We're in a Writing Renaissance: Sam Kahn on Substack Fiction and Democratic Publishing

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PILCROW is Substack's first Serialized Novel Competition . Each quarter, we will present excerpts from the unpublished novels of three rigorously selected finalists and invite our subscribers to vote on one to be fully serialized on our Substack. Quarterly winners will receive $1,000 and both finalists $500. Our first contest deadline is October 22nd. To learn more about this project and our submission guidelines, visit us at pilcrowmag.com.

Today we're joined by Sam Kahn, author of the novel Henchman, which he's in the process of serializing on his own Substack, Castalia. He also edits the Substack The Republic of Letters.

“We’re in a writing renaissance actually, we just somehow don’t acknowledge it and I think it has to do with these bottlenecks and how mass media works.”

PILCROW: Welcome Sam.

SAM: Thank you. Nice radio voice. Really appreciate your having me.

PILCROW: Do you want to tell us a bit about both the novel itself and why you decided to serialize it on Substack? You have different irons in the fire on Substack, so when this came to you, why the decision to serialize it?

SAM: So the novel is called Henchman, it's the extra-territorial and interplanetary adventures of Banx Mulvaney, who starts off as the henchman, as the head of inner perimeter security to Ernest Stavro Blofeld, and then after that base is blown up he goes on a journey to serve different henchmen, to serve different masters, eventually to reach super-villainy himself, and it's basically a workplace comedy. But it was also, I almost can't imagine having more fun writing something than I had with this so. So I finished it and the decision to serialize was in a sense pretty easy, because I really didn't have another venue, I just don't have any publishing industry contacts. And I’ve just become less and less interested in that, and for me Substack is a huge deal. I've been on it for several years. I write on it all the time. I’m just a fervent fanatic about it. So I wanted to give it a go publishing fiction in serialized form and I knew actually that it wasn't going to do very well I think especially when I was starting off on Substack, I published a lot of short stories, and I really always saw it as a vehicle for fiction. That was always the most important thing for me. And consistently, the fiction always does much less well than everything else. And I just know that it's just a fact of kind of how people read on Substack. People want to read articles. They don't want to sink themselves into a story. So I knew that that was gonna happen and just decided to go for it anyway because I kind of have this quixotic attempt to try to get people to lengthen their attention spans. I just feel like Substack has already done so much to lengthen people's attention spans from what it was in the 2010s. And something like Substack shouldn't have been possible according to what everybody thought the internet was 10 years ago. And so the hope is, if enough people do it, if enough people take this kind of thing seriously, that we actually can turn a corner here. And people can really put their best work forward online, and the internet can really become the place where people exchange fiction. So that's the hope.

PILCROW: I mean, that's the hope that we have at PILCROW, too. And I do want to talk about this later, but I want to start by talking about the novel. We’ll come back to this question about what does well on Substack and why. Because if you go back to through the golden age of serialization, a lot of these novels, something that we wouldn't expect, even, like Middlemarch, were couched…I mean, especially Dickens, were coming out of newspapers. So in a very visual, concrete sense, they were surrounded by discourse. And Substack reminds me of nothing so much as that. And we can talk about that later, this question of how things are promoted on Substack and what goes viral and what doesn't. Or if fiction is really supposed to go viral on Substack and then what that means for packaging and presenting it. But to talk about Henchman, you mentioned Blofeld as the sort of original supervillain there. Some people might not have the background to know that that means that at least in the beginning, this is taking place in some sort of skewed James Bond universe. There are these characters that we would know from this franchise. And, you know, the first thing that it reminded me of was actually The Princess Bride. Not the film, but the William Goldman novel that it was based on, who also wrote the screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Rest in peace, Robert Redford. Though I actually think that he and Goldman did not get along very well. Anyway, that novel is a lot more arch and sardonic than the film. It's really a novel for adults, though it is playing with these fantasy/adventure tropes in a way that's both breezy, and knowing, but it has a real sophistication to it. And I was thinking, reading Henchman, you don't really see many novels like this anymore. And I wonder if you have an opinion on why that is.

