Writers can and should enjoy writing

Exams and final grades are in, and I’m looking ahead to in-service and the summer semester with a mixture of exhaustion and gratitude. I’m also planning on more writing, including here.

Speaking of writing, after turning in final grades this afternoon I ran across this wonderful short piece from Fredrik deBoer: “If You Don’t Like Writing, Do Something Else.” An excerpt:

For as long as I can remember, these complaints—writer’s block, imposter syndrome, procrastination—have been key elements of writerly self-deprecation. They’re ubiquitous. And, in a sense, the author is correct to suggest that these are tools for identifying those humans who define themselves as writers. Get writers together in a room and soon they’ll be competing to be the one who likes writing the least. But none of it ever meant anything to me. I find the constant invocation of not-writing as core to the writer’s life to be self-indulgent and annoying, whether coming from the heights of literary success, whatever that might now mean, or from a complete amateur. No one is impressed that you ostentatiously struggle to write. Being a writer is hard because it’s hard to earn enough money to live. Writing, itself, is not hard. Not like digging ditches. It can take effort and focus and discipline, sometimes, and doing it particularly well is difficult in the sense that it’s a hard thing to achieve. But nobody not in the profession weeps any tears about how hard of a job writing is, nor should they. And I’m sick to death of this bizarre affectation that a writer is that creature that hates writing the most. I love to write; that’s why I have sacrificed to make it my profession.

“No one is impressed that you ostentatiously struggle to write.”

— Fredrik deBoer

Long ago, in college, I noted the way some fellow writing students would publicly, performatively talk about how “bad” the characters in their works-in-progress were being, messing up their plots, making wild decisions, and behaving like they have minds of their own. If there’s anything I despise it’s tweeness, and though I now repent of the contempt I felt for those friends and classmates I stand by the decision I made never to talk about writing that way.

But since then the much more common in-group writer tweeness that I’ve seen, that has, indeed, proliferated on the internet, is what deBoer describes several times in his piece: public, performative complaining about how hard writing is and how little you’re getting done, or even talking about the writing process as if it is an intolerable burden. Writers talking about hating writing.

Rubbish. DeBoer again:

I wish people would drop this act; it’s corny and tiresome. If you don’t enjoy the process itself, writing itself, then I don’t know why you’d bother to do this for a living. . . . You’re free to say that I’m overreacting to a harmless cultural quirk of people who write, but I am quite tired of it and find it an actively destructive impulse. It exaggerates the burdens of a way of life that’s quite pleasant if you’re lucky and talented enough to secure it, it teaches young writers that to belong to the category of writer you must constantly evince distaste for the act of writing, and it serves as a floating excuse for not working—hey, every writer hates to write, so if I dick around all day [it’s] just me being a real writer! It’s snide. It’s performative. I’m not a fan.

Likewise.

Read the whole thing. DeBoer opens with a really beautiful meditation on doing things because you enjoy them that is worth reading by itself. And last fall Ben Sixsmith had a similar short essay at The Critic that is also worth reading. Like DeBoer—like myself—Sixsmith is tired of the “writing life” tweets and memes because he loves and always has loved writing and, while it’s not always easy, it’s not hard enough to complain about. A sample:

What really ticks me off, though, is how they both trivialise and dramatise “being a writer”—dramatising it as some kind of constant agonising struggle . . . and trivialising it because that is so evidently silly. “Writing a story isn’t that hard. The only thing that’s difficult is writing the beginning. Well, and ending, those are always a nightmare. Also, the middle is basically thousands of words of utter agony.” That can be true. It can also be true that words flow like a mountain stream. If writing were like pulling teeth nobody would do it.

And, more to the point, “The problem is people who want to be writers far more than they actually want to write.”

Thankful to have another semester under my belt. Looking forward to the summer.

Theatre chauvinism

Back in February I wrote in praise of an episode of the military history podcast School of War in which film critic Sonny Bunch appeared as a guest and talked about war movies for an hour. This morning, Bunch popped up on another show I sometimes listen to, The Charles CW Cooke Podcast, to talk about film, film criticism, and the state of filmmaking and cinema-going. It was an enjoyable short discussion and I commend it to y’all.

The part I was left thinking most deeply about during my morning and inter-campus commutes today concerned movie theatres. Bunch, in the course of talking about the artistic difference between films produced to be shown in theatres and those produced for streaming services, says: “Look, I’m a theatre chauvinist, in the sense that I think that if you don’t see a movie in theatres, it is—you’re watching TV.”

I don’t know that I’d go quite as far as Bunch, but I endorse the basic sentiment.

Like Cooke—who says something on the topic near the end of the discussion—I’ve been hearing about the death of movie theatres for a long time. I’ve also been thinking a lot about why I hope that doesn’t happen.

First, we may not put on suits and ties for a trip to the cinema any more, but there is something special about seeing a movie as an event. I don’t mean the mindless blockbuster “event” movies that studios have built their budgets around, I mean making an event out of seeing a movie—any movie. Watching a movie at home with my wife is different from taking her to a movie, and I hope the latter remains an option.

Second, for purely technical reasons, seeing a film on a big screen and with a theatre sound system is far beyond anything most people can afford or would be willing to set up for themselves at home. Seeing it in theatres makes a big difference, and even if you only see a film that way once and watch it dozens of times on home media later, the theatrical viewing will form the basis of how you see it again later. And if you do only see it once, as will almost certainly be the case, for me, with Glass Onion or the new All Quiet on the Western Front, it’s better to have seen it in a form that allows the filmmakers to make their best case for their work.

Third, for all the understandable complaints about the way people behave in theatres now, there is something good about seeing a film with a large group of strangers. As I noted when I saw Dune, a movie I wasn’t really looking forward to and was pleasantly surprised by, my enjoyment was enhanced by seeing it with an appreciative crowd. Ditto Top Gun: Maverick and The Batman. Ditto my very first visit to a theatre, The Fellowship of the Ring, an experience I still think about. There is something about communal, in-the-flesh entertainment that can’t be attained watching the same film at home in your pajamas. It’s the difference between a live concert and an .mp3 on your iPod.

