Nicely done, Sam, but perhaps a bit too linear, and a bit too individualistic? I like what you say about writing, and obviously, I put a lot of effort into Substack (and reading yours), and I do think it's kind of the only avenue I see in light of what's happening to publishing. But I also really worry about the loss of legacy media, some agreement on the facts, yes, some degree of homogeneity. Agreement, consensus, matter for politics, especially democratic politics. Saying the Hearst empire put thumbs on the scale for the Spanish American war may be true, and we could talk about degrees of influence, etc., but it's a straw robber baron argument: of course national politics wasn't perfect in this or that media environment, what would that even mean? Civilization is inherently discontent. I don't think Substack needs to answer this, and while I like/read the Free Press I don't think they can escape the centrifugal forces of internet platforms. All of which is to say there's a real problem here that I think you elide. Anyway, keep up the good work!
I sense there's envy masquerading as literary snobbism from Becca. So strange that she wrote on her Substack that she saves her best writing for elsewhere.
Hilarious. My experience of substack, which I went to explicitly to find some literary community, is that it is just like any other social media except that the long post is expected rather than exception. The owners and therefore the algorithm VERY BADLY want me to run into right wing and “contrarian” (right-wing, but confrontational on almost all cases) content because despite what I look at and read, I get almost nothing but.
So I laugh at everyone on here talking about how Substack is anything new, exciting, different, unique. It’s a blog platform. And I miss blogs, so I want to like it. But it has deliberately sought to raise the voices I like least.
The literary folk are mostly mad about “politics” getting in the way of their pure art which is about “truth” and I just can’t stop laughing at the naïveté and silliness, not to mention the high school vibe of being the first person to discover Charles Bukowski (here it’s Arx-Han or the like) and think that it’s totally unprecedented in literary history. There are very few people who are well-read and actually producing anything thoughtful or nuanced. It’s mostly - like all social media- a place to try to score prestige points, and the Very Online are here with poorly developed generic conspiracies about censorship and societal structures that control us and all sound like they read a Chomsky book one time and followed that with some Rogan-level podcasting on the subject and then went back to checking their likes.
Your content is broadly speaking higher quality than that but still the hysteria you show in this response that your precious special will be disrupted by someone else on the precious special not loving it as much as you do is just over the top. Maybe take a break from being online for a few days and come back with the perspective being in the sunshine and breeze under changing and falling leaves can bring. My god, Substack is unlike every other social media platform for the self-seriousness of its population.
Needlessly snarky and quite unlike my experience of the platform. I don’t find a lot of unwanted and self-serious content thrust at me. If anything I find more interesting stuff of various kinds than I can digest. But too much of a good thing is not a bad thing.
And there’s nothing particularly hysterical in Sam’s retort.
Very good piece. I just deleted a note suggesting Becca and Udith duke it out in the Flash Style Fiction Battle (because the middle schooler in me likes all this drama, but also, you know exactly which of those two would win in a battle of prose if you’ve read their work) because I’m trying to curb my more immature impulses (on this app and in life in general), but I think you’ve kept it pretty highbrow here.
The biggest problem with the “it’s a blog lol” attitude — that I’ve seen from many people on here, not just her — is it treats culture and technology as one of the same. No one thinks Substack is special because of its super advanced features. It’s special because of the precedent set by early adopters as a place to enjoy lengthy, creative, intellectually nourishing pieces, often deviating from “house styles” of legacy media, and that has remained the general expectation even despite rapid growth. And it doesn’t matter that a lot of (even popular) Substacks don’t live up to that expectation, what matters is the expectation is still there.
I think pointing to the relatively short lifespan of legacy media is an important observation. When I was young, popular consensus was that the Soviet Union had existed for a very long time and was bound to continue to do so. Only after its demise was it easy to see that it had only existed as long as a human life. Also, I agree that it's a weird flex to have a Substack and then brag about bringing a lower quality of writing to it. I don't like the idea that trying to do your best is something for the rubes.
I agree with a lot of what you say here, but I’m going to take exception to some of your examples of authors vs. the publishing industry.
From Column A, Kafka was published repeatedly in his lifetime, even winning a German literary prize at one point. It’s his novels that weren’t published, and that’s probably because he never got around to properly finishing them. Joyce’s first two books were published by “normal” (i.e. non-pornographic) presses. Poe published plenty of articles and stories in his lifetime; in fact he was one of the first American authors to make a living by writing (even if it wasn’t a great living).
From Column B (the USSR), Solzhenitsyn and Bulgakov were widely published (or performed, in the case of Bulgakov’s plays) before their works started being rejected for political reasons. Solzhenitsyn’s “Ivan Denisovich” was published by Novy Mir in 1962, and it was a huge event in the Soviet literary world. His problems came later.
