I’v…

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This is an excerpt from a diary entry I wrote on January 22, 2014:

What am I doing here? I know I’m in the right place — I can feel it, somehow — but being in the right place doesn’t necessarily mean feeling comfortable there. I know I don’t want a regular nine-to-five — I honestly don’t think I’d make it — but I…

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Next week, and my close friend will be attending the 2024 Frankfurt Book Fair as indie publishers/representatives of my latest novel, The Requisitions, a historical metafiction set in Nazi-occupied Poland.

This interview initially appeared in the Septemb…

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Video: I’ve included a video of my discussion with at the bottom of this post for all of my visual learners out there.

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On April 8, 2024, I received a request on my website for a literary walking tour. This is what it said:

Name: Evelyn Skye

Subject: Hemingway and Lost Generation walking tour

Message: Hi Samuél, I'm an author who will be participating in Le Festival du Livre de Paris, and I have a free day in the city. JoJo & Barrie from mentioned that I ought to connect with you.1 Are you free for a Hemingway walking tour, or alternatively, to grab a coffee?

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It’s not often that authors request a walking tour, and I couldn’t help but look up in hopes of learning more about her work before our Parisian stroll.

At first—I admit it—I was just a tad intimidated: Evelyn had recently celebrated a writing partnership with Netflix and was the author of multiple NY-Times bestsellers … what could I possibly teach a Harvard graduate in Russian literature who was living the kind of literary life I could only fantasize about?

It turns out all I had to do was trust Evelyn’s honest words on her website:

“Evelyn believes in the complexity and essential goodness of people, and tries to savor small moments of stillness and joy every day. This–she hopes–is what you’ll find in her books.

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During our walk from Place Monge up to Place de La Contrescarpe, where Hemingway places his legendary in media res beginning to A Moveable Feast (“And then there was the bad weather”), out behind the Pantheon and down into the Luxembourg Gardens and the heart of Saint Germain, Evelyn and I discussed Hemingway’s journey from lovesick war veteran with a proclivity for romance to disillusioned author celebrity with a drinking problem.

Curious, we both agreed over a post-walk drink along the nestled alleyway of Cour du Commerce St. André, that during the last years of his life, Hemingway chose not to write about all of his life’s many financial and celebrity successes but rather those early years in Paris, before anyone knew his name, when he wrote for writing’s sake.

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What touched me most about meeting , who is certainly one of the most traditionally successful authors I’ve ever met, was how humble and kind she was in sharing her own story and wisdom during our walk. She was also genuinely curious about my writing and my life as a writer in Paris.

In a world wherein literary success is defined by best-seller lists, hefty advances, and silver screen adaptations—all of which Evelyn has experienced multiple times—speaking with Evelyn in Paris about fame and wealth and the disillusionment that can come with society’s definition of “success’ revealed just how much of a true writer she is, a specialist in Russian literature who was as skeptical as I am about how much any writer should look towards the tragic personalities of the Roaring Twenties as the types of writers humans worth emulating.

As I proceeded to tell Evelyn, I’ve lived in Paris as a working novelist for my entire adult life, but I have yet to be published by a major publisher, which means sometimes when I tell a stranger what I do, the stranger—usually an American—blurts out, “So, you, like, want to be the next Ernest Hemingway?”

To which I respond, “Well, he was a legendary alcoholic, burned most of the bridges anyone ever helped him cross, suffered multiple traumatic brain injuries, was married four times, and blew his head off in a field in Idaho. So no, actually. I don’t want to be like Ernest Hemingway.”

Far from being aspirational, Evelyn and I both agreed that the cult of celebrity and wealth that has permeated so many people’s definitions of success since Ernest Hemingway’s meteoric rise and tragic ending—a quintessentially American capitalistic story—is best interpreted not as something to strive for but as a cautionary tale.2

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And so, in this week’s episode of Finishing the Hat, Evelyn and I discuss her journey from law firm extraordinaire to mother to bestselling author to a newfound venture on Substack, which is the clearest proof of just how generous she is.3 In her own words, Evelyn’s Substack, is:

“a friendly, vibrant community of thousands who believe that EVERYONE can spark creativity and build an inspired, happier life.”

All of the proceeds from Evelyn’s paid subscriptions go directly to scholarships for Substack writers, teenagers, and adult writers who know just how much a few extra dollars can help in carving out a few days to write (shout out to my 79th paying subscriber this week, ).

As Evelyn and I discuss in Episode 2 , she wrote nine novels before publishing a book that she knew nobody else could write she wrote without hope or despair of publication, The Crown’s Game, a historical fantasy set in imperial Russia and based on her particular interest in 19th-century Russian literature.

The tenth try’s the charm, according to someone, surely.

Since then, Evelyn has published nine more books ranging from YA to Middle Grade to Adult fiction (none of these books, by the way, were reworked manuscripts; Evelyn simply kept on keeping on writing onwards and upwards). Perhaps most impressively, Evelyn even recently partnered with Netflix to write a novel for the Damsel series, and here’s a badass photo that can serve as some kind of proof:

Evelyn’s trajectory is a metamodern version of the American Literary Dream, and while I have no illusions that it’s a rare example of traditional literary success, I think we can all learn something from Evelyn’s tenacity and character.

What inspires me even more than Evelyn’s work ethic is that her definition of success has also changed since she began, which is why all of the money she makes on Substack goes to providing scholarships for writers like you and me (anyone can enter and it’s straightforward; next deadline for a $500 scholarship is August 22; also, it’s free; also, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, so here goes mine: if you think I deserve a scholarship, I’ll use it to go on a miniature writing retreat, and all you have to do to give me a shot at the prize is like my comment I wrote in the comments section of the scholarship page).

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If last week’s episode of Finishing the Hat with was about how indie authors can subvert the publishing industry, this week’s conversation is with an objectively successful, traditionally published author who hasn’t lost sight of the importance of honoring personal definitions of success in the metamodern age … whether that means achieving Netflix specials and bestseller lists or taking French classes at the end of the call, so that one day, once again, we can sit down again on a cobblestoned street in Paris to chat about life, literature, and all the rest of it over a glass of wine.

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CREATIVE. INSPIRED. HAPPY with Evelyn Skye

Publicity Calendar for a Successful Book Launch

Hello there, my brilliant writer friends…

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3 years ago · 6 likes · Evelyn Skye

For the first five episodes of Finishing the Hat (2023), I chatted about YA literature & art of fiction with ; satire and subversive innovation with ; utopian literature & the end of traditional publishing with ; capitalism & the soul of art with ; and , with whom I played in a funk band in Burlington, VT (sweet, sweet memories of Nectars) and who’s taught me a whole lot about my favorite “ism,” metamodernism.1

Finishing the Hat, Season 2

As many of you know, a few months ago I successfully published my second novel, The Requisitions, a historical metafiction set Nazi-occupied Poland, via me and my wife ’s Paris-based imprint, Kingdom Anywhere.2

The limited edition of 300 copies sold out quite quickly (largely thanks to my community), which is why later this month I’ll be going on a miniature book tour in Provincetown, MA (East End Books) before heading to my hometowns of Durham and Chapel Hill, NC (Flyleaf Books) and rounding out the year with readings in Paris, London, and an attempt to break into the international markets at the 2024 Frankfurt Book Festival.

connection > capital

It took me a long time to develop the confidence and conviction to buy back the rights to my debut novel, Slim and The Beast, and to finally decide to publish The Requisitions independently this year, and it’s only because of writers humans like the aforementioned Substack writers that continue to have hope, motivation, and energy to subvert the traditional publishing industry.

Note: The above video shows our laughing faces, but it doesn’t include the episode’s edited audio or the piano song I recorded at the lovely French country home of .

