What I Don't Want this Diary to Be

I don't like pundits. Scratch that. I fucking hate them. A thousand trained monkeys at a thousand type writers can be a thousand pundits. All you do is repeat talking points coined by the ether. How did the ether come up with it? Because the points are so fucking obvious that a thousand people thought the same point at the same time.

Public intellectuals is one thing, critics are one thing; their purpose is to challenge, not confirm--but pundits? Oh god they're awful. They do what they do because they have one very limited field of supposed expertise on which they are held as unaccountable as forty year tenured professors. They may very well be fed points by a central party messaging, but even if they weren't, they'd either come up with the same points or points just as obvious from a different ideology.

You know one when you read one/hear an interview with one. They are there to give their reading on a situation, on which they have no real expertise but their talking points. There's no attempt at details to fill in the vagaries of the area, just ideology, just fitting it into the broader narrative of what they think is already true for not just the subject at hand but everything else. So who cares what a person's opinion is when the opinion is one that anybody else can have? We only read them to get validation for what we already think.

What a person thinks is not important. What's important is what everybody thinks. Private affairs are private , and when writing about private matters it's important to empty every crevass of your mind's nuances. In public affairs, what matters is the community, and what's important is to give voice to a whole community of thoughts. Not just the thoughts of two people with diametrically opposed positions, but people of every background, every demographic, every job, every region, every income bracket, every personality, and yes, every identity.

Tomorrow, hopefully, I'll cover a book that does exactly that, because I'm fucking tired of saying what I think. I'm not even sure I think the same things from day to day. The only people fit for punditry are the people whose point of view is so reliable that you can guess what they think about any issue before you read them, and that makes them incredibly boring. The rest of us are dynamic: we evolve, we live, we experience. Every event doesn't just confirm that we were right but newly influences our thinking as we take stock of the ways we might be wrong.

The word for this kind of polyphonic consciousness is 'literature.' Insofar as I wanted to be a writer rather than a musician, I sure as shit didn't want to be an internet commenter nobody reads except a couple friends Stockholmed by me into believing my point of view is insightful. I wanted to be someone whose thoughts are deep enough that my imagination can explore what other people think, not what I do.

I had begun a novel that takes Jewish history from the point of view of exactly that.

Let me rephrase that. Over more than ten years I'd written over 500 pages of a foot-crushing historical fiction, about a hundred of which were useable (I didn't even bother showing many of them to my editor, sorry Nathaniel...).

I've said it before, but all my life I only ever wanted to be one thing: a great artist. Not some 'artiste' with a business card and not just some hipster in a gallery, but the kind of writer/musician who, even if he can't write something that matters to a wide swath of people, at least tries every day with his very soul. A great artist is not someone who succeeds at it (thought that would be amazing...), a great artist always just shows up to work and tries every day to create the best damn thing he can, even if the whole world thinks its shit. The fact that I haven't, with all my opportunities, is a failure of work ethic, a failure of nerve and courage, and a failure of integrity.

So long as I'm doing this shit, I'll never get there. Maybe I was never meant to. Nothing keeps the muse away like 'Importantitis' and the best stuff always happens by a mixture of habit and accident. Maybe stuff like the last seven-and-a-half weeks is the extent of what I can do, but oh how I'd like to do more.