Substack newsletters have been a good source of long reads for me. Too good, actually; I’m now having to make hard choices in what niche trends to follow, e.g. I spend way too much time reading about the current scene in literary writing, not a bad thing in itself but not a good use of my ever fewer hours. But even in those niches I won’t dive more deeply into I’ve found a few writers I’ll hold onto just for their far above average writing and thinking.
One is Naomi Kanakia, who made an unexpected splash with a Substack short story, enough to get a publishing contract (Princeton University Press!) for her upcoming book What’s So Great About the Great Books, which makes the case that not only should you spend time reading the great books, but that you should consider approaching them as an amateur, setting aside all the scholarship surrounding them and experiencing them directly, with little or no supporting apparatus. I agree, in fact I’ve done that and benefited from it.
But this isn’t about that, it’s about a point she makes in her most recent Substack newsletter “The Future Belongs to Amateurs”, namely that there is likely no living for her or most other aspirants in the ever-dwindling field of prestigious professional writing, and that she would be better off embracing a non-prestigious, non-professional fandom, an arena where her skills are finely tuned and highly valued by the audience, and one she greatly enjoys performing for [emphases added]:
I don’t really know where this journey leads for me. I am fairly positive it won’t lead to, you know, a career as an eminent woman of letters. I am not going to become Lionel Trilling—I’m not even going to become Merve Emre. As I’ve written about before, I think we’re entering a world in which literature is going to be just another fandom—one amongst many—and it won’t necessarily have the privileged position that it’s held for at least the last hundred and fifty years.
That means a lot of the work of discussing literature is going to be work that people do for free. I don’t think that’s the way it should be, I just think that’s the way it is going to be. When we talk about the collapse of the magazine world, and the collapse of professional book reviewing, and the collapse of the academic humanities, then what does that add up to? It adds up to a world where very few people are paid to write about literature, and where the vast majority of literary work is conducted for free, for an audience of passionate fans.
I think the tradition embodied both by the remaining mass-market magazines (like The New Yorker) and by the niche intellectual magazines (like The Point) is a great one, but I learned from my years of pitching that my help wasn’t necessarily needed to continue those traditions. These types of magazines didn’t really want my labor.
Thankfully, I am now proud to be part of a very different tradition—the fanzine tradition—that I think will play an increasingly important role in the twenty-first century. With these nonfiction pieces, I really do think like a fan. My aim is to capture whatever I enjoyed and find some way of transmitting that enjoyment to other people in a way that hopefully does justice to the underlying material. I am proud of the work I’ve done on the nonfiction side of Woman of Letters, particularly over the last year, and I feel lucky that so many other people have responded to that work.
When my son turned fourteen he suddenly displayed massive musical talent, along with a strong affection for bluegrass and old-time music, a major presence in Appalachia where we then lived. I came alongside to help him out, and for eleven years we devoted ourselves to performing semi-professionally whenever and wherever we could. Early on I had to make a decision — was it better to point him at a professional career, where he could certainly develop to the point where he could be the 10,000th-best guitar picker in Nashville and do his best to climb a very treacherous and wannabe-filled ladder? Or to focus on developing our skills locally, odd jobs for odd pay, learning the business and looking for a way to make things work in the context of a normal family life? I chose the second. It wasn’t sustainable, for many reasons, and eventually we had to move on. But it was an incredible enjoyable and beneficial way to raise a son, one that enriched our lives in surprising ways and continues to do so even fifteen years after we gave it up.
The point of that anecdote, at least the one I’m pushing here, is that it’s possible to pursue professional-level excellence without the goal being a paying career. There are other rewards.
Early in our music journey my son and I took lessons from Ginny Hawker and Tracy Schwarz, old-time musicians who were gods to us, whose every word we hung on. One time it was at Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins WV, which had week-long residential programs focused on various types of music. The students were almost all affluent white professionals, retired or semi-retired, with time for the hobby and money to pursue it. As Ginny and I stood in the cafeteria, looking out over hundreds of these folks eating their lunch, she told me that she was standing almost exactly in the same spot with Don Flemons, a member of an old-time music trio called the Carolina Chocolate Drops, focused on highlighting Black contributions to the tradition. The group was already hot, would get much, much hotter.
