Donald Trump and Honor Levy and Sally Rooney and Stephen Sondheim and Me

Doing a real Substacking job of it

Stick around until the end if you want to find out why this is here.

You asked and we listened. So here’s Vita Contemplativa, back with a good, old-fashioned, classic Substack kind of post. Nothing here but the hits of the new blogosphere today. Fiction and poems and real art? See yourselves out, please. The Internet demands a sacrifice and this is it: the finest thigh portions of a defenestrated bull and a Web 2.0 paean to that classic form, the favorite genre of the Substack writer, the LONG POST. Hold on to your hyperlinks, we’re diving into the foaming froth of the digital Charybdis. Yes, reader, because the Internet is eating our babies. Like the great Titan Saturnus, it is devouring our children, chewing them up like cud. The Internet is a Saturnalia of human-on-human feeding; this is why we call our digital scrolls Feeds. The Internet is a long scroll written by a blowhard blogging Kerouac, who is everywhere typing out the never-ending Beat beat: tap tap tapping out the street gospel in between ads for Juuls & pills & online gambling. The Internet is a big pink zit popped on the face of the planet. The Internet is like a fungus. The Internet is History’s id. The Internet is an Inferno without a guide. The Internet is….

1. Current Events

I’ve reached a peculiar point with this Substack—an inflection point, perhaps. I’ve been here two months now, and I’ve found some good readers already, connected in spirit with a few other writers, had some very kind comments, been encouraged about some things, even if I’m iffy on others. But it’s at least clear to me that I’ve planted my bloggish flag down here at a time when Substack is transitioning into…something else, who knows what. Notes being Twitter 2.0 might just be the start.

Just as the cultural moment (please forgive me for using that stupid, stupid term) has shifted so dramatically in the last month, vibe replaced with perfectly opposite vibe, happening with happening, at a rate that’s genuinely comedic. A perfectly sitcom-speed civilizational comedy. I’m continually astonished by how much people seem to know about these shifts and what we’re headed towards, how much they seem to know about the meanings of the last month, about Trump’s Napoleonic near-martyr moment, the immediate abdication of America’s sleepy Lear, the coronation of our coconut-tree Goneril, the revival of deep Pagan anger in Britain, the idiocies of AI literalists, the relentless forward march of a world hellbent on telling our stories for us, etc. etc. etc.

But really, how do people know so much about these things? If I have any theme I want to belabor here, in this my most quintessentially Substackian Substack post, it is this: how do people know so much? I mean it a little satirically, yes, but also genuinely. How do you people know so much? Substack is crawling with experts and genies of the most atomized, specialized, micro-sized things. A great gray ocean of minutest observations, on so many facts and events and words and trends and interests. It’s too much; how do you all write so much? I can barely continue on or have a decent day if I so much as check Instagram or my emails in the morning. The day is such a sacred thing, and any interruption to the mind risks destabilizing it all. And this is the problem with Substack, and the problem with the Internet, and the problem with ME. Tuning out and tuning in: which to do, and when? Especially when one’s thoughts are as easily derailed and scrambled as mine. What is this networked digital cacophony? Where is the Virgil to guide this dull pilgrim through?

And given the last month, how can anyone claim to be anything but cowed and bowed before the wild, enormous flow of happenings none of us can grasp?

A real headline from a real time in history.

Since this, children, is history. So it seems to me. We can’t get free of it. Though the Internet really, really makes us believe we can. Fukuyama’s “End of History” (forgive me, too, for the cliche sin of referring to that poor man’s silly tome) was, I think, correct: the End of History had been accomplished because enough people wanted it to be that way. Human beings are always getting what they want, and this is why life is funny and absurd. Since this is how History works: we really can stop it, or slow it, for a while, with great effort. History has ended a million times throughout history. But then it has always started back up again, and it always will, and even the best of our hubris will send us flailing and kicking, thrown back into the free-fall of great events, where all of us are once again crunched up into mass-historical mulch. Isn’t it romantic?

