amateur hour

research for amateurs

Hello friends—

As you know, I have been deep in the PDF mines for the last several months reading for my RealismEssay™. This might be most reading or research I have ever done for a single piece of writing. The reading will probably inform a lot of the pieces that will eventually make up the book, or at least, I hope so. Otherwise, RealismEssay™ better be really fucking good to make all these PDFs worth it. What am I saying. I love PDFs. I love my huge heap of documents. I have bought a large plastic trifold folder to store them. I dream of rolling around on my PDFs like Scrooge McDuck diving into his vault of gold and swimming around. In fact, the other night, I had a dream in which I had written an essay that The Drift published (The Drift is my dream journal at the moment. One day I’ll get in there, one day!) and I woke up feeling like I had won Wimbledon. So, yes, it’s a lot of reading, but as Nicole Kidman said, We come to this place for Magic. This place being my dragon’s hoard of documents.

Actually, this is not the most reading I have done for a single piece of writing. As you maybe know, it took me two years to read Les Rougon-Macquart for an LRB piece. In my defense, I did a lot of other stuff too, and Zola kind of saved my life. He was the one constant in my life at that time, so perhaps it’s good I took the two years. Otherwise, I might not have made it. Or, if I had made it, I probably would be a different person than I am. I certainly would be a different writer. It’s weird, actually, how much that reading lay the groundwork for what was to come next. From Zola, I went to reading Frederic Jameson and from Jameson, I read Lukács, and from Lukács, I read his interlocters and would-be inheritors, and now I am, like Lukács, writing a RealismEssay™. Also, having read the Lukács and the Jameson, whenever I pick up a PDF about “the novel,” I have this base of understanding to sort through the arguments being made about the novel’s death, revival, second death, zombie life, crucifixion, or whatever we decide today to do it. In retrospect, it all looks rather obvious and well-planned. But it wasn’t. It just happened that way. I had no master plan. No grand agenda or organizing scheme.

I read things, and if I like them, I want to understand them better. So I go and read articles about it. Then, I look up things I don’t understand, which leads me to other articles, down and down until I find the foundational texts for the thing I want to know, and then I read those, and work my way back up through the development of the idea or theory. I read overviews to get a sense of the field, and then I take it apart, bit by bit, working through my confusion, trying to fill in the map. I do this with everything in my life. If I don’t understand something, I go and read everything I possibly can about it in order to figure out what I really think. I feel like I can’t come to grips with something until I understand it. That’s how I ended up reading all of Raymond Carver. I was so sick of pretending to know what his deal was, so I sat down and bought all the story collections, including the un-Lished ones, and I read them all the way through. Then I went and read articles about Carver. Not biography. I am not interested in biography, like, at all. I mean, I read articles about his style. His politics. The politics of his style. I read contrasting interpretations of his work. And then I read articles about the changing of his reputation over time with respect to shifting trends in the broader American culture. Then, I had a sense of what I felt about Raymond Carver: he’s GOATed with the sauce.

A little while ago, I was talking to a friend about his writing. My friend was in a slump, feeling that he would never get to where he wanted to get with his style and that his stories would never be as clear or sharp or intentional as he wanted them to be. This was a conversation we had had many times before. I had given him Strunk and White. I had given him tips on usage, little ways to smooth out the irregularities in his mechanics so that he could make intentional stylistic choices. But none of this was working. And I said to him, I think you need to read about style. I think you need to read an analysis of how one of your favorite writers writes. Because all he had been doing was studying the writers. Studying their stories. Which does work for some people. It works for me, usually. Now, anyway, that I have practice studying stories and style. I can pick them apart at a glance. But if you are in the process of learning how to do that, it can be useful to have it modeled for you. It was modeled for me not by teachers or mentors. I had it modeled for me by Leslie Fiedler, Northrop Frye, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, and Guy Davenport in their works of criticism. It was even modeled for me by my Problematic Ancestress F.R. Leavis in The Great Tradition. Those writers were able to link specific instances of prose to a stylistic tendency which itself was revealed to be a kind of moral tendency at work. By moral, I mean only the relation between an individual and the world, to borrow form D.H. Lawrence. But most critically, the above writers were able to crawl inside of prose or verse and through careful attention, they were able to reveal how the sentences or lines worked.

So I told my friend to go to JSTOR and find some articles analyzing the style of writers he liked. This had not occurred to him before. He had thought that perfecting one’s style came through careful meditation on one’s goals and ambitions, not through careful study. He had thought that his problems could be solved through patience. Yes, I said, but also, you should study.