My overall point? I think you are setting up a bit of a false dichotomy here, between the establishment and the outsiders. And that’s without even getting into the complicated question of writers’ personalities (e.g. did Dickinson even want to get her work into print?).
I don't know if it's almost hypocritically ironic or almost dramatically juicy for a "weird contrarian freak" like myself to comment here. But I think this is one of the best posts you've done in a while. While I have a pessimistic view of Substack's potential as you know (though I'm starting to see that I was mistaken in the short term, as more quotes from Substack are showing up in legacy media and on YouTube the way Tweets did a decade or more ago) at the end of the day I wish I was wrong about the power of massive institutions to irreparably affect a platform like Substack. And perhaps I'm too black-pilled. (Though unlike Becca I do put effort into my posts; a lot, in fact) But this Becca lady seems like the latest snob to condescend toward something that doesn't have a ton of the brand validation needed for her to like something. Which, as you pointed out, is the only real difference between legacy publishers and the smaller fish. If Becca wants, she's welcome to outsource her 4000 subscribers my way. :-)
Even so, history is a continuum and "it's not over till it's over," as they say. It's still too early to tell how Substack will coexist with the legacy media. But society today is driven by a "one-size-fits-all" perspective that, for instance, informs the discussion on long content vs. short content. (With many, like certain previous targets of your past criticism, advocating for short content) Becca's issue is with Substack which disrupts, in her view, our aether: my issue is with the aether itself; with current societal norms, many of which are rigidly affecting us through the technology we use and the quantitative way of thinking it demands of us 24/7. It's one thing for Substack to have a diverse amount of writers; or a glut, as you put it. It's another for Substack to change the one-size-fits-all character of the aether. Such a change may not be possible, at least for a corporation.
Though I'm being a literary nitpicker here, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn and Grossman did have some publishing validation in the Soviet Union: Bulgakov through his plays (especially Day of the Turbins, a popular success), Solzhenitsyn with Ivan Denisovich which Khrushchev did permit to get published; and Grossman, whose pre-Life & Fate work was published and had state validation. (though Stalingrad was "abridged") While it is true that most of their best work was in the samizdat, those moments of publishing validation are important milestones both in their careers and in the history of the Soviet Union, especially with Grossman. (Though Zamyatin, Pasternak and especially the criminally overlooked Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky can safely be added to your list) Of course your point about the limbo in which the dissident writers dwelt in is valid.
In keeping with the other authors you mentioned (particularly Joyce's pornographic "origins"), a previously unknown, early Bruno Schulz story was recently discovered. Hidden behind a pseudonym, it was published in one of the least likely places: an oil-themed magazine for professionals in the Galician petroleum industry. (Where Schulz' brother worked)
I went back and read the exchange between Dematagoda and Rothfeld…I think I mostly agree with him to the extent that they are even talking about the same thing but I have to say that her reaction, if not exactly admirable, is a pretty predictable response to some guy she’s never heard of (who happens to have a literature Ph.D, but who’s counting credentials?) showing up out of the blue and calling her a delusional tool of ‘the oligarchy.’
He also says the following: “I’m in favor of a free press and real journalists who adhere to objective journalistic standards, not propagandists in thrall to power politics simply because it might cohere with their own worldviews.” Then he completely evades the question of how, exactly, this kind of reporting can/should be done so that he can keep going on about the inherently corrupt nature of the establishment press and expressing his personal contempt for Rothfeld specifically. I don’t think this is really productive. Sure, there are major structural problems with the legacy media, and sure, it is annoying when people attached to that legacy media refuse to take those problems seriously. But if you focus on this you are avoiding what seem to me to be the harder and more important questions, like what ‘objective journalistic standards’ actually are or how they could be maintained in the highly decentralized future many people are predicting for journalism. Lastly, I want to say that the ‘I’m from Britain, so I don’t really care, but,’ stuff is extremely annoying and kind of makes me want to side with her on purely patriotic grounds.
I think you’re being generous here: the mode isn’t “i can’t even”; the mode is “because of my privileged position, why should i have to even?” Her voice, her syntax, her childish all-lowercase stylization, and of course her opinion all represent a kind of smug and entitled position of privilege that you almost have to hate her.
My own take on it is harsher than yours: the article was despicable. I see it as the futile rant of a pathetic wannabe elitist who, having served the democrat power-mongers, is now mad that the world recognizes what tools they are. Her ostensible gripe is that Bezos stepped in on the editorial opinion, as if management should be able to trump ownership in a capitalist system. And as if the syndicated "legacy" press didn't routinely take marching orders on what to say about supposed facts they're reporting. But her real grievance is that people recognize what a pos the screed she works for and are rejecting it by the thousands, and the industry by the millions.