Finally, and—to me—most importantly for the sake of the art, theatres demand something of the moviegoer. Virtually every other form of entertainment in the Dominion of Content today is tailored to the consumer and his habits and convenience and this, as I’ve mildly suggested, is a bad thing. Seeing a film in a theatre, on the other hand, is a discipline. You see it at the scheduled time, not whenever. You can’t pause it. You can’t leave and come back to it without missing something. And with a big screen and the lights properly dimmed you can’t see or do anything else. It’s one of the few places left to us that demand real attention, and going to a movie and doing so trains you in a liturgy of attention.

It also demands certain behaviors of you vis-à-vis other people. To go back to my third point, the fact that we recognize talking, texting, doom scrolling, or being a general distraction during a movie as rude is a sign that something important is happening to us, something too important to be disrupted, regardless of what the film is. And when it’s a good movie, one worthy of the attention we give it (and there is a give-and-take between filmmaker and audience), that discipline is all the more rewarding.

That’s what I think we risk losing if theatres die, and why I think a little of Bunch’s “theatre chauvinism” is more than justified.

Deliverance: a recommendation and a detail

James Dickey and Burt Reynolds on the set of the film adaptation of Dickey’s novel Deliverance

This morning the latest episode of John J Miller’s Great Books Podcast dropped and I was excited to see its subject: James Dickey’s first and greatest novel, Deliverance.

Miller’s guest is Cat Baab-Muguira, who has previously appeared for an episode on Poe and written a book about Poe’s unlikely self-help guidance, which is high on my to-read list. Miller and Baab-Muguira have a really excellent discussion not only of the plot and extraordinarily rich characters, writing, and themes of Deliverance, but also of the film adaptation and Dickey’s life and reputation. (I have some secondhand Dickey stories of my own, courtesy of a neighbor and former coworker.) They discuss the novel’s masculinity especially well, refusing to drop into the oversimplification du jour of “toxic masculinity,” and they handle the most infamous elements of the story deftly, not parking on the sensationalism of it but digging into the layers of meaning Dickey applied to his story. This is one of the best episodes of the show I’ve heard.

But—every time they said that the novel takes place in “northwest Georgia” I yelled at the radio, “northeast!”

This was a really strange detail to goof up, but they repeated it five or six times and so confidently that I began to worry that I’d gotten it wrong. But nope, here’s the novel itself, as Ed talks with his wife the morning of the big canoe trip’s departure for the mountains:

Spoiler alert: It doesn’t go okay.

Even Wikipedia has this wrong. Which, as I said, is strange, because every carefully chosen detail of the novel suggests the northeast Georgia mountains. (And there’s no disputing where the film was shot.) The drive northward from Atlanta seems pretty clearly to be that toward Gainesville and points north—I’m old enough to remember changing landscapes and roadside scenes very much like those Dickey describes—and the small towns, mountains, rivers, woods, vegetation, and especially the massive gorge described by Dickey match those of my neck of the woods. And this is important because the setting was important to Dickey and the story. Northwest Georgia is my friend Sam at All the Biscuits in Georgia’s territory and, with all due respect to that area, it’s an entirely different region from “the mountains.”

Again, this is an otherwise excellent episode of The Great Books Podcast. I just had to get that down in writing somewhere before I could move on with my day. If you’ve read Deliverance you know us hillbillies can’t let things go.

You can listen to the episode at the link above or in the podcasting app of your choice, and I strongly recommend you do. Baab-Muguira’s book on Poe is called Poe for your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History’s Least Likely Self-Help Guru. It’s on my birthday wishlist and I hope to read it soon.

I wrote about Deliverance here a couple times last year: first in reference to outsiders’ prurient interest in what Flannery O’Connor called the grotesque; second, having been moved to reread the novel, as an illustration of John Gardner’s idea of the “vivid and continuous fictional dream;” and finally in my reading year-in-review, in which I decided it was the best novel I read in 2022.

Should trouble come

Ethiopian soldiers of the Imperial Army’s Kagnew Battalion in Korea, 1953

Watching the movie finally got me to read SLA Marshall’s Pork Chop Hill. Part II begins with a chapter on a patrol into a hazardous area of the front line known as the Alligator Jaws in the spring of 1953. The small patrol runs into a much larger Chinese force and fights them off from a ditch with a foot of water flowing through it.

But here’s a twist: this patrol is composed of Ethiopian troops sent to Korea by Emperor Haile Selassie. The troops acquit themselves well. One corporal’s arm is blown off at the shoulder by a Chinese grenade, and he calmly hands his weapon off to the man beside him and continues giving orders. This patrol’s performance is especially noteworthy since they are newly arrived in Korea and this is their first combat experience whatsoever.

Here’s how the action concludes as the Ethiopians withdraw to safety.

In that interval, [Lieutenant] Wongele Costa abandoned his position on the left side of the ditch. The casualties were carried to the position on the right flank. But in the darkness, he missed one man, not knowing that [Private Mano] Waldemarian was dead. So he called for lights again to assist the search. When the flare came on, he could see Waldemarian in the ditch. He sat there in a natural position, the rifle folded close in his arms. Wongele Costa crawled over to him, found that he was dead and so returned, carrying the body. Thereby he simply followed the tradition of his corps. Fiercely proud of the loyalty of their men, officers of the Imperial Guard are likely to say to a stranger, “Should trouble come, stay with me, I’ll be the last man to die.”

Chills.

Marshall goes on to note that among the Ethiopians, “in battle, it is the officer invariably who takes the extra risk to save one of his own.” He credits their success in withstanding Chinese attack to pre-patrol preparation, with the leaders carefully familiarizing themselves with their area of operations daily so that they knew their way even in the dark. And, in broken terrain, the Ethiopians would hold hands to avoid losing each other (by this point in the book Marshall has described American attacks falling apart this way at least ten times), a technique that “western troops would . . . scorn as beneath dignity.” The tradeoff, of course, is vulnerability to artillery and mortars, but on this patrol everything worked. Fitness for purpose.

The Ethiopian presence in Korea was a fascinating surprise to me, and I intend to learn more about it.

Room to swing a cat

This week Law & Liberty published an ambivalently positive review of The Reactionary Mind, by Michael Warren Davis, a book I enjoyed when it first came out. The reviewer, James M Patterson, takes Davis to task for romanticizing the Middle Ages, in the course of which Patterson writes this:

[Davis’s] criticisms of journalism and technology are good, though a little naïve. For example, he says, “It was the peasants, in their simplicity, piety, and common sense who saw through all the made theories” of their day. These same peasants also massacred cats because of their association with evil and witchcraft.

