writing

Gentlemen, This Is Democracy Manifest

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

The Lady of the House informs me that some people are purposely leaving typos in written communication to signal human presence. Well, isn’t this a fine kettle of fish. It appears we’re heading into an era in which polish, style, and correct spelling will place one under suspicion of artificial intelligence enhancement. I assume we’ll soon have to submit to the digital equivalent of piss tests.

I trace my letter-arranging prowess back to third grade, when I handily won my first spelling bee by getting “mansion” correct (the last swineherd’s son in competition with me had offered up “manshun;” I mean, come on). Though I’m not severely educated, I do enjoy reading popular books on the art and craft of rhetoric by authors like Mark Forsyth and Ward Farnsworth; thus my passing familiarity with official rhetorical devices. I know how to place dashes like silverware in accordance with the relevant house style. I know how to wield a semicolon like a smallsword in a duel. I know how to keep my dependent clauses at heel like a pack of hounds, loosed only when the field is ready.

And for what? So that in our degraded, demotic age, every half-literate halfwit incapable of forming a sentence without the assistance of predictive text can prod my sentences like livestock, pronouncing them too good to be true? “Writing too smart! Make head hurt! Machine! Machine!” cry the plebs, mistaking skill for sorcery. Very well; what is the charge? Crafting a tricolon? A tasteful, succulent tricolon? I assure you, I wrote it myself; in fact, the LLMs come to study under me. Now kindly step away from my prose. And you — get your hand off my chatbot!

Mihi Ipsi Scripsi (In the Age of ‘Doing Numbers’)

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche, the geist of the zeit, writing

On the other hand, just as many pronouncements may be found that attested to his disinterest in potential readers. “Mihi ipsi scripsi” — “I wrote it for myself” — was the motto he had selected for himself, perhaps also to prevent disappointments, while working on Zarathustra. The same ambivalence emerged from the fact that he had addressed the book to “everyone and to no one.” “How could I write for readers?…Rather, I make notations for myself,” can be read in a notebook from the late 1880s. The question of Nietzsche’s audience was further complicated by the fact that he was convinced he was ahead of his age by a generation, if not by several.

— Philipp Felsch, How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold: A Tale of a Redemption

In 2005, a couple friends and I started a short-lived blog to join the general conversation. I didn’t have a voice yet, so my efforts were mostly derivative. By the time I finally started to write things that didn’t suck, the crowd had drifted to newer platforms and shorter attention spans. It didn’t matter; writing turned out to be intrinsically rewarding. The bargain I made with myself was simple: keep the work addressed to one exacting reader —me— and let others overhear it if they like.

Then came the metricized web. In 2006 I was uploading obscure musical tracks to YouTube and getting DMs like, “love this!! hey subscribe to my channel!!” I’d check their page: a few shaky cam clips and nothing I’d ever want to see again. I kept wondering, like an overly-rational Vulcan, why would I volunteer to be notified every time this dork posts? Eventually I learned that this was just the new etiquette: don’t offer value, collect it. The request wasn’t transactional (“here’s something you’ll love in return”); it was numerical (“help me inflate this meaningless metric so that I can pretend my inner self is something other than a howling wasteland”). Today’s creator programs formalize it: payouts and promotion tied to “engagement,” with replies and outrage acting like adrenaline. If ten thousand people rage-reply and thirty thousand boost it, the algorithm pays out, and discourse tilts toward provocation. It’s not about conversation; it’s a slot machine that rings louder the more you debase yourself to pull the lever. Now, I feel an irrational rage every time I see an ostensible adult boast about achieving a particular round-number follower count, or about a viral post “doing numbers.” How many of these “followers” are real people who actually read each post carefully and comprehend it? How many of these “content creators” even care, though? Numbers are all that matter, like insecure teenagers in a perpetual dick-measuring contest. I want to charge into the Temple of Elon and overturn all the payout tables. “My blogosphere was to be called a house of conversation, but you have turned it into a den of shitposters.”

I’m Gen-X, and the old ethos still feels right: strive for status if you must, but don’t pant for it in public. Obsession over “selling out” could get precious, and of course it was largely hypocritical, but it kept dignity within reach, at least. Even a “too cool for school” stance like ours was still a tribute to an established norm: it would be pathetic and undignified for an adult to chase after mere popularity for its own sake. By the early ’00s, I was belatedly realizing that no such restraint existed anymore. Empty affirmation was all anyone seemed to care about. I’d rather stick with the Nietzschean attitude — a book for all and none — and use outdated measures of value instead: posts reread, saved, passed along from one person to another. If the age needs me later, it will find me; until then, I’ll keep making notations for myself — several generations ahead, naturally.

