I'm So Bored With Cultural Pessimism

Better a fool than a commentator

How Did We Live Here? Remembering Pierre Joris

The poet, essayist, and translator Pierre Joris has died. Like a many readers, I first encountered him through his authoritative translations of Paul Celan, a project that represents a high water mark for the artform, full stop, and certainly for the translation of German poetry in particular. But this is only a sampling of his vast output. His Wikipedia entry states that he authored more than 30 works of original poetry alone. One thing is for certain: we translators have some catching up to do.

Here is a sample of his work on Celan, selected from his blog:

TALGLICHT

Die Mönche mit haarigen Fingern schlugen das Buch auf: September.
Jason wirft nun mit Schnee nach der aufgegangenen Saat.
Ein Halsband aus Händen gab dir der Wald, so schreitest du tot
übers Seil.

Ein dunkleres Blau wird zuteil deinem Haar, und ich rede von Liebe.
Muscheln red ich und leichtes Gewölk, und ein Boot knospt im Regen.
Ein kleiner Hengst jagt über die blätternden Finger –
Schwarz springt das Tor auf, ich singe:
Wie lebten wir hier?

TALLOW LIGHT

The monks with hairy fingers laid open the book: September.
Jason now throws snow at the sprouting seed.
A necklace of hands the forest gave you, so dead you walk
the rope.

A darker blue becomes part of your hair, and I speak of love.
Shells I speak and light clouds, and a boat buds in the rain.
A little stallion gallops over the leaf-turning fingers —
Black the gate leaps open, I sing:
How did we live here?

Foolishness

Clarice Lispector once wrote that the advantage of being a fool was having “time to see, listen, and touch the world.” Considering how popular online sports betting has become, I’m not so sure that foolishness has the same old advantages. But what about an ambitious fool? I’ll admit to being one. This is not so much self-deprecation as an honest assessment of what it means to write and make books in the world right now. It’s a tough discipline and the rewards are slight. You can count yourself fortunate just by breaking even. And as someone who has done better than average, I still find—on a daily basis, it seems— new reasons to worry. The one-two punch of whole-language learning and parenting by tablet has left a generation with their reading ability seriously degraded. But I think writers, both of the frustrated and successful varieties, do more damage than good at this point by banging on the drum of cultural death. For one, it’s gotten real boring, and for two, you can still make, independent of commercial prospects or broad recognition, a beautiful life for yourself through writing.

A month back or so, I was with my girlfriend at a neighborhood pizza joint. We had unwittingly walked into a trivia night, and since I had bad news that was better mulled over outside the house, we stayed, had some pizza, had some beer, and had a good time as spectators. There was another couple beside us at the bar, a land of contrasts between them, the woman quite talkative, the man quite a bit more taciturn. When the trivia topic turned to “Authors that You Read in School” he became more outspoken, cursing to himself and to his teammate, saying that he despised books and that he never wanted to read another one again. He clenched his fists, seemed poised to bang on the table in protest. He wasn’t trash. His antipathy struck me as cultivated rather than a matter of circumstance. He looked the part—performance wear and all—of an athletic, upper-middle-income professional, a type that’s becoming more and more common in my corner of Philadelphia, more representative of the well-educated, well-heeled tech-bro philistine type that Sam Bankman Fried so vocally epitomized.

The questions were, as the trivia category suggested, rather basic. Contestants had to guess the authors of To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye—names that could be picked up ambiently, regardless of whether a student is interested in books or not. The last question, though, I thought was quite clever: Who wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God? I was never assigned Zora Neale Hurston, not as far as I can remember, but I could see how someone might have. I’ve definitely encountered her on the Classics shelf in a thrift shop, alongside Charles Dickens and all those student editions of Shakespeare. “Authors that You Read in School” was a popular category, judging by the crowd’s reaction: lots of noise, sighs and cheers, as the answers were read out.

Then, as the round was coming to an end, something altogether charming happened. The bartender announced that the MC was the author of a recently published novel. He had bought a copy, held it up for everyone to see. I can’t recall the title; I really should have written it down, since I haven’t been able to find it through searching online. As far as I can remember, it takes place in the neighborhood, in Roxborough, where the MC grew up, so the bartender informed us. The trivia contestants all clapped for the newly minted author, and he, in turn, took a little bow, then moved on to another trivia category. Our neighbor stopped grumbling about books, though he continued to frown, as if the night had been ruined for him. But at least he unclenched his fists.

For the past few weeks, I’ve thought about that charming moment, when the trivia MC took a bow, as I scroll through post after post on Substack, post after post on Bluesky, post after post on X telling me, as if it wasn’t apparent already, how literature is in a bad way. Some of these are more artful and informed than others. The best come, like Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press, from people working in the industry. But a huge portion of the discourse is not much more than vibes-based commentary and, in the case of Substack, metacommentary on the platform itself. Again, there is decent writing in this vein, but it falls more in the realm of technology and media journalism than it does literary writing. In any case, I’d rather not swim through dozens of takes just to read the odd article about 19^th-century child spirit mediums or what kind of books Robert Musil would recommend.

Of course, I indulge in commentary myself. What is this particular essay if not that? But I find it hard to sustain any enthusiasm, am baffled by those who engage in it daily. I offer the tardiness of this particular newsletter, a week late, as proof of how boring the subject is to me. But then I look at the latest round of pessimistic takes, see how widely they’re being shared, how this or that writer is making a name for themselves doing it, and then I wonder what I’m doing with my life. It seems foolish not to opine. Online metacommentary appears to be the only growth market in culture, at least outside of AI slop. But then I remember Lispector and the advantages of the fool. Posting commentary takes time away from more measured, more leisured ways of engaging with language; it takes time away from reading books, takes time away out making notes about said books, takes time away from cogitating on what the books might mean, and takes time from articulating thoughts about those books, independent of the ebb and flow of online discourse.

And that was what was charming about the trivia MC. He accepted the acclaim from this small crowd, unaware or uncaring, at least fort the moment, that the wider culture didn’t like what he was doing. A century ago, Ernest Hemingway or Sherwood Anderson might find something pathetic and comical in a provincial scene like this. Local author gets his brief round of applause. It doesn’t sound very grand, nothing to base a life around. But to me, it felt more real, and still feels more real, than all the yakking about whether we’re living in a post-literate age, whether we have enough readerly skill and shared cultural context to appreciate literature, and so on, and so on, ad infinitum. Our trivia MC seemed engaged with a wider, more durable world. I don’t remember his name; I don’t remember his book. But he gave me an occasion to raise a glass to him in genuine, spontaneous feeling. And that counts much more than all the successful commentators whose names I do know.

Postcard from the Oregon Coast