This is great. Over the last few years, I've been mostly reading and rereading classic fiction. Lately, I've been on an Edith Wharton kick and it occurs to me, as I think about this post, that contemporary novels also operate as Wharton-ish comedies of manners but with irony instead of wit and with resignation rather than heartbreak. As I've written elsewhere on Substack, contemporary fiction is about lightly-flawed heroes operating in a world with obvious villains. Some of today's most celebrated novels are just superhero movies where the protagonist's special power is self-detachment.
Interesting. I’ve been rereading Tolstoy and was struck by how the “peace” part of the novel was so typical of the drawing room novels I’ve Austen and the like… “Resignation rather than heartbreak and irony instead of wit…” Modern audiences don’t do earnestness well. It’s like we think it’s (to borrow a phrase from the “young’s”) cringe. So everything is ironic and sarcastic, self referential and performative.
This is excellent. Being a slower reader and selective about what I read as it pertains to my moods and intellectual interests, I've scraped against all of these books dozens of times without any real interest in them, and you've hit the nail on the head why. I am constantly saying to people "I wish I had lived through the seventies, eighties, and early nineties." Not because they were inherently better times, as mindless nostalgia is a place I do not want to live -- but because they were pre-internet. I feel like if I had lived through them, perhaps I could be better equipped to experience life without the internet as cleanly as I would like to. I have never lived without the internet, in fact I grew up with it, but I have always talked in long, winding paragraphs that never fit neatly with the cultural meme-ification of language. I have always felt like the internet robs me of some deeper insight into the emotional psyche of my characters, because I am constantly aware of how those characters may be perceived once discourse gets its hands on it. I'm hoping for the day I move past this, and start to feel that I can write something that has nothing to do with political pedagogy, even if it is applied after the fact.
I read an interesting statement by Susannah Clarke recently. She said that reading Neil Gaiman (I think...?) showed that she didn't have to write a twenty-first century novel and that she could write a nineteenth century novel.
Ahhh this is such an incredible way of thinking about it! I want desperately to work in modes that seem to the culture at large as "out-dated." They are more vital and real to me than anything that recreates the internet or modern culture ad nauseum.
Thank you for your note and for sharing your struggle Rose. I think about it as thus: how can my work contribute to liberation without sounding or feeling to me like propaganda? I’ve heard it said that in making good art, the author must learn in the process, not merely repeat what he or she thought going into it.
I think there’s another point here about progressive culture’s dependence on propaganda and memes, the algorithmic qualities of thought and “choir preaching” it encourages. To me this essay is a call for deeper curiosity. It’s also a warning against using flat and stereotypical descriptions just to make a point.
In my own work, I have been thinking about how our engagement to get “likes” may be shaping the way we communicate and also create.
Is it just me or is it scary to write “beyond the discourse?” This is a good fear to bump up against.
Maybe I should go back underground to give myself a bit more freedom.
No, it's not just you-- it's extremely scary to go beyond it. I feel like even intelligent, thoughtful individuals can be susceptible to believing that suddenly progressive ideals have "won" because of how deeply the media and internet culture is entrenched and dependent on the weaponizing of them. Therefore, they are unwilling to admit that they may be wrong about certain topics, or at least that there are nuances that are harder to deal with without proper, civilized discussion. See Rainbow Capitalism and its like; progressive people can be blinded by the corporate greed, too, if it aligns with their values.
Hello! Thanks for replying. This year I read Erasure, the book that the movie is based on but it was written in a pre social media era. I haven’t seen the movie yet. The book definitely is about flattened characters and playing stereotypes to appeal to readers (and to the publishing industry)
I thought the book was better than the movie at this, even though as you say it is about a different distribution mechanism, it was largely about the same thing. Mansfield Park is a good novel on this topic too.
Henry and @rose I think Erasure is a great example. Yes it’s a book about a Black writer facing Black stereotypes but it also has interesting scenes about family, masculinity, academia with emotions related to belonging, anger, (lack of) confidence and more. So the characters aren’t just flat and the interactions have layers and surprises.
I have not read Erasure, but I saw American Fiction, and as a bookseller I was very disappointed with the film, because it adapts the issues the 20-year-old novel was contending with in a pre-internet world. It did not take into account the changing landscape of black fiction as the years went on -- it didn't even acknowledge the boom in 1960s set narratives after (white woman written) The Help, or the more modern black writer who is constantly writing about generational trauma and tying it all back to slavery. It seemed entirely concerned with the stereotypes that typified urban novels at the time the book was originally written.
