I look forward to the day when we have a good set of categories here on the Westenberg discourse, because I would definitely assign this “social” or “thing I noticed” or whatever we end up with — and anyone who doesn’t like this sort of stuff clogging up their feed will have a way to ignore it. Meanwhile I can only sigh, and some of you will sigh. But I noticed something good in a Helen Lewis note on Substack, so here we go.
As a writer, you also have to watch the meta. Martin Amis called it going in search of the “new rhythms.” You need to know what slang is new and fresh, and what’s now old and clapped out. You need to know what words your audience will know. You need to know what jokes have already been done. Your writing only exists in dialogue with everything else your readers have recently consumed. [emphasis added]
I think many writers are sensitive to this. Some choose an approach that deliberately ignores it, writing timelessly, and I like it when it’s done well. (Well, I like any writing that is done well, so no surprise.) Others embed themselves deeply in the “new rhythms”, and when the zeitgeist moves on what they wrote back then can sound stilted and dated. But some of those, the really good ones, can actually take you back to that time, put you in the different place where those new rhythms reigned, give you a sense of how people thought in ways that led them to speak as they did. Tom Wolfe comes to mind.
And a few writers write prose that is mostly timeless, not idiosyncratic but clear and pure, but with just enough of the new rhythms that the result is lively, giving a feeling that the mind behind the words is engaged with and observant of and delighted with the milieu in which they are embedded. William James does this for me. So does Montaigne.
I am not a peer of any of these, and never will be. But I learn from aping them, aspiring to their heights. And so I try to keep my writing mostly clear and pure, but with a peppering of the new rhythms. In an ironic way, since the zeitgeist has long moved on from when I was an apprentice and journeyman writer, and I am not steeped in the thinking behind the new rhythms of the day, only a noticer. And it’s fun to write in a way that invites an “OK Boomer” response, doing my best to communicate that I am well aware that it highlights my out-of-place-ness, that I am deliberately expressing myself in a “How do you do, fellow kids?” way to get a chuckle from the reader.