Now as far as I can tell, only two people on Substack had something of interest to say about the Trump assassination attempt. These were Sam Kriss and Justin Smith-Ruiu, who are also the two writers most responsible for my ever having heard of Substack to begin with (and the two best masters of the form). They pair well. Justin once told me, gleefully, that Kriss was like his evil twin. To which I imagine Kriss might say that Justin is something like his “beyond good” twin. And so I’d love to think that when these two get together, one would finally get both Beyond Good and Evil.¹

Now, when I spoke to my therapist² not long after the fateful shots at Trump, I was, like everyone else, more than a bit high off that photo. I might still be. A little. I spoke for a while about how extraordinary it was, how wild the mood was online, how everybody seemed so crazily energized, how everyone seemed to understand that this was history we were living through.

“You know, you sound extremely excited yourself,” he said.

Reader, I am a socialist (but not a leftist) who went to Iowa for Bernie, and I despise everything Donald Trump stands for, but my therapist was right. I was turned on. And this, reader, is the Eros of Trump.³ Something I really hadn’t understood until then. Truly: I’ve been living in Missouri for nearly 20 years, and I have normal people without politico brain rot in my life, and I get that the Trumpians love the man they have chosen to punish the feckless elites. But until the man almost got capped, I was never in the mood, so to speak. And yes I still despise what he stands for (knowing full well he stands for our grubbiest American flaws) but have to admit that the photo represented a moment of genuine Eros. Not precisely sexual, though certainly libidinal.

Trump himself is not libidinal and seems quite lacking in any actual virility. Just look at the women he’s drawn to—porn stars, models, beauty pageant contestants—the very same kinds of sculptured show-business women Kanye West loves. I always thought Trump and Kanye were perfect for each other: both men are obsessed with women who are stereotypically-speaking the “most beautiful”, which is to say in an airbrushed beauty-for-the-camera kind of way, without any of the imperfections and idiosyncrasies that make women beautiful in real life. Regardless, the way Trump’s big moment was captured certainly was libidinal, and the Democrats were surely trying very hard to contain their envy and their arousal. Democrats are also not very libidinal (“Libido, that Freudian thing? Sounds suspiciously close to male aggressivity,” one can imagine the average Liberal tut-tutting). This became a big problem for poor, flaccid, sundowning Joe. He was hardly going to compete with a near-martyr. They needed something fresh, so they knocked his knees out in a matter of days, and crowned a new party potentate. Is it any more complicated than that? I’m not sure—like I said, I know very little about these things.

But now back to art, which I do know something about.

2. The Discourse and the Novels and the Internet

Honor Levy will have to excuse me for shamelessly exploiting the name Trump as a lead-in to writing about her book. But she has occasioned from me yet another agnostic position: I simply do not have the confidence to declare anything positively about her book. I don’t know whether My First Book is good writing or not. How are people so certain? At times it seems near-brilliant and ambitious, at other times painfully confined by the strictures of the contemporary fictional style. I like that she’s elected herself (or been elected as) the Zoomer Whisperer and Cataloguer of Internet Terms. Anybody who accepts that kind of project deserves at least some admiration, for their sheer chutzpah.

But to return to my question: how does one actually develop an opinion about contemporary literature? Literature takes a long time for its classics to show. Far longer, I think, than in film or music. Literary influence is less immediate. And after all, what’s great is more up to the artists than anyone else. The work in question has to keep mattering to people who actually write. Infinite Jest, for instance, was clearly a remarkable project by a smart man who could often be a very good writer. People still love it and people still hate it. But I suspect that as time creeps on and Infinite Jest gets classed more within the same period as Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo’s novels, it will seem diminished compared to those better authors’ deeper masterpieces. DFW didn’t really add much to his influences. Though I could of course be very wrong about this.⁴

Reading Levy’s My First Book, I was somewhat beguiled, and a bit bewildered. It begs you to read it in terms of “authenticity.” Is she there at the heart of things, does she have any real insight into our Internet-addled children? Or is she just good at performing it? Is she trolling, or kidding? If a book doesn’t contain within itself its own implicit sense of “greatness,” if it’s not instinctively measuring itself up against predecessors—creating its own influences, as the Borgesian formulation goes—then where does that leave the reader? The whole project is so “meta” in the denuded Internet sense (Matrix .gif of Neo/Keanu go “Whoa”), which thins it out instead of deepening it. And for God’s sake, it’s called My First Book.

