Dear Friends,
I do like to roam around the forest looking for fights, and it’s been a little while since I’ve had the opportunity for one of these little intramural Substack dust-ups. At
, we’re wrapping up a rousing discussion of Theory — i.e. whether a bit of Hegel can in fact make your art better or if you’re better served just trying to change speeds and throw strikes.Best,
Sam
AGAINST FREDDIE DEBOER
Freddie deBoer, the prolific and estimable writer, has a second life as a Substack troll, and on my piece “Are Books Finished?” wrote:
More people are reading more books than have ever been published, printed, sold, or read in the history of the written word. These endless essays that are fundamentally just the rage of the creative underclass just don't contribute to anyone's understanding of anything.
I tried to argue back with Freddie, but since he didn’t reply I figured I’d move it up the thread to here. Now, I like Freddie. His tag line “cool but rude” is a nice description of his style. I find his politics to be incomprehensible and self-serving, but he’s a smart and funny writer — the kind of adaptable writer whom I would happily read on alternate side parking. When I first joined Substack, and was very worried that this place was another Medium, Freddie was one of the people who really validated it for me.
I find Freddie’s position to be baffling but indicative of a stance that I come across all the time. Let’s call it reflexive institutionalism. I think I first became aware of it when I would Airbnb out my apartment in New York City and a certain type — Old Lefty, the kind of person who at one time in their life might have picketed Barnes & Noble and might even claim to have once been a Freedom Rider, or at least to have known somebody who was one — would accuse me of undermining hotel workers. Never mind that it was my own apartment, or that the hotel industry in New York is a giant monolith that takes advantage of the deficit of available rooms to offer price-gouging rates (Trump, for instance, is a New York hotelier par excellence), or that the left is supposed to be on the side of the people as opposed to the corporations, the left just liked the idea of a hotel with a union and anybody else who was making money in short-term rentals in New York coded as scab. That dynamic seems to play out across all of our culture wars, with an Old Left (no matter that the ground they were standing on has completely disappeared from under them) sticking to what they know, which is to look for the organization wherever they can find it and to try to make the organization set the rules. That’s the dynamic I encountered in all the Uber conversations, with the Old Left these sudden vociferous defenders of medallion cabs even though ride apps had obviously upended all of transportation (while creating a vast amount of new income for workers). That’s how I interpreted Jonathan M. Katz’s approach to Substack — that he was, as Matt Taibbi argued, “embittered-conventional” — and that’s the best fit I have for where Freddie is headed with this, that he likes the book industry the way it is (presumably because people do get paid there) and interprets any challenge to it as the tech overlords combining with gullible scabs — i.e. “the creative underclass” — to undermine labor.
I might be misreading Freddie here — certainly, I’d be curious to hear him argue back — but a defense of labor against some ‘disruptive’ new field is the only way, really, that I can make sense of his position. Never mind that Freddie has taken to the disruptive new field, and, I imagine, makes a decent chunk of his living here. For him — and he’s certainly not the only one — there’s something vaguely disreputable about Substack. It’s ok so long as it remains a sideshow to the main action.
What this misses is the extent to which the entire medium of communication is overhauling itself. Books dominated textual communication for a long time because books (together with daily newspapers) were the fastest, most efficient way to transmit information, sort of as the horse was once the fastest means of transport. That would seem not to hold so well now that paper, and binding, is rapidly moving out of the center of people’s lives, and it’s possible to communicate with one another by pressing a button that sends a signal to a satellite which is then transmitted simultaneously to the phones of other people, as opposed to trying to communicate with one another by cold e-mailing a publishing company, or trying to waylay an agent at a cocktail party, and then waiting like three years if you’re lucky for your printed manuscript to come out and get favorable publicity from Publishers Weekly. This is a real change that’s happening, and it’s seismic, and I’d submit that the smart thing to do here is to try to figure out what that means. The analogy would be, if we were say in 1900, to understand how cars are going are affect our lives as opposed to talking about the beauty of the horse — or imagining that the new interest in cars is just another griping of the equine underclass.
