🌻 Audience of One

Metadata

• Author: jasmine.substack.com
• Full Title: 🌻 Audience of One
• Category:#articles
• URL: https://jasmine.substack.com/p/audience-of-one?utm_medium=reader2

Highlights

• They were slower to smile and quicker to criticize. Many of them began to talk about the world in a transactional, economized way. Their universes started to look like giant balance sheets, their appetite for adventure waned and they viewed unfamiliar situations through the cautious lens of cost/benefit analysis.
• My intern at Substack proposed a research project the other day, and I told him, “That’s intellectually interesting, but what’s the business case?” I hated myself a bit for saying it, but the thing I fear most these days is shouting into the void: If I create something and no one’s around to hear it, did it really make a sound?
• My prose has tightened, the excess trimmed. Information efficiency is paramount. I write like the 12 dollar desk salad, the bar that packs 20 grams of protein and plastic into one 200-calorie brick. But good writing, like a good meal, needs fat. It should indulge readers, is meant to be chewed and enjoyed, affording a generous escape from the prosaic and mundane.
• “You can,” he replied. “I think reading literature makes one much more attentive. I go from ‘writing op-eds about who is good and who is bad’ to ‘writing vignettes about what’s amusing, unusual, or thematically resonant’ in my head. It’s like, ‘What genre do I want my internal monologue to be in?’ and most of us are default-choosing ‘enraged op-ed.’”
• ow much time should we spend producing great writing, and how much trying to prove it to the world? Or like a Substack writer recently told me about the pain of self-promotion, “I don’t like having to sell myself like a bar of soap, but here I am.”
• The exhibition could use more secrecy. The secret is a useful metaphor for art in that art’s content is always something that resists articulation and remains unstated.” Although art can have political causes and political effects, its primary impact is much more localized to each viewer, and thus hard to predict. Meaning emerges not universally from the artist’s intent, but from the multiplicity of affective and reflective encounters that result.
• “I write only to please myself.”
• This struggle, ultimately, is the struggle not to sell out your own mind. I think about Obama, Drake, and every other public figure derided for succumbing to the hivemind, to design by committee, to the tyranny of the majority. The more you expose your work to the world, the more you are vulnerable to its petty infringements and unsolicited opinions, which threaten to destroy the very originality that awarded it popularity in the first place.
• I want to, as Joan Didion describes in “Why I Write,” train a mind for noticing “physical facts,” for conjuring “images that shimmer around the edges.” I want to develop Susan Sontag’s “vocabulary of forms”: to find the precise language for every extraneous emotion, every ineffable vibe; I want to learn to sin and write in purple prose.

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title: ”🌻 Audience of One” author: “jasmine.substack.com” url: ”https://jasmine.substack.com/p/audience-of-one?utm_medium=reader2” date: 2023-12-19 source: hypothesis tags: media/articles

🌻 Audience of One

Metadata

• Author: jasmine.substack.com
• Full Title: 🌻 Audience of One
• Category:#articles
• URL: https://jasmine.substack.com/p/audience-of-one?utm_medium=reader2

Highlights

• They were slower to smile and quicker to criticize. Many of them began to talk about the world in a transactional, economized way. Their universes started to look like giant balance sheets, their appetite for adventure waned and they viewed unfamiliar situations through the cautious lens of cost/benefit analysis.
• My intern at Substack proposed a research project the other day, and I told him, “That’s intellectually interesting, but what’s the business case?” I hated myself a bit for saying it, but the thing I fear most these days is shouting into the void: If I create something and no one’s around to hear it, did it really make a sound?
• My prose has tightened, the excess trimmed. Information efficiency is paramount. I write like the 12 dollar desk salad, the bar that packs 20 grams of protein and plastic into one 200-calorie brick. But good writing, like a good meal, needs fat. It should indulge readers, is meant to be chewed and enjoyed, affording a generous escape from the prosaic and mundane.
• “You can,” he replied. “I think reading literature makes one much more attentive. I go from ‘writing op-eds about who is good and who is bad’ to ‘writing vignettes about what’s amusing, unusual, or thematically resonant’ in my head. It’s like, ‘What genre do I want my internal monologue to be in?’ and most of us are default-choosing ‘enraged op-ed.’”
• ow much time should we spend producing great writing, and how much trying to prove it to the world? Or like a Substack writer recently told me about the pain of self-promotion, “I don’t like having to sell myself like a bar of soap, but here I am.”
• The exhibition could use more secrecy. The secret is a useful metaphor for art in that art’s content is always something that resists articulation and remains unstated.” Although art can have political causes and political effects, its primary impact is much more localized to each viewer, and thus hard to predict. Meaning emerges not universally from the artist’s intent, but from the multiplicity of affective and reflective encounters that result.
• “I write only to please myself.”
• This struggle, ultimately, is the struggle not to sell out your own mind. I think about Obama, Drake, and every other public figure derided for succumbing to the hivemind, to design by committee, to the tyranny of the majority. The more you expose your work to the world, the more you are vulnerable to its petty infringements and unsolicited opinions, which threaten to destroy the very originality that awarded it popularity in the first place.
• I want to, as Joan Didion describes in “Why I Write,” train a mind for noticing “physical facts,” for conjuring “images that shimmer around the edges.” I want to develop Susan Sontag’s “vocabulary of forms”: to find the precise language for every extraneous emotion, every ineffable vibe; I want to learn to sin and write in purple prose.