In my opinion, this made for a poor choice for the Adapted Screenplay Oscar, as it could have easily been updated to the current state of publishing to include all these things and the way white people still haven't changed in regard to what works on them to assuage their white guilt. Though I do contend that the ending, as deliberately absurdist as it is, almost makes up for the lack of the current literature landscape commentary. I round this out a little more in my review of it on Letterboxd. I might also be missing something by having not read the book.
I HAVE however read Percival Everett's latest novel, James, which was out-and-out astounding in its evisceration of "reclaiming the voices" narratives that I'm talking about, thereby improving and pushing the actual criticism of modern day allyship to dizzying heights. THAT is how you write a modern novel engaging with the discourse: by removing it entirely from the jaws of those who wield it without wit or curiosity by their sides! I believe Mark Twain would have been in awe of that book, and I can't wait to read more of Everett's work.
“I'm hoping for the day I move past this, and start to feel that I can write something that has nothing to do with political pedagogy.”
Start today! Never mind “starting to feel you can write” the way you want to: start to cultivate a proper loathing for writing in a way that is *anything like* these books you’ve scraped up against without any real interest. Remind yourself, constantly, how dull and limited their way of looking at the world is. Be horrified at the bare idea of being anything like them. If you really feel you *can’t* write the way you *don’t* want, then you’ll have no choice but to move past it. (I find Nabokov’s criticism — “Strong Opinions”, “Think, Speak, Write” — especially bracing in this regard…)
I was born in 1961. Life was much more real before the Internet.
The only downside was that it was much lonelier. There were many times in my twenties when I was miserably lonely and had no one to talk to. That hasn't happened to me now in decades. There is always someone on the Internet to talk to.
The difference is that life before the Internet was three-dimensional. We lived in a three-dimensional world, we interacted in three dimensions, we had to find solutions to our problems in three dimensions or not at all. There was no two-dimensional computer screen to go to. Everything in daily life was inescapably here and now.
So we escaped into novels. But they were novels about the three-dimensional world.
I was a writer and editor for 40 years, and I spent the last ten years of my career teaching people how to write novels. The difference you are looking for is between scenes and exposition. Stop writing exposition. Start writing scenes. Nobody wants to hear what we think about things. Truly--none of our thoughts are all that interesting. They just want to live alongside interesting, realistic characters fighting to make impossible choices in the real, inescapable, three-dimensional world.
“nothing to do with political pedagogy “— perhaps start by observing your life- writing small moments, writing joys. Another approach is to write to a younger version of yourself. There may be political aspects but you probably won’t write propaganda to yourself!!
The times are so urgent that people want to write about the laws and the systems. I totally get it and also if we are called to write differently, perhaps more emotionally or more sensually or more enigmatically, there’s room for all of us.
"Perhaps more emotionally or more sensually or more enigmatically," yes that's exactly what I'm looking for! I am working on things that I want to make people feel, rather than think, on first read -- then when they reread, they find that thinking about what I've written offers new pleasures. I never want to inspire guilt or dread in my reader, but curiosity!
Thanks for this, Henry. It's a perceptive and compelling essay. As I read, I kept wondering, are these characters reflecting our own shallowness back to us? Not just the banality of online discourse and so-called Netflix Realism, but our own inner lives, perhaps impoverished by the internet medium itself?
It is circular - a self-propelling and self-reinforcing mechanism, for sure. The reflection of our (unreflective) reflections. And vice-versa and back again.
This is a hell of an essay (I sort of wish it were two or three). The idea of discourse fiction is fascinating though, as is the idea of novels that have begun to mimic online culture. As a reader, I struggle with this sometimes. I don't want to be "old-fashioned" or stilted in my tastes, yet sometimes books like these just feel too close. I'm living this "discourse," so I don't always want it reflected back at me. I don't mind the presence of technology in what I read, but I don't think I want it to be the crux of what I'm reading.
It’s fine for novels to incorporate discourse, as the Victorians did, I think the problem is that these novels are defined by discourse—hence you uneasy feeing. I thought about splitting it up, but it’s one big idea and if there’s anywhere that an audience will read a big idea like this it’s here!
Is there a difference between discourse fiction and a polemic? (Incredible essay, you’ve given me much to think about and I’m queasily grateful I couldn’t sell my last novel.)