When I was in graduate school for science, I went in thinking that there were things I could do and things I could not do and that these things were fixed. My whole life, I had gotten through school without any need to study. For me, observation had been enough. See it once, and then I could do it. If anything was harder to pick up than that, I simply didn’t try. What was the point. I could get by with what I had. But when I told my thesis advisor that I didn’t know how to do immunostaining, she blinked at me and said something like, “No one is born knowing how to do it. Go read a paper on it and do these experiments.” It struck me then, perhaps for the first time in my life, that intelligence is really not about what you know. Intelligence is about whether or not you have the capacity to learn or be taught. It is perhaps also about curiosity. Anyway, I learned how to do immunostaining, and every time I did experiments, it seemed miraculous to me that I had learned how to do something I didn’t think I could learn how to do. As an intelligent, but unchallenged child, I had developed the bad habit of a fixed view of my abilities. That I was exactly as smart as I was and would get no smarter. This is not true. Or, if it’s true, I think its effect is misstated.

So I told my friend to get up off the floor and go read some articles about his favorite writers, but to stay away from the psychological or biographical stuff because that would not be as useful as reading criticism about the work itself. He said that it hadn’t occured to him that writing could be like that, a thing you study and do. And I told him that in fact, that’s all writing was. Learning how to do stuff.

I consider myself an amateur critic. An amateur because I don’t have a fancy job or post. I work primarily from outside of academia and the other cultural institutions. I also consider myself an amateur because my education in criticism has been largely shaped by my own reading. I am very much learning how to do this as I go. I started reading criticism in 2021, when I realized that I didn’t have any language really to talk about my responses to literature. I had published a book already, and I had another on the way that summer. But for the most part, I had no sense of what people were talking about when they wrote reviews for LRB or NYRB or LARB or any of these other places. There was a whole discourse about literature that I had no access to, and could not make heads or tails of. I got sick of DMing friends and asking them to explain to me why the socialists were fighting on Twitter about books again. So I asked my friend Christian Lorentzen to give me a list of criticism to read so that I could have adult thoughts about books. He gave me a great list, and some of them were mind-blowing, world-changing. I believe that list fundamentally altered the course of my life.

He told me to read Kazin, Fiedler, Edmund Wilson, Guy Davenport, and some others. As I read those books, I would underline them and make note of books they referenced that talked about ideas that were interesting to me. I trawled the footnotes and indexes like I was cruising for trade. Slowly, over the year, I built up quite a constellation of critical texts. Then I started reading PDFs, articles mentioned in the books I was reading. Those articles led to other articles. When I started teaching at NYU, I had to give craft talks, which entailed yet more research, which yielded more PDFs. Slowly, the reviews I was writing began to change, filling with more references to ideas I had learned about in other books and articles. I could make more connections the more I read. But having made them, the connections made me ask different questions, which sent me back to the PDF mines. Now I can’t imagine writing anything without reading a bunch PDFs about it first, to get a sense of the history of the idea and what conversations and discourses I’ll be entering. It feels a bit disrespectful and also irresponsible to do otherwise.

It’s also the case that when people write things drawing on ideas I recognize from the literature without citing them, I feel a kind of rage because either they think their idea is novel due to not doing the reading or they know their idea is not novel and they have elected to pass it off as so. I often play this game of “Thief or Lazy” when I read pieces of criticism. Or sometimes, people will respond to things I write as though I am making something up when in fact, it is a long-settled idea in a long-standing discourse. In moments like that, I realize two things: (1) that the person and I are trying to communicate across some gap of knowledge, and (2)that something has gone wrong in the writing or the reading to create that gap. Either, I have provided insufficient context for them to make the leap, or they are, well, bad at reading. Either could be the case. On my more patient days, I try to figure out which it is. One my less patient days, I tell them to go in peace because I do not feel like trying to bridge that gap of knowledge. The energy required is not worth the outcome.

I wish more people took the time to read about the things they are writing about. I wish people were a little more careful and patient with their ideas. Part of why I started this newsletter was to prompt myself to slow down and to write about my ideas in a way that was broader and deeper than I could do on Twitter. I think Substack has that capacity for deep engagement. But sometimes, I read articles and posts on here that make a hash of potentially interesting ideas because the writer didn’t feel like reading five PDFs, which would have easily mooted the post they wrote.

