Hello, and welcome back. I have missed talking to you, and I hope you have missed the intermissions. Just in time to chill the summer weather (not that it’s particularly warm as of now, as both the West and the East Coasts have seemingly gone through their respective “false summers”), we are back to me screaming into the void (and the void – sometimes you! – listening back). On today’s subject, as the next chapter (or, as you of course remember, chunk of the penultimate chapter) is brewing in the background, I’d like to talk about the death of the medium that I have chosen – literature – and what’s the point, if any, in continuing this charade (no, it’s not spite, I promise).

Some years ago now, a friend and I had a conversation: when your date says they are an “artist” on the first date, which art form would be the absolute worst and best to hear? The obvious worst one was DJ – there is simply no recovery from that; somewhere in-between were musicians (heavily dependent on the instrument and the genre); and ambiguously closer to the top, though not without much bias on my part, were writers. And while I basked in our concurrence that writers were closer to the top, both because of how meticulous the process involved is and how much more committed these people are to that kind of artistry, one had to inevitably admit that it was also a considerably more miserable art form to be stuck with, as, seemingly, the appreciation for one’s artistry dependent on whether it was something “presentable” at a party (you can be the next Oscar Wilde, but nobody wants to listen to an excerpt of your draft at nine pm or two am (trust me, I know from experience)). But now that I think about it further, there was a further correlation: profitability as an actual career. Writing, in both of those regards, is probably as low as it gets.

Let us be frank: of all other forms of media, books are dying the fastest (hold your groans, hear me out). The literacy rates, the ability to grasp – and write with – nuance, that’s all taking a nosedive. Why bother with a difficult metaphor, or a complicated narrative that results in the end, when no one has the time to interpret what is it that you are trying to say, really? All the successful books are scooped up and made it into movies or TV shows, anyhow – something to put in the background while you cook, or clean, or prepare for that next exam, or scroll TikTok. And don’t take me wrong: I see the appeal, I am guilty of it myself; I just hate it.

Then we add another insult: a typical brand-new book costs $30 – at least a half of a weekly grocery bill. That’s fucking expensive (and maybe a semi-call for you to visit more second-hand booksellers). How much is a Netflix subscription? $15? That’s half, and that gives you infinitely more to work with for considerably less of a price, monetarily or commitment-wise. I don’t know if it’s my unchecked ADHD, but I personally really struggle with picking books back up once I put them down for longer than a couple of weeks, having to go back chapters at times just to recount where I left it all off. Other medians, well, that’s a different story entirely.

Then we get to the real problem that might actually be the death of it all: AI, so obscure a decade ago, is now seeming to be ultimately the thing that ushers the next technological revolution; it will also potentially be the fucking death of us. I hate the amount of time that I, when seeing something funny, or interesting, or half-captivating on the internet, my first instinct is no longer to appreciate it, but to question if this was “created.” It’s lazy, it’s boring, it does not have a soul, and it is destroying the planet.  I do not mean to be the old man shouting at the clouds, and I will concede that some use of AI can be creative, amusing, perhaps even purposeful; but it is already overdone, and we’ve barely started.

In totality, these factors make for a grim picture. It’s at moments like this that I wish I was good at other things – music, like my brother; movies, like many friends of mine; or even painting, or sculpting, or something along those lines, so that at least there’s a visual, tangible artifact left at the end of the process. An unfinished song is still a demo; an unedited movie can become a blooper reel or even be reused in a different project; an unfinished canvas can have meaning as a piece of art in of itself. Does a word document with a hundred thousand words missing carry the same weight? Does it in the current attention economy? I don’t know if it does.