Excellent, verbalises observations I've made myself as well but never been able to formalise. Lots of modern novels just feel so entrapped with meta-commentary that they don't seem to be able to tell stories about characters and their thoughts. Even stories that try to be more nuanced seem unable to move on beyond the gimmick of being like that;
I found this essay so interesting that I immediately read it again upon finishing it. It hit on a lot of things I struggle with in some contemporary fiction that I haven't been able to identify clearly. I think for me it's partly to do with the longevity of a novel - discourse moves on so quickly in the modern age that these novels start to appear dated just a year or two after release. Reading this essay has also made me wonder whether discourse narratives can only exist when they're set in the present day. Would changing the setting to the 1970s, for example, (and therefore removing the presence of Twitter/the internet) cast the same discourse ideas in a different light? Or is the internet so central to modern discourse that it would become incomprehensible? I can't think of any contemporary examples of this but would be interested to read one!
Well that’s an interesting question—I think the genre requirements of fantasy make it hard for it to fall into the same trap, though another comment here suggests Babel by R F Kuang is discourse fiction
Great article. I agree that many of these modern discourse novels have no plot. Nothing happens. Any promise of action is not fulfilled. At most--at most!--the character investigates actions that occurred somewhere before the present day, in the prior generation perhaps. But nothing happens now. I think this is the result of being so caught up in the discourse, in the these language games about what and can't be said, or thought. Action becomes impossible, even in fiction. And the character growth, too, is normally pretty limited, because the character must start and end as someone basically sympathetic to modern sympathies.
I have a feeling this might be what some people actually mean when they complain about a story (book, movie, comic, video game) getting "too political." Yeah, most of the time, it really is just "I don't like the politics," but that still leaves that feeling that a story isn't really a story, but a set of talking points--in other words, cliches. That, or someone reliving a Twitter argument, like George Costanza wracking his brain to come up with "The jerk store called..."
I wonder if we could consider Ayn Rand to be an early Discourse Novelist, except that she basically invented her own discourse. But her characters are caricatures, not people, and it feels like the goal is to win an argument with somebody. Whereas authors like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky are absolutely political, but their characters feel like living, breathing, human beings who are allowed to develop their own ideas, beliefs, and arguments for their beliefs.
I think it is a little unfair on Lockwood's novel not to discuss its second half (I'm not sure it's completely successful, but it is a clear attempt to get beyond the trap Lockwood has set for herself / Twitter has set for her).
Maybe, but I find the whole thing to be so premised on and defined by the discourse—and it is self evidently auto fiction and borne of her online life—that it doesn’t work. I’m interested to see what her next book is like.
This is a great analysis. I think there are stories out there today that incorporate "discourse" as essentially the background its characters live in and the language they speak, without having that be the point. I can't think of a novel at the moment, but SUCCESSION does this well. The show isn't "about" capitalism or racism or liberal/conservative ideology or anything like that, though all of those ideas are present in so far as they affect the journey of each character.
I must confess I had dismissed Rooney as a discourse writer (though I wouldn’t have thought to put it in such terms) despite never having read one of her books. Perhaps I need to correct that
There’s a clue at the end of the Guardian link to her dialogue with Lockwood. Rooney says that writing to her is all about the characters she discovers. She wants to find out about them, to introduce them to the reader. There’s plenty of discourse in her stories but ultimately she writes to learn things about people.
Congratulations on the link in Free Press today Henry in their top 10. This opened up a way of thinking critically about writing I am uneducated about and still digesting. Is it the shallowness of thinking that discourse promotes that is distasteful to so many. Are they the writers so trapped in their irony they lose the perspective that makes for “great” writing. For some reason I think of the flavorings in our food that are intentionally engineered to only create a desire for another chip (for example) and flavor becomes the object of desire. Flavor becomes the substance standing in for the more holy? spiritual? fulfillment that eating should bring to our body.
This same feeling of endless scrolling leaves me with a similar nausea of only wanting more of the scrolling and not the substance.
A lot here Henry thank you so much for your thoughts and your work.
This is great. Over the last few years, I've been mostly reading and rereading classic fiction. Lately, I've been on an Edith Wharton kick and it occurs to me, as I think about this post, that contemporary novels also operate as Wharton-ish comedies of manners but with irony instead of wit and with resignation rather than heartbreak. As I've written elsewhere on Substack, contemporary fiction is about lightly-flawed heroes operating in a world with obvious villains. Some of today's most celebrated novels are just superhero movies where the protagonist's special power is self-detachment.