Okay, but what this blog presupposes is… maybe they didn’t?

This is a story I’ve been meaning to dig into for years now. It doesn’t pass the smell test for me, especially because it is always brought up to denigrate medieval people or illustrate their credulity and primitive violence. Like the term “Dark Ages,” if a story, factoid, or anecdote is always brought up to achieve the same effect, and if that effect is always to cut the subject down, double and triple check it, starting with primary sources. So consider this post a set of notes toward a deep dive sometime in the future.

Patterson, above, is making an offhand allusion. Again, the flippancy should arouse suspicion. If it’s this easy to demonstrate the stupidity and superstition of the medieval peasant why is there any difference of opinion? But the broad outline of the story in its various forms usually falls back on these points:

• In the Middle Ages, cats were closely associated with the Devil and devil worship

• The association was so strong that in June 1233 Pope Gregory IX (r. 1227-41) issued a bull titled Vox in Rama condemning cats as servants of the devil

• As a result, medieval people across Europe massacred cats

• The lack of cats caused growth in the rat populations of Europe, leading to the Black Death

That last point is usually the Paul Harvey twist to story, really driving home the consequences of such brute stupidity and violence toward cats. That’s what you dummies get! seems to be the implied moral. Cat people twitch their whiskers and purr.

If you want the most elaborate and self-congratulatory version of this that I’ve run across, see this World History Encyclopedia article on “Cats in the Middle Ages.” The author is not an historian but a “freelance writer and former part-time Professor of Philosophy” and lards his treatment of the subject with a lot of stuff about the position of respect and honor accorded cats in the ancient world (supported by a Victorian classicist painting of Egyptian cat worship), the way medieval “religious bigots” attempted to undermine that position, and—on the other side of Middle Ages chronologically—how the Protestant Reformation “broke the power-hold of the Church over people's lives and allowed for greater freedom of thought.” Citation needed.

That article is a pile of bad research (seriously, look through the bibliography at the bottom), whiggish clichés, and Dark Ages mythology, but it is just about the Platonic ideal of the medieval cat massacre story.

Now, a fair-minded person, one not content to accept any old slander of medieval people that comes his way, should be able to see problems with this story or at least points that are open to question. A few that have occurred to me every time I’ve heard some version of this:

• Were cats really that closely associated with the Devil? Why?

• A papal bull condemning cats? Why would a pope bother with an official pronouncement on something like this?

• How did the pope’s condemnation result in popular massacres of cats? Are there not several steps missing between an official letter from the pope and peasants programmatically butchering animals?

• Vox in Rama was written in 1233. The Black Death, so-called, arrived in Europe from Central Asia in the late 1340s. Was there really a lack of cats in Europe for that long? Are these events related at all?

Accepting a story that leaves itself open to questions like these is predicated on uncritically believing that medieval people were stupid. (It also relies on a Tom & Jerry-level understanding of zoology.) But our hypothetical fair-minded person, having asked the questions above, might be tempted to ask one more:

• Did this even happen?

The answer seems to be No, not really. At least not in the way laid out above and as popularly regurgitated over and over and over.

A few good places to start picking apart this story:

• Here’s a Medium article that accepts rather more of the myth of medieval cat hatred than I prefer but does a good job of demolishing the proposed connection between purported cat massacres with the arrival of the plague.

• Here’s a broad look at cats in medieval society. Though regurgitating the Gregory IX papal bull/Black Death myth as a side note, the article does a good job showing the recognizable role cats played as pets and ratters in medieval communities, from common farming families to abbeys and royal households.

• Here’s a Medievalists.net gallery of medieval depictions of cats ranging from 8th-century manuscript illuminations and marginalia to 16th-century paintings. Note that most of them are either purely naturalistic or playful in that genuinely sweet medieval manner, showing cats doing human things.

• Also from Medievalists.net, here’s a short review of a scholarly journal article on cats’ bad reputations in medieval Europe. Note the chronological range of sources it draws from and the distance it has to reach for examples of medieval “hatred.”

• Here’s a Quora answer to a question about Vox in Rama provided by someone who has actually read and understood medieval literature, understands what a papal bull is and how it worked, gives attention to the bull’s context, and quotes it at length.

• Finally, here’s a 2020 article from Museum Hack on the specific question of Vox in Rama.

The last two items above are the strongest, so if you look at any of these, look at those two. A few of the things Tim O’Neill on Quora and Alex Johnson at Museum Hack do well in rebutting the story of the cat massacres:

• Both present the actual passages of Vox in Rama that deal with cats. If you’re expecting a rabid churchman’s spittle-flecked denunciations, prepare to be underwhelmed, as cats are only incidental and are featured alongside toads and zombie-like specters as part of a rite of initiation. The “animals” in the rite are also clearly shape-shifters—demons taking on physical form—rather than actual toads and cats. This points to the bull’s broader context.

• Both explain well what a papal bull is, its specific function as official papal correspondence, and its reach and effects. Vox in Rama was written and delivered to the Holy Roman Emperor, the Archbishop of Mainz, inquisitor Konrad von Marburg and others for a specific purpose and was not a universally applicable diktat. Misunderstandings of this kind point to the limits of the modern imagination, shaped as it is by centralized government and totalitarianism, and to the bull’s original broader context.

• Both note that Vox in Rama does not at any point call for the killing of cats and that, even if it did, the plague arrived far later than the bull, so a connection between the two is nonexistent, and that even with cats around the plague would still be able to spread among humans because it was fleas rather than rats that spread it. And, as Johnson notes specifically, fleas don’t mind living on cats. In fact, a flea living on cat might have a better chance of biting a human.

• Finally but most importantly, the context. Both point out that Vox in Rama was written to warn about and combat a supposed satanic cult then operating in central Germany and that the bull is narrowly focused on this.

Knowing this and reading the actual text of the bull should be enough to scuttle the myth of the pope-ordered cat massacres. Why, then, does it persist? O’Neill sums it up well:

Despite there being no evidence to support any of these claims, they are repeated uncritically because they have found their way into a couple of badly researched books and because they appeal to people's prejudices about the Middle Ages.

Emphasis mine.

Again, consider these notes toward a deeper dive. (I’m especially intrigued by parallels between the satanic rites described in Vox in Rama and those cooked up by Philip the Fair as an excuse to liquidate the Templars a decade earlier.) I’m most grateful to O’Neill and Johnson for quoting the actual text of Vox in Rama, as its lack of availability foiled my attempts to look into the primary sources behind this story some years ago. I aim to look deeper still and write all this up in a more presentable form someday, though the misinterpretation and misrepresentation of the source at the root of the story seems to settle the question pretty conclusively.

