Reading Fresh from Foul
Urgency versus Content versus Art versus Eating dirt versus Letting the cat die
It's very hot here in New York. This puts stress on us all, especially the perpetually distressed who strut and fret their hours upon its sidewalks. On one sidewalk under the FDR Drive the other day a guy passed me loudly pleading, "will you please just stop lying to me?"
He wasn't talking to me, and there was no one with him. But just like that, he summed up the essay I'd spent the best part of the past few afternoons working on.
The city gives me little gifts like that. Thanks. This essay is about being lied to, and how to make it stop, maybe.
Food or not food
Like you, I read a lot. And the first thing I look for is what the author is actually trying to do. Ulterior motives are the real motives. I want to know who I’m going into business with, and what that business might be. In a poem, it may not be clear until the end, if even then. In fiction, you’re pretty likely to figure it out by the midway point, unless there’s some great plot twist. In an essay, it should be pretty upfront. Like in this one, I already told you. But it’s never that simple.
Fearsome personal inventory
Last summer we had a house fire and had to move. I boxed up all my books, and got rid of a few big boxes’ worth. Despite the time pressure - all four of us were staying at a lesser Best Western while we packed and found a new place to live - there was still no way to get through that part of the move quickly.
The books I threw away or donated were ones I’d read but not loved, or books I’d never quite found my way to, or books marked by an ambition a pretension I never lived up to, or books whose promise failed not far past the cash register.
With exceptions made for the utterly mysterious and the bewilderingly virtuosic books, the ones I kept were all smart people telling me something that was new to me, important to them, told well, and imparted for good-faith reasons. Those criteria may sound obvious, but they stand out more as this century scrolls down.
Non-authored
The reason those principles stand out is the rise of content. I used to think of content as a snazzy bit of catch-all jargon that marketing and media upper management used to characterize anything that could be packaged and sold to subscribers and advertisers.
Now I’m starting to see it as a separate genre entirely.
I’m no innocent. I’ve worked in places where content is the operative word. I count it a mercy that my name has mostly been kept off of what I’ve produced in those places. That anonymity, though, is part of the genre. The writer is not the author of those pieces. The legal entity paying the writer is not the author. Rather, the brand is the author.
A brand is a nested conglomeration of impressions and sensations connected with a product. A brand is meant to imply a promise for which no legal entity can be held accountable. The content being produced for a brand is one more of these impressions. As such, content must be exceedingly careful what it says.
Permission to speak freely
One must be careful with an infant or an ancient vase. But when one must be careful with what one says, something else is usually going on.
I never had a lot of sympathy for people who complain about speech codes, and being cancelled. Some people can’t stand the uncomfortable truth that you can only say the horrible things in your heart among friends. Some people can’t stand the uncomfortable truth I tell my children: Not everyone’s going to be your friend.
Warning: Content may be…
…valuable information offered in service of another aim. But it’s often straight manipulation or just rudderless small talk intended to keep other impulses from taking hold (see 2024’s “On Filler”). This talking is a form of not talking. We all do it.
But what are we not talking about? We may know at first. But if the not-talking is successful, we soon forget. This is what they call repression. When successful, the repressed thing is buried, and its grave unmarked. It’s a sore spot, given space to grow according to its own lights. Finally it reappears, stronger, though changed in name - as your own idea. This is how one’s life comes to be ruled by what they find unbearable.
Digging up the devil
So how do you avoid being secretly controlled by what you hate? One approach has been to investigate your own motives.
The most thorough recent movement in this direction has been psychoanalysis, and people would spit at Sigmund Freud in the street for suggesting it. The approach goes back at least as far as St. Augustine. It’s never been a popular activity, and it’s not for everyone. Once embarked upon, it’s a life-or-death struggle that can go on for decades, during which a person will feel regularly attacked, beleaguered and haunted.
It’s also powerful impulse, possibly the most powerful one available to human beings. It’s changed the world for the better more than a few times. Among artists, it’s sent Dante to hell and vaults John Coltrane to A Love Supreme.
No shoes, no struggle, no service
The urgency that this struggle brings to art is what separates art from kitsch, which mostly consoles. If you’re an American Christian and uneasy about your nation’s actions at home or abroad, you might like a painting of Jesus filling in the red stripes of the American flag with his blood. If you’re a mother uneasy about the guidance you never gave your children, you might enjoy a wooden placard that reads Live, Laugh, Love. If you’re a real estate developer who’s building luxury condos in a city where people’s lives are painfully rerouted by high rents, you might sink some of those tax credits into a massive neon sign that reads Gratitude. This is the art of repression.
Don’t eat dirt
Of course, there’s supposed to be no good or bad art. Good and bad taste is all supposed to have been a residue of unjust privilege, just the accumulated shibboleths of the oppressors. Art is all supposed to be subjective after all. This is disingenuous. It’s like saying food is subjective. Sure it is. But if I consume my weight in soil over the course of a day - like an earthworm does - I’ll die an agonizing death by midnight.
Art is the same way. Van Gogh tells you that you never truly even looked at the visible world around you. Stock photos tell you that the Microsoft corporation is a friend to all children. You choose what you eat. Only one gives you life.
Art - whether it’s the Rape of the Sabine Women or the Brooklyn Bridge - makes people throw off the burden of deliberately ignoring where they are. It’s a burden I admit to feeling more than I’d like to admit.