A cover which I’m sure will age very gracefully.

What I did get from Levy’s book, which I’d never fully appreciated before, was a particular insight into the deepest character of the Internet. All her stories about incels and femcels and kids who live their lives out in memes testify to the fact that the great subterranean quality—the barely-hidden secret fuel of the Internet—is shame. The Internet really is where we have put all the lost Id of History. It’s our dumping ground for the entire massive, dumb repertory of facts and feelings which we can never allow to haunt our waking hours. Now, instead of funneling these things into civilizational projects or religions or art or war, we dump them onto the Internet. And of these buried emotional realities, none haunts us more than our shame. The whole Internet thrums with human shame. Shame at not spending your time correctly, shame at having the wrong opinions, shame at failing to be as interesting as others, shame at never knowing as much as we pretend to know, shame at spending too much time on the Internet…

Behind the mask of every troll is a roiling cauldron of shame. Behind every Twitter thread is the narcissistic acid bath of wall-posting shame. It may be tucked just out of sight, or channeled into hate, but it’s still the fuel that makes it all go. Unless it’s behaving as a phone, or as a library, the Internet is a burning Hell of shameful strangers, each searching for a guide through their shame. But there is no guide. Nothing is going to steer us through the Internet, the way art does. And no matter what the Pollyannas say, the Internet is not really hospitable to art. These days I think that to survive, real art will have to leave the Internet behind. But more on that later.

Levy’s book taps into this shame, profoundly, and is best when it shows some of the intimate workings of it. Yet rather than feeling like the “first” of anything, Levy’s book feels to me like the end of something. A final cap on a very small-minded era of writing, which tried to wrangle with the chimera of the Internet, and taking specifically Internet styles of confession and irreverence and trying to map it onto the novel. Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This did it. Sally Rooney’s books do it, sort of. Lauren Oyler’s whole oeuvre is about this, and her Fake Accounts remains the most baffling to me. It’s dull, turgid, and bad semiautofiction—while reading it, I thought this was the point. My generous interpretation was that she had produced one of those hopelessly narcissistic Millennial slogs she was always criticizing, as a deliberate act of satire. But then I saw reviewers treating it very seriously, and she seemed to feel that it was being misunderstood. And it certainly was: I still don’t understand it.⁵

Rooney is a different case. All of her books make an immediate impact on the mind, before slowly fading in meaning and import. Rooney’s stories are happening at a very myopic level: there’s very little beauty, very little transcendence. Everything is mundane. Not realism per se: they’re not exhaustively autobiographical the way Knausgaard’s My Struggle volumes are. More like a devotion to the fictional mundane. Her characters are trapped in a kind of mundane Hell. They’re stereotypes who know they’re stereotypes, who torture themselves and others endlessly, for their inability to express themselves, or to handle their paralyzing self-consciousness. You want to grab their shoulders and shake them and say, “For Gods sake—Marianne, Connell, Frances, Felix—say what you are feeling, tell that person across from you what you think. You can’t live like this. DO SOMETHING.” Yet they almost never do. And they almost never say anything interesting or beautiful. If they do, there’s always a qualifying “or something” quickly following, an “lol” or “but that’s just my opinion” included as a coda to make sure nobody ever declares anything too strongly, or admits to anything too honest. They’re trapped in the world as the Internet imagines it: a Hell where everybody is always performing for everyone else, and always at risk of being found out, and even though everybody is tired of being an actor, that stage is all they’ve ever known. Maybe this is why I’ve preferred the BBC TV show adaptations of Conversation with Friends and Normal People to the actual books: the characters gain a lot more depth when portrayed by actors who can embody complete people.

Beautiful World, Where Are You makes this most literal and is the Rooney book which gives me the most hope for her soul. Because I really do think her characters represent her own deep, agonizing difficulty with living in our world. It does this most with the intra-chapter email exchanges between her surrogate Alice, and Alice’s friend Eileen. They go back and forth in volleys of messages, rhapsodizing about their own First World privileges, their inability to be sufficiently radical in the face of politics they hate, the dismaying way they still long for boys to love them. What’s hilarious to me, though, is that both these characters are successful literary people. Actually, almost all of the characters in Sally Rooney novels either already are, or are on their way to being, successful literary people. Without trying very hard, they write articles and books that get published, and then kvetch about how flat and meaningless the world is, before having sex together in scenes which read a little like Harlequin paperbacks. This is all surely part of the books’ popularity: readers of her fiction no doubt see in Rooney’s characters their own alienation and inability to connect in relationships.

