I haven’t read anything that describes so clearly the human geography we find ourselves in now. I keep thinking how 55 years ago my mother couldn’t get a bank account without a man, but I meet young women every day who somehow feel more trapped and powerless than she did. A young man in a locker room yelled at me for being naked after a shower, even though I was dressing quickly. On one hand, we are bodiless and on the other we are too-bodied and subject to gunfire and death. And yet even a sight or touch we might have found casual a decade or two back now feels like an unrecoverable assault too. But at least when I read this piece I saw a map of our times, even if it can’t guide me out. Sometimes the only thing we can do is see. So - thank you.
I think a lot of our issues stem from too much privilege, not of one group but collectively as Americans. We’ve run out of most real severe social problems so we invent new ones or pull old ones out and refurbish them.
This darkened my mind to the point of extinguishing the few bright spots I maintain to sustain the illusion that ‘things aren’t as tragic’ as I assume — a naive chant for sure.
Also, this confirms that we’re living in what neo-Freudian Erich Fromm called a necrophilic culture*. Exacerbated into madness by electronic media. 1/2 of the shows on Netflix are all serial killer-oriented or true crime documentaries.
*As opposed to a biophillic (love of life) condition.
Thank you Mary for this rift. I’m always moved by your ability to toggle the dark and light with such grace. Your heart, too, is always front and center.
It wasn't all dark. Some of those kids were great--all of them in some way, including Luke. I'm thinking I should write a follow-up on that lest it seem all shitty.
I think that's always been there, though. Prior generations used to watch executions and, before that, gladiatoral games. At least none of Dexter's victims are dead in real life.
Honestly, young men want to compete against each other in violent tournaments. With video games nobody actually dies. Sports games occasionally got a few people killed in riots.
You are right about the eternal fascination with violence. But in the past you had to face the reality of it even if you were a voyeur. You had to know that this could happen to you. Something about endlessly watching these images is more sublimated, more civilized for sure. But it also creates an unreality, like stimulating aggressive instincts --which I believe are natural--without any physical release. Creates its own kind of danger.
There's some academic text entitled "UNWATCHABLE" about a lot of things on the internet that children see before they are ready. I was exposed by boys to some of the gnarliest stuff from two particular websites: steakandcheese.net & rotten.com. It simply had the most brutal stuff you could imagine. From beheadings, to violent pornography, to shotgun suicides. Oh & two girls one cup of course. That was the only one that made me wretch. But those images stayed with me. And it seems like there's no way to "get rid of them". Once you''re exposed, you're exposed.
This for me started somewhere around 1999. There was something around that time that overloaded the collective. Because of censorship people want to see thing that is behind the curtains. Which maybe isn't the best. In all those cop/investigation shows you always see that something wears them down about having to look at such horrific physical content.
I haven't read Fromm, so I can't comment on his thesis specifically. Obviously nuclear weapons are a huge new threat to humanity as a whole (and Fromm had to flee the Holocaust too). But culture seems to pass through light and dark phases. Our culture is pretty dark lately, but it went through light phases as recently as the 1980s. Also it doesn't necessarily track events directly--sometimes escapism swings up in hard times.
I guess I'd say times are bad, and they're worse than the 80s and 90s, but I'm not sure they're worse than the 30s or the end of the 19th century. Boomers and Gen-Xers happened to come of age into a relatively high point in this country's history. The decline is dispiriting.
Perhaps a new level of denial, but not a new type of denial? Meaning, isn't blood lust just a time proven way to let us believe. by embracing horror, perhaps it won't happen to us? It just seems likely that older tried-and-true psychological mechanisms were amped up successfully over decades of escalating threats. And, perhaps in the face of this new ability of threats "out there" to reach you so personally and randomly that we are just seeing the breakdown of those old mechanisms. Overload. Especially among those who have been looking outside traditional protective bubbles. These truth seekers would be among the most vulnerable, and coincidentally describes young people, and Mary's audience. As a rough correlation, I would say many of us are affected, and we can likely think of people we know who have miraculously been able to cling to life inside traditional bubbles and are enjoying a bliss of ignorance. What the hell do I know? I'm struggling with it like all of us. R.E..M. needs to rewrite the "I feel fine" bit of "It's The End of the World As We Know It".
I teach college first-year students and this year teaching really did me in. I alternate between compassion and disgust, anger at what a raw deal they've been dealt and irritation at how disrespectful they can be. None of it makes sense. What you wrote makes sense. The rise in male suicide rates is horrifying yet nobody seems to want to address it. At the school where I teach there has been one suicide already this year and I have had two male students write or tell me about male friends of theirs who committed suicide in the past year. There should be klaxon-level alarms about this, the secret epidemic. Thank you for taking all this confusion, organizing it, putting into words.
Nailed it on the male suicide rates...and add in worse education turnouts. Men are really getting a bad deal right now but men supposedly have all the power in society so it seems we get kicked to the dogs. I don’t see how we bridge these gaps when no one cares.
Well, there are men at the top of society, and they're stopping women from having abortions, so leftists can't have much sympathy for men as a class.
There are also a lot men at or near the bottom of society who are killing themselves out of despair. Both of these things are true. Old white guy congressmen don't really do much for depressed white guy college kids out of white male solidarity.
I guess I could go further and argue that the current leftist model of oppressor and oppression classes has always been somewhat of an oversimplification, and an actual leftist would point out that I'm ignoring the role of intersectionality. Then I'd say they underweight the role of class, and then at least some of the Marxists would agree with me and try to get me to join their group, at which point I'd say they tried that in Russia and Latin America and it didn't go well, and they'd say it was never really tried...
I can only talk about the USA. I would say that ideologies are constructed to knit together disparate groups in pursuit of goals like winning elections, and change as the coalition changes--remember Democratic Party Jefferson-Jackson dinners? I'd further say that modern progressivism depends, particularly for its activist base (and that's important--someone has to knock on doors and get out the vote), on a coalition that unifies feminists, black and Latino activists, and LGBT activists, and an easy way to do that is to have an enemy composed of white men. Basically you can get everyone on board except for white men, and lots of them feel guilty enough to vote for you (plus the Republicans spend all their time in office trying to kick people off their healthcare, ban abortion, and cut taxes for the rich, and a few years ago tried to launch a coup).
So you can't now turn around and say they have a problem after you've spent a lot of time talking about how awful they are. And, you know, who's going to help those guys? The Republicans? They're too busy with their tax cuts.
Perhaps these young women are in part so screwed up because they've had abortions, so now they have to love death because there's no way to reconcile the soul discomfort.
And these kids are just impossibly f'd up. As now apparently a senior citizen I can't believe how screwed up they are. Though maybe another part of it is being saturated in cheesy entertainment culture that has to be increasingly sensationalistic.
So our culture forgot God and the reassurance there was an underlying moral force in charge of this warped universe and now people are existentially unmoored and, as this topnotch essay notes, apparently not even able to call out writing that is completely pathological.