I would much rather get my news from, and hear the opinions of, people who are independent of the people in control of legacy press. Any independence there is purely performative and always in support of some establishment master. Here you have a chance of hearing something actually valuable. It isn't always good and not always well-written, but at least it's almost always the honest opinion or effort of an individual instead of just more propaganda from the 1%.
I follow both Udith and Becca on here so have seen this debate progress from the beginning. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen the sort of mean spiritedness that I associate with Twitter make its way over to substack. I like Udith’s writing; I like Becca’s writing. I’ll continue to read both of them.
This is a question of the literate canon. The news tomorrow is a special case of every recording instrument Safe On Ships being trained on a few very well raised Eastern seaboard typewriter monkeys. Very personable , vital gorges, gore from 26 vital organs from the 26 dead greatest of all time. After which we will miss Gore's Vidal take on this. Published 4 days later. Fuck it y'all. The eagle returns to roost. We lost when we waited while the senator from KY jellied his way into Chthulu fame. For the first time in 10 years Counterpunch magazine has not made its fundraising goal. 5 employees? Delivering the exclusives of the 4 or for 5 days vetted as to verity news? Forget about Am are I cans. We were never completely practical but we liked a T rex I mean T _ Titus Andronicus, where it was given the auteur treatment. I mean verifiably on your screens that all the medieval humours will be in evidence phlegmati, hotto trot, san guine, ethereal, goblin, I D K but Paul's substack will deliver a Keats, Morris Berman will remind us to quit our jobs, queers will discover the dark side of public lovin, zsatan will panic, zero jews will die, 1000 palestinians, 43 Lebanese set up like clay pigeons, all here on Substack. How much more suffering can you stand, thou masochismoes? Well done Sam.
superb analysis. also: some of these sentences... "Rothfeld’s piece — which can be thought of as a kind of aggrieved establishmentarianism — is based in a category error, which is to confuse the formation with the vibration, or the name of the thing with what the thing is doing." and you just pulled this one together? damn.
So interesting that my first (mistaken) impression of Substack was that it was the place where cancelled journalists went. And then I discovered my favourite New Yorker writers here (like you Junot)! I was sold. Since then I have discovered lesser known - or at least unknown to me - writers like Sam and others here. And I love reading their work. I also continue to read and enjoy The New Yorker.
Emily Dickinson — unpublished [12 poems published in her lifetime, close relationship with Atlantic editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who oversaw her first posthumous publishing]
Walt Whitman — self-published [the first two, tiny runs of Leaves of Grass, which were afterwards brought out by established publishers and expanded to include new poems, nearly all of which first appeared in national magazines and newspapers]
Edgar Allan Poe —unpublished [this is the strangest one, as Poe mainly worked as a magazine editor and The Raven was a print sensation in 1845 (which Poe published several times anonymously so that he could keep selling it to other newspapers)]
Jane Austen — self-published [works published by Thomas Egerton, an established bookshop and publisher albeit with her brother assuming the costs of printing]
Ezra Pound — self-published [are you referring to Egoist Press? Pound never had the money to self-publish but was an irrepressible lover and participant in Little Magazine culture. Perhaps consider that one of his closest friends was the publisher of the still-significant New Directions press, which keeps much of his work in print today]
James Joyce — published by a pornographic press [is this your description of B. W. Huebsch, which became Viking Press? My guess is that you’re referring to Samuel Roth, who was a significant publisher of other modernists, but more to the point, his Ulysses was a pirated third edition that had no participation from Joyce]
Virginia Woolf — self-published [first novel published with Duckworth under the aegis of Jonathan Cape, her reputation was established by her frequent contributions to the Times Literary Supplement]
Franz Kafka — unpublished [published two collections of his shortstories with Kurt Wolff, who would eventually establish Pantheon Books in New York after fleeing the Holocaust]
Marcel Proust — self-published [Proust covered costs but Du côté was published by Grasset and all subsequent volumes with Gallimard, France’s largest and most respected publisher at the time]
possible, altho Lolita’s a hair too late for his period — I would’ve likely pointed out that VN’s four previous English-first novels were all widely reviewed, with Pnin getting excerpted in the New Yorker and selling much better than Lolita until the Kubrick film was announced
Alright, alright! Well, my larger point is that Substack is the shit and this only goes to prove it. I could have gotten away with this kind of playing-fast-and-loose-with-literary-facts on Threads or Twitter, but I can't get that past you or Scott Spires on this platform. I was Wikipediaing a few of these and taking some shortcuts, but here's what I had in mind:
Emily Dickinson - largely unpublished during her lifetime (only 10 of 1800 poems published)
Walt Whitman - self-published 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass
Edgar Allan Poe - you're right, I have to retract this one. What I had in mind was Poe's poverty, and the mess of publishing at this time.