But I’m equally uncertain as to whether it’s a particularly good book. Re-reading it, I’ve been charmed by a few moments, though for the most part impatient with the affected “naturalness” of the characters—it ends up reducing them to small minds incapable of getting off the contemporary fictional script. But Rooney does move them in that direction, subtly. She may not allow them a moment of unselfconscious nostalgia, or more than a peak into real belief (mostly via the ever-earnest Samaritan Simon, one of the two-dimensional male characters in the book), but she nudges them closer to it. If I were making any kind of predictions about her upcoming novel it would be that 1) Someone will be a writer, 2) Her characters will be slightly further along the journey of relieving themselves of their privilege and shame, and 3) Some of her writing may even take seriously the possibility that transcendent art is the point, not just a devotion to the mundane apparently sustained out of her Marxist impulses.

But this brings me to my point about that transcendent art, which is that whatever we are doing here on Substack, we are resolutely not doing that. Sure, it may be a decent venue for some forms (metafiction seems to work okay, though it’s harder to get readers interested), yet the big art we all agree we need ain’t happening here (don’t talk to me about Substack novels, I don’t want to read them). I’m somewhat sympathetic to the sense Henry Oliver spoke of recently, that the Internet ought to be involved in fiction but that this doesn’t mean fiction has to be like the Internet. It put me in mind of something Hart Crane wrote, about a hundred years ago, on how the Jazz Age and all the new inter-war technology had to be imbued in the poetry of the day. But not literally—in the feeling, the rhythm. It had to be implicitly there, in the fabric of the work, in syntax, in tone.

Yet let me counter that briefly with a quote from Wendell Berry’s classic, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer”:

I do not see why I should not be as scientific about this as the next fellow: when somebody has used a computer to write work that is demonstrably better than Dante’s, and when this better is demonstrably attributable to the use of a computer, then I will speak of computers with a more respectful tone of voice, though I still will not buy one.

I was born too late to say this about computers, yet I feel I can just about say it about the Internet, and certainly about the arrival of AI. I only wish I was half as principled as Berry was. Because the Internet is such a large, undifferentiated mass of potential places, all without any kind of real shape or guide. It’s an infinite series of networked nodes—but to navigate it would take something greater than we possess. By navigate, I mean doing that thing which art has been doing for us for thousands of years: functioning as a way through life. Teaching ways and forms of living. Of wisdom. Helping us to sort through which parts of our confused and messy sense of the world we can rely on for meaning—those aspects of ourselves where we might get real insight into ourselves, and into what we’re all trying to do here. We have to start off by admitting that we don’t actually know these things. But art is a better scaffolding than any other to cling to. And the Internet is the opposite of this; it’s a labyrinth which doesn’t lead anywhere. The creation of a proper guide to the Internet—a way of navigating through to what is most meaningful or valuable in it—would probably take a thousand Honor Levys. It would mean a book, or any work of art at all, which might be capable of containing and sifting the whole of the Internet.

Yet to me this is ironic. Not because it’s impossible but because there are already works of art which are in fact bigger than the Internet. The greatest works all are. Seurat’s now-ubiquitous A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which I plastered up there at the start of this piece, is bigger than the Internet. For the Internet to contain it, it has to shrink it down into a copy on a computer screen, in pixels and bytes. For some Cro-Magnon AI hypester, it must seem impossibly small compared to the vastness of the Internet. But this is because he’s looking at it through his little screen. Put the real thing in front of him and he’ll see the beginning and end of his own life, all in one painting. Sure, he may not know it. But that is what he’s seeing, and he’ll wake up further and further to his own humanity, the more he rises to realize it. Ulysses, Don Quixote, The Divine Comedy, The Book of Job—these are books which are each already bigger than the Internet. They are guides to the world, which contain the world. The Internet is smaller than they are, because the Internet cannot guide a person through anything, and can certainly not contain the world.

