I have bought and will buy your books in hardback, from an indie bookstore, as long as you publish them. Also waiting for you to collaborate with comics artist Freddy Carrasco on something, anything. Long live books!!! AI will drive all the good stuff behind a paywall anyway, the days of free sort of quality internet are over.
Junot—recently read Olga Tarkczuk’s (sp?) Empusium and then, reading backwards, began to reread Mann’s Magic Mountain. I was wonderfully amazed at his writing—I had forgotten. I am a huge fan of both writers but I also read a lot of escapist quickies. Reading into the vast landscape of both was akin to reentering my childhood love of books.
I love my screens for snacks & laughter & I find tv to be a good alternative to drink & drugs but nothing compares to a book that completely overcomes reserves, embraces the grey matter like a gorgeous vampire & stimulates all one’s aesthetic impulses.
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
In that room, there is an irreplaceable connection with oneself - quite distinct from the connection with the metaverse, the social verse. Life unravels in that space where the book is being created. The other options are far too immediate, plunging us deeper into the chaos we seek to remove ourselves from. Long live the book!
So as a terminally online teenager from the mid 90s, I'd say the issue isn't the internet per se, but the social media algorithms that have created a specific way of interacting online that is measured in seconds.
Back in the early days of the net, almost all communication was text-based, and slow. I'd use my dialup to download a day's worth of posts from my favourite newsgroups, and then slowly peruse them offline, like you would read a magazine; and then compose replies with the same leisure and contemplation as a kid writing a letter to their pen pal. There was no urgency; no need to get my words across before anybody else did, or before the conversation moved on. I had plenty of time, since my replies would only be sent out the next day when I connected again to download a new set of posts.
A lot of the discussion was crap, of course, but there was deep discourse to be had, and we also made art, kind of: collaborative stories where we took turns writing, several paragraphs at a time. Shitty fanfics, yes, but they were still proper stories, thousands of words long.
Of course very soon Usenet became an ancient wasteland, and writing moved to blogs, livejournals, and now places like AO3 and I guess Substack. I think young people who like to read and write will still gravitate to such spaces, and even if they aren't reading a traditional book, a 300-chapter long web novel probably counts as something?
But yes, that's still quite a niche area of the net, and your average internet user is not reading in that way, but popping 150-word tweets and 30 second TikTok videos. I've felt this assault on my ability to focus, and books are the only way I can wean myself out of this dopamine-fueled compulsion loop.
You know, I've kind of forgotten what the point I was trying to make was, and a part of me wants to just delete all this and not post it: it's boring, it's tldr; it's not valuable, in that very capitalist illithid way (for what are capitalist vampire squids if not mind flayers that enrapture us before devouring our brains).
But I'm reminded that once upon a time I would have happily posted this, and trust that there would be somebody willing to spend the time reading what I had to say, and then (if it resonated with them) spend the time penning a thoughtful response, and not just a bitflip emoji reaction. And if there were no responses, that would be okay too, because I didn't write as a transaction where you expected likes, reacts and monetization in return. I write to feel my own soul and read to feel the souls of others.
So I guess I will just post this anyway, with an obligatory tldr: for me, the internet was once a place for nurturing reading and writing very much in the mode Junot is talking about. But it isn't so much anymore, unless you go to the right places.
@Junot Díaz And a fantastic reply it is! Thanks for such a thoughtful response. I wanted to clarify one point & see if that changes anything for you.
You said, “Books have unique affordances — do things that other media cannot do as well, or at all.” Agreed! What’s troubling me is that we, in many cases, keep using books to do the same types of things the other mediums do now, & often so much better, namely narrative storytelling. Novels became high art in a time when there was no other mass means of telling stories to a consuming public lest you were standing on a stage somewhere. But video in the last 10 years has become cheap, easy, pervasive, & platformed, & has generated the screen-time numbers you cite in your post. Reels & TikTok have made it far easier to consume far more humanity in far less time, they’ve moved culture toward hyper-authenticity (almost retaliatory, even, about craft, which seems suspect compared to the allegedly off-the-cuff micro-video provocations we spend our time watching), & they’ve even (I believe) reduced interest in the mechanics of story, in that there need not be one so long as the content is engaging & something occurs (all those clips, for example, in which someone riffs about something or another but does their makeup at the same time so it feels like we’re moving toward a conclusion minus any conflict). Video doing this job so well might have a hell of a lot to do with why people writ large choose it over reading. Yes, reading is killer for the imagination, but the consumption convenience of this kind of video is clearly winning the market.
The stress of my question to you was really in the back half of it: why not evolve lit into new forms that might meet these shifts? What might it look like for text to be as engaging & quick-hit consumable & mechanically similar to these other forms? What if instead of trying to “make it new” again by doing a new version of what novels have always done — tell stories — we broke it open & turned writing into something else, & really focused on what writing alone can do. We don’t need text to tell stories, & audiences keep choosing other mediums to get their stories, so what if we leaned hard into turning text into something else & made it legitimately new again?
Mind you, I have only fleeting ideas about how that might look, but it’s clear that literature needs evolution, lest audiences write it off altogether.
robert there a lot here and im definitely skeptical of the economies that produce and popularize these new forms but ive tried to answer the core of your question as best as i can. please forgive any misperceptions and errors.