Jane Austen - having to pay costs for Sense and Sensibility, which I would consider to be self-publishing
Ezra Pound - self-published A Lume Spento
James Joyce - yes, I meant the Samuel Roth edition. My defense here is that the pirated edition seems to be how the novel first received any kind of widespread distribution
Virginia Woolf - self-published major works through Hogarth Press
Franz Kafka - major novels unpublished during his lifetime
Marcel Proust - covering costs for publication of Swann's Way, which, as with Sense and Sensibility, would by our contemporary standards be considered self-publishing
I'm impressed by your literary knowledge. As I think you realize, I wanted to make a larger point. We have a tendency at our moment to imagine a very well-oiled publishing industry. We have a lot of trust in the opinions of editors and agents and the process - and 'self-publishing' has a real stigma attached to it. But if we look at 'classic literature,' we find a very messy state of affairs where many great writers got no traction at all and those that did had to really hustle. (It was a surprise for me to realize that Proust had to pay the publishing costs for Swann's Way and that at one point Pound was selling A Lume Spento on the street.)
hi Sam, I agree with you about messiness, but I think we take different things from these examples. To my mind, what distinguishes covering the material costs of publication (which still happen today, even with some mid-major publishers, who often use the term ‘subvention’ to refer to the author’s share of production costs) and self-publishing is the presence of editorial support and the use of the publisher’s reputation to attract attention. In the case of an author like Proust, who was wealthy enough to not need to work but wasn’t quite native to the aristocratic salons that shaped Parisian taste, that reputation and reach helped him to secure the Prix Goncourt (after which, curiously, he sought a larger publisher rather than leaving that system). We can acknowledge that these distinguished interventions also often lead us away from the author’s intent — much of the post-Higginson editing of Dickinson has restored elements that he ‘corrected’ — but it’s hard to imagine that there would have been that scholarly interest had Higginson not used his significant influence to compel Roberts Brothers to publish that posthumous 1890 edition. The ‘A Lume Spento’ story is fun, but that’s hardly the collection that attracted attention to Pound — it’s usually referred to as ‘Pre-Imagist,’ denoting the sensation around the spare, brisk, placid poetry that he, H.D. and a handful of others began publishing in Poetry & Glebe magazines and then in the Des Imagistes anthology, which Pound edited but which was published by Charles & Albert Boni, who would merge with Liveright a few years later.
Ironically, the situation that we’ve collaboratively sketched would suggest that Substack is much better suited to support and spread writing by Becca Rothfeld — someone who has a post at a renowned periodical and an established reputation of her own, but who, like Woolf, may also want to write things that don’t quite belong in those venues — than it is ‘breaking’ an unknown
Isn’t this a case for why we need good editors and the sort of editorial fact-checking apparatus that a larger institution can provide? Not sure someone fact-checking you in the comments section is a case for the superiority of Substack.
Legacy media would also correct the errors and make a note that an earlier draft contained misinformation. I'd be so embarrassed not to have done that!
"if we look at 'classic literature,' we find a very messy state of affairs where many great writers got no traction at all and those that did had to really hustle"
Yes, I totally agree about that! The thing is, the messiness of publishing is more about the traditional publishing process itself than being closed out of it, to the point you have to self-publish or not publish at all. You mentioned Joyce; if you're feeling masochistic, read about the aggravation, the soul-killing twists and turns, that he had to go through to get "Dubliners" published by a "real" press:
Rather a straw opponent (a very annoying piece, I agree), but the issue I've raised elsewhere, which remains one of the salient points in educating young people about information literacy, is that a profit motive degrades reliability. In that regard, there is no comparing a journalist on Substack with a journalist who builds a reputation independently of their publisher's revenue stream. Legacy media is broken, sure. But the journalist as solopreneur is not a blueprint for reliability. It fragments the attention economy that has destroyed the credibility of legacy media into a thousand similar pieces.
Do you take Seymour Hersh on Substack as seriously as you once took him in the New Yorker? I don't. That's a serious problem.