Dale, the first guest of Season 2 of Finishing the Hat, is no exception

I spent quite a few hours researching the nuts & bolts of indie publishing before I came across Dale of , who was one of the very few people I discovered on the Internet who was authentic, honest, and transparent about how he had subverted the trad pub industry (Dale’s YouTube channel is a fantastic resource for anyone researching indie publishing).

Modesty and generosity are hard to come by in this era wherein cults of personality and celebrity capital dominate most definitions of success.

Indeed, when it comes to many “self-publishing gurus” online, most end up hoarding the very information they promise to offer, placing their supposed-wisdom behind a paywall, demanding followers without any guarantee of leading them anywhere (once upon a time, collecting followers was reserved for cult leaders).

This is why it was so refreshing to discover ’ videos, and why I decided to send him this email in hopes of having a conversation:

Dale’s willingness to have a chat—and particularly the following quote from our conversation—pretty much sums up why I believe Dale is in it for the right reasons:

Here’s to a new season of Finishing the Hat, to cultivating community in all the myriad ways that help us grow, and to supporting the folks who inspire us make us feel alive.

Finishing the Hat shall remain free because my conversation with was a refreshing reminder of how you can’t put a price on connection.

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This is Part II of a letter exchange between myself and Meg Oolders of .

In Part I gushed over Meg’s witty yet profound writing, her interest in YA literature, and the challenges of being a parent while remaining devoted to literary work (Meg wrote a killer line that sums it up nicely: "Maybe because middle-age feels an awful lot like adolescence.”)

Down…

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I’m not quite sure when I met . We’ve never shaken hands, or been in the same town together, for the simple reason that we live on different continents.

Meg writes from New Hampshire, an honest, human Substack that blends humor and flash fiction, and for over a year now, thanks to the community, we’ve been corresponding about life, literature, and all…

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This one’s for the philosophers. Which, by the way, means all of us.

Some of you have heard the whispers: I’ve finished my next novel, The Requisitions. It’s headed to print in a matter of days, and you’ll be hearing a whole lot more about it next week.

The reason I mention it here is: 1) only about 45% of you will actually read this message, but 2) while the novel is about history, memory, and the Nazi Occupation of Poland, it’s really about philosophy, i.e. trying to understand what we’re all doing here, and how we make sense of our lives in times of extreme turmoil.

This is the cover:

More on everything The Requisitions soon, but if you’re one of my 900+ free subscribers receiving this on a Sunday morning, you might just find a special offer down below to reserve one of 300 signed limited-1st edition copies of a novel that’s been a lifetime in the making.

Finishing the Hat w/ Brendan Graham Dempsey

For the last of this season’s Finishing the Hat episodes (#5), I’m reconnecting with an old friend from my University of Vermont days, the philosopher/cultural theorist . Brendan wrote an epic poem for his senior thesis, is a badass saxophonist and pianist, and was the first person in the world to get me thinking about the term metamodernism.1

Brendan’s YouTube series on metamodernism is a must-see for anyone seriously considering the ways in which this current cultural era has evolved since the early 2000s, but more than anything else, Brendan’s wisdom comes at a time in my life when—having finished The Requisitions—I feel most receptive to thinking about the forever oscillating aspects of the human condition.

Brendan and I met at the University of Vermont in a college band (The Sepia Tones) which I started with my twin brother, . We weren’t very good, but we did have a whole lot of fun, and I have a photo from January, 2008 to prove it:

Brendan is still making art and living the writing life in Vermont, which is as an authentic way of life as I can imagine. In our conversation, Brendan summarizes his most recent book, Metamodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics, by providing important historical context for understanding the cultural and artistic paradigm shifts from modernism—> postmodernism—>metamodernism.

Below are some of my favorite quotes from this episode. All four previous episodes of Finishing the Hat are cited in the foonote.2

Dempsey-isms from Finishing the Hat, Episode 5

Brendan’s new book: “I'm trying to do something with Metamodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics like what Frederic Jameson did Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, which is try to present sort of a structural account of metamodernism. But, unlike Jameson, I'm not just looking at economic factors and then saying metamodernism is a cultural logic of a certain stage of capitalism. I think there are deeper actual elements to that … try to look at Metamodernism as a cultural logic of cultural logics.”

On the Ugliness of Not Caring: “I think this stuff needs to be out there more to help artists, to help people contextualize their own work. It began very much from my own feeling that, you know, basically growing up during the postmodern kind of paradigm, I guess I didn’t know my own sort of artistic maturity. In the waning years of postmodernism, I just felt like whatever art I was seeing, felt very tired and exhausted and predictable and stupid. It lacked meaning, but it also very intentionally lacked meaning. It was ugly. It was sort of in your face, and confrontational, and that was supposed to be what made it interesting. But for me, that's what kind of just made it like, yeah, we've seen this a million times […]

On Aesthetics: “Beauty's hard. And it's a lot easier to just put a piece of crap in an art gallery—like a literal piece of crap. I mean that literally.”

On Modernity: “In modernity, you get this sense of: we can know the truth and it's the truth for everyone, and it's the only one answer, because we used our reason right? And so it's not a matter of interpretation. It's just the one real story, and if you don't like it, then, you know, sorry. Get with the program. Towards Postmodernism: The postmodern turn is really about emphasizing alternative stories, about shifting away from these notions of progress and linear advancement. And you know, critiquing the roles that technology plays, and this famously got picked up as sort of a way of thinking about this, it’s what Jean Francois Leotard said the postmodern condition is characterized by what he called an incredulity towards meta-narratives or grand narratives. 

On Meaning: “The meaning issue is so crucial to this metamodern conception. If you're grappling with this notion that postmodernism comes along and deconstructs the grand narratives of the past, and then just leaves you in nihilism and meaninglessness and with this very crude power analysis … there's this hunger for meaning and purpose and significance, but in a way it’s not just reactionary. [It’s not just] I'll take up some ancient religious creed or will just believe in sort of some transhumanist Utopia … it's somehow dealing with meaning in a manner that takes seriously the critiques of it, both for modernity, but certainly from postmodernity, and yet find something meaningful on the other side. So what is really meaningful, right? What is actually meaningful?”

On identity: “My self-awareness of my own identity is a product of being around other people, and without others I could not even be myself.  So it really starts to reshape how you think about things. And once you're able to fit in more and more [types of] relationships, and see how all these [relationships] increasingly play off each other, a lot of that strict dualistic black and white thinking just falls away. And you know, arguably, that's what we need right now in a hyperpolarized world, in a world still riven by these old parochial divisions.”

just press play. The episode is full of treasures (and a piano improvisation I dug up from 2020).

If you need proof that such treasures indeed shimmer, you’ll find some of my favorite quotes down below.

Favorite Quotes AKA Sam Kahnisms

On masculinity: “There was a long time when it just felt like you weren’t even supposed to think about masculinity, or talk about it. And this was absolutely how I felt throughout my twenties, that there’s this entrenched patriarchy, and here is feminism, and I think the way I articulated my sense-of-self was about being a fellow traveler to what was happening […] [but it became] important to get back to some understanding that was organic to the experience of my own life and how I’ve taken in the world. […] A lot of what I find myself expressing in my fiction, or in my plays, is about beauty and status hierarchies within the dating market. I mean, it really makes people jerks to other people. That's what the “Gentlemen Prefer Bitches”1 story is about […] it’s about trying to find a sense of masculinity or sense of sexuality that doesn’t feel like it’s taking stuff from other people, doesn’t feel like it’s playing into narratives about some kind of dominance.”

