on the appearance of committing thought

Links on performative writing and reading. Not that **you** do that! (Me neither)

Last week, I went to The Frick (pay what you wish admission on Wednesday afternoons! Just don’t forget it closes at 6pm and arrive accidentally at 5:30pm, though speed-viewing Vermeer is still better than 99 percent of all other human experiences) and The Morgan Library & Museum (if you ask for a press ticket, they will glance boredly at your “website” for 0.002 seconds and give you an entrance sticker for free).

Gorgeous art galore, of course, but what felt most sensational were the walls of these plushy interiors themselves, specifically re: the mossy green velvet that coated the walls and floor of The Frick’s west gallery, and the red silk wall coverings in Morgan’s study. It made me realize how bored I am of the white gallery wall aesthetic that has polluted our eyefeel with so many “minimalist” interiors, which feel totally blinding by comparison to these sumptuous spaces. Go see!

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For obvious reasons, writing about reading & writing—specifically, which forms, intentions, and aesthetics related those activities might make some ventures more superior than others—goes crazy on Substack. The author Carmen Maria Machado recently got roped into this publishing world scandal where a previous student of hers from the Iowa Writers Workshop got caught plagiarizing; CMM ‘stacked about it but also more broadly dropped some opinions about MFA programs and the oft-confused delineation between acquiring the shiny status of having published (or having a book deal) versus doing the achievement of having written. (Written well* is sort of implied) That old tension!

Essentially CMM is offering good, classic advice on like, not rushing your art, but I also lol’d a lot reading it because it’s such perfect writer catnip—the kind of thing everyone is highlighting and retweeting (restacking?) to show that they get it, it’s more about the work than the status even though we are all of course kind of kidding ourselves. She links to this post from the author Summer Brennan on “How (Not) To Get a Book Deal,” which also takes aim at those who seem more caught up in the visible, performative (but also…monetizable?) aspects of writing:

Most of the would-be authors I encounter in life or on social media who loudly bemoan the fact that they are not yet published have a few things in common. For starters, they often cite an arbitrary age-related deadline. They want to become a published author by the time they are 40, or 30, or even 25, and feel like a failure if they don’t. This is not an ideal creative environment in which to write a book. Maybe they do have a particular book they are working on or querying, and maybe not. Either way, the focus of the complaint isn’t usually on the work of writing, on the success or failure of a particular body of work that they are passionate about, but on wanting or failing to achieve the identity of being an author.

I get such mixed feelings reading stuff like this, because while I essentially agree that yes, writing a book is art, and one’s art should be as pure and protected from the realities of commercializing that art for as long as possible, I also think it’s kind of easy to rhapsodize on the holy work of it all from the vantage point of, well, a successful author (counting CMM and Brennan there, not me lol). As someone who has published a novel that idk I think did not terrible?, I know I also sit maybe too comfortably on the side of having published (and having benefited from the status conferred to that) to be critiquing others’ perhaps naked pursuit of the same, if that makes sense?

The itch and the urgency and the not-very-pure graspiness of wanting to have published is kind of fun to paint as gauche once it’s conveniently already happened for me. But I think I’m just reading too cynically into CMM/Brennan’s earnest pleas to write for the right reasons. The implication is that it’s just truly not worth it, soul-wise, any other way. (FWIW, every time I’ve gotten candid with an author, there’s always a moment where we end up exchanging the same sort of dead-eyed look when we admit that it—the having published-ness—doesn’t really feel the way we thought it was going to. The only satisfaction that endures is truly having written; and it feels more like a nice little candle flame in your heart versus like, daily fireworks. But don’t take my word for it! This published author is not not benefitting from her status as such!

Okay this got rambly. But the other bit of newsletter writer discourse related to this that I wanted to link to is Rayne Fisher-Quann’s latest heater, Poser Ethics, where she comes as close to speaking on the “lit it girl” phenomenon and the much-memed concept of the “performative reader” as we’ll likely ever get from her:

The guy in the “u r not a vibe bro” image may be subscribing to poser ethics, but the critic calling him a poser (or the person who uses this meme to accuse other people of being posers) is often also subscribing to poser ethics, by living in a world in which all action is perceived primarily as insincere, where it becomes inconceivable that someone could earnestly enjoy reading a book by their window with a cup of coffee. The critic lost in the world of poser ethics mistakenly believes that something being performative prevents it from being real, and loses access, in the process, to a great deal of reality.