When I talk about books “dying” I’m not arguing for that, or fearing it, I’m just talking like a good leftist might (!), saying that the structural conditions of society and of communication have changed and that therefore we need to study the fresh position that’s on the board in front of us. And, in the way of these things, there are reasons to be excited about some of what’s opening up before us — above all, that the internet creates possibilities for new forms of short-term writing.
I was thinking about all this as I was reading
’s “think piece.” Clancy mostly writes fiction on Substack, but he took a break to thoroughly mock the kind of polemical essay that is, for instance, my bread and butter on the platform. Here is a link to the essay. And here is a taste:If I don’t think about something that happens, did it even happen? If I fail to write about it, have I even achieved comprehension? If you don’t read this, how will you ever understand anything in the same way I do?
It may seem like I am asking a lot of questions, but questions are the essence of thinking, and answers are the essence of essays.
No thought goes in vain. By entering these characters into this word processor, I connect with you, you connect with me, and together we are in conversation in the public space, cave people leaving drawings on cave walls for the next cave people to marvel at as they go on by.
To ask another question: What am I talking about?
Answer: Discourse.
In short, it’s brilliant, one of the very best things I’ve read in some time. And as I was reading it, I found myself thinking that there is nowhere in mainstream media where it would be published. The New York Times doesn’t have a parody section. Every major magazine — The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New Republic, etc — writes exclusively in exactly the sort of polemical style that Steadwell is mocking. Only The New Yorker, with its Shouts & Murmurs, has a section that allows for this kind of off-genre stylistic creativity, but Shouts & Murmurs has for some time been the exclusive domain of upper class twits discussing how little they’ve achieved in their lives. And to get back to the original bone of contention with Freddie, there’s no book (the supposed imprimatur of quality) that would print a piece like Clancy’s, because books aren’t comprised of short parodic vignettes and the kinds of literary magazines that feature short stories and serve as the staging ground for books have long ago fallen into abeyance.
Clancy would, I suppose, be considered ‘creative underclass.’ For one thing, Clancy Steadwell isn’t even his real name. I have no idea what that is, although I assume ‘Clancy’ to be a pet of his and ‘Steadwell’ a street he lived on once. Clancy doesn’t have the credentials of the creative upper class, which at this point are — I don’t even know what — he hasn’t had a book on the (highly fictitious) New York Times Best Seller list, he hasn’t had some sort of “Critic’s Pick” badge with Dwight Garner certifying his existence. But so what? What Clancy is doing is excellent. What the creative upper class is doing tends to be derivative schlock peer-promoted by the friendly courtiers of the blurbers, the reviewers, the managers, and publicists — all of whom are dedicated to proving that whatever looks like a book, smells like a book, quacks like a book, must be a book.
What goes astonishingly unnoticed in these creative debates — and throughout people’s entire careers — is that the writing style in a blog, a Substack, in new media, is both loose and form-fitting. Good or bad, it is the person’s expression. What appears in The New York Times, however prestigious it may be, seen by however many people, is a corset — it is a prescribed house style that makes everybody sound like everybody else. And as often as not, it is somebody else — the publications have rewrite men, who may well surgically alter the pieces to fit the publication, and the name on the byline really doesn’t mean much at all. Real writers, who often spend decades developing their voice, are supposed to care about this sort of thing — but it’s amazing how casual readers basically don’t think about it at all.
The point is that what’s happening in writing right now is to be found in pieces like Clancy Steadwell’s — many of them on this platform, some in blogs and publications dispersed around the web. The publishing industry may belatedly pick it up, but, already, the energy is gone from there, and it lives on like some sort of tourist trap — the Hard Rock Cafe of creativity. People like Freddie — who by the way is someone with real creative energy — should know better. ‘Creative underclass’ is a silly schematic and dismissal. What matters is who’s doing the work. The job of the culture, and the critic, is to adapt to that.
Sam -- thanks for your kind words. It's so funny because I had Freddie so EXACTLY in mind when I wrote 'think piece'.
I think types like him and, let's say, the "creative upperclass" would do well to take notice of what's going on with writing on this platform, particularly with fiction. Cultural history has shown us that the best, most creative and transformative works come from the margins, which often is inhabited by us lower classers. We're early adopters.
As a card-carrying member of the creative under class, I highly endorse this post.