If I am to end this post with any peroration or call to action, let me simply repeat this: If you run across any story repeated context-free purely as a cudgel to denigrate a past period and its people, look into it. Deeply. Whatever you do, don’t accept it because it confirms your prior impressions or prejudices, and definitely don’t breezily repeat it to dismiss someone else’s arguments. Real history is done on purpose.

Pork Chop Hill

Gregory Peck as Lt Joe Clemons with Woody Strode and Norman Fell in Pork Chop Hill (1959)

Last week was my wife and children’s spring break, and while they spent a few days in Charleston I caught up on a backlog of war movies. The one I most looked forward to was 1959’s Pork Chop Hill. The Korean War is underrepresented in the war film canon and, owing largely to my granddad’s service there in the Air Force, I’ve always been interested in what few films there are about the conflict. As it happens, this is one of the best.

Pork Chop Hill focuses on just a few US Army infantry companies and a few days in the spring of 1953. (By coincidence, the 70th anniversary of the action depicted in this film is this coming week.) As peace negotiations between UN forces and the Communist Chinese and North Koreans drag on elsewhere, American outposts on Pork Chop Hill are overrun and orders come down to Lt Joe Clemons (Gregory Peck) to retake the hill.

The hill is tall and steep and the barbed wire entanglements Clemons’s superiors said had been obliterated by artillery fire are still there when his men finally reach the top. Clemons’s company takes heavy casualties; the men start bleeding away in ones and twos well before they reach the trenches. Motivation and exhaustion pose further problems. Officers and NCOs have to urge their men forward and even to fire their weapons. But properly led—and with ample application of automatic fire and grenades—the GIs retake the trenches and bunkers at the top of the hill bit by bit.

Here Clemons’s depleted company consolidates its control of the hilltop and faces further dangers: friendly fire, Chinese holdouts, repeated communication failures, enemy artillery bombardment, lack of ammunition, lack of food and water, and lack of reinforcements. Even the arrival of another understrength company under Clemons’s brother-in-law, Lt Walter Russell (Rip Torn), proves temporary when Russell’s men are ordered back off the hilltop. Heavy Chinese counterattacks prove harder and harder to repulse and each one leaves Clemons with fewer men. By the end, Clemons and his handful of surviving infantry sit stranded atop the hill, waiting. If the Chinese drag out peace negotiations long enough to retake the hill and if Clemons is not reinforced, he and his men will be annihilated.

Pork Chop Hill is a masterfully crafted, no-frills, no-nonsense war film—a true classic of the genre. It tells a specific, narrowly focused story exceptionally well. This shouldn’t come as a surprise as the director, Lewis Milestone, made his name 29 years earlier with the original screen adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front. The film is finely staged and shot, balancing the confusion of combat with the coherence necessary to filmmaking in comprehensible but intense combat scenes.

The film also has good performances from an excellent cast. Pork Chop Hill is an amazing who’s-who for movie buffs. In addition to Peck and Torn in the leads (though Torn doesn’t appear until about two-thirds of the way into the film), Martin Landau, George Peppard, Norman Fell, Robert Blake, and Gavin MacLeod play small parts as officers, grunt infantry, and radio men, and the legendary Harry Dean Stanton appears in an uncredited early role. Real-life West Pointer George Shibata plays a Japanese-American officer and Woody Strode stands out as a fearful GI the officers suspect of malingering. Strode’s interaction with James Edwards, a fellow black infantryman who makes it his job to keep an eye on Strode, injects some understated personal and racial drama into the story.

Pork Chop Hill’s technical qualities and its cast are all excellent, but it’s the film’s atmosphere and attention to detail that sells it as a great war film. When Clemons’s company steps off, the march uphill is agonizingly long, and the attempts to breach the Chinese wire frustrating and lethal. The trench warfare is presented matter-of-factly, which only makes it more hair-raising. While there is plenty of rifle and machine gun fire to worry about, artillery and grenades are the real threats. Even throwing a single grenade into an enemy machine gun position can prove hazardous, with one soldier missing and being wounded when his own grenade bounces back and explodes nearby. Less frightening but much creepier is the wry taunting of Chinese political officers via loudspeaker, providing a kind of evil Greek chorus to Clemons’s attacks.

The film also dramatizes the immense difficulty of communication especially well. Clemons has two radio men and uses multiple runners but still can’t relay or receive messages effectively, a problem that only grows worse once he has seized the top of the hill. There is perhaps no better dramatization of Clausewitz’s dictum in On War: “Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult.”

In The Mask of Command, the late Sir John Keegan presents case studies in four styles of military leadership: the Heroic (Alexander), the Anti-Heroic (Wellington), the Unheroic (Grant), and the False Heroic (Hitler). One could usefully apply the same taxonomy to war movies. In its straightforward, unassuming presentation; its nuts-and-bolts attention to the work of combat; its stoic, uncomplaining reflection on danger and hardship; and its steadfast refusal to exaggerate either the glories or horrors of war, Pork Chop Hill is the Unheroic war film par excellence. I strongly recommend it.

The film is based on the book of the same name by the influential but controversial Brigadier General SLA Marshall, which he wrote based on after-action interviews with the men involved in the real attacks on Pork Chop Hill. I’m ashamed to say I’ve owned a copy since grad school but never read it. I intend to fix that this weekend.

Meet Thomas Bowdler

Last week, in writing about efforts to cleanse the work of Agatha Christie and other dead authors of language and elements that modern people find offensive, I described just such a sanitized edition of one of her novels as bowdlerized. I tried to work in an explanation of that term but it was beside the point and that post was already long enough. But I’ve been thinking about it since then.

Given the way the words censor, censored, and censorship arouse a lot of word games and linguistic dodging among the people who want to vandalize dead writers’ work (“No one is being censored, you ninnies”), bowdlerize, bowdlerized, and bowdlerization may be precisely the right words for our time.