On ‘progress’: “Being places outside of the bubble [of the USA], you don’t have this feeling that the world is all going in one direction. It’s a big world and a lot of things are going to happen. One of my pet peeves is this belief in progress. I think we have this idea stuck in our heads—there’s a Judaeo-Christian version of it, and there’s a scientific version of it, and now there’s actually a woke version of it—we believe things must be getting better, and we hitch ourselves to that train of progress, and I just don’t think that’s true. Things are going to go how they go. What matters much more is paying attention to the course of your own life and the trajectory of your soul—your integrity—and not letting yourself get taken by some ideology or other.”

On the sanctity of literature: “I think of the place of reading and writing and the sort of enchanted self that you’re in as you’re [reading & writing] as being just very removed from everything else. I tend to think about it in pretty religious terms. I mean, it's just the soul. You're experiencing your soul. And so it's very important for me to build walls around that garden to protect that space.”

On maturing as a writer: “I went through enough anxiety or paralysis with my own writing, where I was trying to figure out, oh, you know, should I be writing for the market in this way? What are other people looking for? And then, I just … getting a little bit more experienced, and taking LSD and different things, at some point it was kind of like, no, that's that's not what I'm gonna do. I'm just gonna express whatever my truth is, try to be in touch with my own experience and my own emotions, and that's sort of the job as a writer. And then, inshallah, you figure out some way to make money somewhere in that.”

On capitalism: “There's this delusion in the culture. Call it neoliberalism, or whatever it is, but we really believe in money, and we really believe that money sets value and money sets worth. And so there's this idea that you can kind of harmonize the whole thing. That if you do the great work, it's gonna be picked up by the right studio, and then, you know, you'll live happily forever. And without even being anti capitalist, I just feel that it's just two different value systems. One one is basically a religious experience, it's about your soul, and the other one is about setting markets and how we all live in a resource-poor, physical reality.”

On Martin Gurri2 & anti-authoritarianism: “And then this book, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, was self-published and got dug up after 2016 […] it’s an explanation for Trump and what's happening with the public sector. It talks about authority grappling with the public, and authority means this old stuff that we all sort of love—we love books being published, but authority more and more becomes an entrenched center. And then there's the public beating outside the moat. I have an elitist background in a way, but I felt much more aligned with the public, and that was the side I wanted to be on.”

On Substack: “Substack still sort of has a stigma [of self-publishing]. The traditional media, I noticed, is really hostile to it. I mean, they'll say these absurd things, and it feels like exactly what Martin Gurri described, this citadel of these legacy publishers trying to retain control over the flow of information. [But] my feeling is that era is over, guys […] It's really really important  to look with fresh eyes, think critically, read widely, and come up with your own conclusions, which have taken me to some pretty odd places, some places that aren't on the sort of liberal vs. conservative spectrum that I grew up with.”

On the writer’s duty: “I remember watching this Dustin Hoffman video when I was pretty young and he was saying like, you know, if you wait for the break, you will die. You just have to do it, and you have to put that stuff out—wherever the hell it’s for […] You get to a place of internal confidence where you can put stuff out—it's somebody else's job to figure out whether it's good or not good. That's not your job. Your job is to just listen to whatever the inner voices are, and then, you know, sit your ass down in the chair and put it out.”

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Castalia

Gentlemen Prefer Bitches

Dear Friends, I’m sharing a short story. I posted this earlier — back when the Substack was pretty much blood relatives only. Sorry that this is on the long side. Best, Sam GENTLEMEN PREFER BITCHES From ‘New Yorkers’ Audrey was the kind of person who had theories of everything, theories about relationships, theories about men. Zach, in particular, inspired h…

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3 years ago · 10 likes · 3 comments · Sam Kahn

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Castalia

Manifesto

For the few reading this Substack, the politics here must be a bit perplexing. This is for the good reason that I’m really not sure what my politics are. Or, to put it a little more proudly, that I’ve found it important to scrape away various political assumptions I have and try to put together a politics from scratch…

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4 years ago · 9 likes · 3 comments · Sam Kahn

I started writing on Substack in February 2022,

and was one of the first Substack writers to reach out to me to start a conversation:

June 23, 2022: Hi Samuél, I just discovered your newsletter today and am instantly obsessed. I am writing a piece right now about French literature and I wondered if you might be interested in writing an article together? Specifically, I'd love to have a back-and-forth conversation about what the modern "Parisian Artist" looks like.

Our connection only deepened from there.

We wrote a letter exchange about modern literature1, which I followed with some of my thoughts about the current artistic “ism” we’re living in, metamodernism, a movement I learned thanks to another Substack writer, who also happens to be the saxophonist from my college funk band, .

In that essay, I disagree with Elle on a few points she made in her article “I’m So Over Dead French Writers.” I’m grateful for her willingness to engage in a conversation and force me to put my literary philosophy down in words (it’s a long read, best enjoyed over a cup of whiskey or coffee).

Elle writes about utopianism

for the simple and admirable reason that “if even our best literary minds cannot imagine a better future, how are we supposed to create it?” In another collaboration, we discussed how best to do this and how to cultivate genius in the 21st century.2

She is a thoughtful writer and a skilled researcher, but more than anything else, Elle has been an inspiration and a cheerleader for Substack writers since the beginning, and remains one of the most popular essay/fiction Substacks around.

And so a few weeks ago, I sat down with Elle to catch up and have an informal chat about subjects ranging from life in France to utopianism to why we’re both sick of traditional publishing and are so grateful for being able to write differently on this space.

Enjoy. The next Finishing the Hat episode is philosophy-heavy, featuring one of the most outspoken and thoughtful writers on Substack, Castaliaby Sam Kahn.

PS — This is the 102nd post I’ve published on Substack. I wanted to celebrate the 100th post, but then life happened. Alas. With any luck, there will be at least 100 more.

All this to say, if you enjoy this space, remember there’s a lot of other writing you may not have seen.

In the 100th post for if not, Paris, Episode 2 of Finishing the Hat, thinks of his Substack as a living book, which I love.

Just because something isn’t impossibly new (as soon as something is “out,” we tend to think of it as old—it’s exhausting) this doesn’t mean it isn’t still relevant, like this short story about September 11, 2001, or this saga about my Journey to Los Angeles, or the story of meeting my now-wife, in a dive bar in Paris one week before the world shut down.

7 Elle Griffinisms from Finishing the Hat, Episode 3

On Convincing Readers to “Go Paid”

“I tried to do my own version of tough-sell for a month, and I got ten paid subscribers from it but I hated it. I didn’t like doing the hard-sell. I’d almost rather gate my content and say, you like what I’m reading and you get to a point where you like to read more? Great, then pay for the writing. Don’t pay because I’m being aggro towards you.”

On Humanism

“The best we can do is see that there is suffering in the world and try to better that. And that means helping other humans on earth. Not because we need to get to heaven or something, but just because that’s the thing that needs help more than anything else.”

On a Salary Cap for Humans

A: “That was the whole premise of my essay “An Alternative to Tax the Rich.” I basically argued for not a salary cap but a tie-the-bottom-to-the-top, so the top earners of an organization cannot earn more than ten times of the bottom earners of the organization. The problem isn’t that people aren’t too rich, it’s that other people aren’t getting rich enough. If we tax the rich, all of the tax dollars in the US go to the poor, the old, and the military. Whereas in a Nordic country, if you’re taxing the rich, it goes to everyone. Nobody in America wants to be taxed because they think, none of that money is going to come back to me.”

On Burning Man

“Burning Man started as kind of an anarchist experiment. And what happens to anarchy? Originally everyone said, let’s make art and bring it to the desert. And then what happens? People want bigger art and better art so they need funders, so they get big tech companies to sponsor them to make this art so they can have this crazy installation. And then the company wants to show that it was from that company that art is possible. And now Burning Man is as capitalist as they come.”

