Writer's Diary
10/30/24
I've been thinking about how I can help the three books I have coming out this year. Who can write about them, where, if anywhere? Options are so limited. It seems that, for a lot of writers on Twitter, there's a perverse desire for a hatchet job in BookForum. Writers want it—because at least it’s something.
The odds of getting in the LRB or the NYRB are vanishingly rare. The Times Book Review has much less pull than it used to. NPR is a joke. Just off the top of my head.
The magazines I read in college, the institutions that seemed to move books and that I looked up to, don't matter as much. And when they do matter, it's almost only when a hatchet job or takedown goes viral. That is a very weird, very limited literary ecology.
I don't know.
There are green shoots, some new publications and good Substacks. But the gravitas and prestige have not flowed into these vessels. They are not cool. They are earnest.
In a sense, there are two cultural systems in the world of letters. A decentralized, earnest, and uncool one, made up of Substackers and alt-magazines (of which I suppose I am a part), and then the constellation of prestigious magazines—little or big—whose parties people still want to go to, even if they often don't buy the latest issue.
This is broad; there are exceptions, and there are figures who move between worlds, as they should.
As a writer, I want to be reviewed and thoughtfully criticized in depth, pulled apart or praised deservingly. It feels like I have a little bit of cash in two currencies, but not enough to buy the item I want, since these two currencies can’t be transferred or exchanged.
We've accepted… collectively, tacitly… that politics does not have to be the politics of Lincoln or even Obama or Nixon. It doesn’t need to be expressed in complete paragraphs. It is a guttural, pre-articulate, enjambed mode of expression. It’s as if we’re realized that there’s nothing, politically, but fantasy—of a progressive or reactionary/nostalgic utopia.
After I finish an article or essay (I finished two this week), I want nothing more than to write in my writer's diary. I'm tired of thinking about transitions and coherence. I want to swerve and dance and contradict myself. I want to write not only at the pace of thought, but in the geometry of thought.
Literary theory has died out as a culturally relevant force. I would argue that the cultural critic has replaced the literary theorist, just as the literary theorist replaced the philosopher.