Scatterbrain: a letter from the end of times
One more year of writing dangerously... close to total irrelevance
Bye bye annus horribilis
So here it is, then, the last post of 2023, a couple of days in advance of the regular timetable, to reach you before you start hitting those bottles of Prosecco you swiped from Tesco.
It’s been a prolific year at The Leftovers. And I have been edging perilously close to something I’ve always said I didn’t want to do: writing for money. Or perhaps I should say “a bit closer”, because I’m still considerably far from making enough dosh from this writerly OnlyFans like to justify my dedication to it. I’ve punched a weekly piece this 2023, and I intend to do so again in 2024. If I performed a basic calculation of how much time I dedicated to and how much money I’ve made from this enterprise, I’d be working well-below the London living wage. So better not to think about this as work, or I’ll go on strike against myself.
I wanted to flag up the pieces I enjoyed writing the most this year, in case you missed them. Writers tend to embrace this kind of pathetic attention-seeking gimmick, since we never lose hope that our irrelevance is a consequence of our readers’ lack of attention, when in reality the problem is that we are too many, struggling for the favour of too few.
Here’s my Top Ten, in order of appearance:
AI will liberate us from art. On which I tackle the art and literary worlds’ pearl-clutching around AI, and I express my hopes for a return to more playful and spontaneous forms of cultural expression.
Indie writers talking money in La-la Land. On which I discuss the reality of BookScan sales figures and why writers need to be less hypocritical about how they talk about money, their work, and so-called professionalism.
Writerly bravery and publishing hype. On cover quotes and other promotional stratagems, and the tendency to employ words such as "brave" and "urgent", particularly when describing self-indulgent books of no political consequence at all.
Boredom and its discontents. On the case of the precarious submarine that sunk during an expedition to the wreck of the Titanic, and why we’ll see more of this kind of pointless disaster, as rich people get richer, progressively more bored, and they don’t know what to do with their money.
Literary clickbait. On the predictable art of writing a piece that will get your peers mad online and will get you attention.
The algorithm doesn't love you back. On the wisest decision I took this year: leaving Twitter, and how this was long overdue, since Twitter or X or whatever it’s called now is useless, regardless of what the addicted to it might claim (on Twitter, or X, or whatever it’s called now).
How indie lit magazines die. On why we need to start thinking about these venues more in the spirit of collaboration than as businesses (that don’t make any money and are virtually destined to fail).
Chronicles: an antidote against literary navel-gazing? On which I discuss a very Latin American genre, why we should go back to writing chronicles, and I include my own exclusive translation of Roberto Arlt’s “Lit Windows”.
Make self-publishing great again. On which I argue that we need to rethink the advantages of this mode of releasing books into the void, and stop seeing traditional publishing as necessarily better for literary creation.
Circle jerks: in praise of negativity. On which I write in favour of open negativity, instead of pseudo-comradely, commodity-peddling, toxic positivity, which ultimately results on anonymous personal attacks on Goodreads and other corporate cesspits.
If you read this newsletter regularly and liked any other piece that I haven’t included above, feel free to let me know in the comments section.
My favourite books of 2023 and my predictions for 2024
Here’s the part of an end-of-year post where I’m supposed to pretend someone cares about what I’ve read, pay back some favours. The problem is that my NY resolution for this dying 2023 was to avoid reading as much as I could in English, so I don’t have anything new to offer in the language of the Bard. I could still propose some old titles, or titles in other languages, which would make me come across as intelligent, blessed by a healthy amount of cultural capital. I won’t do that either. Just join the Reading Clinic and come and talk to me and others — much smarter than I — about books. On the other hand, I’m more than happy to make some predictions for 2024.
In 2024 we’ll start to see memoirs written by AI. We should also start to see the first successful Substacks written by this fast-evolving technology. Both memoir-writing and Substacking (is that already a word?) are great examples of the neoliberalisation of both the self1 and literature, so I can’t see how AI — a neoliberal tech if there is one — will be able to resist having a go at them.