Front Matter
So, are we in a monoculture or aren’t we? I’ve long figured that we aren’t. Music is broken up into microniches. Everybody seems to have written a novel or memoir or poetry chapbook. I get at least a dozen emails a day from publicists about forthcoming books. There are five brand-new stand-up specials I could watch on Netflix right now, and nobody can agree on which one of them is funny, or if any of them is funny. Beyonce---maybe we all agree on her? Or maybe the monoculture just says we’re supposed to agree on her, and then lots of us just go and do our own thing.
And yet, with antitrust prosecution a thing of the last century, what we consume is increasingly shaped by Google/Amazon/Apple in such a way that the “long tail” we talked about a decade ago is so attenuated that it hardly qualifies as a tail at all. The algorithm might be bringing us back to the age of three broadcast networks---or such a narrow mindset that we might as well be back in those days.
Or not! Because there’s still a lot of stuff out there, isn’t there? I confess confusion, prompted by Soraya Roberts’ smart essay, “On Flooding,” which makes a strong case for a creeping narrowness in our cultural discourse, as what few cultural writers are left circle sharklike around the same set of new movies, books, and music, chasing the objects that are most likely to catch our attention. Chasing anything else, when authority if not job security is measured in clicks, increasingly looks like an error. This behavior is less craven than the age of the hot take a few years ago, when writers were expected to produce opinions within 20 minutes of the existence of a thing that one might produce an opinion about. But flooding is more insidious too: It is, as Roberts puts it, “a mass torrent of the same stories by the same storytellers at the same time, making it almost impossible for anyone but the same select few to rise to the surface.” The best minds of our generation are putting their most thoughtful essayifying energies into the same stuff. Every week.
Reading at my usual pace, I typically finish one and a half or two books a week. If I wanted, I could map out all my reading for most of the year around titles that are consensus picks in the publishing world. Think of it as a pie chart with three slices—-two big, one small. One chunk is legacy authors---the Ann Beatties and Ron Chernows and Colson Whiteheads. Another chunk is relatively sure bets by lesser-known authors: the important new history book, the book version of that big New Yorker feat of reportage we all read (or at least shared) two years ago, an essay collection that speaks to our current moment, the memoir by that person who got put through the wringer two years ago. The remaining represents books by the bright young writers who’ve exited the MFA chrysalis and are being hyped as the next potential must-cover legacy author. Google “‘most anticipated’ and books and 2019” and you’ll get a bunch of lists that effectively break down that way.
For the average-to-serious reader, a few hundred books a year to choose from sure feels like fragmentation and abundance of choice. But Roberts is right to suggest that this state of affairs can also be a floodplain. You notice that more when the year comes to a close. “This is why every best-of list is identical,” she writes. “Everything is less white than it used to be, but all in the same way.” I get trapped in this myself. For a little while now, I’ve found myself covering the same book for one major daily paper that gets covered in a much splashier way by the same critic for a more major daily paper. Have I “made it,” or am I doing something wrong?
Yes, and...yes? I tell my editors to surprise me with suggestions; I do my best to pitch off the small-press titles that catch my eye. I raise a prayer of thanks every day that I don’t have to be a TV recapper. But it’s a job that, if you’d like to be surprised by it, requires some mindful effort. Roberts wants “more that is different, not more of the same differences.” It’s a distinction I suspect a lot of consumers of cultural criticism don’t think to make, but for we producers it an important part of the job, and probably an increasingly demanding one.
What I’m Reading
Brenda Wineapple explores Walt Whitman’s relationship with his very own Boswell, Horace Traubel. Lauren Oyler registers a defense of Andrea Dworkin against the sexist misinterpretations of her work, though that doesn’t mean she’s always easy to defend. Elissa Gabbert skips through some examples of great parties in fiction. Nelson Algren’s publisher explains what makes Algren’s work so relevant today (though it’s odd to make such an extensive case for him without quoting a single line from his work).
What I’m Writing
I worked the legacy-author beat this week.
I interviewed Bret Easton Ellis about his new book, White, which is half an interesting set of autobiographical essays about growing up a movie nerd and learning to live with the compromised film version of Less Than Zero and the absurdity of American Psycho’s path to publication, and half a lot of bitching about Millennials. “Everything is a lament for me….My whole career has been built on lament. I was the old man on the porch with Less Than Zero, calling out those kids for what they’re doing. Nothing’s really changed.”
And I interviewed T.C. Boyle about his new novel, Outside Looking In, about Timothy Leary’s early LSD experiments. “I do not do the drug now. I never had particularly good experiences. Yes, I saw visions, and the early parts of the trip were quite enjoyable, as with any drug high. But my experiences beyond that were exclusively negative. I think my mind churns too much anyway to be in need of such a stimulation or reinforcement.”
End Notes
When I was in college I played guitar and sang (“sang”) in a pickup go-nowhere quasi-punk band called the Jimmy Carter Experience. We were as awful as our name---one of our songs had two drum solos for some reason. But I had a good time chording and screaming my way through Husker Du’s “Target,” which is as good rant about monoculture and consumption ruts as I know. But maybe if I were less nostalgic I’d know better ones, no?
Thanks for reading. Send your lists of the best least-anticipated books and other correspondence to mathitak@gmail.com. I’m on Twitter. Buy my book. Headshot illustration by Pablo Lobato.