Keep or Throw Away?

Ted Gioia's The Honest Broker is one of the few Substack's that I subscribe to. Maybe I should find a few more to get a better sense of the vibe before I initiate my thing. He recently published a piece decrying the death of mid-twentieth century American culture. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what I'm trying to accomplish with this reading old book thing, but the disappearance of once popular and prominent writers from the cultural consciousness is part of what I'm trying to understand. What gets lost when we forget about works from the past? Should it be discarded or is there some inherent value in a book written decades ago that can tell us something about living today? I'm not sure that really gets at what I'm trying to accomplish. I'm not sure why I'm trying so hard to really define the primary thrust of this idea, but it feels really important to have a clear idea of what I'm trying to do or want to do or think I should do. 

Gioia is mostly addressing the erasure of once significant and well respected works of art from our current cultural experience. They are in there, embedded in the output of the now, but they are invisible, forgotten, no longer an active part of driving popular culture or deeply influencing contemporary artists. Gioia's comments on the embeddedness of our culture in the works of the past is part of my project. I'm more interested in poking around in the parts of the culture that never really took off. If they never really got a foothold in the popular conscience, are they even part of the culture? I guess any work, no matter how minor, is part of the culture. I guess my big question is whether the major works are really all that much better than the minor works. What do the minor works say that got drowned out by the hits that captured a broader audience?

The hits are hit for a reason. The only deep cut from an album that I can think of that was just as good as a hit single is Black from Pearl Jam's Ten. People like to flaunt their elevated task by highlighting deep cuts that they think are better than the hits. Predicting hits in any creative endeavour is a mystic art with a very low success rate. Experts can't reliably pick what will be a hit and what will flop. Hits emerge from some kind of collective act that makes something popular. Then that popularity wanes, and something that was popular is forgotten. Being forgotten doesn't necessarily make that thing bad or of low quality. I'm not really looking to arbitrate whether an old book is a masterpiece that should be recognized for its genius. I'm just trying to see if something produced years ago that sits on the shelf forgotten and ignored offers a meaningful experience to today's reader. How has the accumulation of culture altered the value and meaning in an object produced for a different person in a different time. The Book Club edition of Beneath the Storm's Eye wasn't produced for an almost 50 year old man sitting by his pool in Florida 58 years after it was published. How big should our cultural memory be? How much of the history that informs our culture needs to be remembered? Do we really lose anything when a book that never caught an audience physically exists but does not actively participate in the culture? What should we remember and what should we forget?

I guess that depends on what I write

I never really answered the question about whether people would want to read my thoughts on old books. It's probably not something people would seek out, but if the content is worth their time, a few people will stick around to see what else I have to say. It's not a topic with broad appeal, but hyperfocusd, single topic micro publications are the super power of sites like Substack. Would it be interesting? Would it tell people something they wanted to know? I like to read things that help me understand the world. People who have a perspective and share their lens for viewing the world will draw an audience. Their voice has to be authentic. You can't pretend to be something that you are not. Maybe you can be something you always wanted to be but didn't pursue for a whole bunch of reasons but now the tools of the internet allow you to capture a little bit of that lifestyle?

In my fantasy life, I get to spend my days in serious study of some deep and profound topic. I could be writing a novel or some academic paper. The activity or the topic is secondary to the association with study and gaining insight into how some aspect of our reality works. It's about answering questions without easy or obvious answers. Life as a professor has too many unappealing features for me to have ever seriously considered that path, particularly the idea of begging the government for research funds as a physical scientist, but some kind of self-supported thinker writing books or thought pieces would not be the worst way to spend my days. Some of my other little side projects were my attempt to get a taste of that life. I was reviewing Pitchfork's top 100 albums. I flirted with some kind of personal development theme for a more focused blog or book (it was just an exercise to see how hard something like that could be, it was never something I really intended to pursue in earnest). I did submit a request to participate in a workshop with Seth Godin to develop my ideas into some kind of serious project for a big audience. That was back in 2011. What was I even doing back then? My law school blog project was a mini-project to do something and share the outcome with the world. The blogging part of that process was my primary motivation through that entire project. I can look back at that and know that I never really wanted to go. to law school, but that entire process was fun. It was super selfish given how old my kids were at that time and I did think that there were some advantages to pursuing a legal career (if I had had the courage to believe in my system to just go with A for any logic puzzles that had to be worked out in detailed steps, I would have had a 170+ LSAT score and acceptances into schools that would have been hard to turn down). It was also me trying to find a way to be a thinker or at least someone who shared thoughts and experiences with an audience. 

