Enough about Me
I rarely read, or even look at, a book of mine after it’s published. When the box arrives with my author copies I have a brief glance at the cover and the page layout and then put one on the shelf, setting the others aside to give to friends. I’m not indifferent to having a new book out, but by the publication date my mind has moved on to other things. Plus, when I look at anything I have published, I see only typos, errors, and passages I wish I could rewrite.
But yesterday, when I got copies of the new paperback edition of my biography of the Book of Common Prayer, which corrects some of the more egregious errors of the first edition, I paused to read a few paragraphs, and I thought: Hey, this is pretty good. Maybe I should read it one day. And then I saw a badly phrased sentence and hurriedly set the book aside.
I have an essay in the new issue of The New Atlantis called “After Technopoly”. Why not subscribe so you can read it right away? Here’s a bit of it:
It is in the interest of technopoly to produce people who swarm. Swarming is virality. Swarms live by memes. Swarms produce bestsellers. Swarms form outrage mobs. For their sociality swarms need devices, platforms, and apps, and they need people for whom dwelling within the ambit of those devices, platforms, and apps is a habituated impulse, a thing they learned to do from everyone else who does it.
The apparent captain of technopoly is what [Michael] Oakeshott calls a “rationalist” and what the historian of technology Evgeny Morozov calls a “solutionist,” but that captain can achieve his political ends most readily by creating people who are not rationalists. The rationalists of Silicon Valley don’t care whom you’re calling out or why, as long as you’re calling out someone and doing it on Twitter. And in that sense the most self-consciously radical people in our society tend also to be the most obedient and predictable. But the captain of technopoly is equally obedient and predictable: CEOs swarm too. They are ultimately as enthralled by the logic of technopoly as the meekest “end user.”
This essay is a sequel to my earlier TNA essay “Wokeness and Myth on Campus” and both of them are thematically related to my essay for National Affairs called “Renewing the University.” Most people who write about American university culture today are concerned to take sides and explain why their side is the right one. By contrast, these essays of mine are largely diagnostic: they’re attempts to understand, as precisely as possible, the kinds of conflicts that are troubling many of our institutions of higher learning. Which is why, I suspect, so few people have been interested in them. These are tough times for a writer disinclined to sheer polemic.
Here’s a sneak peek from my work in progress, Breaking Bread with the Dead: The Case for Temporal Bandwidth:
In the ancient world, “table fellowship” was often a fraught affair: to sit down to a meal with someone is to acknowledge their full humanity in ways that can be uncomfortable. In the earliest days of what we now call Christianity, the limits of table fellowship were a matter of contention between the two leading apostles, Peter and Paul, and it is somewhat disconcerting to speculate on what the future of Christianity would (or, more likely, would not) have been if a narrower model of such fellowship had won out.
And one can see a modern twist on the old table fellowship disputes when a controversial politician shows up at a restaurant and is driven out by the protests of the other diners: the unwelcome one is not sitting at their table, but sitting in the same room seems to the protestors defilement enough. We might also think of those who won’t come to Thanksgiving or Christmas or Passover dinners with those whose politics are simply too alien, too repulsive.
If we cannot break bread with our contemporaries who violate our political commitments — whose views seem so alien and wrong that to share a meal with them feels like a kind of defilement — then it would seem that recommending that we break bread with the dead is a lost cause indeed. But perhaps not. The dead, being dead, speak only at our invitation: they will not come uninvited to our table. They are at our mercy, like that flock of shades who gather around Odysseus when he comes as a living man to the land of Hades: they remain silent until their tongues are touched with the blood of the living. What the dead we encounter in books demand is only the blood of our attention, which we are free to withhold.
I love doing this newsletter, but I have enough subscribers that it costs me money. When I first started, and was on TinyLetter, I had an Amazon affiliate account, but I did something Amazon didn’t like and they shut me down. (I have no idea what I did — apparently Amazon doesn’t answer email about this kind of thing.) So I’ve been musing on a range of ways to recoup my costs, like trying Amazon again, or starting a Patreon page. (Or something of the kind, I don’t know what the best model is — do people still do “tip jars”?) And then I had another idea.
As a writer, my first and greatest love is the familiar essay. I think it was Joseph Epstein who coined that phrase: not a personal essay, because not, or not primarily, about my own experience, but familiar: about almost anything, but approaching that Anything in a casual, friendly tone that’s unafraid of digressions and anecdotes. But it has been many years since I have had an outlet for that kind of writing — so why not make it for myself?
Here’s my inchoate thought: Continue to offer this newsletter for free, but also offer a subscription for ten essays per year — and maybe even, say in December, a bound version of the year’s essays, with an extra one added just for fun — though I would have to charge more to make that possible. Anyway, is that nuts? Advice welcome.
STATUS BOARD
- Work: Coming to the end of the term, getting ready for a summer of working on Breaking Bread with the Dead.
- Music: One of the very greatest contributors to the American Songbook is Randy Newman. Just listen, for instance, to “Texas Girl at the Funeral of Her Father” — two-and-a-half minutes of beautiful, beautiful heartbreak.
- Reading: Thinking that, with Gene Wolfe having died, it would be a good idea to go back and re-read some of his major works. By the way, of all the tributes, the best is by Brian Phillips.
- Podcasts: Still experiencing Podcast Frustration. I may delete this category.
- Food: Craving the huaraches at Gary’s Grill.
- Drink: I’ve never been a big fan of gin, but I’ve been making some warmer-weather cocktails with St. George’s highly botanical gin and enjoying them very much.