Nicely done, Sam, but perhaps a bit too linear, and a bit too individualistic? I like what you say about writing, and obviously, I put a lot of effort into Substack (and reading yours), and I do think it's kind of the only avenue I see in light of what's happening to publishing. But I also really worry about the loss of legacy media, some agreement on the facts, yes, some degree of homogeneity. Agreement, consensus, matter for politics, especially democratic politics. Saying the Hearst empire put thumbs on the scale for the Spanish American war may be true, and we could talk about degrees of influence, etc., but it's a straw robber baron argument: of course national politics wasn't perfect in this or that media environment, what would that even mean? Civilization is inherently discontent. I don't think Substack needs to answer this, and while I like/read the Free Press I don't think they can escape the centrifugal forces of internet platforms. All of which is to say there's a real problem here that I think you elide. Anyway, keep up the good work!
I sense there's envy masquerading as literary snobbism from Becca. So strange that she wrote on her Substack that she saves her best writing for elsewhere.
Right??! I thought that as well.
Hilarious. My experience of substack, which I went to explicitly to find some literary community, is that it is just like any other social media except that the long post is expected rather than exception. The owners and therefore the algorithm VERY BADLY want me to run into right wing and “contrarian” (right-wing, but confrontational on almost all cases) content because despite what I look at and read, I get almost nothing but.
So I laugh at everyone on here talking about how Substack is anything new, exciting, different, unique. It’s a blog platform. And I miss blogs, so I want to like it. But it has deliberately sought to raise the voices I like least.
The literary folk are mostly mad about “politics” getting in the way of their pure art which is about “truth” and I just can’t stop laughing at the naïveté and silliness, not to mention the high school vibe of being the first person to discover Charles Bukowski (here it’s Arx-Han or the like) and think that it’s totally unprecedented in literary history. There are very few people who are well-read and actually producing anything thoughtful or nuanced. It’s mostly - like all social media- a place to try to score prestige points, and the Very Online are here with poorly developed generic conspiracies about censorship and societal structures that control us and all sound like they read a Chomsky book one time and followed that with some Rogan-level podcasting on the subject and then went back to checking their likes.
Your content is broadly speaking higher quality than that but still the hysteria you show in this response that your precious special will be disrupted by someone else on the precious special not loving it as much as you do is just over the top. Maybe take a break from being online for a few days and come back with the perspective being in the sunshine and breeze under changing and falling leaves can bring. My god, Substack is unlike every other social media platform for the self-seriousness of its population.
Needlessly snarky and quite unlike my experience of the platform. I don’t find a lot of unwanted and self-serious content thrust at me. If anything I find more interesting stuff of various kinds than I can digest. But too much of a good thing is not a bad thing.
And there’s nothing particularly hysterical in Sam’s retort.
Well if it’s quite unlike your experience I’m sure mine is wrong. I must be imagining it all. That’s got to be it
Very good piece. I just deleted a note suggesting Becca and Udith duke it out in the Flash Style Fiction Battle (because the middle schooler in me likes all this drama, but also, you know exactly which of those two would win in a battle of prose if you’ve read their work) because I’m trying to curb my more immature impulses (on this app and in life in general), but I think you’ve kept it pretty highbrow here.
The biggest problem with the “it’s a blog lol” attitude — that I’ve seen from many people on here, not just her — is it treats culture and technology as one of the same. No one thinks Substack is special because of its super advanced features. It’s special because of the precedent set by early adopters as a place to enjoy lengthy, creative, intellectually nourishing pieces, often deviating from “house styles” of legacy media, and that has remained the general expectation even despite rapid growth. And it doesn’t matter that a lot of (even popular) Substacks don’t live up to that expectation, what matters is the expectation is still there.
I think pointing to the relatively short lifespan of legacy media is an important observation. When I was young, popular consensus was that the Soviet Union had existed for a very long time and was bound to continue to do so. Only after its demise was it easy to see that it had only existed as long as a human life. Also, I agree that it's a weird flex to have a Substack and then brag about bringing a lower quality of writing to it. I don't like the idea that trying to do your best is something for the rubes.
I agree with a lot of what you say here, but I’m going to take exception to some of your examples of authors vs. the publishing industry.
From Column A, Kafka was published repeatedly in his lifetime, even winning a German literary prize at one point. It’s his novels that weren’t published, and that’s probably because he never got around to properly finishing them. Joyce’s first two books were published by “normal” (i.e. non-pornographic) presses. Poe published plenty of articles and stories in his lifetime; in fact he was one of the first American authors to make a living by writing (even if it wasn’t a great living).
From Column B (the USSR), Solzhenitsyn and Bulgakov were widely published (or performed, in the case of Bulgakov’s plays) before their works started being rejected for political reasons. Solzhenitsyn’s “Ivan Denisovich” was published by Novy Mir in 1962, and it was a huge event in the Soviet literary world. His problems came later.
My overall point? I think you are setting up a bit of a false dichotomy here, between the establishment and the outsiders. And that’s without even getting into the complicated question of writers’ personalities (e.g. did Dickinson even want to get her work into print?).