SAM: Yeah, it's a good question. For me, that's very high praise. I haven't actually read the novel. There was a copy of it that was lying around all through my childhood. So I kind of thumbed through it, but the movie was like the gold standard the entire time I was a kid. There was just something about that sense of humor that really, really clicks for me and I think my whole generation. It’s funny to think about. There was a whole genre of this kind of comedy novel that, it feels like all through the 20th century, this is what cult classics tended to be. And it kind of went away, along with most good writing, to be honest. I mean, I guess people like Gary Shteyngart are supposed to be doing this, but I can't really think of anything that, for a while, that resembles this. But it felt like a very natural form to have somehow. I was sort of nervous. The main thing I was nervous about was that somebody had basically covered this, because it seemed like a fairly obvious thing to do in a way. Actually Percival Everett has a novel that's in a similar verse. I don't know if you know Dr. No, which is also—

PILCROW: I haven't read that one.

SAM: Yeah and I had the idea for this separately and it was just in my head, and then Dr. No came out and I was like “oh shit” and I remember going to the bookstore and reading it in trepidation and—

PILCROW: There's that story about William Gibson, when he hasn’t finished Neuromancer yet, and he goes to the theater to see Blade Runner, and he just goes “oh no, they're gonna think—”

SAM: Yeah, yeah. I mean, for me, that's the hardest part of writing is dealing with other stuff that's kind of in your zone. And when you run into something that's close, like how much do you let it take over what you're doing? But anyway, it turned out Dr. No is a really good book, but it turned out that it was doing something really pretty different.

PILCROW: Were you a fan of the Bond franchise, as a young man? Where does the inspiration to deal with these types of tropes come from?

SAM: I can't exactly remember where Henchman came from, but somehow I just knew it was a really good idea to be from the perspective of a henchman, going through all this, going through the journey, like all the usual tropes, but with the perspective shifted so you're not seeing things from the hero’s – you're seeing things from the guy who's in the background who knows that he's supposed to get killed off at some point pretty soon. So it comes from a lot of places. I think when I was in high school, there was a group of friends, one of whom passed, whom I dedicated the book to, and we would…the way we would hang out was that we would see these action movies and then stand under the marquee afterwards and just pick them apart. And sometimes that would go on longer than the movie itself. Like, “Oh, like what?” It's just all this kind of thing. “Why do you do this? Why do you do that? Why don't you just get out of the way?” Austin Powers is kind of like, its sense of humor is basically built on that. “You know, why not just shoot him? Why go through this whole thing?” So all of that was pretty obvious. It was kind of an attachment to Bond. Like, there would be…I really kind of hate Christmas. I have trouble with Christmas. And at that point there was Spike TV – which doesn't exist anymore, as The Man Show, had a Bond marathon for Christmas. And so it's in the background. I kind of remembered watching these. But I'm not really into action movies or anything like that. So I was holding off on writing this for a while. In part because I really didn't know the tropes. And then somehow earlier this year, it felt like it was the right time for it. And I think what it had to do with is not being in the US, being very far away, but still within American pop culture. I mean, people just consume huge amounts of American pop culture here.

PILCROW: Well, one can't escape.

SAM: Yeah, I mean, I went very far to try to escape it. And I can't work in a cafe without this, like, tinny bullshit pop all over, in my ears. But people watch a lot of, there's a lot of TV around. And so it's this feeling of re-accessing America through this pop stuff.

PILCROW: Sort of defamiliarizing it, in a way?