But yeah, I know, Christianity bad and secularism has all the answers.
My views have drifted since I wrote that, but I don't see this as being true.
1. Rates of depression are increasing in young women (and to a lesser extent young men) at a rate much higher and ages much younger than you would expect if they had to have abortions first.
2. Other non-Christian cultures, like in East Asia, are having a lot of the same problems. They never were Christian and aren't now, so that can't be causing it.
3. You'd see depression rates much more clearly correlate with abortion prohibitions both over time and state-by-state if that were the case, which I don't think I've seen any pro-life person argue, which they would no doubt jump on if it were true.
All these older men told the younger men not to go to college! Now they are upset they didn’t go to college! This reminds me of the way that people on the right will wreck social support for working people then use their struggles to get more power.
Maybe it was not such a good idea to constantly tell young men not to go to college but the more powerful men who did this (mostly all went to very prestigious colleges) will now benefit from their disaffection.
A friend of mine is doing student teaching at a middle school in a large metropolitan area. Earlier this year, a female student followed her after school, took out her phone, and recorded her standing next to my friend, making gun motions and telling her she was going to kill her. My friend told her faculty mentor, who told the school admin, who told the school district, who immediately took my friend out of the school 7 months into the school year and placed her in a completely different school. All the relationships she had built throughout the year were thrown out the window overnight. They never asked her what she wanted to do, she wasn't allowed to talk to the student, or the students' parents or the school, or really get any kind of closure. She's since transferred schools again, and is really struggling to make it through the year. Would things have been dealt with differently if they had happened 10+ years ago? I don't know. But just like your experience with Luke, no one wanted to deal with the unpleasantness of a real confrontation, and my friend, for her part, didn't push the issue when she probably could have. A lot of people I greatly respect talk about the need for restorative justice, but my feeling is that most people, myself included, when push comes to shove, really struggle with what that entails, even as we recognize the complete hollowness of traditional "solutions."
For restorative justice to work in that case the girl would have to have been found guilty of something or at least called out. Sounds very unjust all around, awful for your friend and not good even for the crazy student.
I don't know either. I'm guessing it's because she's just a student teacher and the year was close to ending so they figured that was the path of least resistance. Might have been different if she was full time.
Have you ever taught or considered teaching outside of academia? I'm a documentary filmmaker and I've learned so much about representation, character, and ethics from your fiction and essays. A review you wrote in Salon called Satan Goes to Harvard became a blueprint for my filmmaking at times. I'm sure your feedback and observations challenge people from a variety of disciplines in unexpected ways.
Wow, I'm glad the essay registered on you! I remember being so upset by that case! I think I was a little rough on the author of the book but I felt such a gross unfairness had been dealt that Ethiopian girl I went a little crazy. Yes I have occasionally taught outside academia. Older people, more mixed people. Its often great.
Maybe some kind of Masterclass thing? The problem from a marketing point of view is everyone knows her as the person who wrote the book that inspired that movie, and she's going to get the wrong audience.
Also, non-academic teaching requires a lot of self-promotion and marketing work. And you have to figure out ways to game the algorithm for YouTube hits. I do feel like her discursive style would be a better fit for YouTube than TikTok.
She could offer private tutoring in creative writing, but I'm not sure the money's there, and that's extremely labor-intensive (she already dropped out of the blog once because she felt she had to write thoughtful responses to all of our comments if I remember right).
Yeah, I'm not really into teaching right now. I didn't decide to stop only because of the climate in academia--if I really wanted to teach that would not stop me. I want to focus elsewhere now, and writing thoughtful comments here is more my speed now while I'm writing fiction! But you're right, if I would definitely be a better fit on YouTube than TikTok, I mean if I intended to try that.
I'd add that the institutional response also feels false because it refuses to be human, that is, messy.. Everyone is looking for an easy (and speedy) out. Anything but sit down together and talk.
I read this in the Chronicle as well and have shared it widely. It's an important essay, one of the best among so many powerful pieces of writing you've shared with this substack. I wonder if you have gotten any or a lot of pushback from readers of The Chronicle--Academics, that is?
I haven't gotten pushback directly. But I heard there was some on the Chronicle--I don't subscribe to it so I don't see it, but I guess it was there. Probably elsewhere too. I'm sure some people did not like it.
I did, too--in fact, it counted as my last “free” article from them. Well worth it. I found it after reading a letter to the Chronicle from a couple of disgruntled professors who expressed dismay that the Chronicle printed the article (then I HAD to read it!).
I thought the article was brilliant, but maybe I’m biased (I’ve been a fan for ages).
I wrote 3 whole comments because three different aspects of the essay each had a different thought-provoking effect on me. There really is an awful lot in there.
As a creative writing teacher in a university in Ireland, I really relate to the sense of helplessness that closes this essay. However, it’s interesting to note that across the pond, and especially since the pandemic, we have an epidemic of fantasy novel writing (colleagues in other universities have reported the same) and it’s very hard to push the students to articulate what they want to say about the world through this genre. Most is pure escapism and designed for multiple books so they are evading the sense of meaning which a beginning, middle and end would convey.
OK. I read Lord of the Rings, Narnia, all of Howard's Conan stories, most of Lovecraft, Moorcock's Elric stories, more Gor than I want to admit, Vardeman's pulps about the boy and his giant spider friend, David Eddings' Malloreon, Lev Grossman's Magicians trilogy, and every edition of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game manuals, roleplaying games you probably haven't heard of like Vampire: the Masquerade and Call of Cthulhu, and manuals for roleplaying games you *really* haven't heard of like Talislanta, Paranoia, Symbaroum, and countless others. But somehow no Harry Potter. I'm no novelist, but I know from geek. ;) So here's my unprofessional opinion:
Factors pulling young people to fantasy:
1. The popularity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe probably has something to do with it too.
2. A lot of young people who grew up reading these stories are now making TV and movies--look at the prominence of Dungeons & Dragons in Stranger Things, or Amazon blowing millions of dollars on a Lord of the Rings prequel.
3. A few nerdy young people who grew up reading these stories are now really, really rich and can fund stuff like the above.
Factors pushing people away from realistic fiction:
1. As a lot of people have said, the world isn't so great right now so people are naturally turning to escapism. You don't have much agency in the real world, so the folkloric hero's journey is appealing.
2. I don't know how it is in Ireland, but while there are concerns about representation in fantasy fiction nowadays too, it's a lot easier to sidestep worries about 'did I include enough people of the proper races, and are they all positively portrayed' when you're writing about elves and dwarves. You're not going to get an angry elf standing up in the classroom to tell you that not all elves live in the forest.
3. Realistic fiction is often pretty grim. Not sure why (Modernism? someone here probably knows better than me), but it tends to focus on dark subjects. Those are certainly part of the human condition, but a straightforward love story with a happy ending might be seen as treacly or unrealistic.
