism to Novel, Gary Saul Morson — who pleasingly agrees with me that Oscar Wilde’s witticisms are formulaic and shallow, a charge I might extend to La Rochefoucauld — classifies and examines several varieties of short-form writing, from aphorisms and maxims to apothegms and dicta. He categorizes “thoughts,” which he names in honor of Pascal’s Pensées, as belonging to “the family of short genres while more closely resembling an unfinished longer one.” He adds, “It is hard to say just where the thought as a genre ends and the essay begins. Many resemble the germ, or else the residue, of an essay.” He names Lichtenberg and Nietzsche as the other two masters of the form. I like the cut of his jib here, but I fear that “thoughts” is too generic of a term to describe a specific style of short-form writing. Same goes for “reflections.” If I were forced to choose a term, I might go with “reflective fragments.” Maybe even “assays,” just so I could say, “Outis Niemand: putting the ‘ass’ in ‘assay’ since 2005.”

Autotelic

By in books, foolosophy, writing

His notion of happiness: to read and write quietly for a lifetime without ever showing anyone a word of it, without ever publishing a word of it. To leave in pencil everything one has written down, changing nothing, as though it existed for nothing; like the natural course of a life that serves no confining purposes, but is fully itself, and records itself, just as it proceeds and breathes, by itself.

—Elias Canetti, The Human Province

A monastic ideal: writing as a near-religious practice, refusing the market’s demands, even the demand to “matter.” “Pencil” signals provisionality and humility; “changing nothing” rejects the sculptor’s pride in revision. The paradox: he prints this in a published book. So I read it as a corrective rather than a commandment — a way of disciplining the eyes to not wander toward an audience. The point isn’t literally never to publish; it’s to write as if no audience were owed anything. It remains true, however: sharing things we love is rewarding.

 

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