SAM: Yeah, my writing has shifted a bit more to being kind of in these fantasias. And so it's this feeling of accessing that, like the inner life, the kind of subconscious, collective subconscious of the culture through this. So that's where I got into this. And then most of the content is basically from just workplace, or specifically I think working in documentary films, and you spend a lot of time in cars with other guys or on shoots, and it's this very hierarchical setup, but with every level of people you're talking to you have a kind of confidence with them, so it would always be this very interesting thing. I'd be on set and there would be a whole bunch of people and then the director would want to talk to me about something and…it gets a little bit more intimate and then the director leaves and then you get in the car with the other crew guys and you're bitching about the director in the car. And so there's a ring of intimacy there. And then you drop people off one by one and then you're alone again. And—

PILCROW: Well, that's something I want to talk about a little bit later, I guess what an academic would call the “homosocial” aspects of the novel. And it's setting it in a workplace comedy, but also exploring these other themes. I think one of the things I like about Henchman was that it captures some of that essential camp of the classic Bond films, but also that there's a melancholy underneath that. Maybe we would call it the “unbearable lightness” of being these tropes or types. There's a pathos in there somewhere. Which I think is, to me anyway, part of what's wrong-headed about a lot of the genre adaptations we've seen in the last 15, 20 years. I think of Christopher Nolan's Batman, or even the newer Bond films, in fact, where there's an attempt to dial up the grittiness or purported realism in search of this aesthetic torque. While it's missing some of the more subtle or strange parts of what makes these extended narrative universes memorable. This awareness that there's a sort of Sisyphean ongoingness. Does that make any sense to you?

SAM: [laughs] Yeah.

PILCROW: [laughs] Right. I mean, because you said, obviously in the sort of middle-management, these henchmen who don't know if they'll be fed to the shark for a minor mistake. And there's something about its repeatability…when you're writing a character that's trapped in this, it does have something a little bit existential about it.

SAM: Yeah, I mean, to me, it's always been a big thing about why some people just get everything and some people don't. And the more I see of life, the more I'm just like, wow, this stuff is really undeserved. And especially different in the arts economy and working in film and things. There was a while where I had this mad director. And everybody else is a sane normal person, and somehow we all have to take orders from this crazy person and everybody has to justify that to themselves in their own way; you know some people really thought this person was kind of genius, some people are just in it for the paycheck, but just…I believe very, very deeply in this kind of equality between all human beings, that we all have equal worth. And you end up in all these situations where it's not equal and it's unjust how unequal it is. So action movies are really about that, you're always rooting for the hero. I never really would identify with these heroes that much because they always seem like these sort of bland jock-y types and that just wasn't really who I was. And then you're interested in the villain because they're always a little bit different. And then there are these other people along the way who are always treated as disposable. And that's clearly such a deep part of our psychology, is to always identify with the main person and all we can think about is the main person. It’s most of the time, a lot of the time in life, especially in work, you are not the main person. You're off on the side. So just being that person—

PILCROW: [laughs] You’re the NPC.

SAM: Yeah. And being that person, for one thing, it just felt like it was really funny to see everything from them. So, Banx spends a lot of time, he's very into the training and his guys are super well-trained and then every time they get to the fight they just can't hit a shot [laughs] and Bond is hitting all these ridiculous shots and it's just driving him crazy. So that's kind of the basic joke and then a few other jokes kind of unfold from there.

PILCROW: I promise I'll move on from the way that the novel is dealing with its tropes here in just a second, but I couldn't help but think of this Umberto Eco essay, and you might know it, about Casablanca, and I want to read a line from it. He says:

“And so we can accept it…when conspirators cough to interrupt the conversation if a spy is approaching, when whores weep at the sound of La Marseillaise, when all the archetypes burst in shamelessly we reach Homeric depths, two clichés make us laugh, a hundred clichés move us, for we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves and celebrating a reunion, just as the height of pain may encounter sensual pleasure and the height of perversion border on mystical energy. So, too, the height of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the sublime." ¹

Now, I think he attributes this to the writing and production of that film being somewhat haphazard, drafts were being passed back and forth between screenwriters, and so he thinks that was like an emergent property in it. But in Henchman, I think this is very intentional. Am I wrong about that?

SAM: Just say the question one more time?

PILCROW: That this, this dealing with tropes and clichés and not being able to ignore it, given the context that the novel is set in, do they assemble to something higher because the characters, or at least the narrator, has some awareness of this absurdity or banality that he's trapped in?