(But those stories are written, they're called romance novels, and they sell millions.)
Not to dismiss the factors quoted above, but as someone who teaches creative writing (mostly nonfiction but what the hell), I see that the lure of fantasy is that it seems to offer an exit from the straitjacket of the possible. I'm not talking about escapism. I'm talking about a lazy writer who, having brought their protagonist smack up against a narrative dead end, suddenly announces that they have the power to walk through walls or dissolve and reform on the other side. If the teacher objects that there was no previous evidence that the protagonist could do this, the writer looks at him with pity. "Hey, it's fantasy."
Yeah, the PC diversity training in universities has become a stale joke, encouraging students to be over-sensitive to everything. I’ve heard it all from my husband, a professor. But I think maybe the adults in the room (the kids’ parents) should be doing so much more to acknowledge what their offspring are facing in the future, instead of trying to remain so very positive about life, some maybe to justify birthing a kid possibly in pursuit of their own happiness, but also because they don’t want to raise a pessimistic, anxious person who’d have a difficult time succeeding in this cut-throat world. I opted not to have kids for various reasons, including that I didn’t want to bring a kid into this world—not unless he/she would be super-rich, with money/wealth becoming increasingly more important. If I did have kids, I’d be constantly protesting, marching, writing politicians, whatever I could, to address authoritarianism, gun violence, the climate crisis, the wealth gap, etc. IMO, the majority of parents I meet have their heads in the sand, or else they are following an expired formula for raising a kid. Yes, some parents are just struggling to survive (and for working class families this is especially true because of socioeconomic injustices), but even they should sit down and speak with their kids about what is facing them in the future and discuss how their family can do something about it.
That's one of the things I always thought about. They're basically doing reverse cognitive-behavioral therapy on the kids, encouraging them to catastrophize and find evil motivations everywhere, but the kids really do have problems prior generations didn't, as you say--jobs are harder to find and pay less relatively speaking, they have a lot more debt going out, and housing prices keep rising.
I think Haidt has a lot of good points, both about reverse CBT and his later stuff about smartphones being bad, but we are seeing a general downward trend in the US's economy for most people, and it is genuinely harder for young people to meet standard life milestones, and there's always the vague threat of climate change, which is likely to be less disastrous here than it is in Pakistan but is still likely to do a lot of damage. Some of what you're seeing probably is a response to that.
There definitely have been other 'bad' times in history (the 1930s and 40s come to mind), but not within living memory for most people. (Another one to come to mind is the nadir of American race relations, with lynchings and the rise of Jim Crow across the post-Reconstruction South, as well as an upsurge in anti-Chinese racism, but it's not as well-known and of course everyone involved is long dead.) And I do think the USA's peaked as a country, though I think it's more likely to slide into a Latin America-like state of chronic high corruption and political violence rather than an apocalyptic civil war.
Such a fantastic essay Mary! Again, you are able to explore the complexities of the characters - the students you write about - with extraordinary openness and understanding, and at the same time convey the forces they are up against and the total inability/cowardice of academia to respond in any meaningful or helpful way.
"Yes, terrible things were happening in the 1980s, and terrible things have always been happening, but…not like this." First writer I've read who acknowledges that. I wonder...if the gatekeepers of publishing don't change anytime soon, if we continue to prioritize this insistence on happiness -- which in my experience leads to a collective gaslighting -- what will it mean for the art of young(er) writers who wrestle with such profound "darkness" which is, in essence -- and which this essay understands -- the reality of young people's world and lives?
Whew, Mary, you drive a hard bargain with your subscribers.
Often I get muddled-up by your prose, but this time I was engaged from start to finish and will be pondering the questions you raised for the rest of the day (at least).
It made me think back to those halcyon days 60 years ago when a lovely humanities prof allowed us to form the now-embarrassingly-named Society for Enlightenment Through Conversation. We would meet regularly to discuss utopias, Zen and other nifty topics and even published a literary magazine called furioso. All this still within sight of the last world war, the current cold war and the looming lust of Vietnam.
Few of us were unscathed then. Some, like me, fled to the welcoming arms of Canada. Others put on neoliberal hats; others red caps. Wheels within wheels.
Surely you know how critical are teachers of your calibre. But where does truth lie in this post-AI world?
Sam I am sorry if my writing is sometimes torturous, I don't intend that. Maybe you can email me and give me an example? I'm at marygaitskill@substack.com
thank you mary for this wonderful piece. if it's any solace, i recently graduated from a west coast art school with real avant-garde bonafides. while i was there, the tenor of discourse never felt especially hostile or stifling, even in classes focused on extremely charged subjects; race, gender, class, climate, yada yada. if anything my peers demonstrated a remarkable openness to differences of opinion. and faculty showed bravery in animating a vibrant discourse that dodged easy rhetoric. i'm not kidding !
the school is still adamantly opposed to censoring any artwork students produce. i can recall a few thesis shows that stirred up lots of debate on campus, but none that ever involved engagement with the administration, who to their credit stayed out of it and let the students engage with the work independently. wild example, there is a school bylaw from the 60's that allows nudity anywhere on campus, and i was witness to it's healthy exercise as recently as 2020 ! of course such a libertine environment has it's shortcomings, but overall i consider myself lucky to have spent some very formative years in such a relaxed, curious place ! it's rough out there, but the pendulum can always swing the other way...
calarts. i was an undergrad 2016-2020. my experience of that school felt totally unencumbered by the noxious political and cultural narratives deployed in the mainstream around that time. from what i understand most of my peers felt the same. there's no easy explanation for why calarts remained so even-handed... maybe it is due to the significant international student population, whose experiences often provided humbling perspective on the humdrum american culture wars, before we all got too worked up. it's sort of an old-school place, in many ways.
the faculty was a healthy mix of boomers, gen-xers (my parents are gen x), and millennials. i really valued the boomers longview and more durable knowledge, and appreciated the millennials being conversant in the realities of being a working artist in the present day. a special place for sure. i may be insulated from some harsh truths because i am rank of a certain cloistered arts milieu, but most of my friends feel hopeful about the future...
Speaking as a boomer- that’s the way it’s supposed to be! At least that was my experience mid 70’s through the 80’s in 3 different universities. Things were suddenly different in the 90’s. However I was never quite sure how much was because I’d moved countries, landing in a totally different geopolitical environment.
Thank you for another deeply thought-provoking essay.
When I was an angry young man in a creative writing program at San Franciso State, you read a short story to my class. It depicted a scene in which an incapacitated woman was gang raped by a train of unfeeling young men. While one man was on top of the woman, they appeared to have a moment of connection and what seemed like empathy manifested in his eyes. But then he turned and high fived the next guy. I was utterly shattered by that scene. It was horrifying, and while I despaired over it, it made me a fan of your work. You re-arranged something in my heart with that story.