A Correspondence Course

By in books, montaigne, writing

In “A Consideration upon Cicero” — which is, in effect, the second part of his essay “On solitude” — he says that he would have preferred letters to essays as the “form to publish my sallies,” if only he had “had someone to talk to.” The sense of the man that comes across in his writing is of someone genial and talkative who relishes company. Despite his retirement from the affairs of the world, it would be a mistake to see him as a recluse recording his thoughts in lonely isolation. Terence Cave is right to stress the conversational mode of the essays. “Although Montaigne often depicts himself thinking and writing in solitude,” says Cave, “he always imagines his writing directed towards others.” The essays aren’t soliloquies. Rather, they’re attempts to reach out and engage others in his ruminations. The sense of conversation, rather than monologue, is enhanced by the frequency with which Montaigne refers to, and quotes from, other writers.

— Chris Arthur, “On Solitude,” After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays

That rings true to me. I didn’t learn to write by communing with the Muse; I learned by trying to keep up with a friend who outclassed me — Yale and Hopkins-educated, Harold Bloom for a mentor — the sort of mind that forced you to bring better sentences or go home.

I had never written anything but schoolwork and adolescent poetry/lyrics before, but it turned out that I had a latent aptitude for it. Email was my apprenticeship. Each missive had a face associated with it, a standard to meet, a voice to answer. I chased his references, matched allusions, and tried to craft turns of phrase that wouldn’t sound thin when they hit his inbox. Writing, for me, was never a soliloquy. It was sparring with someone generous enough to make me reach further.

Blogging was only a widening of the circle. I’ve never had the temperament for podium-talk. A topic addressed to someone sharpens judgment, trims digressions, and gives each sentence a target. Even an imagined addressee is still an addressee. Without that pressure of an expectant audience, prose gets gaseous; with it, the point comes into focus. Instead of sending an article with comments appended to one person, I posted them for whoever happened to pass by. But the posture never changed: I still write to someone — an educated, skeptical, good-humored reader who won’t let me bluff. Solitude, yes; but it’s a populated solitude, with a seat kept open across the table.

Oral Sects

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

Nitsuh Abebe:

Consider that, for a good stretch of recent history, most of the written material that people spent time with — the stuff beyond signs and menus — was full-on writing-writing: text that somebody sat down and composed, maybe revised or edited, maybe even had professionally printed. And this kind of communication was different from our daily interaction with our peers: You talked to your peers, mostly. Even after the internet arrived, this basic psychic arrangement persisted.

And now it does not — like, at all. “Emails or text messages,” posts and chats, DMs and comments, DoorDashers telling you the restaurant is out of coleslaw: Oceans of communication that used to be handled by speech are now left to lone individuals typing into the internet. Even if you remain a dedicated reader, you may still end up spending more of your time dealing in on-the-fly typings, because that has become the everyday use-case of writing.

There’s been a regime change in the republic of letters. The new state cult is fingered speech, and its hierophants frown at bookish rites. It took several centuries, but oral culture has finally restored its supremacy over the print culture that usurped it. Now we are no longer limited by physical proximity when we want to “talk” to our friends; in a bitter irony, we can do that with our fingers on our phones. The medium of text has been hollowed out and repurposed to carry the idiom of town-square chatter, in a final insult to Gutenberg’s memory. Show up with old-faith orthography from the Before Times, like an em dash, and you’ve basically flashed a countersign from the print ancien régime.

The Edict of Orthography is posted on every alley wall: Thou shalt not parade thy schooling in public. As Apocryphal Thoreau might have said, the paragraph that punctuates least punctuates best. Let your sentences run on like an interstate fender-bender; ruthlessly prune all your capital letters into lower-case; and if in doubt, just say “lol.” Use two-dollar words and you’ll be stopped and frisked for book-larnin’. When the patrol asks if you “always write like that,” you say, “nah bruh fr fr.” The trick is to talk like a citizen of the timeline — jaded, sleep-deprived, mildly retarded — so the censors don’t smell print on you.