Certainly aged that the villains are obvious and I think that’s a key trait of discourse fiction—we know who we’re against!
Interesting. I’ve been rereading Tolstoy and was struck by how the “peace” part of the novel was so typical of the drawing room novels I’ve Austen and the like… “Resignation rather than heartbreak and irony instead of wit…” Modern audiences don’t do earnestness well. It’s like we think it’s (to borrow a phrase from the “young’s”) cringe. So everything is ironic and sarcastic, self referential and performative.
This is excellent. Being a slower reader and selective about what I read as it pertains to my moods and intellectual interests, I've scraped against all of these books dozens of times without any real interest in them, and you've hit the nail on the head why. I am constantly saying to people "I wish I had lived through the seventies, eighties, and early nineties." Not because they were inherently better times, as mindless nostalgia is a place I do not want to live -- but because they were pre-internet. I feel like if I had lived through them, perhaps I could be better equipped to experience life without the internet as cleanly as I would like to. I have never lived without the internet, in fact I grew up with it, but I have always talked in long, winding paragraphs that never fit neatly with the cultural meme-ification of language. I have always felt like the internet robs me of some deeper insight into the emotional psyche of my characters, because I am constantly aware of how those characters may be perceived once discourse gets its hands on it. I'm hoping for the day I move past this, and start to feel that I can write something that has nothing to do with political pedagogy, even if it is applied after the fact.
I read an interesting statement by Susannah Clarke recently. She said that reading Neil Gaiman (I think...?) showed that she didn't have to write a twenty-first century novel and that she could write a nineteenth century novel.
Ahhh this is such an incredible way of thinking about it! I want desperately to work in modes that seem to the culture at large as "out-dated." They are more vital and real to me than anything that recreates the internet or modern culture ad nauseum.
Thank you for your note and for sharing your struggle Rose. I think about it as thus: how can my work contribute to liberation without sounding or feeling to me like propaganda? I’ve heard it said that in making good art, the author must learn in the process, not merely repeat what he or she thought going into it.
I think there’s another point here about progressive culture’s dependence on propaganda and memes, the algorithmic qualities of thought and “choir preaching” it encourages. To me this essay is a call for deeper curiosity. It’s also a warning against using flat and stereotypical descriptions just to make a point.
In my own work, I have been thinking about how our engagement to get “likes” may be shaping the way we communicate and also create.
Is it just me or is it scary to write “beyond the discourse?” This is a good fear to bump up against.
Maybe I should go back underground to give myself a bit more freedom.
No, it's not just you-- it's extremely scary to go beyond it. I feel like even intelligent, thoughtful individuals can be susceptible to believing that suddenly progressive ideals have "won" because of how deeply the media and internet culture is entrenched and dependent on the weaponizing of them. Therefore, they are unwilling to admit that they may be wrong about certain topics, or at least that there are nuances that are harder to deal with without proper, civilized discussion. See Rainbow Capitalism and its like; progressive people can be blinded by the corporate greed, too, if it aligns with their values.
This might especially be true since many people will block anyone they don't want to listen to.
Have you seen the movie “ American Fiction”? The movie dovetails with what you have described- about clicks and likes. I thought it was well done
Hello! Thanks for replying. This year I read Erasure, the book that the movie is based on but it was written in a pre social media era. I haven’t seen the movie yet. The book definitely is about flattened characters and playing stereotypes to appeal to readers (and to the publishing industry)
I thought the book was better than the movie at this, even though as you say it is about a different distribution mechanism, it was largely about the same thing. Mansfield Park is a good novel on this topic too.
Henry and @rose I think Erasure is a great example. Yes it’s a book about a Black writer facing Black stereotypes but it also has interesting scenes about family, masculinity, academia with emotions related to belonging, anger, (lack of) confidence and more. So the characters aren’t just flat and the interactions have layers and surprises.
I have not read Erasure, but I saw American Fiction, and as a bookseller I was very disappointed with the film, because it adapts the issues the 20-year-old novel was contending with in a pre-internet world. It did not take into account the changing landscape of black fiction as the years went on -- it didn't even acknowledge the boom in 1960s set narratives after (white woman written) The Help, or the more modern black writer who is constantly writing about generational trauma and tying it all back to slavery. It seemed entirely concerned with the stereotypes that typified urban novels at the time the book was originally written.
