Poser ethics

on faking it. part one of a series of posts about books.

internet princess reader survey results are coming soon. as of right now, there are about 8,100 responses (crazy!). fill it out now if you haven’t already.

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Over the next few weeks, I’ll be publishing a highly-requested series of posts about reading for paid subscribers. The first is this one! I had initially planned for it to be mostly about my path to developing an earnest love of reading, but it morphed to include a lot more: a bit of analysis about current literary landscape, a reparative reading of the discourse around “performative” book culture, a sort-of defense of performance in general, a reflection on my past as a poser, and a discussion of the paradigm I call POSER ETHICS. (I also go on the record about “literary it-girls” for the first and hopefully last time.) This post was originally like 6500 words long so I tried to split it up — so there may be a part 2 coming about how trying to engage seriously with books has materially expanded my life and solidified my sense of self, and the reasons why I think reading is, for lack of a better word, “good”.

Next, I’ll publish What I Read, which will list some of the best books, essays, and papers I’ve been reading recently, the writers and magazines I follow religiously, tips for tracking down pieces of paywalled, rare, or deep-cut reading material, the ways I like to find exciting new things to read day-to-day, etc. After that will be How I Read, a post about the actual habits I developed to start reading again and get the most out of what I read, as a person with a horrible attention span and a terrible work ethic. I’ve also been thinking about what I’d do if I were trying to start a career as a writer right now with zero connections or experience — this is another one of the most common questions I get from readers — so maybe I’ll write a bit about that as well.

I’m excited for this series! I really like to read and it’s sort of silly I haven’t written very much about it yet! It is basically the only thing that I reliably do every single day (even including, like, changing my clothes and washing my face). Plus it’s nice to be able to do more bloggy posts while I get into the weeds on writing my book.¹ My big hard deadline is coming up so please continue to wish me luck.

I think part of why I was hesitant to write something like this is that I’m a bit of a latecomer to “serious” reading, or at least I often feel like I am when surrounded by the many pedigreed geniuses of the New York literary scene… I am always meeting people who somehow seem to have been intellectuals from birth, who were blowing through Kant and Rudolf Steiner in high school like Sontag did — proud owners of God-given, constitutional literary curiosity, who followed that curiosity to a series of hallowed intellectual institutions where they met more innately serious and curious people and so on and so forth, their lives one great erudite parade. I’m exaggerating, of course, due to my own inferiority complex. And to be fair, maybe nobody feels like a true intellectual. But, regardless: this story I made up about people who I imagine to be better than me is not My Story. (If I remember correctly, my main interests in high school were Instagram, mediocre folk-punk music, Charlie Kaufman movies, and going to Sephora.)

I always liked books fine — I was fond of Vonnegut and The Bell Jar as a teenager — but I generally skimmed the readings in high school English and ignored them altogether when I took English 101 (the sole humanities course I completed in my short-lived college career). I didn’t have a developed sense of literary or intellectual curiosity, which meant that books generally felt like a means to an unfulfilling end: usually either a good-enough grade or the idea of being perceived as smart and tasteful by someone I wanted to impress. I’m also extremely poorly-suited to studying and do not enjoy it at all, and so often felt out of place on most of the studyblr- or academia-adjacent book communities I stumbled across as a teenager. I only started reading seriously after I left school, when I started to realize that I wanted to build an intellectual life for myself on my own terms. (Perhaps uncommonly, I’d say I was a working writer before I was a truly passionate reader — maybe will get into this more in a future post.)

Why read?

I hope this doesn’t come off as judgmental, because I say it without judgement: for many people, one of the primary reasons to start reading is in the hopes of being seen as the type of person who reads. (As said in the intro, this was certainly a large part of why I started reading, and — I’LL ADMIT IT IF NO ONE ELSE WILL — is still to some extent an ongoing incentive.) I won’t bore you with a re-hash of the last year of discourse, but suffice it to say that stocks are up on the aesthetics of bookishness. Being well-read is now the type of lifestyle signifier that appears on Kaia Gerber’s t-shirts. CouCou intimates (which, unrelatedly, has a great cotton slip dress and a bra that in my experience is just okay) has started carrying a pair of underwear embroidered with the word “reader”.

this and a full bush >>>>>

i’m rocking back and forth on the floor repeating “messy top bun tied with a pencil she’s annotating her latest favourite Woolf Didion or Babitz” over and over again

from library science

from favourite child collective

I’ve done so much criticism of digitally-performed aesthetic identity over the years that I’m frankly pretty bored of it, and I don’t necessarily want to do much more of it here (although I do want to encourage us all to be wary of wanting Nietzsche like you want a hamburger, to paraphrase Mark Fisher — more on this later). It feels like nearly any criticism one could make about young women taking photos of themselves reading has already been made a million times over; I feel like we all know that social media incentivizes us to craft consumable personas, to prioritize surface-level aesthetic experiences over privately-held and deeply-felt emotional ones, to run on envy and memetic desire and competitive self-optimization, to buy things in order to better sell ourselves. We know, too, these are pressures that fall especially heavily on women. Most of what I could say critically on this topic I’ve essentially already said here and here, and the idea of rehashing it all again feels easy and cheap, so I won’t. I've also wondered if the endless cycles of discourse on this topic, including my own early additions to the genre, may at times be the result of an unchecked or sublimated fixation on the things we intend to criticize — if it’s possible that one can write critically about aesthetic optimization as a way of continuing to worship it while establishing plausible distance. Much to think about, etc, etc.