Of the writing on Substack there is no end

And much reading is a wearing of the self

Time was I’d look in my notes file and wonder what to do with all those words. Excluding what I’ve ring-fenced for particular stories, essays or books, the total pushes a million, the yield of two decades. Whether I was sleepily jotting notes on a post-it or thumbing them into a latest app, did I have a prospect for each one? How to organise them into texts worth reading? Where will they all go?

Tagging helps but then keywords do add to the volume of words (as well as providing others with a lexicon from which to infer the tenor of my mind - ‘apocalypse’, ‘architecture’, ‘argument’, ‘arseholes’ - or that make stories of their own: ‘disaster’, ‘distraction’, ‘doctors’, ‘dogs’). And even if I had Stakhanovite productivity with a roster of pliant editors, I’d never get around to publishing even that conservative proportion of the total worth anyone else’s time. Had taking notes over these years been a waste of time: a time of waste? Is continuing to take notes pouring more sand on a beach I’ve only made so many castles out of yet, with the shushing waves always at my back?

Enter Substack.

In my About page I call Artless among other things my Uncommonplace Book. That was one hope for it: that instead of whispering into a hole in the ground then covering it up I’d share what I’d read and written more often and easily. I could find readers without having to pitch around first or work to a brief or to publishing schedules as I do with essays and stories I get into print or online.

Surveying the stacks, it seemed possible as well to find readers - not to mention enough to hit critical mass and go paid and so make a living writing on here - without having to pied-piper an existing following from social or old media. Nor without having to write chummy banalities every week. For one, you might hit upon a real imagination-capturing niche. (Subscribe to Costanzaning, where I do the opposite of every choice I’d usually make in a week then write up the fallout.) Or your newsletter might be genuinely useful on some practical level: tech-tips, how-to’s, ten spells covering all your commutes on how to dispatch the passenger playing shite off their phone the loudest to a dimension of nothing but sound, all past and potential sounds heard simultaneously yet each distinguishable from the other, forever.

Another way to find readers is the Poker Strategy. Said card-game isn’t ubiquitous because it’s so much better than bridge or more fun than canasta; if you wanna play poker there’s always a game in town, always someone up for it. So should you join the take-economy, that is write commentary about current affairs or life’s little foibles - the former purview of a columnist - you’re guaranteed at least two readers: the one who likes to read what they already think but worded more eloquently, and the other who likes to get their daily fix of aggravation.

I do read a lot of commentary - and a lot with head-shaking admiration, head-nodding assent. But as someone who writes fiction, whose heart will always belong to art, I feel like proof of that love has to involve maintaining what makes literary art distinct and valuable.

Angela Carter, a journalist and novelist herself, wrote of another straddler, Colette, who in marrying her magazine editor:

sealed her fate as a journalist, which in turned sealed her fate as a novelist, because the professions are mutually exclusive, even if simultaneously conducted.

The excluding factor, wrote Carter, is the paradoxical accuracy of novels:

[Colette’s] novels are fiction and hence the truth; the rest is journalism and so may bear only the most peripheral relation to truth, even if a journalist tells you every single thing that actually happened.

Put another way, a columnist is just a novelist who’s impatient about having their opinions heard.¹

I’m too chary of ‘truth’ to endorse Carter’s take, but do think she was on to something. Ironically it’s more to do with fiction’s autonomy from truth, hence its far greater comprehensiveness. Yes fiction sometimes overlaps with journalism - seeing as it can incorporate every other form of text - but literary art is that in which everything is subordinate - and elevated by - how it’s put together: the synthesis, style, structure. Since conversely non-fiction has to get pulled into or out of shape by reality (or I suppose does depending on the writer’s probity) it tends to be the less artful of the literary arts, tethered as it remains to extra-artistic demands.

As I wanted nonetheless to write something alongside short stories and novels and other narrative art then writing a newsletter about the arts felt at the time a canny way to pull off my own straddling. But in a world with so much arts journalism and commentary in various media, publishing a newsletter implies - and ought to justify - a belief in the ‘written’ word (or, at the risk of wankiness, in literature). It’s not fungible content that can just as easily be a three-hour podcast or voice-overed video essay. The text essay, so says a newsletter, is still distinct and valuable a form.

Combining that form with the topic of aesthetics and lit-, film- and other art-crit might also help avoid self-indulgence. Angela Carter doesn’t accuse Colette of exactly that:

[Her autobiographical reveries and journalism] are a particular kind of literary striptease in themselves, a self-exploitation that greedily utilises every scrap of past experience in an almost unmediated form.

Self-exploitation, self-indulgence… Are these inflammatory terms to traduce the unavoidable fact that we can’t write but from the self, regardless of topic? Patricia Lockwood, in her Elena Ferrante feature, argues for embracing that fact:

While writing this, I read another essay that made me self-conscious; it lamented the trend toward the autobiographical review. Oh no, I said to myself… I have been doing it wrong the whole time. I went through what I had written, carefully removing the I, I, I. Then I stopped. I was even angry. I thought, what else do you read a book with but your body, your history?

