what we do here

a stab at it anyhow

This month, Notebook reached ten thousand subscribers. Which is a lot! Privately, I have always considered that number this newsletter’s “level,” or the point at which the number of people interested in what goes on here will stabilize and will neither dramatically rise nor dramatically fall.¹ The normal churn of subscribing and unsubscribing will be a steady line.

Anyway, I also thought, OK. Since I have, in theory, reached “the level” of people who like “what we do here,” can I give an account of what it is that we do here?

Maybe, maybe.

the thinker

If you’ve ever taken a drawing class, the first thing that you will learn, even if you know it in advance, is that you don’t see things. You think you see things, but really, you are filling in gaps with what you assume to be there. To draw, you need to learn how to see what is really there. This experience, of realizing that you aren’t seeing things, is a cliche, but it doesn’t matter, because you will still need to learn how to see all over again. However your own style develops, however abstract or bizarre it becomes, it is this basic thing, seeing properly, that you have to be able to do to be able to do anything else.

Here, I practice what I call “naïve reading” (a term I didn’t invent). Naïve reading means: direct engagement with what is in front of me. It is what I do here because it is a way of acknowledging certain limitations. The reason I blog about watching Miyazaki movies, for instance, is because I don’t speak or read Japanese. That ignorance is permissible in this context, whereas in other contexts it might really be a problem. The more authority I speak with, the more authority I really need to have.

Instead of pretending that these limitations don’t exist or that they don’t matter, I prefer to make them a kind of given: I don’t speak Japanese. I’m not going to read everything. Sometimes I’m sick and stuck with whatever I can reach from my bed. I have certain interests which I will follow without pretending to a wide understanding of a field. I am trying to look at what’s in front of me. That is, at its most basic, what I think this newsletter is for. The newsletter is where I’m always at zero. That’s not what the book is for. That’s not what writing somewhere else is for.

But it’s what this newsletter is for.

One thing that has shifted for me over time, but which I’ve only recently figured out, is that I used to think of naïve reading as the absence of skill. That is, naïve reading is what you do when you are not doing other things: psychoanalytic readings, formalist readings, historical readings, biographical readings, philosophical readings, and so on. Now, though, I think that naïve reading is its own skill. It is like learning to see when you draw. You have to learn how to look at things with openness and pay attention.

Furthermore, you have to keep learning how to do it, because it is easy to forget. The most basic and most important thing for getting anywhere real is the willingness not simply to look stupid, but to be stupid. I really do believe that. There are lots of things that will try to get in the way of cultivating this necessary stupidity, including people who do not understand that it is a useful thing you’re cultivating within yourself. But we’re all gonna die one day, so you can’t really worry about them.

the thought

Do I practice this kind of thing perfectly? No. Furthermore, my naïveté could be more severe: I could insist on engaging with whatever I’m looking at in a vacuum, instead of allowing whatever associations or juxtapositions or coincidences going on in my life to infect the process. But I do think, in my various attempts to try to come up with an explanation for this newsletter that isn’t “I do what I want,” the above is probably the best that I’ve done. And when I feel dissatisfied with my own newslettering, it’s because I’ve stopped looking at things the way I want to.

Thanks for reading this newsletter and being stupid with me.

xoxo,
BDM

1. That is really based on nothing but my own gut instinct but so’s everything.