the outlier
self immolation and is this it
hello,
It’s quite difficult to avoid some sort of weather-based opening to this letter. I was cold, now I’m less cold. I wish it snowed/sunned more.
But those prosaic weather-based concerns are not for today! Today you can read my piece,
I made an accompanying TikTok about how reading shouldn’t be a sport or shopping list and on the topic of TikTok, it appears this US ban may well actually happen. To celebrate/commiserate, I’ve got a discount on annual subscriptions running for a couple of days in case anyone wants to come and jump aboard my pirate ship.
the books📖
I’m feeling quite professional this week.
I dragged my ailing immune system back to Farringdon for another day in the content coal mine, recording audiobooks of Alastair Chisholm’s Dragon Storm children’s books for Nosy Crow. It was quite a gruelling day given I didn’t feel spectacular on the morning but we warmed up and celebrated with some snacks at Brutto in Farringdon. I’d love to recommend some restaurants and so on on here down the line so watch out for that hot content.
This week, I’ve decided that I’ve found the agent to move forward with and we’ve made a few plans for world domination. That’s been nice. Then I’ve been organising new one off gigs, talking how to grow the boys’ literacy project and potentially the Boys Book Club. You’ll get word here as well as the Instagram for that project.
Then, slightly worryingly, it appears TikTok might actually get banned in the US on 19th January. I thought this felt like one of those bits of brinksmanship to not be that bothered about but it appears it might actually happen! Substack have been making plays to move people over here from over there and it’s events like these that make me even more grateful for having a newsletter audience. You cannot trust these platforms, a topic I’ll expand on in another letter.
for your interest
self immolation and is this it
self immolation
I love a dystopian story.
The Road, The Last of Us, Station 11, the infamous back to the land vision from Fight Club – the future wasteland has a weird primal allure that keeps me returning to tales exploring its desolations.
I was reminded of the deceptive dystopian idyll on reading about Werner Herzog’s film concept where ‘the future might be one in which we had lost all our technical prowess’, one where ‘the worst loss of all was the fire that destroyed the Library of Alexandria’, immolating the world’s store of knowledge in one brutal, brilliant inferno.
The LA fires have become a real world analogue, a living incarnation of Herzog’s idea where aside from the awful human losses, a fair chunk of the world’s fine art may have also gone up in flames.
Paris Hilton’s house burned down and while she’s fortunate enough to be safe and to be able to find shelter elsewhere, her art collection apparently includes artists like Takashi Murakami, Damien Hirst, Alex Israel, Andy Warhol and David LaChappelle. David Geffen’s collection included artists like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning and he also lost his home in the blaze.
Where exactly these collections were stored is unclear but given the wealth in the affected areas, there’s a reasonable possibility that a hefty chunk of the world’s cultural heritage has been erased.
Fire cares for no culture. It is indiscriminate. It does not choose what it destroys. But while a TikTok ban is not necessarily in my interest, I can’t help but think about what smartphone culture, of which TikTok is merely a newer, better version of what came before it, has helped to destroy. Even worse, this destruction has been wrought by our own hand.
In the FT, Sarah O’Connor stated that ‘30% of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child’, a decline precipitated by the arrival of the smartphone and echoed across societies with university-educated adults. Times journalist James Marriott says,
O’Connor is right to say that we are becoming a “post literate” society as scrolling and short form video rapidly replaces sustained reading. I know many intelligent educated adults who never read. Friends who are teachers and academics tell me that the practice of “reading for fun” is virtually dead among their students.
Marriott goes further, invoking Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, by outlining how,
The habits of sustained attention, logical argument, and calm impersonal communication are fundamental to a democratic society. All modern democracies are products of the highly literate societies of the nineteenth century. Without literacy, democracy may not survive.
I discussed with my friend Ranjit how as bookbois, it’s weird to think that the 20th century, a time of ideas, incredible technological advances and many great books, could really be a historical aberration, that everyone reading things is not the norm but in fact that period might be the outlier.
And like reading, democratic society has not been a historical norm either.
This might sound a little overwrought, especially as there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about reading and books. BookTok is one of them, the numbers of bookshops that continue to open are another and the publishing wheel continues to turn, churning out new things to read on top of all the brilliant books that already do exist, yet to perish in the fires of censorship and disinterest.
I read a lot already but like everyone else, I reflexively reach for my phone more often than I’d like. If I’m to set an example I want to set then it’s up to me to not do that in front of others, to show that I care about a literate society through my actions. I think it’s worth girding against some desolate, vertical video future where the wisdom of the past only exists explained to us in short form. Sustained attention is a caring practice, one that nurtures the speaker and the listener and it’s hard to sustain your attention in a world designed to keep you scrolling ever onwards.
So buy the books, read them slowly, stack them high around your house or ‘when that fails, just kind of let them be everywhere, like pets’. You’ll be glad of their company when Herzog’s vision comes to pass and becoming like a character of this week’s book recommendation who,
‘Having lost his past he had lost everything.’
is this it
I was going to write some other stuff but I realised it was a little too depressing to coexist alongside what’s here already. I’m also genuinely having a joyful time right now so while I think my willingness to engage with darker matters is a reflection of me being in a good place, I don’t need to foist all of those thoughts on other people.
What I’ll do instead is pose a question from Zoe Scaman, someone I admire as a thinker and a doer:
It’s impossible not to ask: Is this really the best we can do?
- This week’s Boys Book Club was a triumph and like I’ve said before, quietly radical. I’ve made the book my pick again but I think maybe it could sustain further discussion in another piece as well.
- I’ve been learning to use AI tools to code my own projects on Nat Eliason’s brilliant course. Check out my Pomodoro timer.
- If you get the opportunity to eat at Brutto then go. Get the doughballs.
- After a tough week for them, I’m also optimistic about Arsenal after the North London Derby. If you don’t already know 18 year old talent Myles Lewis-Skelly then remember the name and enjoy his joyful teenage delight during this post-game interview with Ian Wright.
a book
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev made for a popular pick at book club.
We talked translations, nihilism, Russian history and where our sympathies lay between the characters. For my part, I suspect that the book meets you where you are, whether you’re the idealistic young man fresh from his university studies or the slightly jaded elders at ‘a time when regrets look like hopes and hopes like regrets—when youth is over but old age has not yet begun’.
Its triumph lay in its fondness for everyone and by the sounds of things, it annoyed all sorts of people when it was published which means it probably has a few pertinent things to say. It’s only 200 or so pages too so if you’re after an introduction to the great body of Russian literature, this is an ideal jumping off point.
a listen
If I could make a piece of audio, I’d want to make something like In Pieces by Hana Walker-Brown.
In Pieces is a half hour rumination on burnout, made for BBC Radio 4, by podcast producer and author Hana, who wrote the clear and cogent A Delicate Game on the topic of concussion and brain injuries, in sport and beyond. It’s a mix of personal reflection, atmospheric sound, interview and music, reminded me a little of the style of the best podcast of them all by George The Poet, and I thought it very good indeed.
a quote
lastly
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