The grim last days of 2021, huh? We’ve been in the pandemic for two years now, and while my writing career has finally picked up to where I’m publishing a few essays every year, I want to try something new, something that might build on my tiny book-review audience and my slightly less-tiny Twitter audience to create a different animal. Also, I want to get rich.
I’m not sure how I’ll format this; Substack is a genre I haven’t worked in before. The plan for now is to treat this “publication” like a working-ideas notebook, such that arguments and images germinated here might show up in pieces later published elsewhere. I’ll probably throw in clips from books I’m reading, music I’m listening to, art I saw. I’ll include drafts of poems. I will keep things short.
“The General Reader” gets its name from a silly arts-and-humanities culture blog (ugh) I started on Wordpress in 2009, and which gradually went silent as I transitioned into more journalism (and wasted more time shitposting on Twitter). You can still read it all here. Many thanks to my later co-blogger, Dan Pecchenino. The blog was a useful experiment that set me up to be a better writer: more public-oriented, more accessible, briefer and sharper, and above all a lot less interested in what most other academics thought of my work.
The blog’s name was ironic, because there is—and you must, if you remember nothing else, remember this—no such thing as a General Reader, only a kind of ideal to strive for where your writing is doing genuinely public work and reaching bigger audiences instead of aiming for a recondite scholarly vibe, the kind of thing you’re taught to do in PhD school. Now, I’m not sure how much public interaction any of my blogging got. Not many people read TGR—in fact, almost nobody did. This iteration might turn out the same pitiful way, who knows. But it is something one can do to pass the time, as 2022 shuffles in.