“Even if you’re a big fan of capitalism, you’ll at least concede that its greatest strength is probably not its capacity to reward artistic virtue fairly. It’s important for artists to remember this—and then it’s important for us to stop dwelling on it. “I can’t make coffee,” Samson writes; this was probably where I sympathized with her–and also cringed–most. I spent a lot of the past year trying to figure out what, besides writing, I could do to make money.”
A, for me, personally-affecting, brief essay on Emily Books in response to something a member of Le Tigre wrote, which I have not read in full.
Now, this is something I’ve seen a bit of today, and even went so far as to make a passive aggressive, blind item tweet on. So you know it’s important to me. Listen.
One response to this essay, for instance, is to say, “Someone should tell her there’s only one space in between sentences. Some writer, huh!?” Another thing you can say is, “This is so great, yayayayayay!” Neither response is very, I guess, ‘constructive’, but at least one of them is not the shittily casual sort of response that I see every fucking day on the internet.
When someone constructs an argument — or even makes some vague, handwaving gestures toward constructing an argument — it is not sufficient to base your response to it on an incidental or tangential niggle you may have with it. It might seem like that’s an acceptable response, but it’s not because 1) it serves to move to the conversation from this thing they started talking about to this meaningless and only tenuously related thing you want to talk about (usually with the aim of then never returning to the first thing), and 2) it’s (to my thinking, I should note) a sort of implicit “fuck you” to the author. That’s not good to the author. Here, look.
—Hey there. I’m the author, and I wrote this thing that I feel passionate about. You felt passionate enough about it, or at least had enough interest in it to read it (or part of it or at least a precis of it). I chose to share my writing with you for either ego-based reasons or because I wanted some input on it, or I wanted to start a dialog. I at least wanted to do that totally nebulous thing, ‘raise awareness’. There’s a clear thrust to my argument (or whatever it is), and then there are incidental sorts of things I’ve said. What do you think?
And now here comes you:
—I’ll see your ‘thing I feel passionate about’, and raise you a ‘clear signal I don’t want to talk about the thing you want to talk about, and also that I want to talk over what you were saying to say my… inconsequential thing’. I am doing the, I guess, social media equivalent of putting fingers in my ears and saying loudly, ‘Na na na na na na’.
See how that works? It can be done to men and women alike, and it’s always shitty. For some further reading, Rebecca Solnit.