Do you see what I’m saying?

3. Finishing the Hat

Now about that Seurat. He’s on my mind for a reason: an old library DVD of a video recording of the 1984 Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine musical Sunday in the Park with George, a work that I think deserves mentioning with Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians as a genuine masterpiece of late-late-twentieth-century High Art. The key being that term: High Art. I know contemporary people are deeply unhappy with the idea that there’s such a thing as High and Low.⁶ Still, I don’t see how someone can encounter something like Sunday in the Park with George and not feel that it is absolutely High Art. Yes, it exists in a popular, often “low” medium (musical theater), but it is Broadway elevated to the level of a Puccini opera, with the even greater intellectual and constructional complexity of something like Brecht. Comparing it to something like Wicked or Hamilton is like comparing Seven Samurai to the TV show Friends. You can watch them both on a TV, but they’re spiritually very different things.

Certainly anyone who has some misgivings about overt, staged theatricalism; or with some of Sondheim’s deliberate heart-tugging and occasional preciousness; or the tones of Broadway singers (a sound which is, I admit, an abysmal one—thankfully, it was not yet that ridiculous in the 80s), will have a little hurdle to get over. But if it were ever worth getting over your bugbears for a single musical, it’s Sunday in the Park With George. There are a few scattered clips online in poor quality, but it’s worth seeking out the full recording of the play, done with the original cast. I won’t go on too much about the plot (which is often truly abstract), and there’s no use trying to convince somebody to like the music if they feel instantly allergic to it. If you want, you can sample some of Bernadette Peters doing virtuoso things with her decidedly non-classical voice, in the infamously difficult opener. You’ll hopefully note that despite my pontificating, there’s still a lot of “low” mixed in here. Shades of burlesque and vaudeville easily bump elbows with Sondheim’s complicated melodies and more intricate orchestration:

What it comes down to, though, is that Sunday in the Park with George is about one very great artist coming to terms with what he feels art is, by taking his medium (theater) and using it to explore a masterpiece in a very different medium (painting). The masterstroke that book-writer James Lapine settled on was a very consciously stagey tableaux, where the figures of the Seurat painting form a moving, fluctuating realization of the famous image of the park. At times Seurat sketches and adds or erases pieces of the stage decor, and when he has finally frozen his models in the iconic image, the second act opens with them singing in the canvas, stuck there for a century. The underlying struggle in the first act is between Seurat and his neglected mistress Dot. He’s an artistic cliche who slowly reveals a defining, tragic dedication; she’s a melodramatic conceit who beautifully insists on being a whole person. The struggle of their artist great-grandson George forms most of the second half, a decision critics lashed out at early on.

Though once one has given over to the music and the flow of the play, all of this seems right. I felt as much myself, at least. I’m not much of a Broadway lover. I adore old Hollywood musicals, as we all should, but am indifferent to a great deal of musical theater. I also haven’t wept openly at a film in a long time. Sunday in the Park with George reversed these things in one go, prying loose some old, buried parts of myself I hadn’t encountered since I was a child. That’s it, I suppose: we idealize children all out of reason, but the artist’s lot will always involve something of the sensibility of childhood. As Sondheim has it, in one of the show’s best songs, it’s all down to “Children and Art.” They’re the only things worth leaving behind. But they’re also tied together in a more animated vision of the world, which is the only vision worth having. The artist has to be a child. Has to “organize innocence,” in William Blake’s beautiful phrase.

So why am I spending all this time on Sunday in the Park? I admit I have no real idea why this essay has unfolded the way it has. Even in a hyperthyroid post like this, even amongst the conventions of Substack, I still would like to end on something more genuine. At least as genuine as I can muster, in this shambly excuse for a world we call the Internet.