On Making Money off of Art

“You can have pure art that’s not seen ever by anyone and you can have pure art that’s funded. But no matter what, the artist needs some kind of support to be able to create whatever they’re creating. Did Burning Man at some point become not for artists because it became capitalist?”

On Publishing Writing on Substack vs. Writing for Ourselves

“I think in written form, writing for an audience forces me to come to a point. When I used to journal, not for a public audience, I would just have a bunch of random thoughts and not come to any conclusion or solution. They didn’t go anywhere. And that wasn’t helpful to me, to write I’m feeling emotional today, or sad today, and then wonder what am I going to do about it?” 

On Traditional Publishing

“I don’t see the value in a traditional publisher at all. It’s social validation, but that’s all it is. [As for literary agents] even if you get one of the Top 5 literary agents in the world, and even if that Top 5 Agent secures you a Penguin publishing deal, and even if that Penguin publishing deal pays you $100,000—which, just to get to this point, you're already in the top .0001% (it’s like 3 books every 10 years)—then your book will still sell 5,000 copies, maybe 10,000. That’s still nobody reading it. I’ve had articles that have reached 100,000 people. So why would you pay all of these people all of your income and they’re not going to get you a better result?”

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The Elysian

What is modern literature anyway?

Samuél Lopez-Barrantes is a novelist, literary tour guide, and professor living in Paris. He writes nonfiction and fiction for his newsletter, if not, Paris and hosts literary salon discussions online. I thought he’d be the perfect person to talk to about modern literature so I sent him a draft I wrote about dead French write…

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4 years ago · 37 likes · 28 comments · Elle Griffin and Samuel Lopez-Barrantes

Episode 1 was with Meg Oolders, the fantastic flash-fiction writer of . One of my favorite quotes from our discussion—dare I call it an Oolderism?—was

Amran and Meg, it turns out, have also become real-life friends via Substack, calling each other on a semi-weekly basis from their respective homes in Chicago and New Hampshire.

And this is what Substack is all about, at least for me:

forgetting about validation and subscriber counts and instead focusing on the extremely simple principle of fostering connections via language on this communal space.

Lo and behold, when we engage with fellow writers and focus on cultivating communities and friendship versus a “following” (what are we, cult leaders?), good things happen. It’s funny how that works.

“We met in the comments section via Substack”

sounds like a line from a Gen-Z version of When Harry Met Sally, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true (plus, Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan are a perfect match).

Since I first discovered Amran’s witty, outspoken, and acutely intelligent , we’ve exchanged letters about whether we write to embrace or escape and what the point of good comedy and good fiction is all about2.

But after a while, the lengths of our letters became unwieldy, and I thought it’d be worth jumping on a call with Amran to continue the conversation.3 In the hour-long discussion, I learned about Amran’s parenting philosophy, why he thinks some of Substack’s policies are “boneheaded,” and how to remain a decent human being in indecent times. He also gave me some great business tips on making Substack’s subscription model work for me.

I got a lot out of this conversation, and I hope you will too. Down below I’ve included a few of my favorite quotes (I’m calling these Gowanisms), but obviously this is a podcast, which means it’s best to be listened to, so I hope you’ll press play, rest your eyes, kick back your feet, and have a listen while you take a stroll through nature, or maybe while you squint up at a glistening urban metallic cityscape up above, or maybe—gasp!—whilst you ride through Paris on an allegedly bug-infested commuter train.

PS: Episode 3 will be a lively conversation with , a wise human, a prolific Substacker, and one of the main reasons why I first felt seen on this space. Elle and I began our friendship over a year ago via a philosophical discussion about what modern literature is in the 2020s. You can find the link down below.4 And yes, there are many Griffinisms.

7 Gowanisms from Finishing the Hat, Episode 2

On the Human Known as

“I’m just a washed-up 43-year-old man trying to make it in the world. I’m just trying to operate from some real-life pragmatic principles and stand up for what I believe in.”

On Politics

“I don’t cover weekly politics. I’m not covering that beat, man. That shit is exhausting.”

On Belief

“Pick your actual value system. The policy implementation system is always going to be really hard, and it’s never going to be perfect. Start with an overarching value: do we believe in freedom of expression? do we believe in freedom of religion? do we believe in not living in a surveillance state? do we believe in privacy? do we believe in equity and fairness?” 

On Children

“Kids don’t know what they don’t know. I think as a parent, there’s this prerogative to shield your children from stuff. And that’s exactly the wrong way to approach it. I think you gotta expose your kids—you don’t have to traumatize them—but you gotta tell them: look man, 70 years ago, you wouldn’t have been allowed to live in this neighborhood. We might not even have been allowed to vote. There are still a lot of problems, but the problems get better because people decide to do the right thing.”

On Substack Writers who Write about Writing on Substack

“The best way to make money as a writer is to dupe other writers who don’t know anything about business.”

On his Lifetime Payment Model vs. Recurring Subscriptions

“People don’t realize that the recurring paid model creates expectations in both directions […] then the lifetime payment model just kind of clicked with me. I call a living book. It’s not a subscription to a newsletter. It’s a living book. When you buy it, you own it.” 

On Owning Up to Being a Writer

“You hear people say nothing’s worse than telling people you’re a writer. I find that adage completely backwards. When people ask me what I do, and they’re a soulless consultant or investment banker that knows their job is bullshit even though they’re getting paid a lot of money, and I tell them that I write? Their eyes light up and they want to know everything about it. So if you’re a writer in the world, tell people you write, because they’ll really be interested in it.”

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4

The Elysian

What is modern literature anyway?

Samuél Lopez-Barrantes is a novelist, literary tour guide, and professor living in Paris. He writes nonfiction and fiction for his newsletter, if not, Paris and hosts literary salon discussions online. I thought he’d be the perfect person to talk to about modern literature so I sent him a draft I wrote about dead French write…

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4 years ago · 35 likes · 23 comments · Elle Griffin and Samuel Lopez-Barrantes

This is the first of many conversations I’ll be having with fellow Substack writers who’ve inspired me over the past few years. While “The Active Voice” podcast over at has been an inspiration and fantastic resource for interviews with world-famous writers, I wanted to conduct these interviews with authors who may not be as world-renowned as the George Saunders or Patti Smiths of the world, but whose wisdom, though quieter, is still worthy of attention and reflection.

Finishing the Hat Episode 1: Meg Oolders

Meg Oolders is a novelist and short-story writer who lives in New Hampshire. She writes , a refreshing, playful Substack that writes flash fiction based on stock imagery from the world wide web (remember when people called it that?).

What strikes me most about Meg’s writing is how human it is. While she often confronts questions of technology, Meg has a knack for storytelling that never forgets about humans, which are my favorite subjects when it comes to stories (the story down below, “Memory Five” for example, is a heart wrenching warming story about the importance of memory in a changing world.)1

Meg very kindly took the time to expand upon some of my interview questions in written form, but Finishing the Hat is first and foremost a dialogue. The full recording is about 1 hour-long, and it’s not intended to feel like anything other than two writers talking about life, writing, and all the rest of it.

Here are a few of the questions we discussed during our conversation:

• Tell me about the connection between your writing and the German word fernweh (“nostalgia, or yearning, for a place you’ve never been.”)

• When it comes to writing novels (and congratulations on writing five in one year), are a “pantser” or a “plotter,” and what the hell am I talking about?

• Many of your pieces have a darkly comedic, almost absurdist quality that shimmers at their dystopian edges. Two questions about your role as an artist: what is your creative vision for the future? And what do you think—not what you hope, but what you think—is going to happen socio/politically over the next decade?

This series is dedicated to the 63 paying subscribers who make this space and this kind of work possible. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You give us Substacking writers hope.