Meanwhile, the old believers meet in back rooms, whispering their heresies: full stops at the end of sentences, em dashes unsheathed, even a semicolon passed hand to hand like contraband. In the street we keep our heads down and code-switch: commas where dashes would sing, “k” where “Okay.” would injure sensitive feelings, a vacantly grinning emoji to prove we come in peace. Not because the rites have lost power, but because we know which empire we’re in.

One Score

By in writing

Just realized that yesterday was twenty years since I first put finger to keyboard on this blog. The above has been my experience as well, but in contrast, I am grateful that life has gone on as usual with no appearances by bewildered mobs or star-struck groupies. You guys reading this, though, I guess you’re all right.

Obiter Scripta, no. 142

By in books, language, obiter scripta, writing

Every effective metaphor brings with it a more complete perception of the world and its interrelationships. It reveals more truth, it brightens, expands, clarifies—in effect, it helps to create—our understanding of the world. Through metaphor we receive “in addition to the moment or moments of aesthetic pleasure in appreciation…a more permanent boon. It is as though my own consciousness had actually been expanded.”

— Carol Zaleski and Philip Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams

A good metaphor is a pry bar on the skull: suddenly more light gets in, more joints show between things we thought were separate. You don’t just admire the phrase; you find yourself able to notice what you couldn’t notice five minutes earlier. That experience — what Barfield called a felt change of consciousness — is the afterglow of meaning being made. For me, the most foudroyant sense of truly understanding a subject happens when I see it captured in a metaphor. Suddenly, an isolated subject clearly fits into the wider world. Do I quote myself? Very well; I quote myself: “an apt metaphor is to language what the invention of the wheel was to labor — a means of carrying heavy concepts with minimal effort. A prescient metaphorical picture is worth a thousand words of academic detail.”

The Scarlet Punctuation Mark

By in ai, technology, writing

Brian Philips:

Yet for months, the em dash has been the victim of a relentless campaign of online persecution the likes of which no punctuation mark, not even the semicolon, has ever seen. Any chucklehead who disagrees with an online post can, if that post happens to include an em dash, dismiss it with the claim that it was written by a chatbot. It’s gotten so bad that people on random subreddits are having to issue PSAs informing their fellow users that em dashes were not invented by ChatGPT. These people are heroes of our time. Normally I’m an enthusiastic advocate of AI-shaming, but I will not stand idly by while you make the em dash a pawn in your dirty game of bot-spotting.

I’ve been using em dashes for so long, I still make them the old-fashioned way — by pressing “alt+0151.” Hand-crafted quality; that’s the Outis Niemand promise. But anyway, what Philips says is unfortunately true. I’ve seen a few recent examples of people being accused of using AI because of the presence of this arcane sigil known only to sorcerers. Call it linguistic phrenology. Today’s inquisitors don’t measure skulls; they palpate sentences. A dash here, a semicolon there — behold the telltale bump of depravity. In 1692 it was imps and familiars; in 2025 it’s em dashes. Next week the devil’s mark will be ellipses. Or bullet points. Or sentences that begin with “And.” Projection, possibly the only useful concept Freud ever contributed to the world, explains a lot of this as well. What does paranoia feed off of, if not guilt? All those times you copied off the kid next to you in class. All those times you skipped homework to play outside. All those times you enhanced your résumé. All those books you didn’t read in lieu of thumbfucking your phone. You’re all a bunch of lazy frauds. But the surest way to soothe your own shortcut guilt is to accuse everyone else first. “I saw Goody Proctor copying-and-pasting from ChatGPT!”

It’s not just the slack-jawed yokels suspicious of anything longer than a text message who are spooked by the mysteries of glyphs, though. A specter is haunting the professional classes — the specter of large language models. Writing well has long been the mark of educated sophistication or white-collar competence. Now an LLM can draft a decent memo, and the clerisy see ominous portents. So they compensate with punctuation purity tests. It’s the old guild reflex. When a tool escapes the shop, the guild doesn’t improve the craft; it narrows the doorway. When automation gutted factory lines, the sermon was brisk — learn to code. When automation does a drive-by in the severely-educated neighborhoods, we convene a “national conversation,” declare an ethical crisis, and classify the em dash as contraband. If the robot on the shop floor was inevitable, so is the one in your inbox.

