Writer's Diary
7/26/25
There’s a certain age cohort for whom cancel culture is just culture, and the mechanisms of mimetic sacrifice are so embedded that even those who oppose it in theory practice it unthinkingly. Take hypothetical person X—an undergraduate in 2021—who watches their favorite professors all get forcibly retired or fired under threat of cancellation, who privately worries and complains that their program is being ruined by activist-sadists… but then they move to the big city. Life gets hard. There’s no clear way to differentiate oneself, to stand out and make friends. Suddenly, the big, red mimetic sacrifice button starts to become appealing—unconsciously—for X, who starts to think, what’s wrong with a littttle moral surveillance? Everyone does it. What’s wrong with thinking this way? It’s justified right—calling out bad behavior? If I don’t… then how can I survive amongst all the people who are doing it? here in the big city… and slowly, X forgets all their former complaints against the mob and happily slips into the warm water of whatever moral panic is du jour—and it feels so good; it feels normal; they aren’t extreme like the others—they just passively participate, anyway; so it can’t be that bad right? And thus, they become the kind of person they once used to loathe, without realizing it: tacitly, quietly sacrificing individuals to the ideology machine. Their friends approve.
It's very hard to create something durable, whether in one's personal life or in the world and society. It's very easy to destroy it. And that's why the emphasis on quitting or cancelling or cutting off, going no contact, whatever—it’s like every single trend flows in the direction of ease, frictionlessness. It doesn't have enough respect for trial and error, for lessons learned, for the difficulty of making and risk-taking.
Last night, after meeting a friend at Bar Oliver, which closed early, I walked to Clandestino and set up the bar with War and Peace. I'm about 45% of the way through now, and I read my favorite chapters where Prince Andre sees Natasha at the ball and courts her, when he goes to his father for approval and his father tells him to wait a year, while Pierre, trapped in a wretched marriage, looks on with envy and confusion. Sergei Bondarchuk's similarly perfect film captures this moment, which doubles as one of my favorite moments in cinema.
Sandwiched at a bar seat surrounded by noise and chaos, I was able to concentrate on a book more than I have in a long time. I felt with acuity and clarity the paradox of my own life. I'm trying to go back all the time while being situated very obviously in the heart of the present.
Someone, a very friendly drunk guy, asked me what I was reading. I said War and Peace. Guy’d never heard of it. Something similar happened at Funny Bar a few months ago when I was reading Brothers K. People kept asking why I was reading. Strangers, I mean. Only one person in the end, maybe one out of five or six people, recognized the novel at all—
According to the biography I’m reading, Chekhov, who is a doctor, recommended milk and more milk and specific herbal drops to a friend's wife recovering from typhus.
One thing everyone needs to understand about downtown is that if someone doesn't like you, they will simply make up a story about you and blithely admit it later when pressed (“I knew it was bullshit, I just don’t like him.”) Often these people have never met you in person. It's very strange.
The truth is, in the current media climate, you're either a nepo baby or you have to take some kind of risk—take a series of risks.
The fact of the matter is that regardless of one's circumstances, you have to train like an athlete—both figuratively and literally sometimes—to be a great artist.
One critic explains the attractiveness of Chekhov as a figure as follows: “I simply read everything, one letter after another, skipping over things I didn't understand, circling languidly over the marvelous lists and images, and then returning over and over to things I found funny. And there were so many, circling like a goat tied to a stake who eats the grass within his reach. Gathering sustenance, I entered the world of Chekhov's friends, relatives, correspondents, and lovers, making it my own. I was intoxicated by the intonation of his voice, which was something unique unto itself, unlike any other person or thing I knew, conveying dignity, irony, warmth, and at the same time, a remarkably serious attitude towards life.”
Of course I have my contradictions… for instance..