Finally, thank you to for agreeing to this project. Our mutual friend, , will feature on Finishing the Hat in two weeks. Two weeks after that, will feature. Two weeks after that I’ll interview .

And for now, a bientôt.

Interview with from Stock Fiction.

Q: I loved how you spoke about the importance—and unimportance—of the specific, detailed setting of your stories. Tell me about the connection between your writing and the German word fernweh, (“nostalgia, or yearning, for a place you’ve never been.”) Which places do you feel nostalgia for that you’ve never been? 

I’ve never been anywhere!! I’m kidding. But my real “lived” life sometimes feels short on adventure, so for me the fernweh becomes more about visiting an experience that has never been mine than a place I’ve never been. I adore the opportunity that fiction provides for making a choice I didn’t make, or saying words I didn’t say. Taking a different path than my own. This is also a fantastic way to exercise my empathy muscle, which I believe is crucial for writing any kind of character driven story.

Q: Before we delve into the endless questions, I have about who you wrote five novels2 in from December 2021 until November 2022 (CONGRATULATIONS, by the way), what, in a few sentences, do you write about? And why is it always in 1^st person POV? 

I write about real life happening to real people. Or at least that’s what I try to write about. My books could be described as quiet, simply because there are rarely earth-shattering events or fantastical forces driving the narrative forward. I gravitate toward younger protagonists and their stories because I appreciate the importance of their journey in determining what kind of adults they’ll grow up to be. It’s also a place I feel I can move through with ample experience. If I’ve shied away from writing adult stories it’s probably because, up until very recently, I haven’t felt qualified to tell them. Ha! How’s that for revealing?

As for first-person POV, I find it’s the easiest way to get under a character’s skin. I’m big on eliciting “feels” in my writing and find first-person helps me do that. Since I wrote the Five for Five piece, I have been experimenting more with third-person limited POV. My short fiction piece Miles in Her Shoes is an example of that experiment. I’ve also messed around with second-person POV. My stories Everything and The Last of Us are good examples of that.

Q: Why in your fiction—and I hope this doesn’t sound like some puritanical critique, not the least because I am of the exact same mind—do you so rarely write about your family? 

In fiction, I don’t have to.  Of course, I do write about them indirectly, through my characters and their experiences. There are pieces of everyone I know and love (and despise) hidden somewhere in my stories. 

Q: Tell me about your philosophy with epilogues. And what happens when you get picked up by a literary agent / editor / publisher and they tell you to delete them? 

In Five for Five, I used an analogy of the epilogue being like the phone call you need from your kid who’s been off at college and you’re trying your best to leave them alone. The phone call is what I need, as the author, to know my characters are doing okay without me. If an agent or editor asked me to cut an epilogue, I would. In fact, I’ve started cutting them on my own from my final drafts, knowing that they’re a touch clingy. But I’ll still always write them. For me. And if any of my books ever turn into something big, I’ll have those little gems of bonus content lying around to release as fan igniter down the road. Insert maniacal, bookworld dominating laughter here.

Q: In your piece about your five novels, “Five for Five,” you talk about the difference between being a “pantser” and a “plotter.” I am of the same time, a pantser, and I have found a lot of joy and frustration as someone of this camp. Could you explain the difference between the two for people who aren’t familiar with the terms?[1]

A pantser is someone who writes by the seat of their pants. They don’t start a story with a specific point A to point B plan or story structure in mind. They may have some ideas of major events that will happen or how the book will end, but if they’re anything like me, those details usually end up rewriting themselves pretty quickly. Normally, my book writing process starts with a couple of characters having a moment in my head. And the more they talk to each other and move around, the more I learn about them as people, and the more their world builds itself around them and the more their actions in that world determine where the story is going to go. It sounds kind of insane, now that I say it. But that’s pretty much what I do.

A plotter takes a more hands on approach to setting up the world, the characters, and the specific acts and incidents that will take place in their story ahead of time. I’ve heard that genre fiction writers, those who write Science Fiction or Fantasy, do this often because they are essentially creating a new world from scratch. They have to set up a different set of rules for their world and its inhabitants. And I think some writers just prefer to know what’s going to happen. They create the blueprint, then they build the story from it. I know of some who pinpoint every crucial moment, from the inciting incident to the climax to the resolution, before they write a single word. Some people even go as far as to estimate the page number that these events will occur on!

I’ve tried once (and failed) to plot a story ahead of time. I’m too impulsive and I honestly love it when a story takes me by surprise. In a way that tells me that it’s working.

Q: Are you interested in traditional publishing? Have you tried to get involved? Do you care? When or where can I read your novels?

I do care, sadly. And the deal is raw. I haven’t exhausted my efforts trying to get agent representation and I will be making a concerted effort this year to … exhaust myself. This is because I know my limitations when it comes to self-promotion. I suck at it. So I know that the best chance my books have of being even moderately successful is through a traditional publishing house. That said – my shining star novel, See Dot Smile, is available to read FOR FREE at Wattpad.com. Here’s a link to all the YA goodness.

I also plan to put one or two of my other novels on Substack by the end of the calendar year. The first chapters will be free for everyone to read, but you’ll have to take out a paid subscription to read them in full. They’re my babies!!!

Q: I can’t help but notice that many of your brilliant flash fiction pieces—“Memory Five” in particular I found to be a real gem—have a darkly comedic, almost absurdist quality that shimmers at their dystopian edges. I want to ask about two different aspects of your vision: one being your creative vision for the future (focus on weekly writing? More novels?), the second being what you think—not what you hope, but what you think—is actually going to happen socio/politically over the next decade. As a mother, I imagine you’ve envisioned all manner of terrifying scenarios. 

Creative vision – I will continue to put most of my creative juice into my Substack. I’m in a rhythm now and don’t see a reason to disrupt it. Behind the scenes, I may take steps toward self-publishing a short story collection. And I have an ideal for a novella that I may begin pantsing in my spare time. As for novels, I think I owe it the ones I’ve written already to try my damnedest to hook an agent and get a book deal. It’s a terrible long shot, but I really want to able to say that I tried--my damnedest—despite that.  

World vision – As a mother, I worry about my kids growing up in difficult times, for sure. But they’re both already so much smarter and braver than I was at their age, so part of me wants to remain hopeful that they’ll live to see brighter days than these. But I’m also terrified of where things are headed in the short term. Which is why I think the world needs more books right now. More ways to see the world. More empathy. More love stories with lots of kissing. More friendship. More found families. More of the good stuff.

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Stock Fiction

Memory Five

Welcome back to Stock Fiction. A (mostly) short fiction newsletter, inspired by stock photography. I’m rebelling again. I do it so infrequently, it just seems like a muscle I should flex now and again to stay limb…

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3 years ago · 25 likes · 25 comments · Meg Oolders

2

Stock Fiction

Five For Five

The following is a little glimpse into my second life as a novelist. To answer the question most asked of novelists everywhere: No, none of my novels are published. But they are written, and that’s a…

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3 years ago · 24 likes · 13 comments · Meg Oolders

A few months back, I began writing letters to the Chicago-based satirist . I don’t know Amran personally, but I’ve always enjoyed his wit, and it’s just one of the many joys of this Substack community that I now consider him a literary friend.

In our first exchange, we discussed writing as a form o…

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is a Paris-based singer/songwriter & producer from New Jersey. He’s been at it for 20+ years. A few days ago, Ryan asked me 7 questions about writing & creativity for his fantastic new Substack, organizing an accident, where he shares a new song every Wednesday as well as general…

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We used to call someone to whom we wrote letters from across an ocean a penpal. Nowadays, they’re simply called digital friends.

For the past few months, I’ve been exchanging letters with writers who inspire me to create or think in a different way.