In my class we had a whole range of writers, and our first stories were all about suicide or madness or addicition. After that batch, the teacher said, "OK, you've all done your suicide, addiction, and madness stories. Now write something else for the rest of the semester." It was a funny rebuke and made me realize that there was more to writing than telling the world how badly I felt.
I never felt scared of anyone in the class. We didn't have any folks obsessed with murder or rape like you described in your essay. We had real issues, for sure. It was the tail of the AIDS plague and some of our classmates were literally wasting away. We were all experimenting with transgressions of various kinds, but there wasn't this dark, school-shooter vibe. We were aware that we were aspiring to something that at least felt like truth and beauty in our work.
I remember there were always a few of those guys who were obsessed with serial killers. I didn't get that then and I still don't. I agree with you. Murder is the opposite of art. It is Thanatos, not Eros. I remember being interested in Dennis Cooper and the other writers you mentioned, but I didn't feel very connected to that work. It almost seems like they planted seeds back then that have grown into something very malevolent, like the Giant Hogweed. If you touch it, you blister in the sun.
I'm the parent of a son who is the age I was back then. He's into STEM, and he's a gentle, sweet kid. His friends are all very kind, hardworking boys. I wonder if these issues are primarily the humanities going off the rails? Or do some kids in comp sci classes also study forensic crime scenes and see beauty in the brutal sadism that the worst of our kind inflicts on others?
Thank you!!!! Yes, there was something different in the tenor of that time, there was fascination with cruelty and violence but it was from a place of more confidence in what I can only call goodness. It was a will to embrace and understand, or at least it felt that way to me. Maybe it was naive, but what's happening now seems worse. But maybe...that's because I am much older now and can't feel the way younger people are wrestling with it? Much longer ago when I was in college a boyfriend wrote an extremely violent story about murdering his girlfriend; he said his writing teacher had been upset by it and showed it to me. I was surprised by it but it didn't even occur to me to be scared of him. I think I intuitively knew he was trying to understand something. Of course for all I knew he turned out to be a monster? But I doubt it. Anyway, thank you again. I think actually more kids are like your son than not. Even the kids in my class.
I wonder if part of it was that we were pushing against a solid floor of general decency that felt oppressive, as silly as that sounds. And much of it was, don't get me wrong. I was frustrated back then by what felt overwhelmingly middle class, boring, staid, Christian morality. It all felt suburban and bland. And the misogyny you critiqued was anything but decent. But there was a presupposition of a shared humanity, maybe? It was just thrilling to attack aspects of that. Sort of like that infamous artwork at the time, Piss Christ.
It's edgy to soak a symbol of an entire worldview in piss for a moment. But what if the entire world becomes soaked in piss, all the time? It turns out that's fucking awful.
This is basically what I was saying towards the end of the essay. Only better. You can screw around on a solid floor and flirt with a lot of stuff in a way that is actually beneficial. But no solid floor is a whole other thing.
I temper being fascinated by the Neue Sachlichkeit artists in my 20’s. Now I find it difficult and disturbing and would rather not see it. IMO the change is due to life experiences and aging-- having knowledge of pain and suffering, having more emotional understanding of the awfulness behind the imagery, which overtakes what was once a more casual fascination.
I think that we want to de-anonymize ourself in a certain sense. Like see ourselves in these images for some perverse reason. It is without reason & logic. It's a drive to become the image. So that you can feel less distant from the world. Because we are all becoming more and more anonymous to each other, even to ourselves.
I think I lucked out teaching non-fiction writing (mostly) to people who want to be activists. Non-fiction tethered them to the “real” more and their activism (sometimes surprisingly effective, sometimes young and clumsy) gave them a sense of purpose and, just a little, efficacy. They had the usual challenges, many as described above. They also found it easier to be kind to one another and dig deeper.
That said, this rings true start to finish. I’m saddened to see so many good to great teachers driven out of teaching by the current circumstances, sadder still at the world we’re leaving to the young. (What generation couldn’t say that?) I’m glad there are writers struggling with it, as you do here. I think one or two of my students, after long apprenticeships, will get near to where you are as a writer, and many will do some good work. That gives me some hope.
Yes, there is some hope for the reasons you give. Curious that non-fiction somehow creates a saner environment. My husband teaches in that genre and while he does encounter some craziness, it hasn't been like what I ran into.
I am torn between these two things. Tao Lin seems to have found a middle ground between fiction and non. He calls it autofiction. I'm not sure exactly what he means by that but I love his work. I love how slow and boring and sad and kind of digitally retarded TAIPEI is. LEAVE SOCIETY is a little bit less unsobered but I still love TAIPEI.
From what I understand, autofiction is intermediate between autobiography and fiction, so Stephen King might write a story about a writer from Maine who writes horror novels and became famous in the late twentieth century who meets and talks to a person outside his house who doesn't exist in real life. The protagonist is usually very similar to the author, but may differ in small ways.
One other thing: I had lunch with a former student, now a public defender and volunteer at a mutual aid bail organization. I walked away thinking, “Man I thought academia was dispiriting. The criminal justice system? My God, I don’t know how she stands it.”
The legal system has so many complexities. It can be so convoluted, Listening to some of the more serious investigative reporting in podcasts around injustices (false convictions) is truly illuminating. Usually it’s a combo of ego, personal differences, poor police work and withholding evidence that doesn’t fit (something that archaeologists at least used to with with what didn’t fit their hypothesis or which they couldn’t explain or be bothered to try. It just got left out!
Without denying that there are some horrible people out there, on all sides, what emerged was that the vast majority of crimes that a public defender deals with are connected to mental illness, poverty, desperation, abuse, and the dispiriting vicissitudes of human life. There are kids in college with mental health issues. That's bad. There are kids in jail with mental health issues. That's unconscionable.
I haven’t read anything that describes so clearly the human geography we find ourselves in now. I keep thinking how 55 years ago my mother couldn’t get a bank account without a man, but I meet young women every day who somehow feel more trapped and powerless than she did. A young man in a locker room yelled at me for being naked after a shower, even though I was dressing quickly. On one hand, we are bodiless and on the other we are too-bodied and subject to gunfire and death. And yet even a sight or touch we might have found casual a decade or two back now feels like an unrecoverable assault too. But at least when I read this piece I saw a map of our times, even if it can’t guide me out. Sometimes the only thing we can do is see. So - thank you.
"A young man in a locker room yelled at me for being naked after a shower"
Jaysus!!!
I think a lot of our issues stem from too much privilege, not of one group but collectively as Americans. We’ve run out of most real severe social problems so we invent new ones or pull old ones out and refurbish them.
This darkened my mind to the point of extinguishing the few bright spots I maintain to sustain the illusion that ‘things aren’t as tragic’ as I assume — a naive chant for sure.
Also, this confirms that we’re living in what neo-Freudian Erich Fromm called a necrophilic culture*. Exacerbated into madness by electronic media. 1/2 of the shows on Netflix are all serial killer-oriented or true crime documentaries.
