I’m trying to be more explicit about what I’m hoping to achieve with ‘Castalia,’ so here are the major ideas (the underlying beliefs).
Writing is thought. As far back as I’ve been dealing with writing - and loving writing - I’ve struggled with editing. Fundamentally, I can’t do it; don’t get what it’s really meant to accomplish. For a long time I assumed that that was my immaturity. “All writing is rewriting,” I was solemnly informed, “everybody needs an editor,” and sooner or later I figured I would grow up and discover the acquired pleasures of editing. But, instead, the opposite happened. I began to feel that there were two very different ways of writing; and both had their right to exist. One was writing as a craft - in that case, what you were concerned about was creating some sort of object that a reader could make use of (a newspaper article being a prime example) and which would then be of maximum convenience to the reader and for which, yes, editing and polishing would almost always be useful, in the way that, say, a very well-made wicker chair tends to pass through many hands before it finally reaches its happy owner. And then there was writing that was basically just thought, conversation, expression. This form of writing was both less and narcissistic. Less narcissistic in that it was more casual, didn’t aspire so much to creating some fetishized cult object, treated writing pretty much as an extension of speaking as opposed to some other ‘transcendent’ discipline. More narcissistic in that it was worried less about optimization for the reader, demanded more that the reader come into the writer’s space and inner world; roughly, it was the difference between inviting somebody into your home, expecting them, if they accepted, to behave themselves, indulge your quirks, etc, and being a guest in someone else’s home. I don’t think one style of writing - craft or conversation - is intrinsically better than the other, but, for me, I happen to be drawn to conversation. I’ve always liked the Beat precept of ‘first thought best thought’ and I’ve always been a bit mystified about what people think they’re doing as they work on successive drafts of a piece - presumably they expressed themselves to their fullest in the first draft; do they really think they will express themselves more fully in a draft a few days later? (In practice, what tends to happen is that they sand off the rough edges; second-guess themselves.) More interesting, in my experience, is just to follow the contours of a person’s thought at a given moment in time; to make use of writing as a medium conducive to clear, coherent thought in ways that spoken speech is not but no more expecting people to craft or clean up their thoughts than we would, at the end of a conversation, ask all the speakers to edit together what they just said.
A person is multi-dimensional. The energy of the web right now is all going into personal ‘brands.’ The notion is that a person is their own truest product - and that the arc of their lives can be followed more or less the way you would track a stock. The person supplies a key service - their ‘brand’ - and then it’s possible for others to monitor their success via their ‘likes,’ ‘follows,’ ‘SRO,’ etc, or, maybe most succinctly of all, via their ‘verification status.’ This idea was expressed brutally by Mark Zuckerberg, who said in 2010, “You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly….Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” That’s become sort of the life force of the Web 2.0 - a social credit system, interweaving the internet and the real world - and it’s reflexively carried forward by, for instance, Substack, which pragmatically advises writers to find their ‘niche’ and ‘brand.’ I really chafe against this whole idea. I remember when I was starting to write in my early 20s - really struggling with it but had a few phrases that settled themselves into my mind like mantras. One was “writing is different from everything else.” What I meant by that - as I realized over time - was that writing wasn’t pinned to the actual, everyday person. The aperture was open much wider, the moral gravity was very different - it was possible for a person in their writing to inhabit completely personae that had nothing to do with how that person came across in the ‘real world.’ This was most directly realized in the creation of fictional characters but was true to, really, any form of writing - the thrill of it, at the deepest level, was that you weren’t stuck with yourself. In this Substack, I’ve been intentionally a little muddy. Everything I write about is something that I like and find interesting - but I’d be hard-pressed to say exactly what the ‘niche’ is. What I’m able to write about is to some extent constrained - by my personality, by my experience of the world - but I would feel that I had betrayed something important if the writing here settled itself into a very narrow, strict ‘brand.’
The legacy media is dead (even if no one realizes it). We’re in a very odd, transitional phase in the history of communications. The publishing industry and institutional journalism have lost the foundations of their power - exclusive access to the means of production (i.e. printing presses and distribution networks). Anybody can post written material online - and the material can, in theory, be accessed in the same way that we access ‘published’ material. However, the ‘dead hand’ of the legacy media is not so easily beaten. The industry has access to certain modes of distribution - shiny websites, pre-existing subscriber bases, etc - but, most importantly, the industry lays claim to ‘authority.’ If something has been vetted by newspaper editors or publishing houses, the public tends to have a touching, somewhat superstitious reverence for it - and never mind that the content can be as biased or shoddy, in myriad ways, as anything found on the open web. In the book of books, The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri describes our current state of affairs:
We are caught between an old world which is decreasingly able to sustain us intellectually and spiritually, maybe even materially, and a new world, which is not yet born. Each side in the struggle has a standard-bearer: authority for the old industrial scheme that has dominated globally for a century and a half, the public for the uncertain dispensation striving to become manifest. The conflict is so asymmetrical that it seems impossible for the two sides to actually engage but they do engage and the battlefield is everywhere. Given the character of the forces of change we may be stuck for decades in this ungainly posture. You who are young today may not live to see its resolution.
