[MD] To Matt from A Short History of Decay

[MarshaV]

"..., and the discovery blew blasts of sugar into every chamber of his heart."
          (Robbins,Tom, 'Jitterbug Perfume')  


On Jul 14, 2010, at 2:53 PM, Matt Kundert wrote:

> 
> 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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