End of the year, time for reflection, sizing things up, or as Marcellus Hall once put it, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Alas, there has been a disruption to this solstitial cadence, and I have to address that first, and then see how I can transition from that into other things I’ve been hoping to say.
A couple of weeks ago I shared with you all an open letter from several Substack writers to the Substack founders regarding our very serious concerns about Substack not simply hosting overtly Nazi publications but even allowing them to monetize and, well, providing what seems to be a haven of sorts.
Well, later that week, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie finally responded, and his response was… very, very, very bad.
Many of you don’t read any other Substacks, or don’t subscribe to any which you might pay for, so I understand that this controversy might seem a little obscure. What I can tell you is that there are a fair number of people who went all-in on publishing on Substack, to the point where their Substack subscriptions are their primary source of income, and writers are experiencing subscribers canceling subscriptions over this whole debacle, and many prominent writers have already left or are in the process of leaving Substack over all of it.
In the very short term, it’s all had a chilling effect on my own writing. I’ve got three pieces stuck in a state of limbo where I just wasn’t sure whether / how to publish them as though everything going on was normal.
In the short to medium term, I had hoped to finally get at least a mini book club of sorts started in January, and I was even hoping to get my home setup in good enough shape that I could try dabbling in podcasts. I had a couple of specific ones I wanted to record with a couple of specific guests which I thought would be very complementary to other things I was trying to do.
I’m still hopeful all of that will happen in early 2024, but it won’t be on Substack.
My current understanding is that at least two other services are equipped to move my subscriber list and archive to their platform. I’m monitoring what others are doing and anticipate making the move some time in January. If any of you all have thoughts about which services you prefer, I’m all ears.
My best guess is that you will see two or maybe three more posts on Substack before I’m able to affect that transition. I have one mostly finished Running Around Illinois piece which I intend to publish in the next couple of days, as I intended it as a way of wrapping up the running year, and then I anticipate a final piece here before the move.
I am a believer in lemonade. I think that bad situations can often have positive side effects, can open one’s eyes to opportunities, etc. And I believe that the human condition is such that we are constantly going to be confronted by lemons, and if we don’t adopt the right mindset then we are doomed to sour existences.
While I have happened to interact with other Substack writers who I read, I hadn’t before had occasion to interact with people I don’t read as a quasi-colleague. In the last couple of weeks I have increasingly been thinking of myself as part of a cohort of content creators.
Last December, I wrote about the idea of fulfilling the creative impulse, in the context of talking about the people I work most closely with: software developers. I have also written several meta takes on META-SPIEL itself. But I have not actively thought of myself as being part of a cohort of creators in almost 25 years, dating back to a time when we had a text-based e-zine called dto and were actively talking about how to turn it into a significant web presence, an effort which totally fizzled out.
It’s also the case that while I’ve met a lot of people over the course of 25 years, they’ve tended to be people I’ve known through political or community organizing, or they’ve been neighbors, or they’ve been parents of my son’s peers. Even if there may have been artists or musicians, that was secondary to whatever the more immediate association was. This is also true of meeting people online. Friends of mine have figured out how to develop peer groups over Twitter, but that definitely never made sense to me.
You grow older and you try to figure out what you’re really all about, right? And for me, today, the idea that I wouldn’t be creating, that’s a terrifying prospect. But so too is the idea of creating in isolation. I might not be a great networker, I might not be very interested in launching into some sort of personal social media blitz, but I’m not content with my engagement.
I mean this in a few different ways but I’ll cite two. First, I’m not surprised that I’m still going to concerts. But I am surprised at how frequently I’m going to concerts alone or with one other person, and never interacting with anyone else there. I thought I’d get to a point where I’d simply recognize a lot of people, at least say hello, but it’s never really worked out that way.
Second, it’s now been 17 years - 17 years! - since I left the cozy confines of a college town, and with it, the sort of built-in college-brings-famous-person-to-campus calendar. Today I live in a suburb where on a localized basis there’s simply nothing like that. There’s no shared cultural experiences among neighbors here, which means no shared experiences over creativity, unless the creativity involves some action someone’s kid pulled off on a soccer field.
While Substack has provided me with a platform, because (among other things) I haven’t also been aggressive at synthesizing what I write with a social media presence, the engagement aspect here has necessarily been limited. The comments feature is fine but I’ve never found it to be “community building” in and of itself.
