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Feb 21, 2023Liked by Joshua Doležal

You offer a passage that captures something that took me a long time to learn ... admittedly not until my mid 30s.

“As readers we open the door of the book or magazine, look into the face of the poem, and decide whether or not to invite it into our lives.” Too much pretense, rawness, or redundancy, and the reader shuts the door in the poem’s face. But even if the reader invites the poem in, “it may tire or offend or bore its hostess and be promptly dismissed.”

That's one of the best succinct descriptions I've ever seen.

Personally, I still tend to commit the sin of "rawness," though not from ignorance.

Some unusual audience feedback. Since you're talking so much about audiences. I tend to take at least 30 minutes to read a column, and usually come back to it two or three times. I write a lot of comments, like a conversation, and actually post about half of them. I suspect that's not a typical reading pattern.

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There is loads here I could comment on but I wish to restrict myself to just a couple.

Firstly, the idea of a reader inviting you into their home is a great metaphor. I've long felt that to be the case, in effect, but the other way round, ie as a reader. For example, call me a prude, but when I see books or blog posts with the word "f*ck* in the title my immediate response is: why would I want that so-called writing polluting my home? I mean, if you came into my house and started swearing I'd ask you to stop, and if you didn't I'd ask you to leave. I realise that in some cases it can be humorous, or to illustrate justifiable anger, and that's fair enough. But if it's a cynical ploy to draw in more readers through outrage, or simply because the writer is inarticulate, I'm not interested. People's time, and their space, are sacrosanct and should be treated accordingly. In I think an analogous way, I read once that the Lebanese poet Gibran was once given a prize for his beautiful writing in English. Someone asked him how he was able to achieve that, given that English wasn't his first language, and he replied something to the effect of "When one is a guest in another person's house one obeys the rules"

Secondly, I don't know your friend, obviously, but his view that potential readers would slam the door in his face seems to me to be depriving some readers of something they would love. I suppose I can understand it from an economic point of view: why spend a year labouring over something that is going to bring in little or no money? But he also seems to be second guessing what the rest of the world will think. Isn't that, in a strange kind of way, immensely egotistical?

On a more general point, writing for a particular audience (a niche audience) is definitely a good way of building up a readership. It's certainly what Substack recommends. However, I've done that with other (non-Substack) newsletters, and I decided that I wanted to use my Substack one to write about stuff I'm interested in, which could range from literature to a strange sign I saw on a bus stop. I'm slowly but surely building up a decent sized and engaged readership. Ultimately, as someone in the Substack office hours said last Thursday, you (as in the writer) are the niche, the unique 'thing' for want of a better word. So I suppose going back to your analogy, I write for myself, and hope that some people will open the door to me!

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I bet there is a way to willfully read The Confidence Man as a plaint by Melville about how much more he would have preferred to write full time. If so , the sarcasm in thereshould evaporate. Myself am motivated to write by all the unused adjectives and i see you in minds eye feeling similarly. I mean if you can hang an evergreen with all the ornaments of civilization it would mean you were there in the woods where we belong. I believe we mostly storify simple happenstance out of people pleasing desire, i know that Kerouac over did itand came toa hard stop. But the thing you forgot to mention was that it is jealosy jealousy above all we are really demon fighting in writing. A damaging and obsessive emotion. If you can writeand help your reader payfor their ticket the way Dylan does without giving them a chance to feel deprived, now that is something that identity writing just flies in the face of. I hardly think it is wise to enjoy a hurricane. Confidence, these phones we really lay them down in order to sleep. If people are going to hear any stories other than efficiency organization charts it was because we took the time to tell the story. Now Gary Snyder says all is anothing , but we know what perspective he is speaking from. Talk is food i think. If you have nutritious chicken soup to share, is not that an energy give away, and simply more fun the closer to the quick pace of talk you come across.

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I'm going to sit with this for a while. You've written something gorgeous here and I appreciate being reminded of King's "door shut" vs. "door open" language. And the metaphor of "house guest" in not just the digital age but in my digital business is one I'm very much invested in figuring out for myself. I think I reflexively go to a place where my coaching business is MY living room into which I'm inviting people. But that is a rather unexamined stance. I wonder what happens if I focus instead on being invited into their homes . . . how my language or stance or thoughts about our relationship might change. Thank you.

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Feb 21, 2023Liked by Joshua Doležal

It's interesting that what made James, Wharton, and Austen indisgestible to you made them palatable to me, as a fellow working-class college student. though we've discuss a pivotal difference between us.

I still harbor a great love for Victorian English which is reinforced by how much better that period of English harmonizes with modern French, particularly common clausal structures that in contemporary English seem either archaic or hopelessly academic. Study of French and French literature was one of my escapes in graduate school.

But this also leads to your point about how a "house guest" must assume a "general code of manners," which I find that very few, student or peer, do. It's also like only profesional writers do that anymore ... but I cannot tell how much of that generalizes or is just my physical or virtual locale.

Sometimes, I engage in a little too much "rawness" as a exasperant defiance and outrage against a lack of a general code of manners, though I write more about various forms of communication and not just writing. I am much less successfull than Frederick Douglas, "What, To the Slave, is the Fourth of July" (title edited). Though ... I'm not sure what success would look like....

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CJ Hopkins wrote a piece that has a similar theme, might be worth your time.

https://cjhopkins.substack.com/p/the-war-on-insensitivity

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