The Bowdler at the root of these terms is the English physician Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) and his sister Henrietta. There is apparently some historical and literary critical debate about which of them is more responsible for the kind of work we know as bowdlerization, but it’s indisputable that they worked as a team. Their project? The Family Shakspeare [sic], a complete library of Shakespeare’s plays with all the impropriety taken out. The Bowdlers not only cut strong language, religious oaths, blasphemy, sexual allusions and themes, Shakespeare’s numerous and legendary dirty puns, and even entire characters, but took it upon themselves to improve unhappy endings like that of King Lear or change major plot points like Ophelia’s suicide in Hamlet, which in their edition became an accident. Bowdler having also removed all the sexual references from Othello, one wonders how the reader would know what was going on, what was at stake, or why everyone was so upset.

Bowdler published the Family Shakspeare under his own name in 1818 and became a byword for prudery even in his own lifetime. His was the kind of project we moderns might knowingly chuckle at. Certainly, whatever other problems we have today, we view ourselves as above this kind of thing.

I submit that we are not. Here’s how Bowdler advertised his tidied up Shakespeare:

THE FAMILY SHAKSPEARE: in which nothing is added to the original Text: but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a Family. By THOMAS BOWDLER, Esq. F.R.S. and S.A. “My great objects in this undertaking are to remove from the writings of Shakspeare, some defects which diminish their value; and, at the same time, to present to the public an edition of his Plays, which the parent, the guardian, and the instructor of youth may place without fear in the hands of the pupil; and from which the pupil may derive instruction as well as pleasure; may improve his moral principles, while he refines his taste; and without incurring the danger of being hurt with any indelicacy of expression, may learn the fate of Macbeth, that even a kingdom is dearly purchased, if virtue be the price of acquisition.”

There’s a lot going on here, not the least of which is Bowdler’s bluntness in describing his cuts as “remov[ing] . . . defects which diminish [the plays’] value” and his clearly instrumental, pragmatic view of what literature is for. (Note the language of “value.”) And it is clear from his remarks on the moral of Macbeth that Bowdler, like those who think you can have Christie while cutting a bunch of Christie’s words, thinks that there is something hidden in Shakespeare that you can still get without the “defects.” But what caught my eye was the phrase “without incurring the danger of being hurt.”

Or, as we might say in these enlightened times, avoiding and preventing harm.

Harm is the modern bogeyman. The specific perceived threats have changed—a culture as vulgar and perverse as ours mocks at the very idea of “indelicacy of expression” but is puritanically fastidious about transgressions against ethnicity, race, sexual preference, and even obesity—but the intent, the method, and the fundamental prudishness is the same. So is the result: works published and sold under an author’s name that cannot truthfully be said to be that author’s.

Bowdlerize most precisely names the moralistic, artless, destructive impulse to “fix” the “defects” of someone else’s work, and I hope it reenters our lexicon for more widespread use. Maybe then our present literary vandals can rediscover the one virtue the Bowdlers had that they manifestly do not—shame.

You can read more about Thomas and Henrietta Bowdler at Middle Tennessee State’s First Amendment Encyclopedia here and at Smithsonian here. I recommend both pieces. I had planned to open this post with my own first experience discovering that a favorite text had been bowdlerized, but I’ll save that for another time.

Charles Portis: LoA and two good appreciations

Yesterday was the official publication day of Charles Portis’s Collected Works in the Library of America. This is an 1100-page one-volume anthology that includes all five of Portis’s novels, four of his short stories, four essays, his autobiographical essay “Combinations of Jacksons” (which I quoted here last week), and a selection of his Civil Rights reporting.

I’ve been anticipating the release of this book ever since LoA announced it online a few months ago. I gather from a few reviews I’ve read that it is worth acquiring even for those of us who already own all of Portis’s novels and Escape Velocity, a “miscellany” edited by Jay Jennings, who has also edited this new collection. I’m curious to look at it; the LoA description says it includes all of Portis’s short stories but his earliest, “Damn!” is not in the table of contents. It also doesn’t include his play Delray’s New Moon. Regardless, it’s going on my wish list.

With the release of the Collected Works I have run across several reviews and appreciations. Here are two exceptionally good ones that I hope y’all will check out.

First, in an review titled “Gringos and Gnomons” in The American Conservative, John Wilson, a great Portis devotee, offers a wonderful appreciation of Portis’s capacious, idiosyncratic, and above all precise body of work from the “deliciously weird” Masters of Atlantis to Wilson’s favorite—and the one vying with True Grit to become my own—Gringos. Wilson:

Why is Gringos my favorite? It has everything I love in Portis’s fiction, all entwined in a single book. Human self-deception, comedy, wickedness and goodness, quotidian joys and sorrows and mostly unspoken consolations of faith, deep absurdity, betrayal and friendship, a sympathetic narrator/protagonist who sees a lot but misses so much: you get that all in Gringos. I was terribly disappointed when no more novels followed, but in retrospect maybe that wasn’t surprising. Sentence by sentence, it is (so I think) easily among the best American novels of the last fifty years.

Wilson’s review is paywalled online but I was able to read the whole thing in the print edition. It’s worth seeking out. When I read it to my wife she said, “This sounds like something you would have written.” Not because I’m as good a writer as Wilson, who is always a delight, but because my repeated praise of Portis has always fallen along the same lines.

The second review I’d recommend is “Signs and Wonders,” a longer essay by Will Stephenson in Harper’s. Stephenson includes not only a good overview of Portis’s novels but some great anecdotes about Portis the man, opening with a great bit about Portis’s visit to Buckingham Palace in the early 1960s. The whole essay is too full of good material to summarize, so please accept this sample paragraph and go read the whole thing:

And just as “recluse,” as Pynchon once said, can be code for “doesn’t like to talk to reporters,” so too can “cult writer” be code for “doesn’t live in New York.” After his fishing-shack sojourn, Little Rock would remain Portis’s home for the rest of his life—“as much as I can call anyplace home,” he clarified to a Memphis newspaper in a rare interview after True Grit’s release. “I guess I don’t really have one.” His regional association can confuse this point. In fact, Portis spent years living out of his truck, as well as in trailers and motels and non-descript apartment complexes. He spent a substantial portion of each year in Mexico. Even True Grit was written, he said, in a village about two hundred miles north of Mexico City; he seemed to consider San Miguel de Allende a kind of second home. His books are as much about being away from Arkansas as they are about being there. The Dog of the South and Gringos are both set predominantly south of the border, Norwood draws on his fish-out-of-water experience of living in New York (and traveling the country), and True Grit’s action takes place largely in the Choctaw Nation, present-day Oklahoma; it is a journey into the past and into historical research, his serious commitment to which is everywhere in evidence in the non-fiction pieces included in this book.