I haven't thought about that Seth Godin Medicine Ball session thing for a long time. I applied just to see what kind of response I would get. It was kind of a low risk way to see if I maybe had the chops to really work on building something online that could be more than just a diversion or fun hobby. That's the kind of thing I wanted to do, the kind of thing I was struggling to find the right words for at the start of this post. I wanted to build an idea into a thing that people could hold and share. A book. A blog that is more than a diary or journal. A produced thing that I had shipped into the world. Something I thought up, generated, and finished so I could share it with others. 

Is my idea to use obscure books published decades ago to explore the world we live in now the next little project for me to try? Seth Godin would say yes. When I was reading him, he was all about shipping. Get an idea, develop it, get it out into the world. I'm taking some of those steps already. I stopped in Book Rescuers just to see if I could find an old book that fit my project. I looked for a few that AI had given me when I asked for obscure old books. I found a few by one of the authors, but not that specific book. I decided to just start looking for books that had that old book appearance. I found one. Under the Eye of the Storm by John Hersey. It was published in 1967. The physical book has some interesting features. The book has 10 reviews on Goodreads. It's not very long, about 250 pages. I plan on reading it right after I finish this book I've been reading about a sex cult. We'll see what I make of it. I plan on having posts for a few books ready to go before I do anything on Substack so it will be an interesting experiment. 

Would people want to read about my thoughts on old books?

If I were to start a Substack, as my effort to build something digital, what would I write about? My blogs, which are essentially online diaries or journals, are primarily about books/reading, career thoughts, efforts to improve my fitness, and occasional musings on my relationship or my role as a man in the family. My first thought is to do something about reading and books. My dissatisfaction with contemporary books is so high I have a personal desire to explore deep into the catalogues and niches of books published decades ago. I'm almost 50 so books published before I was alive could be a fun slant. That might be too limited so maybe that would be a fun category or post/article topic. Reading the books would be a big part of the stack, but the physicality of the books could be something to explore. Older books are smaller, use different paper, more mass market books for more literary titles. The masculine in literature, a virtual black hole of nothingness in contemporary publishing, would be a strong theme. Where to find the books, how to select them (old bestseller lists, browsing used bookstores, award lists (going deep into the Booker Prize)), and maybe old marketing material could be an element of the articles. This would of course give me something to explore when I'm taking too long to read a book. It would kind of be the anti-booktok. Old books being discussed by a middle-aged white man. This topic is appealing because it aligns with things I already do or want to do. I'm not exploring something new only to find it's not appealing to me in the long run. It also takes advantage of our current tech culture, being able to find something almost instantly online, but applying that to something more analog and non-digital. Physical books, the book as a physical object, would be a big part of the content. These things don't have to be hunted down. They could be found. I wouldn't be looking for things people are familiar with either. These would be obscure books people haven't read or thought about for decades. I'm not picking books popular in college course syllabi. It's almost like finding something new in something old. Our cultural legacy is deep. How rich is the writing that was churned out and published for a culture hungrier for books 60, 70, 80 years ago? Do we no longer read because the material we have to read doesn't offer what we find in a good book? Or maybe an old book is a better place to find what we need than a social media scroll. It would be random and exploratory. There will be good books and bad books. That's kind of the point of the entire exercise.

I used ChatGPT to see how it could help identify possible reading targets. I just asked it to help me find obscure books published in 1970. It gave me some good choices. I looked for a few of them in Thriftbooks and the Amazon used market. They were kind of expensive. This makes sense. These are not common books that are all over the place. They're also not particularly popular or in demand either. Using AI kind of extends that whole idea of using the tools of now to plow into the legacy of yesterday. There is a bit of simultaneous worlds or the elasticity of time element to this. Reading books to better understand the way people in a different time engaged with their media and how the content of that media (and the medium itself as a physical object) alters in meaning as the culture and physical world transforms around it. 

I've never been one to challenge the canon, but rejecting accepted ideas of which books from the past are the most worth reading has a subversive flavor. This effort implies rejecting the accepted tastes to find overlooked but still valuable perspectives. A book that didn't resonate or have a big marketing push isn't automatically inferior to the titles that got lucky and gained fame. I wouldn't stop reading the acknowledged master works. My Modern Library top 100 effort fits into this project very neatly. Those books actually offer a useful contrast to more obscure or overlooked books. One is widely read (at least in the context of the modern reading effort) while another is all but forgotten. One of the books ChatGPT suggested has virtually no activity on Goodreads. The reviews are years old. 

The decline of reading is an element of this as well. The rise of the smartphone is certainly a big player in people turning away from books, but is the reading material available to people now contributing to the reading dearth? Most books that get popular on social media are just bad. People like Lonesome Dove, but that book is amazing and was written decades ago. New stuff just isn't good. Seeing what got published decades ago tells us something about what publishers were willing to support 50 or 60 years ago. The feminization of the reading space is also part of the decline. Men read different books than women, but there are virtually no books for men these days. Perhaps I can crack the code for books that men like to read and a new publishing effort can be launched? That's a long term plan and effort.