(from ‘I hate Nadia beyond reason: I’m Lila, I’m Lenù’, London Review of Books)

Maybe there’s a homecoming relief in the acceptance of this inherent constraint, which isn’t a constraint at all but nothing less than your perspective, that fusion of eyes and voice known as your point-of-view.

But just because we can only look out with our own eyes - our own body and history - doesn’t licence us to dwell on those things or let us off extricating ourselves from them as much and creatively as we can. Because what do you point your point-of-view at?

The Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant only makes sense because we, listening to or reading it, unlike those gropers, know what an elephant is and can conceive of it outside their confusions of a rope for the tail or fans for the ears. The elephant in the room is unknowable, necessary reality. Sure we’re all exiled from the noumena but there’s a difference between wallowing in exile or drawing links back out. The value of what we write with and in, our language and literature, isn’t even that it’s intersubjective. It’s a republic, a res publica, a public thing. What you like and dislike, your taste and memories are private, can be impressed on others only by force of personality. But if you want to establish with others what is better or worse - to exercise critical judgement - you have to write in the common ground.

If writing, inextricable as it is from the self, ought at least to be ego-fugal rather than ego-petal, then is reading naturally less self-centred?

For the reader, the earlier iteration of this platform had the draw of that almost-oxymoron: Substack 1.0 was a one-way relationship. As with print media (sans I suppose Letters to the Editor) all you got by default was the text, at once voluble and silent. Whatever thoughts and feelings it roiled up in you were on you. You had to deal with them, couldn’t ask for clarification or reassurances. Unless a newsletter had comments switched on - unless its writer bought the idea that doing so was necessary to find readers - the writer wasn’t waiting in the wings for you to interact with, for you to rig up yet another pingpong of projection called a human relationship. Reading is a relation - the text was written by somebody, it’s not just a extrusion out of language - but not an interpersonal one. (I’d argue that the binary relation between reader and writer means it’s not even really social…) The text isn’t meant to be a door to reach the person behind it so much as a wall - engraved, graffitied - to define your own thoughts with or against.

A supposed drawback of Substack 1.0 was that readers had to find new writers (and, vice versa, writers readers, if not subscribers) through recommendations from others or mentions in other media (done at the time, it has to be said, gingerly) and not yet through a Recommendations algorithm or other such Discoverability gimmick.² When Substack 2.0 went social it was ostensibly to give writers and readers a chance to find each other without depending on name-brand-recognition.

Brand-recognition, -management, identity-maintenance are the inevitable downsides of any social media. Angela Carter, in her essay on Katherine Mansfield, made a warning to “the woman writer” that applies more generally these days:

one of the great traps for [them] is the desire to be loved for oneself as well as admired for one’s work, to be a Beautiful Person as well as a Great Artist

These might not be mutually exclusive like Carter held being a journalist and a novelist. In fact it’s their warping overlap that’s the problem with any platform where a writer is their own press agent.

Substack 2.0 seems as well to have switched the polarity between writers and readers. Its social experiments, Chat and Notes (Notewitter) have morphed from a readers’ forum, to a readers-and-writers’ one, to a kind of giant nest of writers and their fledgling newsletters. (Imagine if the only people on Twitter were journalists.) Readers becoming writers whose readers become writers: a democratic chain-reaction? Or a case of “The first thing you should know is this is not a pyramid scheme”? How long till people start writing articles elsewhere titled ‘What was Substack?’

What had been for the reader a self-tailor-made reading experience gets more like a slush pile. Or worse: a substitute for reading. With a surfeit of newsletters in your inbox, as with reading apps and browser extensions before them, you can be satisfied by the mere receipt, the collection, the saving-to-read-later. Then not actually reading later.

And this is different to a well-stocked bookshelf from which you take down a volume and find its pages are still uncut (or in a more modern sense, the spine pristine). In that case the books are a narcissistic display. But who else ever reads your to-be-read list? Not even you yourself! And there needn’t be guilt or hypocrisy about this. Hoarding reading material feels like cultural engagement. A backwards step from narcissism among others to a kind of private superstition: throw the unread post on the pile like a votive coin to propitiate an unseen force…

How is the project of reading affected by the project to be read? Does Substack bringing readers and writers together help or impede both?

In Milan Kunera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting the character Bibi talks to a taxi-driver with a sideline in writing. But:

[y]ou might say the taxi driver is not a writer but a graphomaniac. So we need to be precise about our concepts. A woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac. She is a lover. But my friend who makes photocopies of his love letters to publish them some day is a graphomaniac. Graphomania is not a desire to write letters, personal diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one’s close relations) but a desire to write books (to have a public of unknown readers). In that sense, the taxi driver and Goethe share the same passion. What distinguishes Goethe from the taxi driver is not a difference in passions but one passion’s different results.