SAM: Yeah, I mean, it's definitely important for me. Part of the register is that he never, Banx never gets outside of his genre. So, I mean, that's... something that's a little bit inherently limiting about it, that it has to stay, it has to follow the rules of the genre always. And his conception can't go outside of it, but he can take these kind of loops within that world. And a lot of what the novel is built around are these moments when he's being shot at and he goes underwater and he has to hold his breath for a long time. So in the middle of these long action sequences, he'll go for these sort of loops of consciousness. And that's something that I think has always been interesting to me. The very first novel I wrote was basically about that. It was about trying to find interiority in people who would present as not having a lot of interiority.

PILCROW: He's bumping up against something.

SAM: Yeah, I guess the main kind of conflict for me is that I often just feel like I don't really understand anybody, that it just feels like most people I meet are very just kind of locked into their social world that they pretty much are as they present themselves. And then you meet some people who are just not that at all and have these rich, you know, multivarious inner lives. And I know I have…I'm kind of simple in other ways, but I definitely have that. I have all these kind of worlds inside myself. You know, my imagination will kind of drift to places. And so there are all these different selves within me and just why it's so hard for us to kind of acknowledge that about ourselves or about each other. And so there's always this question when I meet people who seem very locked into who they are, it's like, you know, you want to get to all the other rooms that are kind of inside of them.

PILCROW: So, like, what genre of life are you living?

SAM: Yeah, but I mean, I just feel like…I'm really convinced of this. I'm really convinced that people just have something close to infinitude inside of them. I just have so many stories, different things I want to write about and talk about and just the idea that we limit ourselves just so, so much to being like, “oh yeah, that's, you know, Gus the cameraman” or whatever it is. That thing is just…something that I'll never be at peace with about how the world works. So that's what I wanted to really explore with Banx. He's in this world where nobody has interiority, where everybody just is the way they are. And for some reason, he has this interiority and he doesn't even…he doesn't even realize that it's setting him apart. Or he doesn't even realize that he's sort of unusual in this way. So that's a lot of what it's about.

PILCROW: Yeah. And I'm glad you mentioned him versus the other characters, cause he is sort of…there is a sense, there's a claustrophobia, you know, to it, which, even in the first chapter, I know something flipped when I was reading it and I thought “Oh, this is almost—" Immediately, I thought, “this reminds me of some Don DeLillo.” On the level of the prose and the way that the first-person narration is handled, there is a certain droll, laconic observation. I think of some of DeLillo’s short stories like “Human Moments in World War III,” or even in White Noise. Where again, on the level of the first-person narration, there's this commitment to the bit of this everyman moving his mental feet very carefully to maintain some kind of sanity or safety. In a literal sense, for Banx in Henchman. And as you said earlier, these are essentially workplace comedies. They're about power differentials, but there is this absurdist, existential frame. And so I wonder in terms of…leaving tropes and genre and all of that aside, in terms of the way that it's written, were you conscious of any particular inspiration there?

SAM: You're asking really good questions [laughs]. I'm impressed at how well read you are. Yeah, I mean, these are very nice references for me. I mean…DeLillo and The Princess Bride were probably, like, tops for me growing up. I mean, these are really important formative influences. I definitely know what you mean. I'm sure DeLillo got pretty deep into the bedrock of my writing. I wasn't thinking, in terms of this, I really wasn't thinking about any influences in particular. I was mostly just trying to avoid Austin Powers, basically. I'm starting off with Bond, so it's kind of hard to avoid that. Everybody's done a Bond parody. And then for me, it really felt like the novel started to pick up or really find its sea legs in part two, when he goes to this island that I made up and just kind of came to me as I was writing it. It was a slightly funny experience where at some point I realized that the structure of it was basically Candide, towards the end as I was finishing. I had a moment where I just kind of speed-read Candide, which I hadn't read since, you know, French class whenever. And I realized—

PILCROW: Is this a bildungsroman to you, Henchman?