My own perspective is - the hell with the legacy media. It simply has not rewarded the trust the public has placed in it. The failure of legacy journalism to comprehend the turbulent changes of the past half-decade has been a real object lesson for me - a demonstration of the many ways in which ‘authoritative’ journalism is interested in maintaining a perception of stability as opposed to asking hard, open-ended questions about what is really going on in the world. And, on the more artistic side of things, book publishing is proving itself to be just not very good at its job, endlessly promoting a handful of ‘stars,’ systematically excluding and underpaying everybody else, and drifting in really absurd aesthetic directions particularly in its attempts to keep pace with the woke revolution. As Gurri points out, I don’t think I’m likely to see the new ‘dispensation’ fully take root over the course of my lifetime - but I would like to be part of it whatever it is. To some extent, the energy of something like Substack - which really is, together with the blogosphere, the first concerted challenge to the publishing industry since the rise of the alt weeklies in the ’60s - picks up on what writers have been griping about for the entirety of the industrial era, the overly vertical structure of the dissemination of printed material. But it’s not as if the gradual demise of publishing in its current form means some sort of pure anarchy. The vertical structure of publishing is itself a bit of an historical aberration - a subset of what Gurri calls ‘the fourth wave,’ the ‘I-talk-you-listen’ mode of communication in which the owners of some very powerful industrial instrument (the printing press, the radio station, the television station, etc) address an inert public. Before that, before the rise of syndication, there were the small presses, the feuilletons, the folios, which expected to have a limited run - reach only a certain number of people, never ‘saturate’ let alone monopolize the market - and tended to be conducive to the idiosyncratic sensibilities of individual writers. To me, that’s a richer, freer mode of transmission than the megalomaniac, monopolistic “all the news that’s fit to print” premise of the industrial era. Time to orient ourselves towards a different model.
Writing should be ethical. Much confusion is generated by the peculiar ‘moral gravity’ of writing. The general understanding of fictional writing (and of art in general) is that functions very much as a societal subconscious. We carefully create a ritualistic zone (this is the meaning of the lights dimming in a theater, of the opening heraldry of a movie, of the cover of a book) in which the normal ethical rules do not apply, in which, for instance, people who die in horrible ways are not really dead, and in which we are free to collectively dream. This liberation is probably, at core, what people find most thrilling about art, but it leads - especially in an era of ‘autofiction’ and memoirization - to some peculiar ethical places. The most famous recent incident is the kidney donation short story (Dorland v. Larson) in which a writer’s real-life kidney donation was turned into very light ‘fiction’ - and which generated much opinionating and critiquing. There’s a school of thought - it’s implicit in Knausgaard’s My Struggle and in something like Nona Willis Aronowitz’s Bad Sex - that holds that a writer has the ultimate authority to everything in their lives; and, actually, has a certain obligation - if they wish to be authentic - to reveal as much as possible, particularly if the material is shameful or embarrassing. That sensibility underlies a great deal of the ‘serious’ writing that I’ve come across recently - it’s in Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts, in Miranda Popkey’s Topics of Conversation, as well as in everything more clearly marked ‘memoir.’ It’s a tempting direction - and has a perfect cover in the ‘art for art’s sake’ dictum - but I do find it to be fundamentally unethical. It’s not great, actually, that Knausgaard’s ex-wife found out about an affair he had had from reading My Struggle; that Knausgaard’s mother begged him to stop giving away family secrets. The conviction here is that writing should, in some foundational way, be ethical - i.e. be socially constructive. How to do that while being honest, while being authentic, is its own challenge; and interesting and complicated to play around with. The belief is that writing needs always to be intense, to be, within its own domain, life-and-death. But, at the same time - and this sounds paradoxical but makes a certain kind of sense - needs to not take itself too seriously. “I mean, it’s just books,” as Percival Everett wisely says. “No need to stress about anything.”