It’s mega-long and great for our discussion here lol (also, generally notable that RFQ has created such an enviable personal newsletter economy for herself, boldly unbeholden to any “weekly post” cadence in favor of these rare but solid bangers that take an afternoon to get through; is anyone else breaking out of the “more posts is more” fallacy like she is?). Tl;dr, my takeaway from all three links here combined is: being a poser is just being a human—one with a pretty accurate model of the greater incentive structures at work. Which is not a sin!

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Apropos of the having published vs. having written tension…… Nike just launched a Substack lol. You’re going to very much enjoy who’s got an essay in it already…

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Not to be outdone by the season 3 premiere of And Just Like That… (wherein Carrie seems to be a worse friend than usual?) co-opting the current Older Women Dating Discourse, Candace Bushnell published a great, yeah-she’s-still-got-it essay on “Sex After 60 in Sag Harbor” for New York’s sprawling Hamptons issue.

I read it as a kind of funny, breezy rebuke to the hand-wringing best exemplified in current “state of dating” stories like the WSJ’s viral piece that “American Women Are Giving Up on Marriage”; to hear Bushnell tell it, courtship à la straight men kind of just…….. sucks all the way down, no matter your age or income class or historical era.

I was also reading Merve Emre’s New Yorker essay on the history of the advice column, and the excerpts she includes from an old English broadsheet dedicated to advice-giving also seem to underscore this.

The obligations of coupledom remained unclear. So did the norms of courtship—the moral status of promises, oaths, and kisses, for instance, or how to value the love of a good man versus the money of a worse one.

Some questions to the Mercury asked for basic information. “Q. A young woman growing into years wishes to know what she shall do to get her a good husband? A.We answer briefly: go to the colonies.” Others were abstract. “Q. Are most matches in this age made for money? A. Both in this age and in all others.”

“Go to the colonies”!!! They say a Massachusetts Bay Colony 7 is basically a London 10.

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Stuff you should see:

• Not to become a total Morgan Library shill, but the Julia Margaret Cameron show (on through September 14) is amazing. Her portraits of famous men are fine (they’re cloistered in a little cubby labeled “Famous Men,” and I really wish I’d snapped a photo when I rounded the corner on it and saw that all the male visitors at the exhibit were concentrated there), but I wasn’t at all familiar beforehand with the tradition of “literary photography” that JMC pioneered with these staged tableaux of iconic Bible/scenes from famous novels, poems, Renaissance tradition etc. Her fan-casting of Sir Henry Taylor as King Ahaseuerus from the Book of Esther is a thing to behold, for example; god those Victorians certainly knew how to conjure a vibe.

  

  JMC’s “The Rosebud Garden of Girls” did numbers on Victorian Pinterest, I hear

• Alternatively, if you want a reaaaally dead-brained show that will comfortably keep your attention for a night or so and not a minute longer, you should watch Netflix’s Sirens. It will make you feel like you’re summering out east, and the stacked cast (House of the Dragon’s Milly Alcock, Meghann Fahy, Julianne Moore doing her best Nicole Kidman, Kevin Bacon somehow, Abbott Elementary hunk Josh Segarra) really does its best with a nonsensical show that doesn’t understand if it’s a thriller, satire, or trauma plot.

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The Garbage Day newsletter is doing a three-night residency at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn next month. We’re going to try and save democracy in America. Or, at the very least, figure out how we broke it. Each night has a different theme and different guests. Click here for tickets to night one (July 8), night two (July 15), and night three (July 22)!

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HKD Productions is raising finishing funds for The Audit, a dark comedy short about what your job is doing to your soul, starring Devon Werkheiser from Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide. Find out more here.