As it happens, this exilic aspect of Portis’s work—journeys to and from, with home seldom glimpsed outside the rearview mirror—is one of the most Southern things about him. One of these days I’m going to get around to writing an essay about that.

Portis’s novels rather famously went out of print during the 1990s (or earlier) until brought back by Overlook, which was seriously doing the Lord’s work there. But even since it became available again, the delight of Portis’s work has most often spread by word of mouth and the occasional paean in places like Oxford American, The Believer, and Esquire. Nevertheless, the covers of his books had to settle for blurbs that often felt faintly dismissive. The most irritating to me, reprinted again and again, was Roy Blount Jr’s: “Charles Portis could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he’d rather be funny.” Blech.

So it’s gratifying to see Portis getting this kind of recognition. Per Wilson again:

Only long after [a friend] introduced me to Portis did it occur to me that one of the charms of his work was that his name had never even been mentioned when I was in grad school, nor was it bandied about in the lit mags and such I routinely read.

Ditto. I discovered Portis, as I imagine many others did, through True Grit, which I read when the Coens’ film came out just after I finished grad school at Clemson. Very soon I moved on to The Dog of the South and Masters of Atlantis. I certainly felt like I had discovered something—maybe not the last precious Atlantean manuscript but dang close. And I, too, hoped for just one more novel. I think Gringos was the last of his novels that I read, just a few months before my wife and I married. That was ten years ago. Rereading it a third time this spring was a joy—better than ever. And you know how Flannery O’Connor said you can tell when a book is good.

The LoA is a nonprofit publisher and $45 may look steep, but you can’t get all five novels that cheaply in individual paperbacks. All five—and I agree with Wilson, if only through experience, that you can jump in anywhere. If you’re intrigued by Portis, have read True Grit and want to read more, or just like good stories, the LoA’s Collected Works will be worth your while.

Corroboration

A few weeks ago when I reviewed the new All Quiet on the Western Front I faulted the filmmakers for thinking they could improve upon the original when the improvements came at the expense of the novel’s characters, themes, and subtlety. There’s a lot of that going around.

Yesterday The Critic had an interesting review of a new BBC miniseries adaptation of Great Expectations, an adaptation the reviewer describes as “extensive literary vandalism.” In omitting much and adding much else, prolific screenwriter Steven Knight claims he “tried to . . . imagine if Dickens was writing the story now and had the freedom to go to those darker places, what would he do? If he had been liberated to write the things that were going on that he wasn’t allowed to write about.”

The Critic’s reviewer rightly takes Knight to task for this tired excuse to “read between the lines”—which being translated is “make stuff up”—and provides a short description of the series’ departures from Dickens. But the penultimate paragraph broadens her scope from this particular bad adaptation to the current wave of them:

Unsurprisingly, the first episode of BBC’s Great Expectations has been reviewed badly. Many commentators have pointed to “wokeness” as the problem. The rot actually runs deeper: it is simply bad, and it’s bad because Steven Knight doesn’t understand Dickens. To junk Dickens’ striking dialogue, captivating plots and nuanced characters is to entirely miss the magic and meaning of the original. Knight isn’t alone in his hubris. Netflix recently took a sledgehammer to Persuasion, replacing Austen’s profound meditations on “perpetual estrangement” with lines like: “we’re worse than exes. We’re friends”. Despite its popularity, nothing incenses me quite as much as the glossy makeover Baz Luhrmann gave to The Great Gatsby. I’ve no doubt that we must brace ourselves for hundreds more of these heavy handed remakes, as director after director imagine themselves better placed to explore the human conditions than artists of old, artists whose works have endured centuries longer than any of these adaptations will. 

“Miss[ing] the magic and meaning of the original,” all in a misguided effort to be gritty. Netflix’s All Quiet fits this description quite snugly. Read The Critic’s whole review here.

A second, smaller point of corroboration of some of what I muddled through in my review came from James Holland and Al Murray’s We Have Ways of Making You Talk podcast, in a “USA” episode in which historian John McManus joined them to discuss Saving Private Ryan. These three chatting about that movie was a sure way to get my attention.

At approximately 13:00, Murray makes an interesting aside about the film’s horrifying vision of Omaha Beach and the way that vision was seized upon for promotion:

Al Murray: Have you read William Goldman on um—the screenwriter William Goldman wrote about Saving Private Ryan and he wrote some very interesting stuff about it. Because when it was being promoted, all the PR was: This is the most realistic war film ever made. It’s all true. True to life in its depiction. Yes, it’s a story, but the depiction is entirely true-to-life, was the pitch. And get this—war is hell. War is horror. And Goldman kind of—who wrote A Bridge Too Far, of course—he sort of says, Well, come on, I thought we all knew that. Everyone knows war is hell, war is horror. What are you taking us for, here?

As I wrote regarding All Quiet on the Western Front, platitudes aren’t enough to sustain a movie. No need belaboring the obvious. Fortunately, Saving Private Ryan has more to offer.

A great episode. Listen to the whole thing here.

I wrote about Saving Private Ryan for its twentieth anniversary back in the early days of this blog. The film turns 25 this summer. Holland’s Normandy ‘44, a comprehensive history of Operation Overlord and the Normandy campaign, and McManus’s The Dead and Those About to Die, a study of the 1st Infantry Division at Omaha Beach—a book I would have given anything to have back when I was writing about Corporal Phillips in high school—are both excellent and well worth your while.

Portis on the New South

Main Street in a purportedly Southern city

Since rereading Gringos back at the beginning of this month I’ve been revisiting more of the late lamented Charles Portis’s work, particularly the short stories and travel essays collected in Escape Velocity. This comes from his magnificent memoir “Combinations of Jacksons,” published in the Atlantic in 1999. Throughout, Portis uses the phrase “combinations of Jacksons” to denote a certain kind of rural, unsophisticated, rambunctious, indeed ungovernable but good Southerner. Salt of the earth, good folks—an instantly recognizable type.