SAM: Well, it's the relationship between him and Boorstin. So Banx... the framework of it is that everybody else pretty much is exactly themselves. Like, he has this love interest who he always hopes is going to be kind of multidimensional in the way that he's multidimensional and she just never is. And everybody else is the same way. But I figured that supervillains also need to have accountants, and the accountants, of course, know everything that's going on and are handling all the debt that the lairs are getting into. So the smart Jewish accountant of Blofeld’s is, you know, he has that dimensionality. And so Banx has a workplace friendship with him. But this is something I've run into a lot where you kind of think you have this camaraderie with somebody, and then when push comes to shove, they always choose their own career advancement and they kind of forget about your, like their friendship with you. And then he has his friend Sod Job, who's quiet, who's silent for most of the time, is kind of his secret sharer, is the other side of it. So I may have forgot what the question was. You started talking about Boorstin.

PILCROW: Well it’s leading into this. The second half of what you said is leading into this next question because they're related, which is, as you've already said, like it is structured as a workplace--

SAM: Oh, I'm sorry.

PILCROW: No, no. I’m sorry [laughs].

SAM: But it does have... let me reply to that. Sure, sure. I'm sorry. I've been reading the book about Joe Biden's senility, so Biden moment [laughs]. So is it a bildungsroman? Well, it's his journey. It’s his journey to supervillainy. And to get there, he has to break through certain sentimentalities within himself, which is very painful for him and mirrors some things that I think I was going through around the same time. But in terms of Candide, the structure. The structure is basically being schooled in the harsh realities of the world. And I was kind of shocked when I reread Candide, just how, first of all, it's much faster…it's really fast. It's really schematic. And it's really brutal, just the kind of worldview it has. So, um, Boorstin is meant to be kind of a Pangloss figure who's leading Banx through it. And I realized—

PILCROW: A sort of psychopomp? Or is this like—

SAM: Yeah, he's giving him a tour of how the world works. But how the world works is just not in keeping with the real richness and inner life of the human soul. It's about being misled in this way, although I think Candide actually has – Voltaire definitely sticks the landing more than I did, and so it has this extremely powerful end where Candide really differentiates himself from his mentor. And in this one, I think partly because I was stuck by the rules of the form, Banx stays fairly close to what Boorstin is teaching him, but. But he's just trying to kind of calibrate it for himself.

PILCROW: Is there, to you anyway, is there a tragic dimension to that? Is something in this novel about what it takes to succeed in a hostile profession? Exaggerated as the context of the novel might be, but, you know, the arts are a hostile and difficult profession.

SAM: Yeah, so one of the chapters that I just put up online is…it’s this feeling that to get ahead you basically have to betray everybody you know, like that you always have to put number one first and that's something that I've been learning like that that's definitely you know as I get towards my forties, I just understand more about, you know, how money and how work really is. It's kind of like that. The workplace is set up so that it only really functions if everybody's putting themselves first at all times. That's really what it's based on. And so I do feel like I'm trying to chisel away these softer parts of myself. The parts of you that want to be kind of buddy-buddy with your friends, or want to have an ironic detachment from the work that you do, want to be kind of idealistic about the work that you do. At some point you get to this place where the only thing that matters is money, my own advancement, and everybody else is thinking the same way, and I think that the higher—

PILCROW: What better place to be having this discussion than on social media?

SAM: Yeah, yeah. And the higher up the greasy pole you go in workplaces, I think the more that's true. So I think a lot of it is just my trying to understand or come to grips with basically how power works. There's a speech towards the end where they talk about power and how, when you're young, you just don't even really think about it. You don't notice these kind of power imbalances or inequalities in social relationships. And then at some point you really do. And you notice at work and you notice it in your romantic life. Just the way that these kinds of zero sum power games become like the deep truth of how the world works. And I think I've been fairly late in the game to really understand that, that kind of, that's what it is. Like that's all there is in life in a way. And then part of me, and part of Banx, is just trying to look beyond that and be like, “is this really true? Is that all there is?” And it's…man, it's hard to see stuff on the other side sometimes.

PILCROW: Yeah, it's something that I've been thinking about [laughs] not just reading this novel, but in general.