There is great freedom in being an amateur. I love being an amateur. I can hang out in the margins and make up the rules as I go. I can write in this kind of open idiom and not feel beholden to certain strictures of style native to academia or even to institutional publishing. But even though I consider myself an amateur critic, I do try to bring a degree of rigor to my writing here. I try to look carefully and closely at things. I try to do the work. I try to do the reading. Even when I’m dashing something off, I try to really make sure that I’ve got my head around a thing before I send it out so that even when people disagree, I can say, yeah, okay, I see your point, but I disagree.

Again, I am not trying to institutionalize Substack. I am not trying to create a Program—I know how you weirdos feel about that. I am not trying to tell anyone what to do. My goal in this post is two-fold: (1) to show people that even if you assume I am some authority who is sanctioned to write about things or ideas or whatever, I am really no different than you. I am amateur. You too can write about ideas. You too can learn about things that interest you. Or things that you find confusing. You can find out about them. You totally should. However works for you. PDFs. Video. Audio. A book. Many libraries have these wonderful reference guides and sometimes they even host talks. Community centers sometimes have resources for this sort of thing. You don’t have to be an expert in order to begin learning about something. Sometimes all you need is a web browser and Jstor. (2) I would like to encourage people to do that reading. If you think you have a thesis, a kind of fuzzy idea. Read two articles that prove you have an idea and try to find an article that proves you don’t. And then try to make sense of it.

The most useful advice I got from my time in science school was that when you had an idea or a hypothesis, you should try to do everything in your power to disprove it. Not to design your experiments only trying to prove you’re right, but that you should let a degree of skepticism and doubt into your design process. This has been most the most critical bit of education in my life, maybe. That I always let in a little doubt. When you’re researching an idea, be open to the negative case. Click on that article that takes the opposite argument than you would like. It makes your ideas sharper and clearer, better. It’s the same in fiction writing. You have to be willing to let the world make your character’s life hard. You can’t just put the fix in. That is, as D.H. Lawrence tells us, immoral.

So what does this look like? I’ll lay out the process for a talk I gave a couple years ago on “cinematic writing.”

1. Decide on topic: Cinematic Fiction

2. Search various databases for articles containing specific phrases “cinematic fiction” or “cinematic literature” or “cinematic” “literature”

3. Come across article by Marco Bellardi about the “Cinematic in Fiction”

4. Article requires me to read about narratology and various terms relating to cinema

5. Find article by Jost that serves as an overview of narratological terminology

6. Find book by Balazs, one of the great cinema theorists

7. Return to article by Bellardi, find new terms needing explaining

8. Research into Mieke Bal and Genette to get a better understanding of the field of narratology and storytelling grammar

9. Return to Bellardi article—finally understand Bellardi’s notion of “narrative relief”

10. Write craft talk

That’s all I did. I wanted to write a talk about “cinematic fiction” that was more than complaining about trite physicality. I wanted to really understand what we mean when we say something is “cinematic” so that I could help my students be more precise and specific about the effects they were describing when discusisng their own work and the work of others. In doing so, I learned a lot about narratology, which helped me understand certain aspects of my own work. It also provided a really wonderful basis for when I eventually read Lukács because what he describes in “Narrate or Describe?” is essentially what Bellardi will many decades later come to theorize as “narrative relief.” Like, it’s the same thing! But I could grasp Lukács immediately because I had already read the Bellardi and had understood it. I also realized that my own writing is “cinematic,” which caused me a lot of pain. But then I worked very hard to change it, lol.

Note the looping aspect of this. How many times I return to the Bellardi article, each time armed with new information, only to need to go off on another tangent to better understand some aspect of his argument. I didn’t just know who to track down. I used his footnotes and references to go find the original articles he was discussing and synthesizing. I used the footnotes like clues in a mystery. You build out from the article, making a web of relationships and then work your way back in. At least that’s how it works for me. When I didn’t understand something, I looked it up. There was a lot I didn’t understand. There is so much I don’t understand. But now the ideas in Bellardi’s article are so central to my own work as a writer and a teacher and a critic.

I am sure people learned how to do this in college or school. I didn’t take any literature courses. I wrote one paper in my time in college. Otherwise, I played table tennis and took organic chemistry. My electives were math and French. For fun. I had to learn how to research. Part of that came from 7th grade Language Arts where we learned about boolean functions. Part of it came my abandoned PhD program, where I was taught to treat gaps in my knowledge as starting points rather than endings. So if you are like me and you didn’t learn how to do this stuff. Well. This is how you do it.

I already wrote a post about how I take notes, which is downstream of this process. I’ll link that here.

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