A Brief(ish) Note on Brevity
...and the hyper-availability of content, everywhere and all the time
Roberto, being my partner, is obligated to read everything I post on Substack whether he feels like it or not. Last week’s fungi appreciation post did not contain any information he hadn’t already heard because most of it was cribbed from Entangled Life, a book from which I have read him many, many a gobbet. Nevertheless, I insinuated that he should read the post, so he did, and when he’d finished it I asked him what he thought, and he said, ‘Mm. It was a bit long.’1
He later apologised for his curtness. But he didn’t retract his opinion, which was okay really, because he was right. I knew it was too long because I’d deliberately avoided copy-pasting the draft into Microsoft Word in order to check the word count, knowing that if I did I would have no choice but to edit out some of my awe-inspiring fungal facts. Every fungal fact seemed to me entirely essential and I did not want to lose a single one.
Then I just so happened to subscribe to
, a really great Substack about how to write a really great Substack, and as I perused I spotted a piece entitled ‘Write Less, Please’. It was like a riposte to my fungi essay, replete with sobering facts about how people read on the internet. In a nutshell, everyone skim reads and most people do not read to the end of anything. ‘Some of you are telling yourselves that readers love your long posts,’ Fay writes. ‘No, they don’t.’I did know this, in my heart of hearts. I too skim read things on the internet and often navigate away from whatever I’m reading before I reach the end. I just like to imagine that what I write is so fascinating as to hold everyone’s attention throughout. This is the problem with editing yourself: there is no one around to stop you believing your own bullshit.
Ironically, given my decision to start creating weekly content, I also lament the fact that there is just too much content nowadays. By this I don’t just mean the vague category of ‘stuff you can look at on the internet’ but music, books, film, TV, everything. Apologies to those who object to me calling this ‘content’ and would prefer me to call it ‘art’. The thing is, I quite like the word CONtent, because it’s got a sort of backwards relationship to the word conTENT. This seems fitting, because I do detect a negative correlation between my levels of contentment and the amount of content I encounter on a daily basis.
It’s not like the old days, where if you were going to miss a TV show you taped it or lost it forever. Nowadays it’s impossible to miss a TV show because it will just bed down on the internet and wait for you. So will all the articles you’ve ever bookmarked for later, and all the podcasts and Youtube videos and indeed Substacks, not to mention the complete back catalogues of all the musicians you admire, and this is before we get to the many books you own because you thought, ‘Wow, that looks interesting, I’ll definitely make time to read that!’, or the social media content that you probably don’t want to consume at all but do, because it is there, and it doesn’t require you to make any decisions.
It accumulates and makes you feel guilty: all the edifying content you haven’t consumed, all the unedifying content you have. Not to mention all the edifying content you did consume but merely skim-read and now can’t remember. (I say you, but is it just me? I don’t think it is. Is it?)
Here I should probably confess that some of my beef with this content-deluge is that it makes it harder for ME to make MY voice heard. I work in publishing; believe me when I say that a dizzying number of books are published every month. The ones that make it to the tables in the front bit of Waterstones are a fraction of the total. It can be a little deflating, as the author of one (1) book, to be so regularly exposed to the sheer vastness and infinitude of the competition. But it is also possible to reframe it, so that every sale, every comment, every reader review becomes the unlikeliest of gifts. As in: hey, somebody read MY book when they could have read literally ANYTHING else!2 Okay, yes, fine, they hated it, but isn’t it amazing that they picked it up at all?!
Recently, in our household, we acquired an antidote to the content maelstrom. It is a record player. I used to think it was pretentious to own a record player in this day and age, but now I’m fully converted. The reason being that it stops music being ‘content’ and turns it back into ‘music’ again.
Previously I listened to everything on Spotify, which aside from being extremely ethically dubious, was sort of hollowing out music for me. Not always, I must stress. But often I find it a great flattener of experience. It is too easy to outsource your decision-making to the algorithms, to let the machine choose what it thinks you want to hear. It strips away your agency and with it your pleasure in discovery. When you can listen to anything at all, the things you do listen to are less precious.
Our record collection is still small, so our record-listening is less diffuse and more concentrated. Needless to say, record players do not segue into an ‘artist radio’ when the album is over, so you have to make a decision yourself about what to listen to next. It’s pretty wild that this has become a novelty. And the physicality of it all — removing a record from its sleeve, putting it on the turntable, moving the funny little arm over, listening to it crackle. I find it satisfying in the same way I find making coffee satisfying.
Sorry to be so wide-eyed and nostalgic. It’s just that when an experience has been routinely flattened, it’s quite enchanting to feel it getting its texture back again.
There is no way that any of the above can be called anything but ‘content’, so if you read this far, many thanks, and sorry if I added to your overwhelm (especially if you are one of the people I coerced into subscribing). I tried to keep it brief, partly to avoid being tedious and partly because I thought of the title in advance and didn’t want to change it. I don’t know that I fully succeeded, but at least it’s briefer than the fungi post! That one was about three times Sarah Fay the Substack guru’s recommended length, so if you read to the end of that one, I salute you and thank you most profusely for your time.
I feel I should counterbalance this information with the fact that he peeled me an orange and brought it to me while I was sat here writing this post, and later gave me very positive feedback on the final draft even though it makes him look, in his words, ‘like a right twat’.
I was never more disappointed in a celebrity than when I heard Tom Hanks on a favourite podcast of mine, being interviewed about his debut novel. When asked if there was a big difference between promoting a book and promoting a film, he replied, ‘You bet! Promoting a movie is [different because] you’re in competition with everything else that’s out there.’ As if books were not in competition with anything at all! This is the celebrity novelist’s privilege, you see. They debut in the top ten and think it’s normal.
I quite enjoyed the long read. Does size matter? As long as it’s packed with well written interesting new thoughts and facts