SAM: Yeah, it's a tough reflection.

PILCROW: The last thing I want to ask about the novel, and we've covered some of this ground, but it's about…okay, at least the first third of the novel, we are in this typical Bond villain underground, underwater lair. All the henchmen are sharing space, practicing what will ultimately be their ineffectual routines to defeat Bond and all of that. And they live in this sort of dormitory life. It's very much men being around men. Except for the femme fatale, who's the supervillain's girlfriend who is hovering, quite literally, she's on the staircase in one of the first scenes we meet her, at this remove. It reminded me of Dr. Strangelove at the beginning. You have the General's girlfriend who's on the phone and we only see her for a little bit. She's the only female character in that film. That film too is very much about a kind of homosociality and violence, and even plays with some of these supervillain tropes in a way. Were you conscious in the writing of this novel about trying to say – what you were just saying about this recognition, this adult recognition that there is power, however it's concealed in workplaces, and that is some essential reality. But beyond that, were you trying to say something about how that power actuates in men's relationships with other men?

SAM: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're right. It's definitely very male novel. I guess at the end it's really about friendship, is what it's really about. And how do you have these bonds…basically whether those kinds of male relationships always break down into vertical, zero-sum, I've got to get ahead and kill you stuff, or whether you can have these kind of shared bonds.

PILCROW: This is the stuff of op-eds these days, right? Male friendship and all of this.

SAM: Yeah, and actually, as I was writing this, I had a kind of a workplace dynamic fall apart in a pretty dramatic way. So I was thinking, so I was very much taking that in and I'm in the middle of another one of these right now. So, I mean, these tend to be very fraught dynamics between men, because men, in my experience, tend to be very good at having a sense of camaraderie, of like, we're going through stuff together, uh, yeah, this sucks, but we'll go through it together, but then usually you need, like, the leader of the pack, and then at the moment when you're jockeying for power, all that other stuff falls away, and so there's a lot of betrayal kind of built into that. There's this very interesting thing that can happen where somebody betrays somebody else but is also kind of like, “hey, sorry man I've just got to do this,” and you sort of understand each other. So yeah, I mean that's definitely the zone of a lot of this.

PILCROW: I want to switch gears here and talk about Substack itself. This is a bit of a meandering question, but I think it's important: where has it been and where is it going? A part of why we started PILCROW, this novel serialization contest, was a sense that the literary community on Substack would have to develop its own structures, maybe for lack of a better word, that might be more durable than any one individual's efforts, not in competition with that, but in addition to, and hopefully to make Substack more legible to the traditional publishing industry, to give writers who aren't naturally skilled at this self-promotion, the frenetic pace of what it takes to succeed doing that, a platform to reach people like agents and editors. Because the publishing industry is not going away. It's not going to be replaced by, you know, however literary a site is Substack. And people still want to see their books between covers. And that's a good thing in my opinion. There is and was – and I think correctly or justifiably – a dissident element to Substack that's very critical of trends in mainstream publishing. And it's something that I largely agree with. I could go on for a long time about that. But you also see this in dissident cultures. I saw this in my time on the political left, often a reluctance or refusal to evolve or develop structures that can support long term efforts, almost a kind of anarchist pose in some way. And I think that doesn't work long term. I think Substack’s literary precincts could easily be swamped by this sort of “5 Ways to Sell Your Novel!” type listicle drivel. And more established outlets are becoming aware of the potentials of Substack. And so, this is a very broad question, but I wanted to ask your perspective on all of this. What do you see as Substack's role in the immediate or medium term future?

SAM: Yeah, there are a lot of different pieces to that. So historically my position is that I'm just extremely fanatical and evangelical about Substack. I mean, it was just a godsend for me. I felt totally dead in the water in terms of finding access points for any of my writing across a bunch of genres and just being able to cut away all that middleman and just be like, “okay, I'm going to put my stuff out there and then find readers.” Uh, that was, I mean, that's probably the single thing or top three or five things in my life that I feel good about, like unequivocally. So that was a huge deal for me and I was just plugging away at it and got to a place that I'm pretty happy with. Um, right now is kind of the first time I've been a bit bearish on Substack. Something's happened in the last few months. I'm not quite sure what it is, but the wind seems to have gone out of the sails a little bit. I have a suspicion that it has to do with Substack corporate and that maybe they're getting a little tired or they're not kind of pushing it in the same way.