*As opposed to a biophillic (love of life) condition.
Thank you Mary for this rift. I’m always moved by your ability to toggle the dark and light with such grace. Your heart, too, is always front and center.
It wasn't all dark. Some of those kids were great--all of them in some way, including Luke. I'm thinking I should write a follow-up on that lest it seem all shitty.
I think that's always been there, though. Prior generations used to watch executions and, before that, gladiatoral games. At least none of Dexter's victims are dead in real life.
Honestly, young men want to compete against each other in violent tournaments. With video games nobody actually dies. Sports games occasionally got a few people killed in riots.
You are right about the eternal fascination with violence. But in the past you had to face the reality of it even if you were a voyeur. You had to know that this could happen to you. Something about endlessly watching these images is more sublimated, more civilized for sure. But it also creates an unreality, like stimulating aggressive instincts --which I believe are natural--without any physical release. Creates its own kind of danger.
There's some academic text entitled "UNWATCHABLE" about a lot of things on the internet that children see before they are ready. I was exposed by boys to some of the gnarliest stuff from two particular websites: steakandcheese.net & rotten.com. It simply had the most brutal stuff you could imagine. From beheadings, to violent pornography, to shotgun suicides. Oh & two girls one cup of course. That was the only one that made me wretch. But those images stayed with me. And it seems like there's no way to "get rid of them". Once you''re exposed, you're exposed.
This for me started somewhere around 1999. There was something around that time that overloaded the collective. Because of censorship people want to see thing that is behind the curtains. Which maybe isn't the best. In all those cop/investigation shows you always see that something wears them down about having to look at such horrific physical content.
Actually, no. As Fromm points out, as soon as the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima we entered a horrifying new facet of the necrophilic.
I haven't read Fromm, so I can't comment on his thesis specifically. Obviously nuclear weapons are a huge new threat to humanity as a whole (and Fromm had to flee the Holocaust too). But culture seems to pass through light and dark phases. Our culture is pretty dark lately, but it went through light phases as recently as the 1980s. Also it doesn't necessarily track events directly--sometimes escapism swings up in hard times.
I guess I'd say times are bad, and they're worse than the 80s and 90s, but I'm not sure they're worse than the 30s or the end of the 19th century. Boomers and Gen-Xers happened to come of age into a relatively high point in this country's history. The decline is dispiriting.
As a gay male maneuvering through AIDS and Reagan, the 8O’s were a horror show. Quite dark. Oy.
That's fair and I should have added that. No time is uniformly light or dark for everyone.
Perhaps a new level of denial, but not a new type of denial? Meaning, isn't blood lust just a time proven way to let us believe. by embracing horror, perhaps it won't happen to us? It just seems likely that older tried-and-true psychological mechanisms were amped up successfully over decades of escalating threats. And, perhaps in the face of this new ability of threats "out there" to reach you so personally and randomly that we are just seeing the breakdown of those old mechanisms. Overload. Especially among those who have been looking outside traditional protective bubbles. These truth seekers would be among the most vulnerable, and coincidentally describes young people, and Mary's audience. As a rough correlation, I would say many of us are affected, and we can likely think of people we know who have miraculously been able to cling to life inside traditional bubbles and are enjoying a bliss of ignorance. What the hell do I know? I'm struggling with it like all of us. R.E..M. needs to rewrite the "I feel fine" bit of "It's The End of the World As We Know It".
Electronic madness: yes!!
I teach college first-year students and this year teaching really did me in. I alternate between compassion and disgust, anger at what a raw deal they've been dealt and irritation at how disrespectful they can be. None of it makes sense. What you wrote makes sense. The rise in male suicide rates is horrifying yet nobody seems to want to address it. At the school where I teach there has been one suicide already this year and I have had two male students write or tell me about male friends of theirs who committed suicide in the past year. There should be klaxon-level alarms about this, the secret epidemic. Thank you for taking all this confusion, organizing it, putting into words.
Nailed it on the male suicide rates...and add in worse education turnouts. Men are really getting a bad deal right now but men supposedly have all the power in society so it seems we get kicked to the dogs. I don’t see how we bridge these gaps when no one cares.
Well, there are men at the top of society, and they're stopping women from having abortions, so leftists can't have much sympathy for men as a class.
There are also a lot men at or near the bottom of society who are killing themselves out of despair. Both of these things are true. Old white guy congressmen don't really do much for depressed white guy college kids out of white male solidarity.
I guess I could go further and argue that the current leftist model of oppressor and oppression classes has always been somewhat of an oversimplification, and an actual leftist would point out that I'm ignoring the role of intersectionality. Then I'd say they underweight the role of class, and then at least some of the Marxists would agree with me and try to get me to join their group, at which point I'd say they tried that in Russia and Latin America and it didn't go well, and they'd say it was never really tried...
I can only talk about the USA. I would say that ideologies are constructed to knit together disparate groups in pursuit of goals like winning elections, and change as the coalition changes--remember Democratic Party Jefferson-Jackson dinners? I'd further say that modern progressivism depends, particularly for its activist base (and that's important--someone has to knock on doors and get out the vote), on a coalition that unifies feminists, black and Latino activists, and LGBT activists, and an easy way to do that is to have an enemy composed of white men. Basically you can get everyone on board except for white men, and lots of them feel guilty enough to vote for you (plus the Republicans spend all their time in office trying to kick people off their healthcare, ban abortion, and cut taxes for the rich, and a few years ago tried to launch a coup).
So you can't now turn around and say they have a problem after you've spent a lot of time talking about how awful they are. And, you know, who's going to help those guys? The Republicans? They're too busy with their tax cuts.
This makes all too much sense.
Commenting 16 months later.
Perhaps these young women are in part so screwed up because they've had abortions, so now they have to love death because there's no way to reconcile the soul discomfort.
And these kids are just impossibly f'd up. As now apparently a senior citizen I can't believe how screwed up they are. Though maybe another part of it is being saturated in cheesy entertainment culture that has to be increasingly sensationalistic.
So our culture forgot God and the reassurance there was an underlying moral force in charge of this warped universe and now people are existentially unmoored and, as this topnotch essay notes, apparently not even able to call out writing that is completely pathological.
But yeah, I know, Christianity bad and secularism has all the answers.
Wake up already.
My views have drifted since I wrote that, but I don't see this as being true.
1. Rates of depression are increasing in young women (and to a lesser extent young men) at a rate much higher and ages much younger than you would expect if they had to have abortions first.
2. Other non-Christian cultures, like in East Asia, are having a lot of the same problems. They never were Christian and aren't now, so that can't be causing it.
3. You'd see depression rates much more clearly correlate with abortion prohibitions both over time and state-by-state if that were the case, which I don't think I've seen any pro-life person argue, which they would no doubt jump on if it were true.
All these older men told the younger men not to go to college! Now they are upset they didn’t go to college! This reminds me of the way that people on the right will wreck social support for working people then use their struggles to get more power.
