Overdue

It's easier to make hard decisions you've been avoiding when other people basically make the decisions for you.

DALL-E 2 prompt: “rick rubin reading a book, digital art”

I.

Twice in the past year I got in the car and heard legendary music producer Rick Rubin giving an interview about his new book. There’s nothing I can do to explain more clearly what these interviews were like than to tell you that the first interview began with Rubin and his interviewer attempting to achieve a meditative state by synchronizing their inhalations and exhalations of breath.

The conversations, like the book, were not tell-alls about the famous musicians Rubin had worked with over the years. They were about Rubin’s quasi-spiritual approach to being creative and his extremely successful methods of fostering creativity in others. After both interviews I walked away with the distinct impression that this wasn’t the sort of book I’d normally read, but I also couldn’t shake the feeling that it might be quite important that I read this book.

The second time I heard Rubin on the radio, this December, I got home and announced that if there was anyone who still needed to get me a Christmas gift, consider buying The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. Someone took the hint, and on December 25th I started reading a book that was exactly as weird and hippy-dippy as I expected it to be.

The table of contents does not list chapters; it lists “78 Areas of Thought,” which include Nature as Teacher, A Whisper Out of Time, and The Source of Creativity. (“The Source” is given proper noun treatment throughout the book’s 404 pages.)

As a piece of writing, The Creative Act has been slightly underwhelming — there are only so many mixed metaphors about sowing and tending the Seeds of Creativity that one can endure. But it’s an extremely breezy read and has exposed me to a handful of ideas (either for the very first time, or again at the right time) that have shaken the very foundations of my own creative practice.

Consider the following passage:

It’s a healthy practice to approach our work with as few accepted rules, starting points, and limitations as possible. Often the standards in our chosen medium are so ubiquitous, we take them for granted. They are invisible and unquestioned …

If you want to paint, you’re likely to begin by stretching canvas over a rectangular wooden frame and propping it up on an easel. Based solely on the tools selected, you’ve already exponentially narrowed what’s possible, before a single drop of paint has made contact with the canvas.

We assume the equipment and format are part of the art form itself. Yet painting can be anything that involves the use of color on a surface for an aesthetic or communicative purpose. All other decisions are up to the artist.

I have written previously about how the ideology of Facebook changed what gets written about and how often it gets written. To put that same idea in Rubinian terms, by seeking to drive traffic through Facebook, news organizations have narrowed what’s possible by prioritizing in its coverage (implicitly or explicitly) the qualities that Facebook rewards. I bring this up to illustrate that the notion of a creator’s message being limited or altered by the medium they choose to work isn’t a new concept to me.

But it wasn’t until I was confronted by Rubin’s observation that I made the connection that, by publishing this letter on Substack, I too, have made a choice to narrow what is possible.

II.

There can be value in setting timelines and imposing deadlines on yourself, I’ve heard. So for a while I was happy to look around at the publishing cadence for other newsletters and aspire to approximate what they were doing. But what I soon found is that the topics I was most interested were quite difficult and expensive to research, write, and edit all in the span of a week — forget about twice or three times a week. As an example, I currently have various projects delayed, pending visits to a historical society in Northwest Ohio, a courthouse in Los Angeles, the TV and film archives at Vanderbilt, and the National Archives facility in Atlanta.

Faced with these constraints and others like them, I thought my choices were to 1) tackle less ambitious topics or 2) tackle the ambitious topics on a compressed timeline. Both of these choices seemed bad, but instead of doing anything to change them I just silently regretted my choice of restaurant and ordered something I wasn’t excited about anyway.

Hosting this site on Substack kept me from seeing the very obvious third option: do the ambitious topics and let it take however long it needs to take. Instead of being the guy with a disappointingly infrequent newsletter, I could be the fun uncle who shows up at unpredictable times to delight everyone with wild tales from his travels.

But migrating away from Substack to a more suitable medium would be yet another non-writing thing standing in the way of the writing.

Besides — what’s the rush?

III.

The next thing that happened is that Substack became infested with pro-Nazi content (not just content that has echoes of Nazi ideology but content praising the actual historical Nazis) and was alarmingly equivocal in its statements about how it would handle moderating and removing pro-Nazi content going forward. Some publishers acted quickly and left Substack straight away, but I figured this was such a stupid blunder that an apology and course-correction wouldn’t be far behind.

Ron Howard narrator voice: “It wasn’t.”

Then, one of my favorite newsletters, Garbage Day, announced its departure and made some good points on the way out — including a few observations on how Substack’s once-innovative email product has languished as the company has turned its focus to refashioning itself as a social network. And then a couple days later, the same thing happened with Platformer.

So, I’ve decided to leave also. Not that I expect my departure to make any sort of statement or cause any meaningful dent in Substack’s bottom line. But the platform hasn’t made sense for me in a while, and now the status is quo isn’t just misaligned with my creative goals — it’s morally indefensible.

I’m still working out what the best landing spot will be, so I’ve taken the step to pause all payments. When payments resume on the new hosting platform, they will not be tethered to a publication schedule. It will be a pay-what-you-think-is-fair sort of deal to offset some of the costs I incur in researching and producing this work.

And you’ll also get a free copy of the book, when it’s ready. (The free book will also be offered to anyone who’s purchased and later canceled an annual subscription.)

IV.

Oh yeah, I’m writing a book.

Or at least, the project that’s been occupying most of my imagination for the past year or so has become book-like in its scope. I plan to continue pursuing (and am, in fact, currently pursuing) other stories as I keep working on this book-shaped project, and possibly I will also share some book excerpts along the way.

I’ll keep things pretty vague for now, but I’ll just say that it’s a topic that hasn’t been explored, in my view, at a depth anywhere near proportionate to its prominence in Gamecock lore.

There will be some other changes to the site too, but they’ll be mostly cosmetic.

Anyway, apropos of very little, here’s 10 new (to me) songs I enjoyed during first week of 2024.