🫶🏻
I have bought and will buy your books in hardback, from an indie bookstore, as long as you publish them. Also waiting for you to collaborate with comics artist Freddy Carrasco on something, anything. Long live books!!! AI will drive all the good stuff behind a paywall anyway, the days of free sort of quality internet are over.
Junot—recently read Olga Tarkczuk’s (sp?) Empusium and then, reading backwards, began to reread Mann’s Magic Mountain. I was wonderfully amazed at his writing—I had forgotten. I am a huge fan of both writers but I also read a lot of escapist quickies. Reading into the vast landscape of both was akin to reentering my childhood love of books.
I love my screens for snacks & laughter & I find tv to be a good alternative to drink & drugs but nothing compares to a book that completely overcomes reserves, embraces the grey matter like a gorgeous vampire & stimulates all one’s aesthetic impulses.
Junot, you are my Huizinga! X
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
In that room, there is an irreplaceable connection with oneself - quite distinct from the connection with the metaverse, the social verse. Life unravels in that space where the book is being created. The other options are far too immediate, plunging us deeper into the chaos we seek to remove ourselves from. Long live the book!
So as a terminally online teenager from the mid 90s, I'd say the issue isn't the internet per se, but the social media algorithms that have created a specific way of interacting online that is measured in seconds.
Back in the early days of the net, almost all communication was text-based, and slow. I'd use my dialup to download a day's worth of posts from my favourite newsgroups, and then slowly peruse them offline, like you would read a magazine; and then compose replies with the same leisure and contemplation as a kid writing a letter to their pen pal. There was no urgency; no need to get my words across before anybody else did, or before the conversation moved on. I had plenty of time, since my replies would only be sent out the next day when I connected again to download a new set of posts.
A lot of the discussion was crap, of course, but there was deep discourse to be had, and we also made art, kind of: collaborative stories where we took turns writing, several paragraphs at a time. Shitty fanfics, yes, but they were still proper stories, thousands of words long.
Of course very soon Usenet became an ancient wasteland, and writing moved to blogs, livejournals, and now places like AO3 and I guess Substack. I think young people who like to read and write will still gravitate to such spaces, and even if they aren't reading a traditional book, a 300-chapter long web novel probably counts as something?
But yes, that's still quite a niche area of the net, and your average internet user is not reading in that way, but popping 150-word tweets and 30 second TikTok videos. I've felt this assault on my ability to focus, and books are the only way I can wean myself out of this dopamine-fueled compulsion loop.
You know, I've kind of forgotten what the point I was trying to make was, and a part of me wants to just delete all this and not post it: it's boring, it's tldr; it's not valuable, in that very capitalist illithid way (for what are capitalist vampire squids if not mind flayers that enrapture us before devouring our brains).
But I'm reminded that once upon a time I would have happily posted this, and trust that there would be somebody willing to spend the time reading what I had to say, and then (if it resonated with them) spend the time penning a thoughtful response, and not just a bitflip emoji reaction. And if there were no responses, that would be okay too, because I didn't write as a transaction where you expected likes, reacts and monetization in return. I write to feel my own soul and read to feel the souls of others.
So I guess I will just post this anyway, with an obligatory tldr: for me, the internet was once a place for nurturing reading and writing very much in the mode Junot is talking about. But it isn't so much anymore, unless you go to the right places.
@Junot Díaz And a fantastic reply it is! Thanks for such a thoughtful response. I wanted to clarify one point & see if that changes anything for you.
You said, “Books have unique affordances — do things that other media cannot do as well, or at all.” Agreed! What’s troubling me is that we, in many cases, keep using books to do the same types of things the other mediums do now, & often so much better, namely narrative storytelling. Novels became high art in a time when there was no other mass means of telling stories to a consuming public lest you were standing on a stage somewhere. But video in the last 10 years has become cheap, easy, pervasive, & platformed, & has generated the screen-time numbers you cite in your post. Reels & TikTok have made it far easier to consume far more humanity in far less time, they’ve moved culture toward hyper-authenticity (almost retaliatory, even, about craft, which seems suspect compared to the allegedly off-the-cuff micro-video provocations we spend our time watching), & they’ve even (I believe) reduced interest in the mechanics of story, in that there need not be one so long as the content is engaging & something occurs (all those clips, for example, in which someone riffs about something or another but does their makeup at the same time so it feels like we’re moving toward a conclusion minus any conflict). Video doing this job so well might have a hell of a lot to do with why people writ large choose it over reading. Yes, reading is killer for the imagination, but the consumption convenience of this kind of video is clearly winning the market.
The stress of my question to you was really in the back half of it: why not evolve lit into new forms that might meet these shifts? What might it look like for text to be as engaging & quick-hit consumable & mechanically similar to these other forms? What if instead of trying to “make it new” again by doing a new version of what novels have always done — tell stories — we broke it open & turned writing into something else, & really focused on what writing alone can do. We don’t need text to tell stories, & audiences keep choosing other mediums to get their stories, so what if we leaned hard into turning text into something else & made it legitimately new again?
Mind you, I have only fleeting ideas about how that might look, but it’s clear that literature needs evolution, lest audiences write it off altogether.
robert there a lot here and im definitely skeptical of the economies that produce and popularize these new forms but ive tried to answer the core of your question as best as i can. please forgive any misperceptions and errors.