[MD] To Matt from A Short History of Decay a repost

[MarshaV]

Hi Marsha,

Marsha said:
I thought all along that you were not writing for a caring 
reader.  That's been my frustration, but I understand it 
completely.  It is not always safe to care on this list.

Matt:
That's a good way of putting it.  Over the last ten years 
I've come to think more and more about the specific topic 
of "amateur philosophy," what it's supposed to be and do, 
what it's relationship is to other fields (especially 
"professional philosophy"), how one should or might do it, 
what one should or might get out of it, how I should or 
might do or figure out any of these.  One reason that 
particular topic has come to the fore for me has been my 
experience on this list alongside my experience in the 
university--pretty near simultaneous--and the very 
different kinds of audiences that make up either, in 
addition to the different kinds of books I find nourishing 
and who _they_ were written for (the differences in 
audience between Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day, 
Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, Baldwin's The Fire Next 
Time, Stout's The Flight from Authority, Faulkner's As I 
Lay Dying, and Franken's Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat 
Idiot), despite the fact that the nuggets of wisdom and 
nourishment that float to the surface between all of 
them for me do not seem to me dissimilar.

So how should I compose myself?

I've decided that the best way to avoid being completely 
disappointed in my experience as a writer is to balance 
pleasing others and pleasing myself (to varying degrees at 
different times).  We say that those who only please 
others are "sell outs" (or boring, mechanical didactic types), 
but I have enough experience with my sister to be 
amazingly bored with people who spout the outsider-rhetoric 
that most of the time excuses their inability to be 
appreciated by anybody else (and I don't care if you're the 
angsty hipster down the street or Melville, the rhetoric is 
tiring, even if Melville was in the end right that he was an 
unappreciated genius and not both unappreciated and 
_not_ a genius, as the hipster is likely).

I know that most of the time nobody understands or 
appreciates, or other kinds of audience-epithets, what I 
write, but particularly when you write amateur philosophy 
for the particular kinds of audience that might make up a 
listserve or travel to a blog, I've come to think that if at 
the very least I'm not growing by my writing, then it might 
not be worth it because I cannot count on anybody else 
even reading it, let alone anything else.

Much of the time I don't think about what I'm doing, but at 
least some of the time I try to cater to an actual audience 
I'm aware of existing.  I may not always make the right 
choices in how I think I'm catering to them (Plato's word 
was "pandering"--and his outsider-rhetoric led to an entire, 
democratically-acidic political philosophy, recently come to 
be known as Straussianism and an ethos that populated 
the Bush administration), but with such a diverse 
population of interlocutors with different backgrounds, 
attitudes, and perspectives, I've given up worrying, and 
just go by my gut.  That's where facts come from 
anyways, so I hear.

Matt
 		 	   		  




 
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