Thinking of myself as being within a cohort of creators, though, unified not just by a technical platform, and not just by being adamantly opposed to Nazis (because, ahem, everybody should be adamantly opposed to Nazis), but, I am finding, by something more, something where creativity per se is elemental to the whole thing… it’s like I have finally started to unlock a missing piece of this whole endeavor.
So I guess what I’m saying is that while there’s a push effect to moving on from Substack, there’s also a pull effect, toward something that could… maybe… be much better. Better like a nice glass of lemonade.
When writing these things I often go back and look at the archive to see if I’ve already written about something. This evening, we were at the Elmhurst Art Museum to see their Picasso exhibit, and while there, in the local room, we came upon a piece called “Coin Wash - DeKalb” by Bret Steinhaus. It was a watercolor drawing of a laundromat, and it got me to thinking about this old idea I had about documenting remaining mid-century modern laundromats, which made me wonder, had I actually written about that, and, yes, I wrote about that in February. And running into that got me to thinking an hour ago, what more do I truly have to say, if I’ve already gone there?
Well, I took another look at the archive, and to my surprise, the word “lemonade” did not appear in any of the preceding 195 META-SPIEL pieces. Which means I never pulled out this quote from our dear Saint Kurt:
So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."
I wrote above that I believe in lemonade. And I do. I believe that we are all going to have a lot of shit come our way. And I believe we can - usually - choose to respond with love and grace and creativity. We can, as Grant Hart implored, turn on the news.
And I know that’s not what Kurt meant in his anecdote about his Uncle Alex. He meant the lemonade more literally than all that. But it fits just as well figuratively. Indeed, the lemonade may very well be what brings us together under the apple tree.
I would very much like to hear from you all about what you’d like to see or hear going forward, and where you’d like to see or hear it. I’ve been writing this thing for a while, after all, and I’m sure some people want more hamster pictures, and some people want political rants, and some people want a lot more baseball. But if this thing is actually going to move on, and some changes are necessarily coming, then now’s the time to get the most feedback, I suppose. Do any of you want podcasts, or is that silly? Do you want shorter pieces? More frequent pieces? Guest pieces? More fiction, or never again?
And, maybe, a more pointed set of questions. What do you think could make this endeavor more successful, according to whatever definition of success you want to apply? Is more engagement a mark of more success? Many more subscribers? A more robust comments area? More social media activity to match? Because I know this needs to change, somehow or another, to keep my own interest up if nothing else.
While you’re thinking about all that, why don’t you have a nice glass of lemonade?
You touched on lots of topics here. Let me see how much I can fit into the max allowed characters in the Substack comment box.
# Platforms
I'll follow you on whatever platform you choose.
I personally prefer posting on my hosted WordPress. However, that very much lacks the discoverability feature that Substack has. Plus, Substack is just much simpler. Both for the writer and for the audience.
The writer on substack doesn't have to worry about themes. Or writing in WordPress' block system.
The audience on Substack gets a cleaner experience. All your subs are in one place. Nice, easy email subscriptions. Substack is nice.
But there's something about having WordPress on MY site. And it's all MY files. Although most likely, I like WordPress because I've self-hosted my blog since 2021. I got some income from Google Ads in the early 2010s. But now those days are long gone, especially with AI cutting out the search engine business.
Perhaps I need to realize that the days for writers are now on services focusing on getting subscribers, not on getting ads displayed.
Anyhow, that doesn't answer your question. Just rambling thoughts on services.
# Lemonade
Your metaphor of lemonade is somewhat related to my metaphor of the potato. It's the whole reason why I use the "spudart" name online. Actually, the potato metaphor comes from other German artists like Sigmar Polke, Jorg Immedorf, and Joseph Beuys. The basic gist could be summed up in this quote by Polke, "Well if there is anything at all which manifests everything artists are supposed to be or have - the delight in innovativity, creativity, spontaneity, productivity, creating entirely out of oneself and so on - then it is the potato." Basically, taking what you got, and making something out of it.
# Interaction at concerts
For years, I went to art talks with the same thoughts. That at some point, I would interact with people at these talks. But that never came to fruition. There were a couple of talks that were geared more towards getting the audience members to engage with each other. And that got me to meet a few people. However, none that I continue to engage with today.
# Shared experiences
Whoa. Yeah. You've encapsulated it. After leaving college, I was always amazed at how the regular world doesn't spontaneously interact with each other. Like my 3rd floor studio in Wrigleyville. I remember finding it odd how everyone kept their doors closed in the staircase. At college, people would keep their doors open.