All writing is opinionated. One of the great lies of institutional media is that it’s ‘objective,’ ‘authoritative.’ That this is not at all the case is obvious to anyone who’s ever sat in an editorial meeting. ‘News’ is given a shape and direction - a ’slant.’ If very admirable journalistic ‘ethics’ is, more often than not, followed in the reporting of individual stories, there is a great deal of editorial discretion in what is covered or not covered, in which stories are prioritized, in the underlying ‘approach’ to a story. The apparently detached appearance of articles throughout a newspaper goes a long way towards masking the extent to which the newspaper is molded, is, in fact, a ‘work of opinion.’ A really ridiculous advertising slogan like Fox News’ ‘Fair and Balanced’ is actually a kind of koan for the public-at-large. Of course, Fox isn’t really fair-and-balanced, but then it’s worth asking who is. Fundamentally, all writing is opinionated. As a great deal of content moves towards a more blog-y, Substack-y model, the usual caviling is about ‘objectivity,’ about the loss of editorial standards, the absence of fact-checking departments. But - as the era of public-facing ‘fact-checking’ demonstrates, ‘fact-checking’ can be just as opinionated as anything else - and the difference, really, is that on the open web you’re getting the opinions of writers as opposed to the opinions of newspaper owners or editors as washed down through writers. The shift towards more writer-driven writing online doesn’t mean the ‘end of objectivity’ - just more honesty about how inherently subjective the whole enterprise really is. A reluctant readership is forced to be more critically-minded, to think for itself, to sift through an array of perspectives as opposed to leaning on ‘authority’ - to do all the things that that readership should have been doing in the first place.
Writing is a form of self-development. Very often, the articles on this site aren’t exactly something I know; it’s something that I’m learning as I write. This is sort of discouraged in traditional media. Book reviewers, opinion writers, tend to write from a posture of authority. They know all the work of the author under review; they are an expert in their domain - and are accordingly able to spot any deviation from the norm. The approach here is different. If I feel like I really know something I’ll say it. But, as often as not, I’m learning. The point is that the world is changing all the time; nobody is really an expert in anything - and, in critical ways, we are always starting from the beginning. Best to be honest about that.
A website is a kind of personal museum. I’ve been a bit surprised at the extent to which online communication, for the past few decades, has been seen as transient, insubstantial. My guess is that the rapid turnover of technology convinced everybody that whatever they said online wouldn’t really matter; the tech would change so quickly and dramatically that anything expressed digitally would pretty much just evaporate. But, recently, people have been learning the hard way that that’s not exactly the case - that people’s most unpleasant moments, most embarrassing utterances, have a way of haunting them online. As the internet matures - as it becomes increasingly clear that the internet in more or less its present iteration is likely to be with us for a long time - it’s also the moment to take it more seriously; and for people to concertedly shape their identities through the web as opposed to treating the web as escapism from ‘real life,’ which had been the earlier idea. It really is odd to me that this idea isn’t more widespread. People’s Twitters, Facebooks, Instagrams, even websites, tend to be reactive, transactional. It happens sometimes that Instagrammers turn their accounts into personal museums - showcases for their work - and, whenever I see that sort of thing, I get excited; get the feeling that maybe the internet is to the good, after all. That the animating principle for internet exchange isn’t really platform updates or news cycles; that it’s a vehicle for expressing inner life in a way that doesn’t demand sign-off from some sort of art or publishing industry and that allows people (in a way that’s almost never been possible) to truly be themselves.
An insightful analysis of the world of writing, publishing, and even identity. I'd like to make three points to build on what you've so eloquently said, Sam. First, as an author and teacher, I believe that the process of writing is an ongoing, changing effort—a deeply human experience. We all have language and consider this: the “word” as Emerson said, “if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right means straight,” “wrong” means twisted. “spirit” primarily means wind … the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind,” he explains in Nature, Chapter IV, “Language.” Thus, we all own metaphor in our words. Second, on editing, I often say editing is a secondary task. Third, as the publishing world has consolidated under Bertelsmann, the opportunities for editors to actually discover new voices has been left to the small magazines and perhaps to Substack, in its own way. Third, building on that point, authors who now are part of the so-called 'canon' might never have been discovered. Would we know Virginia Woolf if Leonard Woolf had not created a press and published her? Would we know James Joyce if Sylvia Beach had not published _Ulysses_? Even Grace Paley said in a _Paris Review_ interview after she was well-known that if she hadn't known personally the wife of an editor at Doubleday, she might never have seen her stories published. She says, "...poor Ken was more or less forced into reading them—you know, The kids are over at her house all the time, you might read her stories. So he took them home and read them and he came over to see me and said, Write seven more of them and we’ll publish a book. So that’s what happened. Luck happened. He also told me that no magazine around would touch them, and he was pretty much right about that too, although two of the stories in that collection were finally taken by _Accent_." Perhaps her modesty shows here. But still, we learn something here about connection--not in the way I meant when I named my newsletter, "Only connect ..." The best advice I ever got from E.M. Forster's epigraph to his novel _Howards End_. ~ Mary
Another valuable I am after from these substack letters was metaphors to overwrite the little puffballs of hopefulness raisined through every rock and roll song. I have had a good life listening to rock but . Patently the lack of context in the writing of them makes Thema diminishing returns prospect for me. Brave of you to read. It does take slowing down and we are rightfully frightened that so called advertisers have seen our desks and home interiors. I mean we value our reflexes to react. Takes coaxing your dignity as much as cognitive biases to stand up sit down fight does not it? Writing.