120: we who "love to be astonished"

LAST WEEK: I’m into theater again; Black feminist literature; the Substack essay

Today’s title is a recurring line in Lyn Hejinian’s poetry book, My Life, a collective reading of which I attended last night.

COMMUNITY BOARD

Goodreads / Letterboxd / Instagram / Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG)

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I LOVE theater, I couldn’t help thinking last Tuesday night as I watched actors Cole Doman and Julian Sanchez wrestle each other in the new play, Other People’s Dead Dads, written by Jacob Wasson and directed by Rory Pelsue. I’m not really good at keeping abreast of what cool and small theater things are happening in the city, even though I was a theater kid in high school and went all the time as “homework,” so when RAFTM¹ Kyle Curry suggested we go see Wasson’s play I was intrigued enough to want to remedy the situation. Set in 2005, Other People’s Dead Dads follows Ollie (Doman), a gay man in his mid-twenties who acts as a professional mourner, attending the funerals of homophobic fathers who have run their real sons out of house and home. OPDD is surprisingly funny (it is billed as a dark comedy but that doesn’t always guarantee humor) and the performances, by Doman and Jess Darrow especially, are really what make a play that has a great first act and then wobbles through a confusing second act and a too short third act. One of the things that weakened the play was also the thing that got the best laughs: the Greek chorus of “gay martyrs” that seem to exist in the some kind of mental purgatory that Ollie has entered as a result of the psychic toll of inhabiting other people’s trauma. Figures like Marie Antoinette, Joan of Arc, and Oscar Wilde, quip and moan and sneer about the ways they’ve been iconized by gay communities without regard for their actual lives. Jacob Wasson told PAPER that he “wanted to write about how gay men talk about, use, digest and claim women” and the harmful effects of that, even when coming from a place of love and idolization. The connection between that element of the play and Ollie’s work as a paid mourner, the PAPER piece notes, is how America uses (gay) “corpses and bodies…to make a point.” Unfortunately, this link is not that obvious or smooth in the play itself, and the more didactic scenes of the martyrs just don’t work. There’s a lot to do with bodies and scars and corpses that easily could do the work that the martyrs’ PSA moments are meant to do but that don’t get enough attention as the play goes on.

(After the play, faced with a torrential downpour, we scuttled to the closest bar which we later found out was Ray’s, the bar co-owned by Justin Theoreux and Nicholas Braun. That explains the powerful hetero energy that permeated the air. It was not busy, our server was awkward. But we did get free beignets AND free “midnight fries” i.e. fries served at midnight)

I had the hardest time getting through Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, a classic Black feminist novel that I’ve wanted to read for years now. It is the trippiest novel I have read in some time, dizzying and exhausting. While that makes it hard to barrel through in three days, once I got to the end of the novel, I realized that these are purposeful qualities, that Bambara is, in the structure and style of the novel, paralleling the psychic experience of her central character, Velma Henry. The novel begins with and revolves around Velma, a dedicated revolutionary organizer who has recently attempted suicide and has now been committed to a psych ward, as a spirit healer attempts to pull her out of the catatonic state she has fallen into.² Descriptions of Velma during this pseudo-exorcism focus on her unstable grip on the stool she is sitting on, the way she tips over, reels, and how her mental and physical imbalance thrusts her into various scenes and settings, all hinged precariously together, far from her immediate setting of the hospital. And reading the novel feels exactly like sitting on that stool, rocking uneasily about, eyes drooping as you struggle to maintain a grip on solid reality or stable narrative. As Velma blocks the efforts of the spirit healer, Bambara blocks the reader from penetrating the narrative, from getting comfortably inside of it. It makes for a frustrating and at times unpleasant reading experience. There’s no doubt that it’s a brilliant novel.

Fun fact: Toni Morrison was Bambara’s editor and you can see the similarities between the two women’s work, but The Salt Eaters makes Morrison’s famously tricky novels seem like a walk in the park. I thought this Chicago Public Library list of some of the books Morrison edited was fun. Libraries are the best!

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ON REPEAT

• Clairo, “Sexy to Someone”

• The National, “I Should Live in Salt”³

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STACK’D

On Friday morning, Emily Sundberg of

Feed Me

sent out a salient and relevant piece on the state of Substack, writing and the monetization of writing. I immediately responded to Emily’s piece because it touches on something that I’ve been talking/complaining about for two years, which is not really about Substack but about the state of writing in general and people’s romanticization of what it means to be a writer. Since I read the piece on Friday, the piece has blown up and has received lots of responses in Substack Notes⁴, in the comments (it has about 202 comments as of writing), and in other newsletters. In the piece, Emily discusses how she has noticed an uptick in the amount of publications of Substack, an uptick seemingly motivated by people’s desire to make money from writing. ”You can make SO much $$$ writing.” The result of this motivation is that a lot of people are making “content,” churning out personality-less dispatches whether it be “lists, random thoughts, and (easy to write) roundups,” as Emily notes, or photo “moodboards” that seem to be just things saved from Instagram, as my sister mentioned to me recently. And I’m sure some of you are thinking, what’s wrong with that? Shouldn’t people be able to share whatever they like? This was the sentiment behind several of the negative responses to Emily’s piece that I saw. And those people are not wrong. Substack is a platform like any other platform, whether that be Blogspot or Instagram, and everyone can and should share whatever they like. I’m always saying that I don’t think it’s that deep. But not everything on Substack, even if it’s 1200 words, is writing and not everyone who has a Substack is a writer. And that’s really the problem. As Emily writes in the piece: “Substack is making everyone into writers the same way Instagram made everyone into photographers,” which is to say that people feel more comfortable calling themselves writers, and it’s effecting our collective sense of what quality writing is, on and beyond Substack. What is considered passable writing these days, not just in terms of what is popular, but what gets published in respectable publications is, frankly, embarrassing. I read novels from respected critics that make me gag and question the taste of everyone involved (I love a hearty acknowledgements section). I’m not trying to be a hater. In fact, my disappointment stems from the fact that good writing is something that matters to me, likely more than anything else. Of course, this downturn in quality writing is has not solely been caused by Substack—the ecosystem of writing has been dire for some time. But, when it launched, Substack seemed to be a hopeful light and it no longer feels that way. This seems to be the way things go when we start talking about “democratizing,” especially with writing and criticism, which are often seen as things that don’t require effort or training (when I say training, I don’t mean institutionally) and we forget that letting more people in doesn’t mean lowering our standards.

I definitely have more thoughts about this, especially in relation to questions of taste and the idea that being a writer isn’t really about being a commentator, but being a good thinker, one who, as Sheila Heti asked of Lauren Oyler, “[carries] around in her head a library of references and quotes from decades of reading and remembering what she read.” I probably won’t write more about that here, at least for the moment, because I have homework to do. But if you want to buy me a drink, I’d be happy to get into it with you.

1. RAFTM = Reader and Friend to Me, respectfully stolen from RAFTM Rachel Tashjian, who, in the context of what I discuss in the latter half of today’s dispatch, is one of the best living writers today!

2. Erica R. Edwards has a really good reading of the novel’s political concerns of the novel in her book The Other Side of Terror, which I mentioned in my last dispatch. If you’re a paid subscriber, you can read the intro here.

3. My dear roommate Ken Castaneda brought me back a CD of Trouble Will Find Me from London that I’m obsessed with

4. Are people using this? Or the Substack app in general?