🎵We’re the Graphomaniacs!🎵

Where does graphomania come from? Kundera continues:

Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions:

1. an elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;

2. a high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals;

3. the absence of dramatic social chances in a nation’s internal life. (From this point of view, seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel. Bibi³ is, moreover, right to say that looked at from the outside, she hasn’t experienced anything. The mainspring that drives her to write is just that absence of vital content, that void.)

Does this hold true now, does “practically nothing” happen in the West? Rather nothing and everything happens because of that great leveller and turbocharger of the graphomaniacs, mass internet. Kundera seems to have detected we were on the brink of it; he wrote The Book of Laughter and Forgetting a few years before the age of the internet but his diagnosis of graphomania reads prophetically:

General isolation breeds graphomania, and generalized graphomania in turn intensifies and worsens isolation. The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside.

This is more than the cliché alarm over ‘echo chambers’ we got after the Brexit and Trump ‘upsets’. (Though I’ll note that when people are urged to read outside their echo chamber it’s always the left urged to read right.) It’s more even than the idea we’re siloing off ourselves into bespoke mind-palaces that share no premises with others. Say what you will about jargon and shibboleths but at least they imply an in-group as well as out-group. The scarier thing about the future of the world of (news)letters is that it stops being a republic altogether, stops being even a one-way relationship, instead a one-way broadcast, a self-isolation. As Kundera concludes:

One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.

So we’re back to whispering into a hole in the ground.

After one year writing on Substack has it been worth it? Does worth mean making a living or is having readers enough? Writers want a “public of unknown readers” for financial, even emotional gain but they don’t need them for that. The one thing a writer needs readers for is what readers need writers for beyond them producing the text…

Say that writing in the age of the internet is graphomania, self-indulgent, mirror-walled: narcissistic. And narcissism not phonily defined (away) as megalomania. But neither in the redacted more common and pernicious sense of Underground Man victimegalomonia. Just the neutral sense of a Colette-like fascination with the self. Then reading, on the other hand, is other—at least figuratively if never possibly literally.

If you find it hard to handle otherness in live people, reading is a safer way to still get out of your body and history. Reading, you learn your thoughts and feelings, your point-of-view, aren’t unique or special—not the most important things in the world. But not unimportant either, instead having the same dignity as all other parts of the world out there.

One of the advantages of reading history in particular - and I say this as somebody who thinks all drawn lessons are so obviously contingent on chaos and irrationality to ever be useful - is that it’s one of the few ways that the malcontents among us (and by us I mean writers) can realise they’re not the first to think their iconoclastic thoughts, that others have had them many times before, and better put, and done more with them. But behind that disenchantment is a consolation: no longer are you the lonely outlier, the one free-thinker against the world. You belong to a history, however discontinuous, of thinking, that’s been around you all this while, that you’d have noticed had it been less important to appear a certain way to yourself and others in the present than it was to look for company in the past.⁴

Were a platform not to broaden but narrow the social or personal side of the writer, the reader would have to as well. Buffered from identity, undistracted by the chance of get-togethers, they might fall in love with what makes good literature good, that which doesn’t depend on personal preferences or bias: its cathedral-like synthesis of structure and ornament, use and, yes, beauty. Love, and here I’m definitionally excluding self-love, means paying attention to the details.⁵

I’ll repeat the ‘Argumentum Ornithologicum’ from my Borges essay, my one real contribution to scholarship, and one I’d’ve never have gotten round to writing were it not for Substack:

I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts a second or perhaps less; I don’t know how many birds I saw. Were they a definite or an indefinite number? This problem involves the question of the existence of God. If God exists, the number is definite, because how many birds I saw is known to God. If God does not exist, the number is indefinite, because nobody was able to take count. In this case, I saw fewer than ten birds (let’s say) and more than one; but I did not see nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, or two birds. I saw a number between ten and one, but not nine, eight, seven, six, five, etc. That number, as a whole number, is inconceivable; ergo, God exists.

Either you envision no number of many birds or there’s a reality outside of your perception. Either we’re babbling to ourselves on here or the world is what is the case. Read around and find out.

1. Or as Gore Vidal would have it, “journalism has always been the preferred career of the ambitious but lazy second-rater.”

2. It should go without saying but ‘Recommendations’ is a one-word lie—but then calling them what they are, Predictions, might make a person feel, well, a little predictable.

3. Prophetic juxt.

4. A friend said to me the other day, “When you live by yourself, watching TV makes you feel lonely; reading doesn’t.”

5. I’m forever repeating the case for re-reading but not so as to encourage more obsessives. The first re-read is the first truly paid attention. At a time when people are barely finishing newsletters (hi!) what better accolade could one have than to be re-read?