Stacks on Stacks on Stacks

Also: Walter Benjamin's Illuminations, the Apu trilogy, a brief hiatus

Lately I’ve wound up in a couple of different conversations with other writers about Substack. Some had one that was successful, some had one but weren’t sure what to do with it, some were thinking about starting one or felt like they should. The one constant was that it seems like nobody really knows if it’s worth it.

I’ve been writing this for a year and a half, and often wonder if it’s worth it. Eighteen posts, most somewhere between one and two thousand words, or roughly half a book’s worth of writing. I don’t love thinking about it in those terms. In other ways, it’s not like a book at all: my writing here is not as focused, sustained, or nearly as stressful, and the time and effort involved is much less, because I don’t revise these much.

When I joined Substack, I didn’t know much about it. I subscribed to a few, piecemeal—most of those are no longer active or I no longer subscribe to them, which seems to suggest something—but I didn’t really understand what it was. My closest thing to a model was my friend Dave Madden’s. As I said in my first post, I started this because I wanted to write in a more public way. I had almost no online presence at the time, and hadn’t for a number of years. That made my life better, but was probably not great for my career—I often felt invisible, like I’d entered some kind of writer exile. I thought of this as an alternative to social media, especially Twitter, which usually made me like or respect other writers less. (I’m sure the same applied to me; that’s one of the reasons I left.)

In other words, I bought into Substack’s claims of being a publishing platform.¹ But the longer I’ve been on here, the more it’s begun to feel like social media. Specifically, it’s been reminding me too much of Twitter, the last supposed publishing revolution (remember microblogging?) that sucked in so many writers desperate for attention, or the illusion of popularity and influence, and then gave us no tangible return for all the collective time and effort we spent there, producing content for free. Those parallels became more obvious a few months after I started this, when Substack launched Notes, which shamelessly ripped off Twitter and, judging by the scant time I’ve spent there, might be even worse: the same pandering political outrage, dumb and obvious writing advice, and hasty takes on fleeting controversies, only without the vestiges of humor or news that once made Twitter tolerable.

The more it seems like social media, the less interest I have in Substack. I do like and reliably read a handful of other newsletters, some of which I’ve discussed here. And I’ll keep writing this as long as I feel like I’m getting something out of it, even if it’s only a fleeting sense of completing something every month. But a few people have asked if I have any plans to monetize this, and the answer to that is no.

I don’t have anything against other people making money on here. Don’t hate the hustle. But don’t obligate it, either. Turning this or any Substack into a reliable revenue stream strikes me as a dubious prospect for most writers, not to mention a miserable one; personally, I’m doing my level best to stay out of the content mines.

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Speaking of Substack conversations, one of those was after a true crime event I did a while back with Leah Sottile, author of When the Moon Turns to Blood and creator of the hit podcast Bundyville, among others. She also does original reporting on her Substack, one of the better ones I’ve seen. This recent post is a good example.

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I’ve read roughly 700 pages of student work in the last month, so I don’t have much in terms of reading recommendations. Right now I’m working my way through Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, a posthumous collection of his essays and criticism. I found a battered and zealously annotated paperback copy at Belmont Books, my local used bookstore and one of the gems of my neighborhood.

I’ve been fascinated by Benjamin since grad school. I used to teach his essay “Hashish in Marseille,” and spent a handful of months trying to write an essay about his drug journals, which has yet to coalesce. (Although I turned a few sections of it into this Essay Daily piece.) I’ve read a few of the more famous essays in Illuminations before: “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” the one about unpacking his library.

But I wasn’t familiar with the book as a whole. It was collected and edited by Hannah Arendt, whose fifty-page introduction is a marvel that manages to combine a concise biography and a critical summary of Benjamin’s work. I thought the parts about his failed academic career, his book collecting, and his approach to using quotations were especially interesting—especially the idea that he aspired to create works almost entirely from quotations, and viewed them as a destructive force, or, as he put it, “robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions.”

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I also recently read this piece by Sigrid Nunez, which wound up in Best American Essays. I’m not sure how best it is—and I have issues with that anthology—but I liked the essay as a compendium of other writers’ thoughts, a sort of commonplace. I was especially interested in the Oliver Sacks quote on how, from a neuroscientist’s perspective, we’re living through a global psychiatric catastrophe driven by digital devices, as well as the characteristically cranky late-Roth epitaph for the literary world.

That said, I’m suspicious of the subject. Why we write is one of those self-important and ultimately meaningless questions writers love to ramble on about. I suspect writers aren’t asked that question nearly as often as Nunez’s essay would have you believe—I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it asked, and I’ve attended more literary events than any reasonable person should. If someone did ask me, I’d probably say I write because I wasn’t a few inches taller, in which case I would’ve wasted my youth trying to carve out a career in some third-tier European basketball league instead.

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Although I haven’t been reading as many books, the movie binge continues. It feels like the most literary thing I can do when my reading time is occupied by work. One thing I love about movies² is that they’re easier to learn about than books are. I’ve been reading literature since I was a stubborn second-grader trying to plow through the biggest book I could find in my school library, the collected works of Poe,³ and I still don’t know most of the literary tradition. But movies are only a little more than a century old; you can get a decent education in a few years.

This month, I finally got around to the Apu trilogy. If you’re thinking you might not want to spend your weekend watching six hours of subtitled black-and-white films set in early twentieth-century India, believe me, I understand. But once you start Pather Panchali, it’s kind of mesmerizing. I finished all three within a week. When World of Apu ended, I was sad it was over. The backstory of their restoration is also worth a watch.

I also re-watched Point Break⁴ for the first time in a long time. I’ve loved that movie for decades—I own the director’s cut on DVD—but now that I’m a cinephile, I realized that I don’t just like it for the campy nostalgia. It’s actually a well-made movie, maybe even a good one;⁵ compared to most contemporary action flicks, it might as well be Casablanca. Don’t make me write a whole post about this.

A few other recent highlights: Man on Wire, The Daytrippers, Fish Tank, Kicking and Screaming, The Holdovers (way better than Oppenheimer), and Hale County This Morning, This Evening. 

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I’ve been promoting friends’ work a lot here lately, but hey, I have smart friends. Matt Young’s first novel, End of Active Service, comes out soon. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve been looking forward to it for a long time. His first book, Eat the Apple, is one of my favorite memoirs. I’m guessing the things that made it great—its formal inventiveness, honesty, and sense of humor—will translate to the novel, too.

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I’m going to take next month off to focus on finishing a draft of one of those aforementioned book projects, so the next post will be in August, inshallah.

1. The homepage promises “a new media ecosystem” with “full editorial control and no gatekeepers.” As if eliminating editors somehow equates to full editorial control, and as if as algorithm deciding what content we see based on opaque and profit-driven motives is somehow both not gatekeeping and better than the human alternative.

2. Cinema would probably be a better word here, if it weren’t so barfy.

3. I had nightmares for years.

4. If you’re wondering whether I mean the original or the 2015 remake, you shouldn’t be.

5. Jake Gyllenhaal agrees.