This week, I took down that psychoanalytic take I did about Cait Corrain. Reception of the piece was positive, but I’d started to feel rankled and uncomfortable when I saw it on my page, like I needed a shower.
My real problem with it was the fact that, in that moment, I had felt so passionately about writing a Take at all. Looking back on it, I’m like: why did I write about this? Why did I aspire to write about this? The whole ordeal (“Review-gate”) was an blip within a particularly niche, drama-filled sector of publishing. The airtime it was given by the whole world was, in retrospect, dumbfounding. And as much as I tried to differentiate my Take from others’ — dredging up information that felt obscure, arguing against the truisms about the story — it was still the same genre of sweaty, self-servicing, desperately-relevant, small-minded internet longform that I otherwise would have professed to hate.
A few things, recently, led me to Jesus. First of all was Cait Corrain herself, going public again with her account of what happened. (I won’t link this article.) She remained defensive and came across as wheedling and manipulative. But she did reveal more about her state of mind: that she’d been suicidal and psychotic, medicated and self-medicated with a truly terrifying confluence of drugs, plus alcohol and cannabis abuse. She told this to a certain publication that framed her quotes with a bunch of facetious asides and misleading paraphrases; the title itself was a fake quote designed to make her seem particularly tone-deaf. Afterwards, the bookfluencer community renewed their outrage at Corrain in a vast second tsunami of reaction content. (I won’t link these either.) Far be it from me to defend Corrain — that would certainly be a Take, and a bad one — but by now the whole cycle just feels exhausted and codependent. Corrain jumps in, unable to let the story rest; the Internet professes to be sick of her but ravenously eats up each new breadcrumb of offense that she provides. If everyone is truly as sickened and depleted by this drama as they say, why hasn’t anyone stopped?
As the Internet plunges its talons further into our collective brain, this kind of doom spiral is going to get harder to resist. The SFF, publishing, and book-reading communities have largely chosen their futures, and it’s more of this: more controversies, more codependence, more incidents called Something-Gate, more of that awful, hypnotizing mass disgust that passes for community discourse. As writers, we could follow along: delve into endless Internet research, throw around receipts, assemble our alembics and phials and glass curlicues and try to distil the final Take on this week’s Cait Corrain. Or maybe we could think about literally anything else.
One of the worst parts of this was trying to imagine going back in time and explaining that article to myself as a child. She’s the in the backyard, smeared with grass, waving a stick and pouring craft glitter on a frog. What do I say? In twenty years, you will not have written anything cool. Instead, you’ll have compiled a thinkpiece on a minor troll who gave one-stars to other authors on Goodreads. Everyone involved is a complete bitch, including yourself. She would be very grossed-out and confused, and would probably cry.
Over the past few months, I’ve been pondering various orbs: my own mortality, my selfishness, what I can do to be actually useful and good to other human beings, and the overarching need to — soon, if possible — assign myself a general reason for being alive and doing things as a human being. I don’t think officious Takes that no one asked for, or attempts to psychoanalyze people I don’t know, or witty commentary about passing drama should be part of that reason. Refining my own snark into purer and newer forms — like the Marie Curie of copium —and distributing that content to an audience that’s generous enough to read my stuff should not be a part of that equation either. I read Lady Chatterley’s Lover a few weeks ago (still much too late), and D. H. Lawrence is spot-on when he says gossipy, too-current writing is just brain rot — is just
stories, curious, very personal stories about people… clever, rather spiteful, and yet in some mysterious way, meaningless. The observation was extraordinary and peculiar. But there was no touch, no actual contact… smart, but there’s nothing in it.
The only real alternative is grace, patience, and a genuine desire to share a worthwhile experience with others.
Here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness… properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life.
Many of the writers I’ve been drawn to on Substack have reclaimed this older kind of sensibility. They produce, amidst the psychic grapeshot of the Internet, stuff that feels more ambitious and more generous of spirit.
Which brings me to Update 2: the death of the Orb. In other words, I will soon be renaming the Substack. “News from the Orb” has been fun, but News has never been a good word for what I really want to provide, and it was always kind of ironic anyway. It’s been starting to constrain my output to the fun, pop-culture-y SFF stuff. This has never been my complete personality, and if you know me, running a personal Substack that doesn’t also touch on history, theory, alchemy, and random tidbits from the Renaissance doesn’t really make much sense. It should be, and feel more like, a place where quoting Lady Chattlerley’s Lover on main makes as much sense as dissociating about Rebel Moon.
To better things!
MSC