Here, Portis moves from describing how the support of a great uncle who rode with Quantrill and Jesse James for Theodore Roosevelt, a New York Republican, infuriated other Confederate veterans in 1904 (“Unseemly spectacle, coots flailing away”) to make an aside about the gradual, creeping fulfilment of the hopes of the Henry Gradys of the South:

For more than a century now, at intervals of about five years, southern editorial writers have been seeing portents in the night skies and proclaiming The End of the War, at Long Last, and the blessed if somewhat tardy arrival of The New South. By that they seem to mean something the same as, culturally identical with, at one with, the rest of the country, and this time they may be on to something, what with our declining numbers of Gaylons, Coys, and Virgils, and the disappearance of Clabber Girl Baking Powder signs from our highways, and of mules, standing alone in pastures. Then there is the new and alien splendor to be seen all about us, in cities with tall, dark, and featureless glass towers, though I’m told that deep currents are flowing here, far beyond the ken of editorial wretches in their cluttered cubicles. A little underground newsletter informs me that these peculiar glass structures are designed with care, by sociologists and architects working hand in glove with the CIA, as dark and forbidding boxes, in which combinations of Jacksons are thought least likely to gather, combine further, smoke cigarettes, brood, conspire, and break loose out of a long lull.

The essay is tinged throughout with a ubi sunt melancholy, perhaps nowhere more pointedly than here.

I live just outside a city of exactly the New South described here—glossy, polished, deracinated, full of outsiders. Not so much out-Yankeeing the Yankee as letting him take over. (Here’s a spoof I recently discovered. You laugh so you don’t cry.) I think Portis was onto something. I also hope he turns out to be wrong, that the pendulum will swing back, that his Jacksons will “break loose” and combine again.

Agatha Christie vs the dominion of content

Near the end of the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, hitman Anton Chigurh breaks into his employer’s office and shoots him. The reason? Professional betrayal. His unnamed boss had not only hired him but put a group of cartel killers on the same job without telling him. The result was half of the chaos in the film. As Chigurh watches the light go out of his boss’s eyes, a hapless accountant explains the reasoning behind the betrayal: “He feels—he felt that the more people looking—”

Chigurh cuts him off. His reply is a line I often think of: “That’s foolish. You pick the one right tool.”

Up until now I haven’t written about the Roald Dahl fiasco, a story that has turned into a slowly unfolding revelation of widespread censorship of long-dead novelists. Since Puffin’s silly, craven, artless changes to Dahl’s stories were revealed earlier this year, changes to other authors have come along including Ian Fleming and now Agatha Christie.

Still, I felt like I had actually anticipated this and said all I had to say about it two years ago, when a small but loud number of book influencers on Twitter, Goodreads, Instagram, and TikTok demanded the cutting of individual lines from several popular authors’ latest books. Then, while reading about the Agatha Christie revelations this week, I saw this:

I had heard that Oates is a bit of a… character on Twitter. I can’t judge based on one screenshotted tweet, but even if this were the first strange, ill-informed, and thoughtless thing she had said it would still belong in the Condescension Hall of Fame.

There’s the backhanded compliment of “clever,” the kind of word used of a precocious toddler or a dog that answers more than six or seven commands; the sniffy invocation of style and “sociological realism” as standards of excellence that poor Mrs Christie simply can’t afford; the scare quotes around the idea of a plot twist, as if this is some kind of outlandish and distasteful feature of primitive storytelling; and of course comparison with “more literary” authors, whatever “literary” means here. Probably arbitrarily difficult, though that doesn’t describe Twain, who certainly wrote to entertain, and only some of Faulkner, who still had a connection to a reading public in a way most latter-day “literary” types do not. This is the kind of blithe snobbery more likely heard from the mouths of clichéd British aristocrats in bad movies than in real life.

Last week I finally got (most of) my thoughts about the dominion of “content” out of my system. Read that if you haven’t so you can see where I’m coming from. But note Oates’s last and presumably most important argument: “changing her language will hardly matter.”

Oates’s snobbery is nasty enough, but the implications of this idea are abominable. A good writer is a craftsman. He selects his words carefully and precisely. As he writes he looks for—to bring Chigurh back in—the one right tool, the exact word expressing what he intends and that no other word can. Each word matters. Each must be right. A good author will find it regardless of whether he’s trying to be “literary” or not, and Agatha Christie was a good author. She paid attention, planned carefully, and worked hard at what she did. So did Ian Fleming, something I’ve taken pains to point out.

What Oates is arguing here is the logical endpoint of storytelling as mere content production. She suggests that some gnostic form of Christie’s stories exists independent of the words with which Christie, their author and creator, constructed and told them. As long as you get that, it doesn’t matter what particular words are used to deliver it. They’re interchangeable and replaceable and can be tailored to the consumer. All of this reduces Christie’s careful work to branding on content. The snobbery is a cheap justification of vandalism.

I go into this not because I have an animus toward Oates—I’ve never read any of her presumably “more literary” work and don’t really know anything about her—but because the sentiment she expresses here is representative. I’ve seen many variations of it, usually something like: “They’re just changing a few words so that modern audiences can continue to enjoy them.” Enjoy what? Christie’s books? Because that’s what the editors and sensitivity readers are fooling with.

It’s not Christie’s books that need to change. Oates—a writer!—and everyone who agrees with her or supports the alteration of old books should be ashamed. Not because Christie was the greatest writer who ever lived, though she was a good one, and not because purportedly offensive things must be left in print, but because to treat a writer’s tools, his words—every one of them, even those of which we disapprove—as irrelevant is to undermine the very idea of writing as a craft. It’s an ugly and destructive betrayal.

As it happens, the changes to Christie’s books were not news to me. Last year after Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s The Rest is History episode on Christie I dropped by Barnes & Noble to browse her books. On the copyright page of the very first one I picked up I read a note from the publisher stating that “minor editorial changes” had been made to “outdated cultural representations” but that “for the most part this classic work is reproduced as originally published.” For the most part is doing a lot of work there.

I didn’t buy that book. It wasn’t the one Christie wrote and I was not going to pay for one some grubby failure of a sensitivity reader had gotten ahold of. If you care at all about stories or the art and craft of writing, I encourage you not to settle for bowdlerized, compromised editions, either. And I hope publishers take note.

*****

Addendum: The commonly repeated and mindless rejoinder to the specific example of Agatha Christie is: “What about And Then There Were None? AKA Ten Little Indians? AKA Something Much Worse?” If you can’t tell the difference between changes to a book overseen and approved by the book’s author and those undertaken long after the author is dead, you don’t belong anywhere near someone else’s work.

