This episode of Finishing the Hat was recorded on September 29, 2023. I could wax poetic about how thankful I am to have spoken with
about literature, psychedelics, and the point of why we’re writing without hope or despair about fame and/or anonymity, the entire point of recording such conversations is some dialogues are best enjoyed off the page, sojust 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.”
Finishing the Hat w/ Sam Kahn