In my opinion, this made for a poor choice for the Adapted Screenplay Oscar, as it could have easily been updated to the current state of publishing to include all these things and the way white people still haven't changed in regard to what works on them to assuage their white guilt. Though I do contend that the ending, as deliberately absurdist as it is, almost makes up for the lack of the current literature landscape commentary. I round this out a little more in my review of it on Letterboxd. I might also be missing something by having not read the book.
I HAVE however read Percival Everett's latest novel, James, which was out-and-out astounding in its evisceration of "reclaiming the voices" narratives that I'm talking about, thereby improving and pushing the actual criticism of modern day allyship to dizzying heights. THAT is how you write a modern novel engaging with the discourse: by removing it entirely from the jaws of those who wield it without wit or curiosity by their sides! I believe Mark Twain would have been in awe of that book, and I can't wait to read more of Everett's work.
good novel too
“I'm hoping for the day I move past this, and start to feel that I can write something that has nothing to do with political pedagogy.”
Start today! Never mind “starting to feel you can write” the way you want to: start to cultivate a proper loathing for writing in a way that is *anything like* these books you’ve scraped up against without any real interest. Remind yourself, constantly, how dull and limited their way of looking at the world is. Be horrified at the bare idea of being anything like them. If you really feel you *can’t* write the way you *don’t* want, then you’ll have no choice but to move past it. (I find Nabokov’s criticism — “Strong Opinions”, “Think, Speak, Write” — especially bracing in this regard…)
You're totally right! Thank you for the encouragement. I'll check out those Nabokov essays.
I was born in 1961. Life was much more real before the Internet.
The only downside was that it was much lonelier. There were many times in my twenties when I was miserably lonely and had no one to talk to. That hasn't happened to me now in decades. There is always someone on the Internet to talk to.
The difference is that life before the Internet was three-dimensional. We lived in a three-dimensional world, we interacted in three dimensions, we had to find solutions to our problems in three dimensions or not at all. There was no two-dimensional computer screen to go to. Everything in daily life was inescapably here and now.
So we escaped into novels. But they were novels about the three-dimensional world.
I was a writer and editor for 40 years, and I spent the last ten years of my career teaching people how to write novels. The difference you are looking for is between scenes and exposition. Stop writing exposition. Start writing scenes. Nobody wants to hear what we think about things. Truly--none of our thoughts are all that interesting. They just want to live alongside interesting, realistic characters fighting to make impossible choices in the real, inescapable, three-dimensional world.
http://victoriamixon.com
“nothing to do with political pedagogy “— perhaps start by observing your life- writing small moments, writing joys. Another approach is to write to a younger version of yourself. There may be political aspects but you probably won’t write propaganda to yourself!!
The times are so urgent that people want to write about the laws and the systems. I totally get it and also if we are called to write differently, perhaps more emotionally or more sensually or more enigmatically, there’s room for all of us.
"Perhaps more emotionally or more sensually or more enigmatically," yes that's exactly what I'm looking for! I am working on things that I want to make people feel, rather than think, on first read -- then when they reread, they find that thinking about what I've written offers new pleasures. I never want to inspire guilt or dread in my reader, but curiosity!
Thanks for this, Henry. It's a perceptive and compelling essay. As I read, I kept wondering, are these characters reflecting our own shallowness back to us? Not just the banality of online discourse and so-called Netflix Realism, but our own inner lives, perhaps impoverished by the internet medium itself?
It is circular - a self-propelling and self-reinforcing mechanism, for sure. The reflection of our (unreflective) reflections. And vice-versa and back again.
Online discourse as uncanny horror.
This is a hell of an essay (I sort of wish it were two or three). The idea of discourse fiction is fascinating though, as is the idea of novels that have begun to mimic online culture. As a reader, I struggle with this sometimes. I don't want to be "old-fashioned" or stilted in my tastes, yet sometimes books like these just feel too close. I'm living this "discourse," so I don't always want it reflected back at me. I don't mind the presence of technology in what I read, but I don't think I want it to be the crux of what I'm reading.
It’s fine for novels to incorporate discourse, as the Victorians did, I think the problem is that these novels are defined by discourse—hence you uneasy feeing. I thought about splitting it up, but it’s one big idea and if there’s anywhere that an audience will read a big idea like this it’s here!
Is there a difference between discourse fiction and a polemic? (Incredible essay, you’ve given me much to think about and I’m queasily grateful I couldn’t sell my last novel.)
Polemic is non fiction much more directly argumentative. Thanks!