Writing a letter to someone I’ve never met before allows me to engage in a different kind of writing than …

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This is part of an ongoing correspondence between Jo Petroni, an architect & illustrator living in the south of France, & Titus (AKA me), an imaginary character living in a self-sustaining community somewhere off the grid.

While readers may prefer to think of this as a work of fiction, the intention is to bridge the gap between fiction & reality when it …

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This is a response piece to ’s piece from last week. To read my original essay “On Cultivating Genius (Part I),” see the footnote.1

NOTE: I highly recommend reading this essay directly on Substack’s website / in the Substack app. If you’re reading this in your email inbox, click on the piece’s title/subtitle to be redirected.

Dearest Elle,

After reading, re-reading, and digesting your response to my essay + reading the comment sections (plus reading the comments on comments), it seems to me that this whole discussion about genius is at risk of reductio ad absurdum being reduced to an absurdity.

Of course, you and I could continue discussing what “genius” is and how/if it should be cultivated, but I will seek to answer two more fundamental questions that feel pressing:

• Why are we so interested in defining, let alone producing, “geniuses” nowadays?

• If “genius” is in fact connected to “progress” (as is generally assumed), how far, exactly, have we come?

In Praise of Genius Unfinished Thoughts

We live in an age wherein purchasing education and regurgitating others’ ideas has become synonymous with being an intellectual.

I should know, at least on paper: I have plenty of student debt from an MA in social theory + an MFA in creative writing. In addition to paying my bills as an “expert literary tour guide,” I adjunct at the Sorbonne, a supposedly esteemed academic institution.2

Over the last decade, however, whether at my local Parisian dive bar or with walking tour clients or in seminar rooms alike, I’ve noticed how much of intellectual discourse has gone the way of perceived value and superficiality, a surface-level conversation based on who knows can cite more sources, refer to more “geniuses,” or paraphrase zeitgeist-acceptable ideas that keep us all comfortably distanced from sharing anything resembling what we, individually, actually think.

This is odd, given that we live in an era of rampant solipsism identitarianism and individualism narcissism. Indeed, these days, subjective opinions have become tantamount to ideology if not capital-T truths, which is why people like you and me are often cautious about saying something that might be misconstrued or—lo and behold—deemed “offensive” to any number of people (the title of Chris Rock’s latest stand-up special sums it up quite nicely: we live in an era of “selective outrage”).

Take this letter exchange, for example: you and I could very well continue this dialogue in academic form by exchanging what amounts to a compendium of references to other thinkers’ ideas, mostly proving that we understand what “smarter” people than you or I think, without ever risking much other than an incomplete footnote.3

But at its most effective, in my opinion, philosophy is a dialogue between two people because it is also an exercise in cognitive independence. It isn’t about being well-educated, name-dropping, or proving how much we’ve read, but rather about calling on our own mental faculties to attempt to understand what we purport to understand about existence.

An exercise in futility, perhaps. And yet … in reading many of the responses to your and Hoel’s essay, I’m struck by how often we (myself included) feel the need to prove our own position by referencing someone else’s intelligence. This is quite normal (in fact, it’s what we’re all taught to do), but in the spirit of a genuine dialogue, I shall keep my hyperlinks to a minimum down below (and only a few essential footnotes). Finally, if there are comments on this piece, I’m far more interested in learning about what readers THINK than reading about what they KNOW.

Progress is Freedom

Knowledge and wisdom aren’t the same thing, and the Internet has proven this. As to the wealth of information to which much of the world now has access, it seems it’s left us with impoverished attention spans.

Despite our utopian, dial-up dreams that the World Wide Web would introduce a golden-age of independent, free-thinking individuals, unlimited access to information has left much of the world more myopic less thoughtful.

As Hoel correctly points out in his essay,4 we have yet to see a glorious paradigm-shift in human affairs or human wisdom. In fact, many people’s baseline ideas about the human condition are becoming more calcified and entrenched in identitarian nativistic and individualistic egomaniacal mythologies.

Alas, despite our best-laid plans, authoritarianism & fundamentalism are on the rise.

Human Arrested Development

It isn’t all bad, obviously, and in many ways I agree with your essay, Elle: there is much to be said for the “genius” and “progress” of the last twenty years, too.

The Trans Movement is one of my favorite examples at a societal level, for the very simple reason that it challenges our naive assumptions that we can explain much of anything with binary systems. On an individual level, the movement has been essential in teaching us that every. single. human being. has the right to identify however they please … indeed, like life itself, the breadth of the human experience exists on a vast spectrum.

Unfortunately, however, this truth has been lost to political posturing

which is why, in my opinion, we are now being confronted with reductionist ideas about what identity is (or can be) in our endless search for a collective identity.

Take the USA as the most pertinent of examples. Despite the wisdom of thinkers like James Baldwin and the post-colonialist Frantz Fanon (“to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture”), terms like “black” and “white” and “left” and “right” and “red” and “blue” (and acronyms like LGBTQ+, QUILTBAG, BIPOC and a host of others) are being used as neat and tidy identifiers, as if any generalization could ever mean something specific.

A person’s identity doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with their ethnicity/sexuality/gender or preferred pronouns, and yet this is currently a primary concern for many people across all sides of the political spectrum, resulting in splintered interest groups that fall prey to Group Think as they are further forced to draw lines in the sand lest they die upon one thousand different hills in the name of semantics, political correctness, or moral righteousness.

Essentialism = Individuation! Censorship = Freedom!

This truth, coupled with imperialist/colonialist countries’ historic, consistent, and systematic marginalization of '“The Other” has led many people to feel the need to reclaim their identity by identifying pigeonholing themselves into increasingly specific (and eerily corporate) acronyms/interest groups that claim to honor a collective identity by insisting that individual identity become paramount.

As for whether or not civil liberties are progressing in the USA, AR-15s, police body cams, and crooked leaders still benefit from more protections than elementary school children. Even our oh-so-hallowed “freedom of speech” has become politicized, where at one extreme you have state governments banning drag shows and children’s books about male penguins raising a baby in a zoo, and on the other end you have “sensitivity readers” bowdlerizing Roald Dahl books, censoring words like “fat” and “ugly” in the name of “inclusion and accessibility.” (Dare I mention She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named? What would a 2003-version of J.K. Rowling, a cisgender female FAAB TERF5 with disagreeable opinions, think about the ways in which fundamentalists always seem to find a way to silence those who identify as women?).

BUT I DIGRESS.

This is not a political treatise. My point here is only to segue into an unsavory idea: the very concepts we’ve been talking about—“genius” and “technology” and “progress”—are in fact selective delusions that we need to believe in lest we relinquish the mythologies in which we were taught to believe:

“Freedom of Speech.”

“All Men Are Created Equal.”

“Life, Liberty, & the Pursuit of Happiness.”

“American Exceptionalism.”

Part III: On Utopian Ideals Contemporary Realities

Despite the 21^st century’s untold of utopian comforts, many of us remain disillusioned, anxious, and in search of a culturally appropriate form of sublimation. This is why we’re now witnessing a slew of stringent ideals and ideological dogmatism. Quite simply, we are lost, and we want somebody to tell us what to do.

In this sense, I applaud you, Elle, for looking at the bright side of it all, and rest assured, I don’t intend to be a Negative Nancy Debby Downer Salty Samuél about your optimism, because in many ways, it’s much more valuable to talk about a malaria cure than to talk about cultural regression, or to discuss the cosmic benefits of a new kind of telescope than to peer into what’s happening in states like Florida and Tennessee.