Obiter Scripta, no. 141

By in books, foolosophy, montaigne, obiter scripta, writing

The dialogue between Montaigne and others, like a literary game of mirrors, is one of the most original aspects of the Essays. Montaigne engages in self-reflection through books and comments on these books not to cast himself in a favorable light, but because he recognizes himself in them. As he observes in the chapter, “On the Education of Children,” “neither have I said so much of others, but to get a better opportunity to explain myself” (I, 25).

— Antoine Compagnon, A Summer with Montaigne: On the Art of Living Well

Someone once remarked to me about my writing: It’s interesting that you rely on an external spark (quotation, anecdote, found phrase). You’re never starting from a vacuum; you’re starting from friction with something that already exists. Yes, I said; as much as I might like to pretend that I’m purposefully following in the humanist commonplace-book tradition, the truth is that I learned it from the old blogosphere, where it was standard. I like to keep that old spirit alive, of pointing to things I’ve found funny or interesting in case someone else might enjoy them too. I always liked the idea of writing as part of an ongoing dialogue, rather than ex cathedra pronouncements from a self-absorbed writer alone in his study. It makes my site a salon, not a pulpit. A good quotation isn’t to end an argument, it’s to start a conversation — with the author, with the reader, with my multitude of selves.

 

Obiter Scripta, no. 139

By in books, nietzsche, obiter scripta, writing

Nowadays it is not only my habit, it is also to my taste — a malicious taste, perhaps? — no longer to write anything which does not reduce to despair every sort of man who is “in a hurry.”

— Nietzsche, Daybreak

There are two ways to drive the hurried reader to despair. One is the cuttlefish method, a long-time favorite of fatuous frauds: hide your scrawny meaning within a cloud of ink. I prefer the second method — compression, not fog. I’m not trying to be opaque or verbose; I’m trying to be dense. Ideally, I want to set spring-loaded sentences, capable of snapping on careless fingers. I want to produce prose that looks like a harmless puddle and turns out to be two feet deep. I want my posts to be gobstoppers, fitting easily in the mouth, but cracking a tooth if you try to chew and bolt. The internet serves cotton candy “content” by the yard. I’m offering beef jerky—salted, tough, but ultimately more nourishing.

Obiter Scripta, no. 136

By in books, obiter scripta, writing

Logan Pearsall Smith was asked shortly before his death whether he had found any meaning in life. “Yes,” he replied, “there is a meaning; at least for me, there is one thing that matters — to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.”

— The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes (ed. Clifton Fadiman)

Philosophically, I can agree with that. Semantically, though, I think I’d like my word chimes to resonate more like the Corinthian Bells, or maybe the Quartal Basso Profundo.

Not For All My Little Words, Not If I Could Write For You

By in bonsai minimalism, books, foolosophy, writing

When I consider all the people I know or have heard of who write prolifically or who at least produce lengthy and finished works, I feel an ambivalent envy, a disdainful admiration, an incoherent mixture of mixed feelings. The creation of something complete or whole, be it good or bad — and if it’s never entirely good, it’s very often not all bad — yes, the creation of something complete seems to stir in me above all a feeling of envy. A completed thing is like a child; although imperfect like everything human, it belongs to us like our own children.

And I, whose self-critical spirit allows me to only see my lapses and defects, I, who dare write only passages, fragments, excerpts of the non-existent, I myself — in the little that I write — am also imperfect.

—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

An aristocratic patron recently gifted me a copy of Leopardi’s Zibaldone, a book I’d admired from afar for many years. It’s a mammoth of a book, over 2500 pages of notebook-style reflections on everything from literature to philology to history and sundry other topics. He compiled this between 1817-1832, and he only lived to be 38 years old. Pace Senhor Pessoa, I wouldn’t say I feel “envy” when confronted with such a vast laboratory of thought. It’s more like dull incomprehension. How can anyone think, let alone write, that much? I’ve already outlived Leopardi by nearly fifteen years, and had I written down every coherent thought I’ve ever had, it probably still wouldn’t match his word count. I can only think or write in short bursts, with a lot of silent observation and subconscious reflection in between. I simply can’t comprehend what it would feel like to be “on” all the time. I’m a bonsai essayist, that’s what I am.

C’est Tout Dire

By in books, writing

[M]y ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book — what everyone else does not say in a book…

— Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

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There are writers who can express in a mere twenty pages things I sometimes need two whole lines for.

— Karl Kraus, Dicta and Contradicta

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Tormented by the cursed ambition always to put a whole book in a page, a whole page in a sentence, and this sentence in a word.

— Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert

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Would you chatterboxes please shut up? I’m trying to concentrate on precisely how much to twitch my eyebrow to express what I’m thinking.

Sardonicus Maximus

By in books, writing

Wise sayings (and dicta) know, sardonic maxims ask why we think we know. The former presume, and the latter doubt, both the possibility and the value of wisdom or knowledge. Sardonic maxims concern vanity in both senses of the word: futility and excessive self-regard. Their sense of the former makes them suspicious of effort and their sense of the latter of judgment.

…For the sardonic maximist, zeal — of religious fanatics, or political parties, of adherents of a theory or proponents of an ideology — constitutes the greatest, and most dangerous, folly.

…The maximist speaks from experience, which counts more than reasoning or theory, and has evidently had plenty. We sense him as old, though not very old. He has lived through what surprises younger people and has reflected upon it. Having moved among the urbane and sophisticated, he knows his conclusions have been tested by demanding judges. In this sense, the maximist is aristocratic, as well as world-weary. He speaks out of what one commentator has called “cool disdain.” The maximist expects his readers to be as old and sophisticated as himself, and to recognize from experience, rather than proof or argument, the truth of what he says. If they don’t, no argument will substitute.

…It takes self-control, as deft as the maximist’s control over language, to remain alone as a mere observer. “In France,” writes La Bruyère, “it takes much firmness of spirit and a great breadth of understanding to do without offices and positions, and be willing to stay alone and do nothing.”

— Gary Saul Morson, The Long and Short of It: From Aphorism to Novel

Obiter Scripta, no. 134

By in obiter scripta, writing

I confess that I am like an aeolian harp — which gives off some pretty sounds but can play no songs.

— Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert

I’ve spent the last few weeks going through my archives and collecting my best efforts to present in bespoke book form to my oldest friend for her birthday later this year. It’s fun to take a bird’s-eye view on twenty years of scribbling, to see how my thoughts have developed or changed, but it also confronts me with my own limitations. I have a few favorite themes, and I’ve produced some good jokes and some well-turned phrases, but per the Peter Principle, it’s clear that the blog is the highest level of my writing competence, such as it is. There will be no extended essays forthcoming, let alone novels or monographs. I’m just another unremarkable koi fish in the small WordPress pond, and that’s how I like it.

Amazing Space, How Sweet the Site That Saved a Hack Like Me

By in writing

Ed West:

While I wouldn’t advise you to enter the media, I would suggest that you might become a man or woman of letters, which is a different thing altogether. In fact, while print journalism has been dying a prolonged death for two decades, now joined in its agonies by television, we live in a golden age of letters.

Substack is the leading platform for the renaissance in the republic of letters, making it much easier for writers to earn a living from the western world’s dwindling number of functionally literate people. Its growth continues unabated, and with good reason.

Yeah, well, the gentrification has started:

Why, it seems like it was just the other day that journalists were fretting about how Substack was a vile den of neo-Nazi misinformation. Then they discovered there was gold in them thar hills, and now they’re colonizing the place. So it goes.

The moral of the story is the same as ever. If you want to make money and be somebody important, then sure, join Substack. If you want to write for the pure fun of it, if you want to be beneath notice, forgotten by the world, and left alone, if you want to be a man of lower-case letters, then keep a blog.

Lost In the Digital Taiga

By in writing

Erik Hoel:

And this same reaction of “I don’t even know where to look, or where to begin” in the viewer (here, reader) is what I think the very best of blogging should strive for. For you can’t read a very good blog all at once. It is the creation of something so ridiculously large in scope that you can only take it in a little bit at a time.

This is why Substack’s focus on email was more defining and important than even the founders knew, and why it triggered the new Silver Age of blogging. In Michelangelo’s chapel, it is the use of space by the artist that creates the overwhelming effect; filling in such a complex topography means there is detail in every curve and window and feature. In blogging, it is not space that separates the pieces, but time. One email update, one short read, one consideration, one detailed panel. Above it all, the ghost of a greater presence hovers unseen.

In 2025, I want to feel more ghosts of greater presences, here in the last mottes of the internet. It’s time for bloggers to step up.

Is Substack the renaissance of blogging? Then what have people like me been doing all these years, just freely giving our thoughts away for the sheer fun of writing them down? I guess we’re like the Lykov family, refusing to abandon the only way of life we know, and fleeing even deeper into the desolate Siberian hinterland.

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