Excellent, verbalises observations I've made myself as well but never been able to formalise. Lots of modern novels just feel so entrapped with meta-commentary that they don't seem to be able to tell stories about characters and their thoughts. Even stories that try to be more nuanced seem unable to move on beyond the gimmick of being like that;
I found this essay so interesting that I immediately read it again upon finishing it. It hit on a lot of things I struggle with in some contemporary fiction that I haven't been able to identify clearly. I think for me it's partly to do with the longevity of a novel - discourse moves on so quickly in the modern age that these novels start to appear dated just a year or two after release. Reading this essay has also made me wonder whether discourse narratives can only exist when they're set in the present day. Would changing the setting to the 1970s, for example, (and therefore removing the presence of Twitter/the internet) cast the same discourse ideas in a different light? Or is the internet so central to modern discourse that it would become incomprehensible? I can't think of any contemporary examples of this but would be interested to read one!
Well that’s an interesting question—I think the genre requirements of fantasy make it hard for it to fall into the same trap, though another comment here suggests Babel by R F Kuang is discourse fiction
Babel is a great example! I found it quite jarring to read, so maybe that answers my question
I enjoyed it a lot, but I did think it was too long
Great article. I agree that many of these modern discourse novels have no plot. Nothing happens. Any promise of action is not fulfilled. At most--at most!--the character investigates actions that occurred somewhere before the present day, in the prior generation perhaps. But nothing happens now. I think this is the result of being so caught up in the discourse, in the these language games about what and can't be said, or thought. Action becomes impossible, even in fiction. And the character growth, too, is normally pretty limited, because the character must start and end as someone basically sympathetic to modern sympathies.
Fascinating essay that explains why so many modern novels leave me feeling empty.
I have a feeling this might be what some people actually mean when they complain about a story (book, movie, comic, video game) getting "too political." Yeah, most of the time, it really is just "I don't like the politics," but that still leaves that feeling that a story isn't really a story, but a set of talking points--in other words, cliches. That, or someone reliving a Twitter argument, like George Costanza wracking his brain to come up with "The jerk store called..."
I wonder if we could consider Ayn Rand to be an early Discourse Novelist, except that she basically invented her own discourse. But her characters are caricatures, not people, and it feels like the goal is to win an argument with somebody. Whereas authors like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky are absolutely political, but their characters feel like living, breathing, human beings who are allowed to develop their own ideas, beliefs, and arguments for their beliefs.
my thoughts on this are HELL YES GET THEM HENRY
haha yeah!! I actually thought no one would care about this but the response is great :)
I think it is a little unfair on Lockwood's novel not to discuss its second half (I'm not sure it's completely successful, but it is a clear attempt to get beyond the trap Lockwood has set for herself / Twitter has set for her).
Maybe, but I find the whole thing to be so premised on and defined by the discourse—and it is self evidently auto fiction and borne of her online life—that it doesn’t work. I’m interested to see what her next book is like.
This is a great analysis. I think there are stories out there today that incorporate "discourse" as essentially the background its characters live in and the language they speak, without having that be the point. I can't think of a novel at the moment, but SUCCESSION does this well. The show isn't "about" capitalism or racism or liberal/conservative ideology or anything like that, though all of those ideas are present in so far as they affect the journey of each character.
I must confess I had dismissed Rooney as a discourse writer (though I wouldn’t have thought to put it in such terms) despite never having read one of her books. Perhaps I need to correct that
You must!!
There’s a clue at the end of the Guardian link to her dialogue with Lockwood. Rooney says that writing to her is all about the characters she discovers. She wants to find out about them, to introduce them to the reader. There’s plenty of discourse in her stories but ultimately she writes to learn things about people.
Yes exactly so
This was great. New sub here! ✨
splendid!
Awesome work
Thanks!
Congratulations on the link in Free Press today Henry in their top 10. This opened up a way of thinking critically about writing I am uneducated about and still digesting. Is it the shallowness of thinking that discourse promotes that is distasteful to so many. Are they the writers so trapped in their irony they lose the perspective that makes for “great” writing. For some reason I think of the flavorings in our food that are intentionally engineered to only create a desire for another chip (for example) and flavor becomes the object of desire. Flavor becomes the substance standing in for the more holy? spiritual? fulfillment that eating should bring to our body.
This same feeling of endless scrolling leaves me with a similar nausea of only wanting more of the scrolling and not the substance.
A lot here Henry thank you so much for your thoughts and your work.
That’s how I found this column! Subscribed!!
Haven’t seen it…will look thanks for telling me!