I don't know if it's almost hypocritically ironic or almost dramatically juicy for a "weird contrarian freak" like myself to comment here. But I think this is one of the best posts you've done in a while. While I have a pessimistic view of Substack's potential as you know (though I'm starting to see that I was mistaken in the short term, as more quotes from Substack are showing up in legacy media and on YouTube the way Tweets did a decade or more ago) at the end of the day I wish I was wrong about the power of massive institutions to irreparably affect a platform like Substack. And perhaps I'm too black-pilled. (Though unlike Becca I do put effort into my posts; a lot, in fact) But this Becca lady seems like the latest snob to condescend toward something that doesn't have a ton of the brand validation needed for her to like something. Which, as you pointed out, is the only real difference between legacy publishers and the smaller fish. If Becca wants, she's welcome to outsource her 4000 subscribers my way. :-)
Even so, history is a continuum and "it's not over till it's over," as they say. It's still too early to tell how Substack will coexist with the legacy media. But society today is driven by a "one-size-fits-all" perspective that, for instance, informs the discussion on long content vs. short content. (With many, like certain previous targets of your past criticism, advocating for short content) Becca's issue is with Substack which disrupts, in her view, our aether: my issue is with the aether itself; with current societal norms, many of which are rigidly affecting us through the technology we use and the quantitative way of thinking it demands of us 24/7. It's one thing for Substack to have a diverse amount of writers; or a glut, as you put it. It's another for Substack to change the one-size-fits-all character of the aether. Such a change may not be possible, at least for a corporation.
Though I'm being a literary nitpicker here, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn and Grossman did have some publishing validation in the Soviet Union: Bulgakov through his plays (especially Day of the Turbins, a popular success), Solzhenitsyn with Ivan Denisovich which Khrushchev did permit to get published; and Grossman, whose pre-Life & Fate work was published and had state validation. (though Stalingrad was "abridged") While it is true that most of their best work was in the samizdat, those moments of publishing validation are important milestones both in their careers and in the history of the Soviet Union, especially with Grossman. (Though Zamyatin, Pasternak and especially the criminally overlooked Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky can safely be added to your list) Of course your point about the limbo in which the dissident writers dwelt in is valid.
In keeping with the other authors you mentioned (particularly Joyce's pornographic "origins"), a previously unknown, early Bruno Schulz story was recently discovered. Hidden behind a pseudonym, it was published in one of the least likely places: an oil-themed magazine for professionals in the Galician petroleum industry. (Where Schulz' brother worked)
I went back and read the exchange between Dematagoda and Rothfeld…I think I mostly agree with him to the extent that they are even talking about the same thing but I have to say that her reaction, if not exactly admirable, is a pretty predictable response to some guy she’s never heard of (who happens to have a literature Ph.D, but who’s counting credentials?) showing up out of the blue and calling her a delusional tool of ‘the oligarchy.’
He also says the following: “I’m in favor of a free press and real journalists who adhere to objective journalistic standards, not propagandists in thrall to power politics simply because it might cohere with their own worldviews.” Then he completely evades the question of how, exactly, this kind of reporting can/should be done so that he can keep going on about the inherently corrupt nature of the establishment press and expressing his personal contempt for Rothfeld specifically. I don’t think this is really productive. Sure, there are major structural problems with the legacy media, and sure, it is annoying when people attached to that legacy media refuse to take those problems seriously. But if you focus on this you are avoiding what seem to me to be the harder and more important questions, like what ‘objective journalistic standards’ actually are or how they could be maintained in the highly decentralized future many people are predicting for journalism. Lastly, I want to say that the ‘I’m from Britain, so I don’t really care, but,’ stuff is extremely annoying and kind of makes me want to side with her on purely patriotic grounds.
I think you’re being generous here: the mode isn’t “i can’t even”; the mode is “because of my privileged position, why should i have to even?” Her voice, her syntax, her childish all-lowercase stylization, and of course her opinion all represent a kind of smug and entitled position of privilege that you almost have to hate her.
I'm not sure it's perfectly clear in your article what post started all this, but here's the link: https://afeteworsethandeath.substack.com/p/why-i-am-skeptical-that-substack
My own take on it is harsher than yours: the article was despicable. I see it as the futile rant of a pathetic wannabe elitist who, having served the democrat power-mongers, is now mad that the world recognizes what tools they are. Her ostensible gripe is that Bezos stepped in on the editorial opinion, as if management should be able to trump ownership in a capitalist system. And as if the syndicated "legacy" press didn't routinely take marching orders on what to say about supposed facts they're reporting. But her real grievance is that people recognize what a pos the screed she works for and are rejecting it by the thousands, and the industry by the millions.
