Things to read this week

worth sharing

Here are a few things worth your time…

1. Did “poptism” cause the fall of Pitchfork?

“But poptimism fundamentally rewired the perceived purpose of the critic; now, the critic is simply the person who reassures the masses that their tastes are already correct. This is pretty much the opposite of everything I believe about music, criticism, the arts, and the culture industry. It’s also bad news for the kind of music I like, which will never have mass appeal.” — Freddie de Boer in “What We’ve Lost in Music Criticism”

2. The original Mac is 40 years old

“that first Mac brought the graphical user interface and the pointing device known as a mouse to mainstream computer users, as long as they could pay the list price of $2,495, or about $7,300 in 2024 dollars.” - At The Verge

3. DFW tried to make Infinite Jest a huge failure, but it backfired

“Wallace, like Incandenza, held high hopes for his work. He believed Infinite Jest—originally titled “A Failed Entertainment”—could lead readers out of ironical disaffection and into genuine engagement with others. To do that, he believed the book itself needed to fail, at a fundamental level, as that would compel the reader to look for true fulfillment not in the book, but in life. But Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s editor at Little, Brown, took a more, well, commercial approach to the book’s publication. He cut hundreds of pages from the manuscript, rearranging chapters and events in a way that arguably made the book stronger. He made the book’s heft a selling point, sending out postcards to booksellers promising the book would offer “infinite pleasure.” And it worked. The book became a hit, and Wallace a star.” — At The Bulwark

• This article is more about how conglomerates have taken over publishing, but I thought that was a good anecdote

4. Rules for the ruling class

• Outlines the problems with the word “elite” and how many who would usually be considered “elite” now use the word in disdainful ways, somehow making themselves not elite. — At The New Yorker

5. Largehearted Boy’s fav books of 2023

• Friend of the newsletter and epic blogger

  David Gutowski
  shared his favorite books from 2023 a few weeks ago and I missed it! He reads a ton! At Largehearted Boy.

6. How to make $100,000 on Gumroad

Gumroad is a creator site where you can sell digital products and courses and whatever else. Like a more chill Etsy. Anyway, here are some tips from the top creators over there. I compiled them together. At Medium.

7. The power of daily note-taking

Note-taking has a bad reputation.

It’s all because of those (lost?) years in school or college.

* Sitting and falling asleep during lectures.

* Mandatory Zoom classes.

* Lexis-Nexis, JSTOR, and that dusty floor of the library with those weird “carrels” where Red-Bulled grad students growled at you when you came too close (or maybe just at me).

As an online writer, you don’t want to lose the research snippets, or potential article ideas. If so, your progress will lag.

Think of the frustration of knowing you had a nugget of wisdom, but it fell away due to a lack of an effective system.

This is where note-taking comes in. — At Medium

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Books…

I’m stuck reading the same ones. LaserWriter 2 by Tamara Shopsin, The Shards by Brett Easton Ellis and Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster. They are all so different from one another. I may stop The Shards, the writing is great—probably the best from Ellis in awhile, but it’s really narcissistic which is no surprise coming from him.

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“The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.” — Nelson Algren

Keep going-

Josh Spilker