At the same time, I don’t want you to misinterpret what I am saying as wishing it was easier – I unequivocally reject that notion. The point has never been that it is easy to read Ulysses, or easy to write a short story on the level Chekhov did, or easy to write The House of Leaves, or easy to read between the lines of A Minor Role; the point of writing – of any creating for that matter – had always at least to an extent been to struggle. As much as I love enough of it to put it out to the public, I hate a lot of my writing; I hate how long it takes me to come up with ideas and put them together; I hate the editing – God, I really hate the editing – but I would never shy away from its imperfections in favor of a polished product that just has zero human input or effort put into it. As has become customary by now – as indeed probably happened throughout this intermission – I often overlook typos (accidentally, I assure you), even as I scan the pages a few times before finally posting. Many a-time, it’d take a polite text from a friend to say that I did, indeed, leave a really big one in there (a not so flattering recent example was mixing up “squinting” with “squirting;” don’t bother looking it up, this is one of those things that you had to see before I promptly fixed it), but I’d like to believe – or at least cope in believing – that it produces a chuckle about a human error that a machine can never replicate; a chuckle that, in a way, recognizes the humanity behind the process, and makes it, if not good, endearing. Even bad writing – cheesy, poorly constructed, not very-well proofread or thought-out, all things my prose was – and still is! – guilty of – has value, and no one can be realistically expected to just be good at something without failing at first. I may not win any prizes for it (I may not even get a publishing deal out of it, at a bare minimum), but it’s a creation; can that ever be enough?

For the last year, as I navigated my way through the mess that is the first year of law school, I often had to accept the truth that a lot of my interests are simply not that profitable. A certain career path in this industry will set you up for generations to come; another will put you just above the debt you’ve accumulated getting here. For a variety of reasons, personal and professional I would very much like to at least be closer to the former rather than the latter; it would also be nice to not have to sell my soul in the process or compromise on my principles as a result. Yet that’s a concern I share with many others, and I salute any law student that is able to overcome it by going into a field they care about – not for profit, but for the sake of doing what they are good at and what they are passionate for. So it is with creative pursuits, to an extent. Despite me being a firstborn child of non-Western parents, I did want to be a lawyer; but artistry was not a flirty alternative – it was still just a hobby, not something one purposefully chases. If you are good at it, great – keep doing it, and, if you are lucky, you might make it into the industry; but you don’t get a prize just because you did every step leading up to that goal correctly and aced that exam. It’s all luck – a right person in the audience, a slipped page on the cutting room floor, a viral hit on the internet – and luck is a notorious bitch.  

So, then, is the point of the art – any art, however mediocre or groundbreaking – to struggle through making it? Is the point that it isn’t meant to be a “realistic” option? Is the fundamental point to just do it, as I argued in an earlier intermission, because no one else would? I’d like to think so. A belief on the contrary would make no sense if one were to continue creating, even as the reality of the situation seems to suggest the opposite.

Because I’m a stickler for doing things a certain way, I guess I should tie it back to Decembrism somehow, however meta-narrative this may turn out to be. The best I’ve got is this passage from Night 2 – one that I am actually proud of – reflecting on the ever-elusive “what could’ve been” (if you haven’t read it you should, like, totally check it out, just saying):  

On reflection, I’d like to think that somewhere, maybe in another life, we’ve met again … Maybe this moment, this beautiful, terrible, god-awful, bastard of a moment I’ll never forget, bloomed into something more, something where either her or me had to make some arrangements and take a chance on each other. And maybe, after another year or two, we went our separate ways, as is often the case with people you tend to meet in the first half of your twenties … 

Yet that’s not what was to be, not what happened, and a part of me might even say it’s better this way – a temporary heartache over having it all come crashing down in a blaze after years of building, sacrificing, and fighting. However disappointing the reality was, a daydream could last forever or be gone as early as tomorrow on a whim, unbound by any circumstances.

But a different part of me, one that persists no matter how much I fight it, will always hate me that this moment is all we’ve ever gotten, wondering if there was more, and detesting that we couldn’t have it, no matter how much we wished for it.

Perhaps that’s the answer, then: we create not because the struggle is the point; we create, amongst other things, because the alternative, the awful what could’ve been, is too unbearable otherwise. The struggle, that’s merely an addendum. I don’t believe that everything that’s good is worth fighting for –sometimes throwing in the towel before it’s too late is the best choice one can make – but art, surely, must be it. And whether the medium is doomed or not, at least, in the end, I’ll confidently say that I tried and found out the hard way.

The next chapter is on its way, and unfortunately it will be the sluggish one to get through writing. I  have so many exciting things prepared for the finale, the last 50ish pages, but we gotta get there first. With luck, mid-June-ish is when you’ll have the next installment. We also might be moving to substack, but that’s a whole other topic.

Until next time, stay safe, and enjoy the summer,

– Daniil