Writer's Diary
6/13/26
I’ve been thinking about the multi-block frozen yogurt or gelato lines that are forming because people see the same TikToks or whatever, funneled and aggregated into the safe behavior—far beyond the point of irrationality. Does the inanity of having waited in line for two hours make the yogurt taste better?
This, by the way, is why I’m a little pessimistic about producing plays, or whatever else, certainly selling books—because unless you do something idiotic, unless you are idiotic, unless you squish all meaning into a dumb little button and aggregate people’s desires, then you’ll have empty seats or unsold books.
Cultures have never been particularly good at recognizing their best art in real time (i.e. Gaddis, The Recognitions).
Zoomers might have the unique distinction of not even knowing that there’s art at all, not even recognizing the category or possibility of art—and therefore failing to even fail to recognize.
To offer a variant on Yeats: the stupidest lack all conviction.
The age of empty-headed affluence and empty-headed precarity.
A bored and idea-free overclass. A nervous and titillated underclass. A tiny, nervous, educated middle.
Sometimes I think about how different sleep must have been before electric light. You can get a sense of it in Keats, for instance, from “The Eve of St. Agnes”:
Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest,
And sort of wakeful swoon, perplexed she lay,
Till the poppy’d warmth of sleep oppressed
Her soothed limbs and soul fatigued away,
Flown like a thought until the morrow day,
Blissfully havened both from joy and pain.