Against content

In the latest episode of “Half in the Bag,” during an interlude regarding The Whale, streaming entertainment, and the recent cancelation of shows with low viewership, hosts Mike and Jay enter their weary satirical mode:

Mike: [zombie-like] Watch the programs on your TV.
Jay: [laughs]
Mike: Watch programs. Watch the movies that we talked about, I guess, or don’t. Watch the programs. Programs!
Jay: Content!
Mike: Content!
Jay: Content! It’s not “movies” anymore, it’s “content.”
Mike: Watch those contents.
Jay: It’s not TV shows, it’s content. “Willow” didn’t make enough money with its content so they canceled it. Move on to next content. “Mandalorian” season three is not doing as well as season two.
Mike: Bring back Grogu.
Jay: Bring more content. Give me content.

And, finally:

Mike: [demonic, surrounded by flames] CONSUME MORE CONTENT.

They put it even more succinctly a few years ago.

If there are any themes to speak of in this hodgepodge of a blog, this commonplace book, one of them is surely the idea that not only the things we talk about but the way we talk about them matters. This applies not only to our meaning but to the individual words with which we express it. Words have meaning. They should be used precisely and with care. This isn’t pedantry. As George Orwell argued in an essay I’ve invoked here many times, sloppy language leads to sloppy thinking. And vice versa.

The trends Orwell and others in his day noted have continued uninterrupted. We’re living at the sharp end of a long period of careless, apathetic imprecision in how we speak, write, and think. To be precise: a decline. The signs are everywhere. But nowhere is the sloppiness, vagary, imprecision, and muddle more pronounced than in the way people talk about art and creativity. And again, this can be seen most clearly at the vocabulary level—words.

The movies are particularly vulnerable to the rot, especially in popular discussion of the unstinting flux of superhero movies, remakes, video game adaptations, and streaming series. “Franchises” and “IP”—business terms that stink of the boardroom and the copyright lawyer—are commonplace ways to talk about movies now.

But the vilest, the stupidest, the most insidious and invasive of all of today’s sloppy art language is “content.”

A word that, like franchise and IP, began as a lowest common denominator legal term is now the default among even the general public. Instagram and YouTube users tell their favorite photographers and video essayists “Great content” and “Quality content” and “I love your content!” All of which are apparently meant to be compliments.

A book has a table of contents to tell you the most important thing about itself—what precisely is in it, what specifically you can expect. Ditto the lists of contents on medicine bottles, shipping containers, and boxes of Legos. But as used today content means nothing more than “stuff.” Everything is content. Novels and short stories are content. Movies and YouTube videos are content. Photos are content. Music is content. Book reviews and blog posts and longform essays are content. The news is content. If all of these things and more can be called by the same word, the word is useless.

I am writing a blog post right now. This morning I wrote announcements for my students and e-mails for my colleagues. Last night I passed the 30,000-word mark on a short novel. This week I revised and submitted an epic poem to an online magazine. A few weeks ago I drafted, revised, and submitted a short story to another. At supper the other night I drew Puss in Boots on a napkin for my son. Are all these things just so much content?

Once upon a time, art was specific. We described it with a huge and sometimes highly specified vocabulary. It was rich in specific nouns and precise verbs. Writers and journalists wrote stories. Authors wrote novels. Musicians composed or improvised thousands of kinds of music and played hundreds of different instruments. Poets composed poems—or, if you go back even further, they shaped songs. The vast team of the film crew wrote, directed, blocked, lit, costumed, miked, slated, shot, cut, and printed whatever part of the film fell within their prerogative. What do creative people do now? They “produce” “content.”

Produce, like a factory. Mechanically, seemingly automatically, with no single person to credit and in great quantities. Should we be shocked that the quality has suffered? My colon produces content.

And what do you do with content? Verbs again. We don’t read, watch, look at, listen to, or even think about content. Sure, all of those faculties are engaged on some low, barely involved, power-saving level, but what we do is consume it. Like a fire, a monster, a glutton, a plague of locusts, or a wasting disease. I have actually heard living human beings use one of the handful of breaths they get in their one precious finite life to begin a sentence with, “When I consume content…”

I am become content, the destroyer of worlds.

“So what?” I imagine lots of people saying. “That’s just how people talk. Let them like what they want to like.” First, no. Second, consider the consequences of our imprecision, the knock-on effects. Just like produce uses the language of the factory to erase the artist and his craft, discipline, and hard work, content boils the vast universe of art into whatever porridge-like slurry fills a particular vessel. Doesn’t matter what it is as long as there’s something in there to be consumed. Then you can demand more. And complain that it’s not very good.

Art is unique. Content is interchangeable. Art is irreplaceable. Content is disposable. Art is challenging. Content is numbing. Art strengthens. Content atrophies. Art satisfies. Content addicts. Art demands excellence. Content needs only to be available. Art endures. Content fades, falls apart, and is forgotten. Art is life. Content is death.

I keep wanting to hedge or claim I’m using hyperbole to make a point, but I really mean this. The state of the arts, of creativity, culture, and most especially storytelling, is dire. And the sloppiness with which we talk about producing content rather than making art only makes things worse. It’s a vicious cycle. To take it back to Orwell:

[A]n effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. . . . It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

But note that I said “dire” but not “hopeless.” Following that passage from Orwell, the very next sentence is this: “The point is that the process is reversible.”

It starts with each of us and our habits of speech. If you’re an artist, don’t call your work “content.” Call it “work.” Don’t be a “content creator.” If you write stories, paint pictures, compose music, or even make videos, call it that. And insist on it. Whether your work is an a hobby or a profession claim it specifically, as an honorable way to spend your life doing something specific and meaningful. Show yourself and your work some respect.

And if you are only a “consumer” meant to “consume,” get specific again. Don’t talk about, praise, or even criticize “content” any more. Talk about stories, movies, videos, music—all of it, specifically, and what the real people behind art have to do to make it—and don’t consume them, but watch, read, listen to, or even just look at them. In a precise word, enjoy them. That, too, is honorable. For what other reason would an artist make art except for people to enjoy it?

I don’t know how to save all of art or to encourage a new wave of creativity or to save Western Civilization, but speaking and writing precisely and specifically, not settling for content—whether as mechanical producer or gluttonous consumer—will force us to think in new ways about our stories, music, and art and how and why we make them. More precisely, more specifically, and hopefully in the cause of truer, better, and longer lasting art.