Maybe it was not such a good idea to constantly tell young men not to go to college but the more powerful men who did this (mostly all went to very prestigious colleges) will now benefit from their disaffection.
A friend of mine is doing student teaching at a middle school in a large metropolitan area. Earlier this year, a female student followed her after school, took out her phone, and recorded her standing next to my friend, making gun motions and telling her she was going to kill her. My friend told her faculty mentor, who told the school admin, who told the school district, who immediately took my friend out of the school 7 months into the school year and placed her in a completely different school. All the relationships she had built throughout the year were thrown out the window overnight. They never asked her what she wanted to do, she wasn't allowed to talk to the student, or the students' parents or the school, or really get any kind of closure. She's since transferred schools again, and is really struggling to make it through the year. Would things have been dealt with differently if they had happened 10+ years ago? I don't know. But just like your experience with Luke, no one wanted to deal with the unpleasantness of a real confrontation, and my friend, for her part, didn't push the issue when she probably could have. A lot of people I greatly respect talk about the need for restorative justice, but my feeling is that most people, myself included, when push comes to shove, really struggle with what that entails, even as we recognize the complete hollowness of traditional "solutions."
For restorative justice to work in that case the girl would have to have been found guilty of something or at least called out. Sounds very unjust all around, awful for your friend and not good even for the crazy student.
You're right, most people can scream for justice, but when it comes to performing it, they get lost. Not all, but it happens.
I don’t understand why your friend was transferred and that out of control student stayed.
I don't know either. I'm guessing it's because she's just a student teacher and the year was close to ending so they figured that was the path of least resistance. Might have been different if she was full time.
It's very much a customer-driven mindset, I think. The kids are paying (a really exorbitant amount in many cases), so you keep them happy.
Have you ever taught or considered teaching outside of academia? I'm a documentary filmmaker and I've learned so much about representation, character, and ethics from your fiction and essays. A review you wrote in Salon called Satan Goes to Harvard became a blueprint for my filmmaking at times. I'm sure your feedback and observations challenge people from a variety of disciplines in unexpected ways.
Wow, I'm glad the essay registered on you! I remember being so upset by that case! I think I was a little rough on the author of the book but I felt such a gross unfairness had been dealt that Ethiopian girl I went a little crazy. Yes I have occasionally taught outside academia. Older people, more mixed people. Its often great.
Here is a link to that Salon essay, in case others would like to read it (it was new to me, thank you Matt!): https://www.salon.com/1997/10/13/gaitskill/
Now I know what my next ‘free’ read on Audible will be, if it’s available. Tx for the link
Me, too. There is an awful lot to these conversations to be grateful for.
Maybe some kind of Masterclass thing? The problem from a marketing point of view is everyone knows her as the person who wrote the book that inspired that movie, and she's going to get the wrong audience.
Also, non-academic teaching requires a lot of self-promotion and marketing work. And you have to figure out ways to game the algorithm for YouTube hits. I do feel like her discursive style would be a better fit for YouTube than TikTok.
She could offer private tutoring in creative writing, but I'm not sure the money's there, and that's extremely labor-intensive (she already dropped out of the blog once because she felt she had to write thoughtful responses to all of our comments if I remember right).
Yeah, I'm not really into teaching right now. I didn't decide to stop only because of the climate in academia--if I really wanted to teach that would not stop me. I want to focus elsewhere now, and writing thoughtful comments here is more my speed now while I'm writing fiction! But you're right, if I would definitely be a better fit on YouTube than TikTok, I mean if I intended to try that.
I think I might write a novel consisting of just comments on random forums. It'll be a part of the post-postmodern subtext.
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I'd add that the institutional response also feels false because it refuses to be human, that is, messy.. Everyone is looking for an easy (and speedy) out. Anything but sit down together and talk.
Thisssssssssss
Exactly. That’s our biggest societal problem--No willingness to listen to each other. Binaries.
I read this in the Chronicle as well and have shared it widely. It's an important essay, one of the best among so many powerful pieces of writing you've shared with this substack. I wonder if you have gotten any or a lot of pushback from readers of The Chronicle--Academics, that is?
I haven't gotten pushback directly. But I heard there was some on the Chronicle--I don't subscribe to it so I don't see it, but I guess it was there. Probably elsewhere too. I'm sure some people did not like it.
I did, too--in fact, it counted as my last “free” article from them. Well worth it. I found it after reading a letter to the Chronicle from a couple of disgruntled professors who expressed dismay that the Chronicle printed the article (then I HAD to read it!).
I thought the article was brilliant, but maybe I’m biased (I’ve been a fan for ages).
I wrote 3 whole comments because three different aspects of the essay each had a different thought-provoking effect on me. There really is an awful lot in there.
Thank you!
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As a creative writing teacher in a university in Ireland, I really relate to the sense of helplessness that closes this essay. However, it’s interesting to note that across the pond, and especially since the pandemic, we have an epidemic of fantasy novel writing (colleagues in other universities have reported the same) and it’s very hard to push the students to articulate what they want to say about the world through this genre. Most is pure escapism and designed for multiple books so they are evading the sense of meaning which a beginning, middle and end would convey.
OK. I read Lord of the Rings, Narnia, all of Howard's Conan stories, most of Lovecraft, Moorcock's Elric stories, more Gor than I want to admit, Vardeman's pulps about the boy and his giant spider friend, David Eddings' Malloreon, Lev Grossman's Magicians trilogy, and every edition of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game manuals, roleplaying games you probably haven't heard of like Vampire: the Masquerade and Call of Cthulhu, and manuals for roleplaying games you *really* haven't heard of like Talislanta, Paranoia, Symbaroum, and countless others. But somehow no Harry Potter. I'm no novelist, but I know from geek. ;) So here's my unprofessional opinion:
Factors pulling young people to fantasy:
1. The popularity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe probably has something to do with it too.
2. A lot of young people who grew up reading these stories are now making TV and movies--look at the prominence of Dungeons & Dragons in Stranger Things, or Amazon blowing millions of dollars on a Lord of the Rings prequel.
3. A few nerdy young people who grew up reading these stories are now really, really rich and can fund stuff like the above.
Factors pushing people away from realistic fiction:
1. As a lot of people have said, the world isn't so great right now so people are naturally turning to escapism. You don't have much agency in the real world, so the folkloric hero's journey is appealing.
2. I don't know how it is in Ireland, but while there are concerns about representation in fantasy fiction nowadays too, it's a lot easier to sidestep worries about 'did I include enough people of the proper races, and are they all positively portrayed' when you're writing about elves and dwarves. You're not going to get an angry elf standing up in the classroom to tell you that not all elves live in the forest.
3. Realistic fiction is often pretty grim. Not sure why (Modernism? someone here probably knows better than me), but it tends to focus on dark subjects. Those are certainly part of the human condition, but a straightforward love story with a happy ending might be seen as treacly or unrealistic.