And now, in the burbs of Chicago, I was so glad to have our street torn up for six months when they installed new pipes. Not only for getting the lead pipes out but also for how much the block interacted with each other during this process. People would stand outside and watch what was happening. People would stop and chat. It gave us all something in common to chat about. And now that the construction has been done for a couple of years now, I rather miss it.
# Elmhurst Art Museum
Oh! I should follow the Elmhurst Art Museum more. They have a Picasso show? Oh yipes, it's open only until January 7th.
# What we'd like to see
I really like the format of how you write these. It's impressive how you tied together various topics.
When I write, I tend to write more frequent short posts. That way, it gives people something more specific to reply to. But, lol, my blog gets barely any comments. So, I guess that method doesn't really work?
However, when I read longer form posts with multiple topics, I wonder if people get overloaded with what to say in response. Then again, I bet a lot of people simply read your posts and don't leave a response. Maybe most people simply read to consume, and that's it.
When I read, I like to share responses. In fact, I make a point of leaving some form of comment on what I read, so the author knows that their works are being read and thought about.
The method of longer posts with various topics works for you. Your articles are engaging to read. If they were short blips, the reader would feel like you aren't as invested in the content you are writing.
And that's part of the signaling that readers pick up on. "Does this author care about what they are writing about? Or is this filler fluff?" Maybe I'm too sensitive about this angle, because I work in the media/newspaper industry where I see articles being churned out. But readers certainly can sense if the author is invested. Write a nice longer-form essay that weaves in multiple topics, and ties them together under a thread of thoughts. That brings the reader along a journey on well-paved roads.
# Engagement
The success for me is the very writing you create. That you spend the time to sit down and craft all these words and put everything together around once a week is very impressive.
I'm certain it helps you to clarify your thoughts. And to develop new roads of thought. It's also nice to be able to look back at your archive. Just like you did with the lemonade search. You looked to see how you covered something (or not covered at all). The more you write, the more you can intersect things. And actually, that's one method of getting more subscribers. When writers demonstrate that their work is interconnected with their previous writings, it shows themes. It shows your investment that you cover these themes in depth. Linking to previous articles shows that you care about your previous writings, which means your future writings will be good, too.
And the search engines like the interlinking. That helps the search engines do their job. When you interlink stuff, the search engines know better how your work relates to each other and what the important topics are.
And the same for readers. The readers get to read more of your work that way. They discover more of your archives. They get more invested. The more invested your readers are, the more likely they are to share your work. And then your work spreads. From time to time, I've linked to your writing from my site.
It takes time to interlink all your work. I haven't done a good job on my site. Maybe I should do that more. But it all helps to develop a larger readership.
Which then leads to more engagement. That's my primary goal with writing.
Speaking of engagement/comments, Substack is a curious land in that regard. I've seen some substacks with lots of comments. Some with very few. It raises the question if Substack is built for comments. The simplicity of the UI certainly helps to get more comments. (In comparison to my blog, the design is too bloated at the end of the article to get the comments.)
However, I've noticed that when you post your articles on Facebook, you get more comments there. And that's because Facebook is built for comments. That comment box is right there. Boom. You don't have to scroll to the bottom of the post to leave a comment. Of course, that's weird, because people would leave a comment without reading the whole thing. Alas, that's how the internet works. Even with that point aside (that someone would comment without reading the full post….) Facebook's UI gets people in the mood to comment, because the comment box is immediately visible. It sets the tone for commenting.
I've thought about designing my site to mimic that--having the comment box appear right away near the top. I just never got to it.
To be clear, I'm NOT advocating that you post your full-length articles on Facebook. You aren't doing that now, and I don't need to get into all the reasons why not to do that, because you are probably already aware of that.
Ok, back to your point, you feel like something needs to change to keep your own interest up. I'm curious what you are looking for. More subscribers? More comments? I'm guessing you'd like both. But with your writing, I also get the sense that you enjoy writing them.
Hi, Phil. So sorry to hear about the Nazi-enabling Substack administration. I wonder why I have not heard about this from Heather Cox Richardson or Joyce Vance (the other two Substacks that I read). I am sure they would be concerned if they knew of this. You might reach out to them, if they are not already part of your coalition. As for the future, I don't really listen to podcasts or watch videos (what we used to call "television"): it just takes much longer than reading to get the information on offer, and time/life is short. I, of course, value your insights into politics and society; and I have also enjoyed your cultural comments (on, e.g., pizza parlors in various suburbs) and enjoy learning about your life. I'm in a little academic town (Hyde Park). Drop by and see me sometime, if you want some of that vibe (can't guarantee famous people). It would be great to see you.