PILCROW: Substack before Notes was very different than Substack after Notes.

SAM: Yeah, that's another question. It's whether... Brandon Taylor was arguing this. Some people have said this, that basically Notes is...as soon as Notes came out, that was kind of the end of Substack as really a literary form. It's possible. I happen to like Notes. I mean, I just come on it all the time. I scroll around. I like it. But it is true that it makes it much easier to just read the Notes as opposed to reading the articles when they were coming through on email.

PILCROW: There was a walled garden aspect to this beforehand where you would read somebody's Substack and if someone made an interesting comment, you would click on their name and see if they were writing a Substack.

SAM: Yeah.

PILCROW: And I do miss that, but part of this question is, you know, nothing gold can stay. Like what would be the future of, would that just be a sort of another kind of WordPress that maybe had a better user experience, but I don't know, what is it supposed to be?

SAM: Yeah. I mean, my general feeling is that what we're witnessing, it's not about really about Substack the company. It's really about…it’s about the mode of expression. It's the communicative technology. You have these peer-to-peer social media technologies, but you're able to use it for meaningful content. And to me, that may be the thing that sort of saves our civilization, essentially. And it shouldn't just be writing. It should also be people putting up their movies on Vimeo and this kind of stuff. So little by little, it's about expanding people's attention spans from the slop and the bullshit to actually taking this stuff seriously and really treating each other and treating themselves with respect. And that seems to be a very difficult process because there is something about the screens that we just don't want to do that, that we turn into these kind of chimpanzees every time we have a screen in front of us. So the big thing that I've been doing, which is what you're doing, too, is trying to move away from this individualized stuff to building more communities. So I initiated, launched The Metropolitan Review, ended up editing, launching The Republic of Letters together with David Roberts and so that to me has made this like a really good year because to me what The Republic of Letters is…is just really special. It's a lot of people who, you know, none of them really are like name writers. I mean what I'm paying is well below market rates for a professional. But they're all really good and it's just people writing sometimes it's about ideas sometimes it's reviews sometimes it's people writing about their jobs or personal stuff and honestly I'm just floored by, it’s just people turning in all kinds of things. That’s what I want to get to, I had a piece at one point about like. Saying that we're in a writing renaissance actually we just somehow don't acknowledge it and I think it has to do with these kind of bottlenecks and how mass media works that everybody just kind of has a finite attention span and they think that the only things that matter in terms of culture are what's coming through The New York Times, HBO, The New Yorker and a couple of other places and somehow it just has to do with our stupid childish brains, that we can't think about this stuff in a much broader more small-R republican kind of way, where it's just like “oh my god, there are lots and lots of people who are doing interesting things” and we just want to appreciate each other in a very confederated sort of way.

PILCROW: Yeah. It's one of the things that we've tried to emphasize about our novel serialization contest, even though it is taking the form of a contest, it is asking subscribers to vote, to participate in this, in this process about the novel that we ultimately end up serializing every quarter. That's the goal here. And there's almost a kind of pincer movement, where there is this exhaustion with social media and what it's done to us and also how it's hollowed out in some ways traditional media. In my interview with John Pistelli last week, he said, you know, I'm sympathetic to this idea that we need to touch grass, that we need to get off the screens. But he says, I can't because there is no, currently, any other structure. So I feel a lot of what you're feeling, it is these sort of almost like bipolar moments of, you know, “oh no, like, this is happening again. This is taking the shape of social media, which we have so much damage from,” but also moments of great optimism where I say, you know, I've discovered people on Substack that I never would have read. I never would have read in any other venue. And it is, as you said, like small-R republican. It has a democratic feel to me, very much so. And if people are looking at the way the Substack is developing, there are a million criticisms you could make about it. But I encourage them to look back 20 years and say, how much harder would it have been to get eyes, thousands of eyes on something that you were writing? Even in the early age of the blogosphere you couldn't access this kind of audience. So it's a qualified optimism, but I think if people currently on Substack who care about it and care about that democratic impulse don't build some kinds of structures, as flexible as they need to be, it is surrendering the field to all of these things that we don't like.