I would much rather get my news from, and hear the opinions of, people who are independent of the people in control of legacy press. Any independence there is purely performative and always in support of some establishment master. Here you have a chance of hearing something actually valuable. It isn't always good and not always well-written, but at least it's almost always the honest opinion or effort of an individual instead of just more propaganda from the 1%.
I follow both Udith and Becca on here so have seen this debate progress from the beginning. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen the sort of mean spiritedness that I associate with Twitter make its way over to substack. I like Udith’s writing; I like Becca’s writing. I’ll continue to read both of them.
This is a question of the literate canon. The news tomorrow is a special case of every recording instrument Safe On Ships being trained on a few very well raised Eastern seaboard typewriter monkeys. Very personable , vital gorges, gore from 26 vital organs from the 26 dead greatest of all time. After which we will miss Gore's Vidal take on this. Published 4 days later. Fuck it y'all. The eagle returns to roost. We lost when we waited while the senator from KY jellied his way into Chthulu fame. For the first time in 10 years Counterpunch magazine has not made its fundraising goal. 5 employees? Delivering the exclusives of the 4 or for 5 days vetted as to verity news? Forget about Am are I cans. We were never completely practical but we liked a T rex I mean T _ Titus Andronicus, where it was given the auteur treatment. I mean verifiably on your screens that all the medieval humours will be in evidence phlegmati, hotto trot, san guine, ethereal, goblin, I D K but Paul's substack will deliver a Keats, Morris Berman will remind us to quit our jobs, queers will discover the dark side of public lovin, zsatan will panic, zero jews will die, 1000 palestinians, 43 Lebanese set up like clay pigeons, all here on Substack. How much more suffering can you stand, thou masochismoes? Well done Sam.
superb analysis. also: some of these sentences... "Rothfeld’s piece — which can be thought of as a kind of aggrieved establishmentarianism — is based in a category error, which is to confuse the formation with the vibration, or the name of the thing with what the thing is doing." and you just pulled this one together? damn.
So interesting that my first (mistaken) impression of Substack was that it was the place where cancelled journalists went. And then I discovered my favourite New Yorker writers here (like you Junot)! I was sold. Since then I have discovered lesser known - or at least unknown to me - writers like Sam and others here. And I love reading their work. I also continue to read and enjoy The New Yorker.
Check my stuff out 😎
What a lot of name calling and tone policing. I hoped for better from this rebuttal, instead you proved her point.
Emily Dickinson — unpublished [12 poems published in her lifetime, close relationship with Atlantic editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who oversaw her first posthumous publishing]
Walt Whitman — self-published [the first two, tiny runs of Leaves of Grass, which were afterwards brought out by established publishers and expanded to include new poems, nearly all of which first appeared in national magazines and newspapers]
Edgar Allan Poe —unpublished [this is the strangest one, as Poe mainly worked as a magazine editor and The Raven was a print sensation in 1845 (which Poe published several times anonymously so that he could keep selling it to other newspapers)]
Jane Austen — self-published [works published by Thomas Egerton, an established bookshop and publisher albeit with her brother assuming the costs of printing]
Ezra Pound — self-published [are you referring to Egoist Press? Pound never had the money to self-publish but was an irrepressible lover and participant in Little Magazine culture. Perhaps consider that one of his closest friends was the publisher of the still-significant New Directions press, which keeps much of his work in print today]
James Joyce — published by a pornographic press [is this your description of B. W. Huebsch, which became Viking Press? My guess is that you’re referring to Samuel Roth, who was a significant publisher of other modernists, but more to the point, his Ulysses was a pirated third edition that had no participation from Joyce]
Virginia Woolf — self-published [first novel published with Duckworth under the aegis of Jonathan Cape, her reputation was established by her frequent contributions to the Times Literary Supplement]
Franz Kafka — unpublished [published two collections of his shortstories with Kurt Wolff, who would eventually establish Pantheon Books in New York after fleeing the Holocaust]
Marcel Proust — self-published [Proust covered costs but Du côté was published by Grasset and all subsequent volumes with Gallimard, France’s largest and most respected publisher at the time]
Re "pornographic press": I suspect Sam might have gotten Joyce confused with Nabokov. "Lolita" was indeed first published by a pornographic press.
possible, altho Lolita’s a hair too late for his period — I would’ve likely pointed out that VN’s four previous English-first novels were all widely reviewed, with Pnin getting excerpted in the New Yorker and selling much better than Lolita until the Kubrick film was announced
Alright, alright! Well, my larger point is that Substack is the shit and this only goes to prove it. I could have gotten away with this kind of playing-fast-and-loose-with-literary-facts on Threads or Twitter, but I can't get that past you or Scott Spires on this platform. I was Wikipediaing a few of these and taking some shortcuts, but here's what I had in mind:
Emily Dickinson - largely unpublished during her lifetime (only 10 of 1800 poems published)
Walt Whitman - self-published 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass
Edgar Allan Poe - you're right, I have to retract this one. What I had in mind was Poe's poverty, and the mess of publishing at this time.