Accelerated repression
Rigorous introspection may save a person’s soul. It may create art and allows for the appreciation of art. It may save democracy or even preserve and redeem civilization itself. But it won’t move the needle on quarterly earnings the way that a slightly better iPhone or a new formulation of Effexor will.
The 21st century hasn’t been a great time for thinking. This started with the internet, which was supposed to know everything, so you don’t have to. Of course it never did. And while knowledge may be power, it only possesses any potency when active within a human mind.
Now we have AI, which promises to do all the thinking and expressing. But wait, who exactly is doing the thinking, then? And why are they expressing what they express from those thoughts? No matter. Turn it into the professor. Publish it.
The here motivation isn’t to know or to connect with another person, but to avoid both. These aren’t human motivations, but the motivations of something inhuman, of content.
The genre of content
What does content want? Its owners want clicks, eyeballs - to rub advertising on those eyeballs, or charge money for the clicks. Content itself is hollow. It’s meant to crowd out competing content. As a genre, it’s indifferent if not hostile to beauty and humor. It has the intellectual and moral IQ of a kudzu vine.
By that analogy, a surly teenager might argue that all art is just a competition of plumage, of flowers seeking pollinators. And there’s no shortage of art that will make you doubt the entire project of art - the something-above-the-couch art, or the at-least-she’s-sober art, to name just two.
Finding nourishment and direction from art is a matter of personal trial and error. It happens alone. It’s like how you size up whether or not a stranger is a threat or a friend - their speech cadence, where their eyes go, their shoes. It’s why clerks in book and record stores have changed the courses of thousands of people’s lives. It’s why readers have such strong feelings about something so intangible as style.
Two gallons of hardboiled
Style isn’t something that can be applied like an instagram filter. It’s a mix of charm, will, kinks and bitter disappointments. It’s neither easily concocted nor easily concealed.
Different people tell stories differently, and I get to know a person best when they’re talking about anything other than themselves. They give away a great deal - starting with how much patience they believe the world has for them. For instance, very good-looking people are almost always long-winded.
I don’t believe in storytelling as a thing. Whenever people start talking about storytelling, I brace myself to be either bored or to be sold something. The idea of great storytelling is bandied about as if it was fine Corinthian leather. People think they can upholster anything with it. Well, maybe not people, but brands do. Franchises do. Please, please tell me again why Batman is so sad.
Three-act structure
Good storytellers are usually a little desperate. They’re in trouble, or they need you to believe something. They instill in you their own sense of urgency. They have something that they have to say right now because in the morning they won’t have the courage, or they’ll be dead, or you’ll be sent back to the land of the living.
I think of films where it’s one person talking, like Swimming to Cambodia. There’s a desperation to Spalding Gray, unfortunately proven out, which makes him impossible to ignore. Like any great writer, he makes you feel what he’s saying as if you were saying it yourself. He invites you to be the uncomfortable, intelligent person he was, arguing with his neighbor.
Animal-loving detectives
Urgency and intimacy have many enemies (see last August’s “Institution Creep”). In art today, rule-following and likability are among the most dogged.
Save the Cat! is the name of a famous screenwriting guide. And you’ll notice a lot of cat-saving in movies. I saw a film about an investigative journalist - a trope as unlikely in the 21st century as the well-paid writer - trying to solve a murder in Norway, and a stray cat comes scratching at his door. Of course he feeds the thing, rubs its throat until it purrs audibly. Already, I know this movie is a mess. It shows a lack of urgency, a hedging of bets, and of trying to play more than one game at a time.
It’s no fun, after a long day of eating shit to keep your job, to watch someone else eat shit to keep their job.
Baby baby baby
But I hear urgency on the radio, on the oldies station, on most of the FM.
Imagine someone pulls a plastic bag over your head. Your life will end in about one minute. Everything you’ve ever seen or done is coming to an end. When the bag comes off, it doesn’t mean you were wrong. It just means you were being fucked with, rather badly. And being alive means that you’re always being fucked with. Not long after the bag comes off, you soon forget how awful it was, and even start to miss it. That’s the story of a good love song.
Urgency isn’t hard to come by, when you remember that you’re dying.
Without I-thou
Urgency, like honesty, exists between two people.
But if you remove the author, there’s a good chance you lose the reader too. “I don’t know who needs to hear this” goes hand-in-glove with “I don’t know who is even saying this.”
When I scroll through the provocations in a social-media feed, I find myself becoming uncharacteristically passive and listless. I have no responsibility - no expectation of response - for the genre of content, or to its zero or thousand authors. While the experience of the scroll offers some insight into the dim fascinations of our age, I don’t enjoy it.
Take two and call me in the morning
Once urgency and intimacy recede, I’m not myself so much as a Netflix profile with its established preferences. Once urgency and intimacy recede, I’m adrift with entertainment, or worse, content. This tide pulls towards Anything-But-This-America, where there is no show too insipid or screen too small.
What had been art, honest enthusiasm or communication becomes a topical ointment, an emergency repression-helper, some medicinal Star Wars to rub in my perception-holes when I can’t get to sleep.
An impossible opinion
I hear myself there, attacking mindless entertainment like I’m above it all. I hear the tone of it. It reveals a certainty that can only be told, in public, as a bet on the unanswerable question:
Is there too much time, or not enough?
Anxiety waits on either side. So much to do, and so little time in which to do it. Or, so much time, and so little actual substance to fill it with.
You don’t have to choose a side. But there’s a cost to not choosing. And time runs out either way.
Selected bibliography
An essay about an intimate experience of a piece of art