(But those stories are written, they're called romance novels, and they sell millions.)
Not to dismiss the factors quoted above, but as someone who teaches creative writing (mostly nonfiction but what the hell), I see that the lure of fantasy is that it seems to offer an exit from the straitjacket of the possible. I'm not talking about escapism. I'm talking about a lazy writer who, having brought their protagonist smack up against a narrative dead end, suddenly announces that they have the power to walk through walls or dissolve and reform on the other side. If the teacher objects that there was no previous evidence that the protagonist could do this, the writer looks at him with pity. "Hey, it's fantasy."
That's a great number 4 for either list! Thank you!
Fascinating
That’s interesting. Escapism makes sense in 2023.
Yeah, the PC diversity training in universities has become a stale joke, encouraging students to be over-sensitive to everything. I’ve heard it all from my husband, a professor. But I think maybe the adults in the room (the kids’ parents) should be doing so much more to acknowledge what their offspring are facing in the future, instead of trying to remain so very positive about life, some maybe to justify birthing a kid possibly in pursuit of their own happiness, but also because they don’t want to raise a pessimistic, anxious person who’d have a difficult time succeeding in this cut-throat world. I opted not to have kids for various reasons, including that I didn’t want to bring a kid into this world—not unless he/she would be super-rich, with money/wealth becoming increasingly more important. If I did have kids, I’d be constantly protesting, marching, writing politicians, whatever I could, to address authoritarianism, gun violence, the climate crisis, the wealth gap, etc. IMO, the majority of parents I meet have their heads in the sand, or else they are following an expired formula for raising a kid. Yes, some parents are just struggling to survive (and for working class families this is especially true because of socioeconomic injustices), but even they should sit down and speak with their kids about what is facing them in the future and discuss how their family can do something about it.
That's one of the things I always thought about. They're basically doing reverse cognitive-behavioral therapy on the kids, encouraging them to catastrophize and find evil motivations everywhere, but the kids really do have problems prior generations didn't, as you say--jobs are harder to find and pay less relatively speaking, they have a lot more debt going out, and housing prices keep rising.
Yes. Their problems are real and they know it.
Exactly. Anti-CBT. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you...weaker
The Coddling of the American Mind has it all
I think Haidt has a lot of good points, both about reverse CBT and his later stuff about smartphones being bad, but we are seeing a general downward trend in the US's economy for most people, and it is genuinely harder for young people to meet standard life milestones, and there's always the vague threat of climate change, which is likely to be less disastrous here than it is in Pakistan but is still likely to do a lot of damage. Some of what you're seeing probably is a response to that.
There definitely have been other 'bad' times in history (the 1930s and 40s come to mind), but not within living memory for most people. (Another one to come to mind is the nadir of American race relations, with lynchings and the rise of Jim Crow across the post-Reconstruction South, as well as an upsurge in anti-Chinese racism, but it's not as well-known and of course everyone involved is long dead.) And I do think the USA's peaked as a country, though I think it's more likely to slide into a Latin America-like state of chronic high corruption and political violence rather than an apocalyptic civil war.
Such a fantastic essay Mary! Again, you are able to explore the complexities of the characters - the students you write about - with extraordinary openness and understanding, and at the same time convey the forces they are up against and the total inability/cowardice of academia to respond in any meaningful or helpful way.
Thanks Catherine!
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"Yes, terrible things were happening in the 1980s, and terrible things have always been happening, but…not like this." First writer I've read who acknowledges that. I wonder...if the gatekeepers of publishing don't change anytime soon, if we continue to prioritize this insistence on happiness -- which in my experience leads to a collective gaslighting -- what will it mean for the art of young(er) writers who wrestle with such profound "darkness" which is, in essence -- and which this essay understands -- the reality of young people's world and lives?
“if we continue to prioritize this insistence on happiness -- which in my experience leads to a collective gaslighting -“
Yes. Thank you for saying this. Yes 1,000 times.
Whew, Mary, you drive a hard bargain with your subscribers.
Often I get muddled-up by your prose, but this time I was engaged from start to finish and will be pondering the questions you raised for the rest of the day (at least).
It made me think back to those halcyon days 60 years ago when a lovely humanities prof allowed us to form the now-embarrassingly-named Society for Enlightenment Through Conversation. We would meet regularly to discuss utopias, Zen and other nifty topics and even published a literary magazine called furioso. All this still within sight of the last world war, the current cold war and the looming lust of Vietnam.
Few of us were unscathed then. Some, like me, fled to the welcoming arms of Canada. Others put on neoliberal hats; others red caps. Wheels within wheels.
Surely you know how critical are teachers of your calibre. But where does truth lie in this post-AI world?
My pondering has begun…
The truth is the same place it's always been. The lies are just more convincing and numerous.
Sam I am sorry if my writing is sometimes torturous, I don't intend that. Maybe you can email me and give me an example? I'm at marygaitskill@substack.com
I love this piece. And I am so glad not to be teaching creative writing!
thank you mary for this wonderful piece. if it's any solace, i recently graduated from a west coast art school with real avant-garde bonafides. while i was there, the tenor of discourse never felt especially hostile or stifling, even in classes focused on extremely charged subjects; race, gender, class, climate, yada yada. if anything my peers demonstrated a remarkable openness to differences of opinion. and faculty showed bravery in animating a vibrant discourse that dodged easy rhetoric. i'm not kidding !
the school is still adamantly opposed to censoring any artwork students produce. i can recall a few thesis shows that stirred up lots of debate on campus, but none that ever involved engagement with the administration, who to their credit stayed out of it and let the students engage with the work independently. wild example, there is a school bylaw from the 60's that allows nudity anywhere on campus, and i was witness to it's healthy exercise as recently as 2020 ! of course such a libertine environment has it's shortcomings, but overall i consider myself lucky to have spent some very formative years in such a relaxed, curious place ! it's rough out there, but the pendulum can always swing the other way...
This is heartening, what school is it?
calarts. i was an undergrad 2016-2020. my experience of that school felt totally unencumbered by the noxious political and cultural narratives deployed in the mainstream around that time. from what i understand most of my peers felt the same. there's no easy explanation for why calarts remained so even-handed... maybe it is due to the significant international student population, whose experiences often provided humbling perspective on the humdrum american culture wars, before we all got too worked up. it's sort of an old-school place, in many ways.
the faculty was a healthy mix of boomers, gen-xers (my parents are gen x), and millennials. i really valued the boomers longview and more durable knowledge, and appreciated the millennials being conversant in the realities of being a working artist in the present day. a special place for sure. i may be insulated from some harsh truths because i am rank of a certain cloistered arts milieu, but most of my friends feel hopeful about the future...
huge fan mary, i wish you all the best !
Speaking as a boomer- that’s the way it’s supposed to be! At least that was my experience mid 70’s through the 80’s in 3 different universities. Things were suddenly different in the 90’s. However I was never quite sure how much was because I’d moved countries, landing in a totally different geopolitical environment.
