If you're being honest, there's no chance that a great book sells a million copies, or five hundred thousand copies, or a hundred thousand, or fifty thousand, probably not ten thousand. With vanishingly few exceptions, quality means obscurity, success means stupidity: this is the cultural social contract.

The danger of Substack is that it popularizes the average, the semi-exceptional—the sounds-smart: a network of almost-smart people reading almost smart-pieces.

It's just a gut feeling what a system based on clicks will produce.

The like button is memetic. It's not really possible to imagine that it could function differently. If you like this iteration of the writer's diary, then you have to incentivize someone else to like it. If you agree with me now, for reasons you do comprehend, there's chances that someone will agree with me in ten minutes for reasons they don't understand, just because you do.

With the magazine you're holding in your hands, it's not the same. I don't know you're holding it in your hands.

Basically, Substack selects from Mimesis, like all social media. And so what's emerging is a new genre of writing, which has evolved to be quotable, shareable, a blend of concise and portentous, prophetic sometimes but usually mid.

Activism is a careerism.

How incongruent the Voltarian “I”— the Enlightenment I, which has the confidence to stand outside a world of injustices and irrationality—is with the digital oversoul.

The writer-prophet with a well-honed sensibility—that incarnation of individuality is foreign to us, and we're foreign to it. We who are hooked up to the network at all times. Who have lost our Voltarian I—no longer believers in progress, but the comical egress of techno-dystopia.

Samuel Beckett was like a refugee from the lost island of modernism. Beckett died in 1989. Modernism died its final death. But what we really mean by modernism is literature that requires the whole knowledge of Western civilization to understand it. We mean the literature of high literacy, works that capable of justifying their difficulty.1

I hate having things to do early in the day. I would really prefer to have to be nowhere before 4pm ideally.

I do feel that I have to learn to consume less, to spend less, to do less. My life has not really felt sustainable for—at least in its current incarnation—for a long time. I feel like I'm always one step ahead of something that's chasing me, and I'm too afraid to look back around to see what it is. The shadow of scarcity. The shadow of irrelevance.

A persistent literary archetype. The priest-turned-artist. In Lawrence you see the Anglican minister-turned-artist. In Tolstoy you see the Orthodox Synod-turned-artist. Or sort of—you see a failed holy man who can't help but be an artist. So often literature is either a failed version of a new religion or a competitor which has set up shop next to religion. 2

This is the perfect time of year: where it still gets cold enough at night to make a fire, but it's golden and warm by 11 a.m.

If no one wants to exile you, if no one takes issue with you and your work, if you're completely simpatico to your community, are you really—can it be said—an artist? Or are you a nice person with a little bit of talent, an ability to put on a puppet show?

I think there's a simple distinction possible in the history of the novel, at least over the last 150 years, between the poetic novel—Woolf, Henry James, Joyce,3 both—which compresses and uses techniques typically reserved for poetry to catalog society and to represent the hero. And then there's the prose method, which is based on historical chronicle. Like Balzac or Tolstoy.

We might think of a novel as a perversion of an existing form of communication. So many novels today refract the tweet or the post, the meme.

The one purpose that this diary serves for me—selfishly, nakedly, nakedly selfishly—is that it's one platform where I can think fully as myself in a longer form: liberated from the need to self-promote or participate in the discourse. Even in my official essays for various publications, there's a need for a hook, an extended argument, there's a bit of flattening, compression. And then of course on Notes, on X, there's the temptation to troll or to argue or be ironic.

And all this has a winnowing effect on the mind, even on beliefs and values. The boundaries of your own thought processes move in, like moving in the fences on a baseball field. You start celebrating hitting 200-foot home runs rather than 400-foot home runs.

All the different fractured, mutilated parts of the digital brain, the parts of my own embodied psyche that I project onto the Internet, start to think that they're the primary thing, and the primary thing starts to think that it's it.

But here, the writer's diary, I can let the primary psyche, the real-thinking-me, push the fences back a little bit, put the fractured digital selves in their place.4

Stephen Spender, in The Struggle of the Modern, writes, “by the end of the 19th century, the eye becomes the mask, the persona, which is a projection of the stylized pose of the poet, acting a role in real life. The drunken, affected, vitiated mask of Wilde, a Lionel Johnson, or a Dowson, is partly a defense against the public refusal to become involved in the self-betrayal of playing an accepted role, and partly a sophisticated and self-conscious variation of the romantic poet becoming poetry. In 1890s poetry, the eye is both the poet subjectively and the poet regarded by himself as he. In Wilde, in the early 20th century, the eye is regarded ironically, but the irony is at the expense of the public, not the poet's own expense. The poet, who deliberately produces before his public an impression of mocking frivolity, alone to himself he is all wearied seriousness rhapsodizing to the moon.”