"Was he alone in possession of a memory?” wondered Winston Smith as he starts a diary in the novel 1984.
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I resonated to that line massively when I read it again in my umpteenth re-reading of George Orwell’s masterpiece.
Yes, I know. Constantly referring to the Orwellian-ness of everything is just as bad as comparing every authoritarian who pops up to Hitler, but there is this feeling around the edges these days…of being stuck in an eternal present where no one knows anything about the past; that nothing’s very deep; that opinions are always binary and that there’s no time for nuance. You can’t stop for nuance, because we’re driven on to the next thing, and because none of us have attention spans anymore, and because of the FOMO (fear of missing out) disease.
I am a former magazine and feature writer, a two-time book writer…a word-worker, in other words, feeling adrift in this chaotic cacophony of content, trying to figure out if any of it really matters, trying to figure out where, if anywhere, I fit in.
My substack title comes from magazine work or any sort of long-form writing. The abbreviation means "to come," as in “the-title-to-this-substack-is-coming…sometime, when I get a bloody second, and will you please stop nagging about trifles, Mr. Small-Minded Editor!”
(That’s a risky, and kind of inside baseball, joke. I would never really insult those magnificent creatures called editors; it’s just that we are natural enemies, like New York and New Jersey, Knicks v Nets, Army v. Navy, workers and management and so on.)
I’m starting this substack because I have a physical need to write every day but have never been able to write in a diary. Apparently, there has to be a listener at the other end. I will write a few diary paragraphs and then say, “Why am I doing this? I know what happened.” (What I learned later is that one forgets what happened and sometimes reading the record back can be revelatory and entertaining as well.)
And we are living in a particularly gruesome time; it may very well be a tipping point into something far worse, and maybe the Good Guys Team (you know who you are) could use some more hands-on-deck.
Maybe I can contribute, in some way, to stop the race to the cliff edge.
I did a couple of times before, in the nineties, for instance, when I was AFAIK the first writer to ask in print whether there really was “an epidemic of date rape” on college campuses and, by the way, what was this thing they called “date rape”?
(The incredible thing was that not one mainstream reporter feasting on this new crisis du jour asked the alleged victims to explain how they defined the word “rape”—and the amazing gift (in reportorial terms), the news, at the heart of this story was that actually most of these young women were reporting ordinary sexual intercourse with all of the inevitable misunderstandings, hurt feelings, wounded pride and regrets and calling it rape, using a term applied to Class A Felonies. In other words, run-of-the-mill human engagement had been relabled using a word for a Class A Felony and the redefinition was cheered on by adults in authority on campuses.
So that was the nineties. I think I helped a tiny bit in holding the line for sanity again in the early 2000s when I pointed out that the engineered integration of women into all strata of the US military wasn’t going as swimmingly as folks at the New York Times claimed—because there are hard-wired sex differences which will mean that an 18-year-old woman is generally not going to be as good a soldier as the average 18-year-old man.
In between those big pieces I have written about anything and everything for anybody who paid writers. It didn’t matter what. There’s just a bliss in being strapped in, commanded, not responsible for the results, but having to dig deep to find a way into, for instance, a piece for a Christmas advertising insert titled “The Top Ten Gifts for the Car Lover on Your List.” There is a way to make that piece sing, you see, and a way to make it dead boring. It’s a kind of Zen. Each subject has an internal perfection
Tom Wolfe talked about the giddiness of the general assignment feature writer set loose to write about the most inconsequential subjects for backwater sections where no one looks at your copy. He claims he developed his New Journalism style (crazy punctuation, onomatopoeia) in the early sixties for the Sunday Supplement inserts at the New York Herald Tribune:
Sunday supplements had no traditions, no pretensions, no promises to live up to, not even any rules to speak of. They were brain candy, that was all. Readers felt no guilt whatsoever about laying them aside, throwing them away or not looking at them at all. I never felt the slightest hesitation about trying any device that might conceivably grab the reader a few seconds longer. I tried to yell right in his ear: Stick around! … Sunday supplements were no place for diffident souls. That was how I started playing around with the device of point-of-view.
Ok, the Tom Wolfe bit was a digression. I will always digress to talk about Tom Wolfe.
Anyway, when I got a chance to pick my assignment, I’ve tended to return to my obsession with sexual politics, i.e. the assault on masculinity and femininity, and on the most primary unit, a man and a woman and the ways they bond.
Third generation feminism has worked very hard to destroy heterosexual sex in our time and on some fronts it’s made massive inroads. Forget #MeToo and out-of-control sexual harassment regulations for the moment, one can see the damage in Gen Z which—as reported by Abigail Shrier in her book Irreversible Differences: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters seem pretty blasé about losing their reproductive equipment via massive doses of hormones and surgery. This transgender “craze” (and one hopes it will fade like all crazes) is truly bizarre.
But after a war on masculinity that’s lasted at least fifty years, it’s not hard to see why many boys are scared to death of growing up to be men. After being told repeatedly that they are identical to their 16-year-old brother sexually and that they are unnatural if they are not as voracious, aggressive, visually stimulated, and orgasmic, and that the only way to have sex is to imitate porn stars because your porn-schooled boyfriend knows of no other way, it’s not hard to see why some young women are running full speed away from growing up to be women. And it is no accident that Gen Z has nearly stopped having heterosexual (i.e. eventually procreative) sex and that the US population rate is in decline.
In further posts, I’ll go into more detail…because there is more material than ever out there.
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You can see some of my work at Muckrack and, at least, cites to it on LinkedIn
https://muckrack.com/stephanie-gutmann-1/articles
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanie-gutmann-51869645/
I dream that we can soon look back on the transgender craze with the same embarrassment that we do disco, leisure suits, double-knit slacks, parachute pants, etc. I guess it was inevitable that a society stuck in the now, transfixed by screens of all sizes, and desperate for instant attention would push into normalizing all sorts of ground-breakingly stupid behaviors--like putting saucers in ear lobes and covering perfectly good arms, shoulders and backs with hideous tattoos. But the transgender craze/fad is super-stupid. It actually contributed to my early retirement from a 37 year stand-up comedy career because is the one idiotic passing fad that CANNOT be made fun of. At the same time, there is no passing fancy in history that is more deserving of ridicule. `
My first writing gig was as a local community opinion writer 23 years ago. Once a month, 500 words, no pay. That word limitation was liberation from my tendency to write Faulkneresque write-on sentences. After 18 months, I was thanked and dismissed.
Four years later the paper hired me to write a business leadership column (my field of work). Two columns per month, 700 words, $150 per month. It lasted four and a half years. On the same day that they published my first column I began a weblog.
Almost twenty years later, I am still blogging, now at Substack. But now, it is long form, 1500-2500 words. I also published a book, Circle of Impact, in 2018, then wrote and self published at Amazon seven short books during the pandemic. I’ll published two more books this year.
Last year, here in Substack, I revised twenty or so posts from a decade ago. It was a remarkable experience as I realized that much of what happens to us is learning the same thing over and over again (Iteration) in different contexts.
Your experience as a professional writer as journalist, is so similar to mine as as a semi-professional player in the minor leagues. Having to write every day is really the desire to edit, abandon, re-edit, toss out, and finally move on. After publishing my first book, people would talk to me about writing a book. I’d say “Don’t! Just write. Don’t write sentences. Just words, fragments, observations, quotes, and anything that comes to mind. Put it in a journal and forget about it. If there is a book there, it will show itself. Then, you can go lose a couple of your life as you write it.” I really love what you say here. Thank you.