Perhaps things are finally shifting
Thank you for another deeply thought-provoking essay.
When I was an angry young man in a creative writing program at San Franciso State, you read a short story to my class. It depicted a scene in which an incapacitated woman was gang raped by a train of unfeeling young men. While one man was on top of the woman, they appeared to have a moment of connection and what seemed like empathy manifested in his eyes. But then he turned and high fived the next guy. I was utterly shattered by that scene. It was horrifying, and while I despaired over it, it made me a fan of your work. You re-arranged something in my heart with that story.
In my class we had a whole range of writers, and our first stories were all about suicide or madness or addicition. After that batch, the teacher said, "OK, you've all done your suicide, addiction, and madness stories. Now write something else for the rest of the semester." It was a funny rebuke and made me realize that there was more to writing than telling the world how badly I felt.
I never felt scared of anyone in the class. We didn't have any folks obsessed with murder or rape like you described in your essay. We had real issues, for sure. It was the tail of the AIDS plague and some of our classmates were literally wasting away. We were all experimenting with transgressions of various kinds, but there wasn't this dark, school-shooter vibe. We were aware that we were aspiring to something that at least felt like truth and beauty in our work.
I remember there were always a few of those guys who were obsessed with serial killers. I didn't get that then and I still don't. I agree with you. Murder is the opposite of art. It is Thanatos, not Eros. I remember being interested in Dennis Cooper and the other writers you mentioned, but I didn't feel very connected to that work. It almost seems like they planted seeds back then that have grown into something very malevolent, like the Giant Hogweed. If you touch it, you blister in the sun.
I'm the parent of a son who is the age I was back then. He's into STEM, and he's a gentle, sweet kid. His friends are all very kind, hardworking boys. I wonder if these issues are primarily the humanities going off the rails? Or do some kids in comp sci classes also study forensic crime scenes and see beauty in the brutal sadism that the worst of our kind inflicts on others?
You've given us much to think about, as usual.
Thank you!!!! Yes, there was something different in the tenor of that time, there was fascination with cruelty and violence but it was from a place of more confidence in what I can only call goodness. It was a will to embrace and understand, or at least it felt that way to me. Maybe it was naive, but what's happening now seems worse. But maybe...that's because I am much older now and can't feel the way younger people are wrestling with it? Much longer ago when I was in college a boyfriend wrote an extremely violent story about murdering his girlfriend; he said his writing teacher had been upset by it and showed it to me. I was surprised by it but it didn't even occur to me to be scared of him. I think I intuitively knew he was trying to understand something. Of course for all I knew he turned out to be a monster? But I doubt it. Anyway, thank you again. I think actually more kids are like your son than not. Even the kids in my class.
I wonder if part of it was that we were pushing against a solid floor of general decency that felt oppressive, as silly as that sounds. And much of it was, don't get me wrong. I was frustrated back then by what felt overwhelmingly middle class, boring, staid, Christian morality. It all felt suburban and bland. And the misogyny you critiqued was anything but decent. But there was a presupposition of a shared humanity, maybe? It was just thrilling to attack aspects of that. Sort of like that infamous artwork at the time, Piss Christ.
It's edgy to soak a symbol of an entire worldview in piss for a moment. But what if the entire world becomes soaked in piss, all the time? It turns out that's fucking awful.
This is basically what I was saying towards the end of the essay. Only better. You can screw around on a solid floor and flirt with a lot of stuff in a way that is actually beneficial. But no solid floor is a whole other thing.
I temper being fascinated by the Neue Sachlichkeit artists in my 20’s. Now I find it difficult and disturbing and would rather not see it. IMO the change is due to life experiences and aging-- having knowledge of pain and suffering, having more emotional understanding of the awfulness behind the imagery, which overtakes what was once a more casual fascination.
Remember not temper
Jesus.
I think that we want to de-anonymize ourself in a certain sense. Like see ourselves in these images for some perverse reason. It is without reason & logic. It's a drive to become the image. So that you can feel less distant from the world. Because we are all becoming more and more anonymous to each other, even to ourselves.
Zizek has constantly said that privacy is actually the thing we are trying to escape. Which is something I've been thinking about for a while.
Hard thinking produces excellent writing.
I think I lucked out teaching non-fiction writing (mostly) to people who want to be activists. Non-fiction tethered them to the “real” more and their activism (sometimes surprisingly effective, sometimes young and clumsy) gave them a sense of purpose and, just a little, efficacy. They had the usual challenges, many as described above. They also found it easier to be kind to one another and dig deeper.
That said, this rings true start to finish. I’m saddened to see so many good to great teachers driven out of teaching by the current circumstances, sadder still at the world we’re leaving to the young. (What generation couldn’t say that?) I’m glad there are writers struggling with it, as you do here. I think one or two of my students, after long apprenticeships, will get near to where you are as a writer, and many will do some good work. That gives me some hope.
Thank you.
Yes, there is some hope for the reasons you give. Curious that non-fiction somehow creates a saner environment. My husband teaches in that genre and while he does encounter some craziness, it hasn't been like what I ran into.
I am torn between these two things. Tao Lin seems to have found a middle ground between fiction and non. He calls it autofiction. I'm not sure exactly what he means by that but I love his work. I love how slow and boring and sad and kind of digitally retarded TAIPEI is. LEAVE SOCIETY is a little bit less unsobered but I still love TAIPEI.
From what I understand, autofiction is intermediate between autobiography and fiction, so Stephen King might write a story about a writer from Maine who writes horror novels and became famous in the late twentieth century who meets and talks to a person outside his house who doesn't exist in real life. The protagonist is usually very similar to the author, but may differ in small ways.
Like SECRET WINDOW
By the way there's a great section in Zizek's SEX & THE FAILED ABSOLUTE entitled "THE RETARDED GOD OF QUANTUM ONTOLOGY"
I don't know why but it feels very pertinent. The title itself.
One other thing: I had lunch with a former student, now a public defender and volunteer at a mutual aid bail organization. I walked away thinking, “Man I thought academia was dispiriting. The criminal justice system? My God, I don’t know how she stands it.”
The legal system has so many complexities. It can be so convoluted, Listening to some of the more serious investigative reporting in podcasts around injustices (false convictions) is truly illuminating. Usually it’s a combo of ego, personal differences, poor police work and withholding evidence that doesn’t fit (something that archaeologists at least used to with with what didn’t fit their hypothesis or which they couldn’t explain or be bothered to try. It just got left out!
That's all true.
Without denying that there are some horrible people out there, on all sides, what emerged was that the vast majority of crimes that a public defender deals with are connected to mental illness, poverty, desperation, abuse, and the dispiriting vicissitudes of human life. There are kids in college with mental health issues. That's bad. There are kids in jail with mental health issues. That's unconscionable.
I'm off topic here. I'll stop.