SAM: Yeah, I mean, Substack really completely transformed the way that I think about kind of the production of art. I write about this pretty often in terms of this small church and the big church is the way I put it. The small church is basically what I grew up with. I would think about something like Harold Bloom and the way he writes about it in The Anatomy of Influence. Where it feels like there are only about like twenty-five writers ever. And they're all sort of influenced by each other. It's just like there's only so much genius that matters. Those are the only people that matter. And everybody else is basically supposed to just kind of shut up and read those people. And that's how our whole pedagogical structure works. It's very, very zero-sum. Just being on Substack, I've realized how deeply not true that is. There's just a lot of people who have interesting lives, they have interesting things to say. And because the spigot is turned on now, we can, to some degree, access those people where we couldn't really before because there were these very tight limits and column inches and publishing houses. And especially now there are just more and more people. So what exactly do we do with that fact, with just the volume of stuff? And to me the only ethical thing to do is to just bask in it, to really appreciate it and celebrate it.

But what it does is that it changes kind of the whole psychological structure of how we appreciate art because the way we're conditioned to do it is to be like, okay, what is the best book of 2001? These are the top five. Let's get down to the top one and let's recommend one thing to each other. And I get why we all do that because it's part of our social stuff, but it's very antithetical to how meritocracy is really working. So, so I'm really, really pushing myself to try to get out of that and then to something else.

PILCROW: Well, as you say that it seems to me to tie back to some of the themes of Henchman, of your novel, which is exploring this, you know, “who are the disposables?” Who are the people that we see in these tropes, and they have their own lives, and there's an egalitarianism about externalizing that in a way that can be understood.

SAM: Yeah. By the way, you mentioned, you were talking about kind of similar books before. That really reminds me. Charlie Kaufman, his book Antkind, and it's really good. And he has a huge thing about that. It's about how the best movie ever made gets kind of lost. And there's a whole thing about the guy who makes the movie that — it's some kind of still life animation kind of thing. But there's the figures that he's using for it, he has just thousands more that don't show up on the camera or are kind of the unseen. And it's a very haunting image. And so that's a lot of the stuff that I'm trying to deal with. So in a way, it's like, I still have kind of my own artistic, writerly ambition and want to be the best and I'm pushing and all of this stuff. But a different side of me has really woken up, especially as I get a little bit older. And that's really just trying to figure out, okay, what can be the access points for all these people who aren't appreciated or aren't read, to get read. And I get very, not to be sort of mawkish about this stuff, but I get very moved by a lot of the emails that show up from, for The Republic of Letters, which is people who clearly haven't been published before, who are very shy about it. And, I mean, you know, I'm not even – I'm just paying them 50 bucks. Like, I have a frigging Substack. It’s not like a publishing house, but there's this feeling that they have of crossing some kind of a threshold. And I think it means a lot to a lot of people. So. That's kind of where a lot of my head is right now.

PILCROW: I guess what Substack says to me, as you're indicating, as we were speaking earlier, that his idea that there aren't people out there who will read 15,000 word essays about whatever, it's not true. There is an audience there. It might be one thing to sit in an office in Manhattan and look at a slide deck and say something, but hopefully one of the roles that a place like Substack can play is not just demonstrating the quality of people's writing, but demonstrating that there is an audience. However squashed, however beaten down by whatever algorithm, there's a reason that they came to a place like this. Thanks for talking to us today, Sam.

SAM: I enjoyed it, Thomas. Thank you.

1. https://lanoviolencia.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/casablanca-cult-movies-and-intertextual-collage.pdf