Jane Austen - having to pay costs for Sense and Sensibility, which I would consider to be self-publishing
Ezra Pound - self-published A Lume Spento
James Joyce - yes, I meant the Samuel Roth edition. My defense here is that the pirated edition seems to be how the novel first received any kind of widespread distribution
Virginia Woolf - self-published major works through Hogarth Press
Franz Kafka - major novels unpublished during his lifetime
Marcel Proust - covering costs for publication of Swann's Way, which, as with Sense and Sensibility, would by our contemporary standards be considered self-publishing
I'm impressed by your literary knowledge. As I think you realize, I wanted to make a larger point. We have a tendency at our moment to imagine a very well-oiled publishing industry. We have a lot of trust in the opinions of editors and agents and the process - and 'self-publishing' has a real stigma attached to it. But if we look at 'classic literature,' we find a very messy state of affairs where many great writers got no traction at all and those that did had to really hustle. (It was a surprise for me to realize that Proust had to pay the publishing costs for Swann's Way and that at one point Pound was selling A Lume Spento on the street.)
- Sam
hi Sam, I agree with you about messiness, but I think we take different things from these examples. To my mind, what distinguishes covering the material costs of publication (which still happen today, even with some mid-major publishers, who often use the term ‘subvention’ to refer to the author’s share of production costs) and self-publishing is the presence of editorial support and the use of the publisher’s reputation to attract attention. In the case of an author like Proust, who was wealthy enough to not need to work but wasn’t quite native to the aristocratic salons that shaped Parisian taste, that reputation and reach helped him to secure the Prix Goncourt (after which, curiously, he sought a larger publisher rather than leaving that system). We can acknowledge that these distinguished interventions also often lead us away from the author’s intent — much of the post-Higginson editing of Dickinson has restored elements that he ‘corrected’ — but it’s hard to imagine that there would have been that scholarly interest had Higginson not used his significant influence to compel Roberts Brothers to publish that posthumous 1890 edition. The ‘A Lume Spento’ story is fun, but that’s hardly the collection that attracted attention to Pound — it’s usually referred to as ‘Pre-Imagist,’ denoting the sensation around the spare, brisk, placid poetry that he, H.D. and a handful of others began publishing in Poetry & Glebe magazines and then in the Des Imagistes anthology, which Pound edited but which was published by Charles & Albert Boni, who would merge with Liveright a few years later.
Ironically, the situation that we’ve collaboratively sketched would suggest that Substack is much better suited to support and spread writing by Becca Rothfeld — someone who has a post at a renowned periodical and an established reputation of her own, but who, like Woolf, may also want to write things that don’t quite belong in those venues — than it is ‘breaking’ an unknown
Isn’t this a case for why we need good editors and the sort of editorial fact-checking apparatus that a larger institution can provide? Not sure someone fact-checking you in the comments section is a case for the superiority of Substack.
Alright alright. Touché!
Sorry, not trying to join a dogpile! There's a valuable point I see you're trying to make in there.
Legacy media would also correct the errors and make a note that an earlier draft contained misinformation. I'd be so embarrassed not to have done that!
"if we look at 'classic literature,' we find a very messy state of affairs where many great writers got no traction at all and those that did had to really hustle"
Yes, I totally agree about that! The thing is, the messiness of publishing is more about the traditional publishing process itself than being closed out of it, to the point you have to self-publish or not publish at all. You mentioned Joyce; if you're feeling masochistic, read about the aggravation, the soul-killing twists and turns, that he had to go through to get "Dubliners" published by a "real" press:
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/james-joyce-down-and-out-in-dublin-1.1820565
It takes amazing grit and determination to get through something like that!
Rather a straw opponent (a very annoying piece, I agree), but the issue I've raised elsewhere, which remains one of the salient points in educating young people about information literacy, is that a profit motive degrades reliability. In that regard, there is no comparing a journalist on Substack with a journalist who builds a reputation independently of their publisher's revenue stream. Legacy media is broken, sure. But the journalist as solopreneur is not a blueprint for reliability. It fragments the attention economy that has destroyed the credibility of legacy media into a thousand similar pieces.
Do you take Seymour Hersh on Substack as seriously as you once took him in the New Yorker? I don't. That's a serious problem.