How to stop writing
Thinking about The Practice 2
“I've seen Book Twitter destroy the best writers of my generation.”
(not) Susan Sontag
Yesterday I fell into a cesspit. I can still smell the faeces on me. I can still feel them on my skin, on my hair. Some of the faeces went in my mouth as I was screaming for help. It was horrible — it still is. To make matters worse I fell into the cesspit with my laptop and most of a work in progress. And to think that it was only a symbolic cesspit: the symbolic cesspit known as “Book Twitter”.
It turns out that this cesspit was very active yesterday, predictably responding to a clickbait piece about how books are middle class. I’m being perhaps unfair to the article, which wasn’t necessarily clickbait beyond its title, and argued a few interesting things, questioning books as signifiers of cultural capital1. I have even written about this topic before, and argued something along those lines, before trolling book fetishists was mainstream, saying things that were much harsher that what is said in this article. But since this newsletter is not a broadsheet, and book fetishists still depend on the national press for their daily dose of culture, my provocation went largely unnoticed. It’s still there, for anyone wanting to pay to get mad at me. So I won’t say anything more about this shitstorm in a teacup.
What I want to say, after my experience of falling into that cesspit full of faeces is the following: this kind of accident is the surest way of feeling so ill that you won’t ever want to set word on page again.