Your conviction that we need to imagine a better future in order to create it is well-founded. In the era of the 24-hour news cycle, it’s become a truism to lament the various ways in which life feels like it’s getting worse. The media eats it up, and we are eaten up by it, which is why I’m genuinely impressed by (and thankful for) your ability to investigate the silver lining.

Yes, even I have hope. I am an existentialist, after all.

Which is why my less-than-optimistic feelings about “utopias” and “genius” and “progress” don’t mean both of our opinions can’t co-exist. But while you point out some fantastic examples of contemporary “genius” in your piece,6 I have to admit that reversing the aging process sounds eerily dystopian to me (ah, the human quest to be immortal), and self-driving cars don't interest me (what is this obsession with saving time; to do what? to go where?), and the unchecked power of AI systems like Chat-GPT and Open-AI are downright scary.

Alas, whenever we seem to be at our best, we also seem to teeter on the edge of folly.

Just think of it. We asked for the moon and just as soon as our feet were covered in moon dust, we demanded more from the stars … and now we have space debris and something called the Kessler Syndrome (don’t look it up).

And what about the promises of the Enlightenment juxtaposed to the Atlantic Slave Trade? Not to mention the continuing ripple effects of Johan Friedrich Blumenbach’s On The Natural Variety of Mankind (1775), which proposed a “scientific” taxonomy of “race” that proposed five “racial” divisions for humankind (“white,” “yellow,” “brown,” “black,” “red” … guess which “color” Blumenbach put at the top of his “scientific” “racial” hierarchy? And why, exactly, are we still using some of these terms today?)

In my mind, this is simply what it means to be a human being, forever riding the swinging pendulum between two poles, oscillating in perpetuity between prosperity and calamity.

Which brings me to some kind of conclusion, for now:

We live in increasingly technocratic, authoritarian societies which peddle “progressive” technologies as liberating rather than as nefarious tools used to wield power, profit, and control.

Almost one hundred years ago, a group of progressive “geniuses” built the atom bomb, the most destructive weapon human beings have ever known. To this day, advocates say the nuclear bomb has kept the world powers at peace longer more than any other technology in human history (if we didn’t bomb Japan, we would’ve had to liquidate the entire country; Mutually Assured Destruction is the best chance at world peace … never mind that in 2022, Vladimir Putin started a new war on the European continent).

Detractors point to the fundamental instability of nuclear energy (see: Fukushima), not to mention the ongoing prospect of nuclear war, which could very well be the conclusion of our megalomaniacal obsession with oblivion.

And so, my dear friend, in my opinion, I’m not quite sure I agree that “a lot of what we’ve come up with is so much better than [older] philosophers could’ve ever imagined!” Now more than ever, words like “progress” and “genius” and “utopia” give me pause, which is not to say I don’t believe in them, but belief is fickle, and I remain a skeptic when it comes to believing “genius” necessarily leads to a more equitable world.

But this is just my opinion

and I’m no genius, and to prove it to you, I shall continue this run-on sentence by breaking my own hyperlink rule (as well as a cardinal rule of academic writing) and end this essay with a paragraph about the atom bomb, written by George Orwell in 1945:

“We were once told that the aeroplane had “abolished frontiers”; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable. The radio was once expected to promote international understanding and co-operation; it has turned out to be a means of insulating one nation from another. The atomic bomb may complete the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt, and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a basis of military equality. Unable to conquer one another, they are likely to continue ruling the world between them, and it is difficult to see how the balance can be upset except by slow and unpredictable demographic changes.”

Yours,

Samuél

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PS

Woof. It’s high-time for a glass of whiskey, don’t you think? That’s what you get when exchanging letters with an optimistic absurdist.  

1

if not, Paris

On Cultivating “Genius” (Part I)

Abstract: the subjectivization of language (and so, too, the term “genius”) began in earnest when the structuralists and post-structuralists brought all language—and so all of existence—into question. The above sentence is meant to obfuscate confuse you…

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3 years ago · 26 likes · 45 comments · Samuél Lopez-Barrantes and Elle Griffin

This is Part 4 of a 4-part letter exchange between me & Reena, an essayist & poet living in Northern California.

I met Reena last summer via Substack. Although we’re separated by continents & oceans & are of two different generations, we’ve developed an unexpected friendship via this letter exchange about mortality, love, & philosophy. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to read the series back-and-forth:

Letter 1 (Reena) | Letter 2 (Samuél) | Letter 3 (Reena)

Dear Reena,

Your words about grief being “simply the other side of having loved” are comforting. I believe we have spoken before, you and I, about Carl Jung and synchronicity, and I dare say it isn’t only by chance that we’re having this conversation right now, just a few days after the last of my grandparents passed away.

I always knew her as Marymom. She was 98 years old. I wasn’t close to her, although I do have fond memories of her gentle voice, well-mannered Southern accent, and consummate “ladylike” ways.

It’s a term we no longer use, and I understand why. I understand why some find the term problematic or even offensive, but I use the term “ladylike” here to allude to the time and place in which Marymom was most alive, which was a very different time and place, indeed.

Marymom was born in 1924 in the town of Hickory, North Carolina, a town that didn’t exist before 1850. She lived during a time when, for better and for worse, “ladylike” was considered a compliment to describe “the archetype of a Southern Lady,” as she was described in her obituary. But whatever your stance on language, Marymom was one of the most intelligent, polite, quietly powerful, and kind people I’ve ever known.

I can still smell her perfume, an almost too-sweet, floral scent wafting into the room before Marymom even appeared. The smell lingered when she left, too. It was the smell I came to associate with her generation—the “Greatest Generation” according to some, an exceptionally patriotic and prideful generation that came from towns like Hickory, NC, wherein polite society could still pretend that their wealth and comfort had been the results of hard work and moral righteousness alone instead of a much more complicated, unexamined southern history.

The family name mattered a lot back then, and it preceded individual identity: Marymom was the daughter of a respected doctor and was raised by politely religious folk who worked hard and dreamed of sending their children to college (her mother was among the first women in the family to go to college).

But these are all historical facts, and they have little to do with my current feelings surrounding grief and death about Marymom’s departure, because the truth is, Reena, I have not grieved my grandmother because I do not know if I’m able to, at least not in the way the movies tell me.

The memories I have of Marymom are a pastiche of old family photos and home videos and stories from my mother. I don’t remember the last conversation I had with Marymom—it would have been about fifteen years ago, over Christmas, before the Alzheimer’s took over—and the last time I saw any glimmer of radically present life in Marymom’s eyes was about a decade ago, just as her mental faculties were slowly but surely swept away by Alzheimer’s, which turns not only the patient but also the patient’s family into a passive kind of being.

The family sent her to a nursing home, where money was spent to keep her alive but never present, and given the low quality of a fulfilled life, it took a long time—too long, according to many—for Marymom to go.

As the family funds dwindled to keep her alive, a far-too common reality in the USA, Marymom was transferred to hospice, where nurses who were paid too little spent too many of their waking-hours trying to bring what had become a stranger-to-herself some small kind of comfort as Marymom slipped away from my memories within the white walls of an antiseptic place.

We seldom know how to talk about the reality of aging and death. It can be terrifying. But an image has just popped into my head: an open funeral casket filled with an empty vessel, made-up and dolled up to look like anything but the truth that it represents.

Memory, too, is a funny thing, isn’t it? In The Overstory, Richard Powers writes, “Memory is always a collaboration in progress,” and for a woman like Marymom, one of the last of her generation, I wonder who will continue collaborating in Marymom’s memory-, somebody who, for the last decade of her life, couldn’t even remember her own children’s names.