Ginny asked Don, “What do you think when you look out at a group like this and see a sea of white faces?” Don took a beat, then replied, “I see … opportunity.”
Absolutely. As in most performing fields, there is not enough attention to go around. And what attention exists is not evenly distributed, most of it is spent on only a few things, leaving the rest out in the unseen, unheard cold. So it can be a good thing to find an angle that might capture attention and allow you to exploit it. At the time (and even now, I suppose) Black performers stood out in a lily-white genre — but one whose audience is surprisingly non-racist (in my experience). Everyone thought, “I’ve never seen anything like this before — I wonder what it’s like?” and gave at least a benefit-of-the-doubt listen. The CCDs were good enough to repay their good-will investment of attention manyfold.
I thought about that as I read Kanakia’s piece, because she comes out of fandom but her writing and analytical skills are much, much better than what is usually found there. She is good enough that she could start as the 10,000th best literary critic in the little magazines and try to work her way up. Or she could turn to the fanzine tradition and be an outlier there, a critic who takes their work seriously, applies her skills unironically to edify her readers. I think an audience which is traditionally held in contempt by the smart set might very well eat that up. Even if it’s not financially rewarding, being able to perform as a top-tier critic with an audience may be reward enough for her.
And then I thought about this recent Substack piece from Freya India, “You Have to be Human”, about finding opportunity in the recent trend to let others do the heavy lifting in doing original work — and in particular, to resign ourselves to having the machines do it:
If I’m honest I’ve been feeling hopeless lately. Sometimes I feel like giving up. What’s the point of writing when AI will soon automate the book I just spent years on, and generate my blog posts faster than I ever could? What’s the point of improving at anything? There is nothing impressive left to do or to learn. This is all there is, staring down the barrel of a life spent inputting and prompting. It feels like the worst time to try.
Then I started thinking about the next generation, and how bad that feeling must be. Why learn to drive when self-driving cars are coming. Why bother to code or start a company. Why learn to draw, why practice guitar, why study photography, why struggle through academic research.
Or is there a way to adopt a Don Flemons attitude, face down the challenge and look for an opportunity:
But as I thought about this happening in every direction, all at once, it began to look like an opportunity. When so few seem interested in being a person, isn’t that the best time to be one? Maybe this is a moment for optimism. You just have to be human.
It is mind-breaking to think a time could come where the way to stand out from the crowd is simply to be human — but here we are. And that doing only that could be a major competitive advantage? Inconceivable. But here we are.
Now it feels unfair—now that we are rapidly approaching times when it is necessary to know how to be human. Times when the most ordinary human things will seem extraordinary. After years of being trained out of our humanity, these are times when it will be the most valuable thing about us again, the rarest and most prized possession, if you managed to maintain it. And now we need to be human if we want to compete. Nobody is remembered for being robotic and predictable, for thinking and sounding the same as everyone else. Sure you can prompt and generate your words and beliefs but you will do nothing lasting, build nothing of consequence. And I refuse to believe that relying on AI is an advantage; they keep saying we will be left behind if we stay human, but maybe I want to be left behind from a life spent delegating my thoughts and feelings and decisions to machines.
One more thing. This oddball change in attitude will likely be advantageous, but much less likely will it be financially profitable. Even in the above you can see hints and admissions that, basically, providing a living is not the most important quality of a pursuit, there are other rewards, etc. etc. All true.
I only want to add something I don’t always see mentioned about unremunerative pursuits. Even aside from consolation prizes (which might be considerable!), there is one outcome that is mostly guaranteed: you got to do the thing! My son and I never achieved significant rewards, financial or otherwise, from being performers. But we got to be performers! We lived the life, faced the challenges, learned to operate in that world, strived for and even achieved a level of excellence. We decided in the end that it wasn’t for us and we weren’t for them. But it was a lived experience, and a rich one. The journey was the reward.
Similarly, I expect that Naomi Kanakia will experience great success in her chosen arena with her chosen approach. Whether she can construct a life which allows her to both devote enough effort to that while paying the bills remains to be seen. But I can certainly see wanting such a thing enough that it’s worth organizing the rest of one’s life so that the bills are manageable, whatever that takes.
And Freya India? Whether or not it works out that being human is unusual and distinctive enough that others will reward her with attention (and probably envy!) … well, at least she gets to focus on being human! How good is that?