So then I suppose it would be genuine to say that, as silly as it sounds, a little musical told me what art is and now I find I have to go out and discover that intoxicating feeling again. As Sondheim says in his gorgeous metaphor for the artist’s act and obsession, it comes down to one thing: Finishing the Hat. The song which says it is so grand, full of such pathos, erring so close on this side of sentimental—it’s a tightrope. But then the A section opens up into the B, and the orchestra sweeps up, and the only thing left is to give in. To give in completely. This is what the artist is always having to do: surrendering to things which seem silly or embarrassing, or which risk some confusion and shame from other people. But you do it anyways. The inner world is more real, and you have to feed it, and that means Finishing the Hat. No matter the cost. Only when you’ve done that can you return to the world with any dignity.

Do you see what I’m saying? This is why I think Sondheim is remarkable. He elevates his medium to an Olympic height. He’s always dealing in a world of overt theatricality and artifice, in a medium which rewards sentimental motifs with easy applause. It is resolutely entertainment, and all great entertainment requires its own kind of professionalism and expertise. But a great piece of entertainment like this lifts itself higher, demands higher kinds of pleasures. It risks being very maudlin, even laughable, because of how earnestly it wants to be grand and great.

The Internet teaches us to play a lose-lose game of playing at authenticity. But great art teaches us an artifice containing a deep, central truth. Our contemporary art needs much more of that theatricality and artifice. It also needs one of the important lessons of theater: if you don’t have it, then you can’t cut it. If you can’t learn that song by tonight, you’re going to bomb. If you make the same mistake too many times, there’s a dozen people who won’t tolerate it much longer. You have what it takes, or you don’t. And if you don’t, there’s no point whining when you’re kicked off the stage, because the bigger picture can’t work if every little part doesn’t function perfectly. That is: I mean: professionalism. The worlds of theater and classical music and dance are probably the only places left where mediocrity can’t last. There’s only so long you can put somebody on a stage before people figure out if they’re really good or not. And someone like Sondheim, to hear him speak about his art, had a real limit to how much mediocrity he was willing to forgive. Contemporary people find this very harsh and wish everybody could have their moment on stage. Genuine artists get that this is a silly idea.

The fact remains that the artist’s way is a grueling one, and requires listening to an inner sense which other people simply aren’t going to see or care about it. And the Internet is awful because it is a constant stream of other voices, noise which adds nothing, which drowns out the artist’s inner sense. I’m still not sure what this means for me, exactly. Or for you, sweet Substack reader. But after encountering Sunday in the Park with George, having struggled for some time this year over how exactly to know good art from bad art, the helpful Internet from the damaging Internet, it’s been clarified for me. A masterpiece of art is unforgiving, yet boundless in its generosity. Its artifice is a surface infinitely deep. But the Internet is not helping us make art. It is impeding it, directly. New technologies are impeding it. We will not have Internet novels, or Internet plays, or Internet films. Nor we will have AI-generated versions of those things that are in any sense worth our time. Instead, we will have the real thing in real life again, but only when we decide we actually want those things, not just the diminishing pleasures of the Internet. Someone somewhere is already doing this, we just have to find them.

But what does this mean for me, for you? I don’t know: I know so little about these things. But I know this much: you have to Finish the Hat. Because what you leave behind you is everything. Nothing else matters. Only children and art. Children and art.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for hanging in there. If you’re interested in reading something more, I have a piece that was just published over at UnHerd, about the eternal importance of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his essays, and why we should all be Emersonians. You can read it here. Title of the article not mine, but that’s how these things work.

1. Please, someone laugh. Someone, somewhere. Please.

2. Bragging or branding? You decide.

3. Incidentally, this title is free to use for any Theory goblins who might want it for a book. Verso would probably love it. Or The American Conservative, depending on the goblin.

4. Give it a little, though, and Pynchon and DeLillo themselves might just be reduced to The Crying of Lot 49 and White Noise only, when they have to contend with Proust and Joyce and Woolf as all being “twentieth century novelists” just as we sometimes homogenize Jane Austen and the Brontës, despite the difference of three or four decades between them. Such is the cruel winnowing of the classics.

5. There is, however, the wonderful moment when a little Orthodox Jewish boy appears briefly to her main character at her door, which still sticks in my mind. She’s got some moments there—I still think she’s going to write something really fresh someday.

6. I suspect that, despite academic bluster about challenging oppressive categories, it’s really because people are terrified that their taste would be deemed very, very low.