I must not be of the Lutheran mould, for Marymom would have never uttered words so dry, crass, and obtuse. But at the top of your list of words of “advice” is the one I commit most to memory: not just to be present, but to be radically present. Marymom was this to all of her four children, and I’d like to think I’m constructing a life that honors this truth: I don’t work a nine-to-five job and I am not willing to, and maybe what I’m really becoming is a Frenchman at heart, for I don’t believe it’s possible to remain radically present when the majority of our waking-life is spent doing what somebody else wants us to do.

And so my thoughts are coming full circle. I am here. I am present. I am sitting at the mezzanine café inside the Centre Pompidou. There are masterworks inside (Alice Neal has been a revelation) and hundreds of people are queuing outside in the rain to have a chance at standing in front of a masterwork, if for only a few seconds to perhaps harness the opportunity that great museums offer us: to be radically present by observing. Which is what I wanted to do here by observing Marymom’s life.

And so while I’m still thinking of her, I do not grieve her; I only feel a tinge of regret that I didn’t ask Marymom more questions about her life when she was still conscious of the present moment:

What was it like to raise four children as a house-wife in Hickory, North Carolina, where you spent an entire lifetime amongst the same places, the same people, and only ever with Sam, your first and only lover? Did you have other lovers? Can true love last a lifetime?

I wish Marymom could have read your words too, Reena, your reminder to honor our elders and to help them remember by encouraging them to keep learning and cultivating life, to believe in something new.

It’s is a myth that our elders only ever think about what has passed. I have friends in their eighties who are more alive than many thirtysomethings I know.

In one of my favorite television shows ever written, Tony Soprano sits miserably amongst beautiful women at a champagne dinner as his friend recounts tales from days of yore. “Remember when is the lowest form of conversation,” Tony says and storms away.

But perhaps “remember when” is only problematic when we become disenchanted with our own lives, when we grasp for memories not to feel more present but rather to escape our workaday lives, deluding ourselves into thinking that if by reminiscing about what once was, we can somehow harness the possibility of what might be once again.

As I see my parents get older, and as I get older myself, I’m taking your advice to heart: to be radically present. If we hope to live for the moment (whatever that means to us, personally), we must resist becoming a shadow of the “remember when” moments that are relegated to history books and obituaries.

The Dalai Lama said it far better than me in one of his most famous quotes when asked the question, “What surprises you most about humanity?”

“Ourselves. Because we sacrifice our health in order to make money. Then we sacrifice money to recuperate our health. And then we are so anxious about the future that we do not enjoy the present; the result being that we do not live in the present or the future; we live as if we are never going to die, and then die having never really lived.”

Here’s to living in the here and now, and to remembering to live in the present, and to rejecting the idea that a life well-lived can ever be properly summarized in the past-tense.

Sincerely,

Samuél

Abstract: the subjectivization of language (and so, too, the term “genius”) began in earnest when the structuralists and post-structuralists brought all language—and so all of existence—into question.

The above sentence is meant to obfuscate confuse you.

It confused me and I wrote it. What the hell am I trying to say?

Over the last few months, I’ve had the pleasure of exchanging with on a variety of topics, ranging from a discussion about what modern literature actually is to why Elle gets annoyed by dead French writers and why I don’t:

if not, Paris

Why I’m Not Over Dead French Writers Just Yet

This is an essay response to Elle Griffin’s recent piece “I’m So Over Dead French Writers.” Elle and I have been exchanging ideas about 21st century literature via letters. You can read our conversation here. This is accompaniment essay about the transition from modernism to postmodernism to metamodernism. Best enjoyed with a cup of coffee or whiskey…

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4 years ago · 11 likes · 18 comments · Samuél Lopez-Barrantes

Last week, Elle Griffin asked me to respond to her recent writing prompt, “How should we cultivate genius?”

What follows is my initial response to the prompt. The conversation is ongoing, because as we’ve found with our other conversations, a philosophical discussion about a term like “genius” never really ends.

On the cultivation of “genius”

When it comes to the very nature of language itself, we seem to live in an era wherein many of the most intelligent amongst us use language more as a gavel for control than as a tool for communication.

Let’s reconsider that first sentence up above: the subjectivization of language—and so the term “genius,” too—began in earnest when the structuralists and post-structuralists brought all language—and so all of existence—into question Sometime in the 1960s, everything ceased to have clear and present meaning.

At that point in the world of intellectual discourse (I personally believe approachable French philosophy ended with Absurdism), it seems that sounding smart became more important than actually communicating much of anything.

This is the problem I had (and still have as a teacher at the Sorbonne) with academia through two master’s degrees, which taught me little about understanding the structuralist ideas of (almost exclusively French male) thinkers like Lacan, Deleuze, Bourdieu, Althusser and it-doesn’t really-matter-who-else-because-I’m-already-getting-bored-with-this-list.

Genius Academics Citation Machines

Annoyingly, or hilariously, depending on your proclivity for academic jargon sense of humor, most of the structuralist/post-structuralist texts I’ve read on the nature of language remain incomprehensible, making all but the most “genius” amongst us feel grossly inadequate by the use of obtuse semantics endlessly confusing language and pompous brain-vomit referential complexity to uphold the house of cards that is the business of higher education academe.

Consider the following dialogue, which summarizes the life-changing seminal experience I had at University College London when I realized I didn’t want to be “an academic”:

“Hello professor,” I entered the graduate seminar. “I know I was supposed to give a presentation on Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘Structures and the habitus,’ but try as I might, I simply couldn’t understand it, let alone how the run-on-sentence of a first paragraph got past an editor.”

“Interesting thought,” the world-renowned professor replied. “Why don’t we ask the others. What do you all think?”

Another student chimed in. “Well, it’s quite impossible to understand Bourdieu without understanding Althusser. Have you read him?”

“No.”

“Oh, well, no wonder you’re confused. Surely you understand Althusser’s departure from Marx in relation to Bourdieu?’

“Okay, sure, but no, can you just tell me what this opening paragraph means?”

“You have to read it through an Althusserian lense.”

“So you can’t tell me what this first paragraph means?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

‘Round and ‘round the round-table we went, an esteemed group of graduate students at an elite university … and nobody had an answer for what the opening paragraph actually meant, not even the two world-renowned professors who, to many, are considered academic geniuses.

In praise of simple honest language

I’m damn grateful for that moment, not only because it saved me from pursuing a PhD that would’ve turned me into a citation machine, but also because it revealed the extent of academia’s thinly-veiled ploy to “cultivate genius” by pigeon-holing everything into a niche until the niche consumes itself, the intellectual equivalent of a black hole.

One of my favorite academic texts ever written is an essay called “The Professor of Parody” by the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, which is a beautifully scathing critique of the philosopher Judith Butler’s all-but-impossible-to-comprehend-feminist theory:

“Something more insidious than provincialism has come to prominence in the American academy. It is the virtually complete turning from the material side of life, toward a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women.”

That was written in 1999.

Fast forward to today, and to the idea of “cultivating genius,” and we still live in a world in which this very conversation seems to be limited by calcified academic ideals. Because while I happen to agree with a lot of what says in his piece, I'm less interested in the lack of a "genius boom" that should've occurred with the Internet than I am in why, according to almost all of us, the term "genius" remains reserved for white European men who lived during the 15th-19th centuries, and why geniuses are only usually ever considered in the worlds of science and mathematics.

So here’s my question before continuing with my thoughts on why artistic geniuses don’t just come from private tutoring, but can also come from places like Compton and 8-Mile:

What exactly are we talking about when we talk about “cultivating genius”?

What does the term “genius” mean in the 21^st century?

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Part II:

This is Part 2 of a 4-part exchange between me & Reena Kapoor, an essayist & poet living in Northern California.

I met Reena last summer on Substack. Although we’re separated by continents & oceans & different generations, we’ve developed an unexpected friendship via this letter exchange about mortality, love, & philosophy.

What…

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