LET'S BE LONG ABOUT IT

on embodiment & refusing the bit for the patience and exasperation of going long.

I’m sick of the bit and its over saturation.

Maybe it’s internet speak, maybe it’s the commodification of the inside joke as representation of community, maybe it’s the way we find belonging these days, but my craving for depth is coming up again and again for me in conversations. A new friend recommended Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger, and I told her I saw it available on Libby all the time, but I never requested it for fear it was another “internet book” with a “bratty” voice (not to be confused with Brat™), but literally the undercutting, sly, slightly vindictive voice of internet speak which is a feature in every personal essay collection being published at the moment.

A few months ago when I was writing a pitch for a slow book, let’s call it unhurried, I found myself defending unhurried books instead of actually describing the book at hand. Every MFA student loves Housekeeping, yet we’re decrying the death of the “literary novel” at every turn. Sure, the market wants blockbuster (not to be confused with what media wants to publicize, which is debatable based on organization), but isn’t that solely because we’re not offering them sisters aboard a train in a brief 219 page devastation? People don’t find what they’re not being marketed.

Earlier this week on a walk, I tried to listen to a new podcast started by someone I deeply admire and the first episode is a highly-lauded author speaking with a debut author about what they’re currently working on. I’m being vague-ish on purpose. I made it twenty minutes in and then chose bird song. Whenever one of the writers would make a sort of complicated point—the start of what could be a deep untangling if it was given the breadth of a few more precious seconds, the other writer would cut-in with an internet-derived joke. It was a real-time monopolizing of depth for the sake of the bit.

And I’m all for a bit, but not at the constant drag of depth. What it comes down to for me is a flattening of sensuality. It’s a reliance on the bit, the shorthand—which perhaps makes folks feel in-community with one another in the quickest possible way without sharing any true vulnerability—at the expense of that vulnerability entirely.

I love(d) Griefbacon by Helena Fitzgerald, started in the earliest days of Substack. She would write 7000 words on the color green and I would read each one like little olives plucked from the tips of my fingers. And she dawdled about, circling points, calling back to them, dead-ending somewhere in a suburban cul-de-sac and circling around on her bike, not to be confused with a braided essay though you could call it that loosely, but something more meandering. Her newsletters felt like taking a walk with someone’s mind.

I guess what I’m saying is that my fear is that the digressions are where the good stuff is. When we allow ourselves to push something to the end of its thought—that long clouded train (my son’s train book has cars carrying bananas next to coal cars next to a dump truck a next to an oil tanker next to a red caboose and that’s how I imagine these thoughts)—that’s where the good stuff is. I’m not saying everything (or every book, or every essay) needs to be like that, but when I’m listening to a podcast or reading a book, or even reading a newsletter post for that, I want more than the bit. And I don’t want the bit to interrupt what could actually be meaningful.

My best friend teaches seventh grade. She told me last week that none of her seventh graders know how to have a back-and-forth conversation. We joked about the fact that they watch a lot of “get ready with me” videos on Tiktok and so they know how to be talked AT but not talked TO, and they don’t know how to do that sort of jousting of good conversation. They’re learning, but someone has to teach them—we have to talk to each other. But when all our communication is cut into (and through) a series of in-jokes, what then?

While the bit might be the hook-in, the lead, the deck, the title, the subtitle, whatever you want to call it, the bit isn’t wide enough to be substantial. Not to mention, it’s someone else’s and it’s been commodified everywhere which is what makes it so familiar and so easy to slip-into like a glass slipper, like a fairytale. We know the story, we know the line. But we’re the step-sisters, our bulbous feet “feel” comfortable in the bit because it’s an easy yes, but it’s not an actual truth. Staying there is a disservice to the thought.

From a publicist perspective, I’ve been thinking about how much of marketing copy and pitches actually relies on the bit, and how far I want to run from that easy stipple-down of literature, voice, and art. I’ve been trying to write more sensual pitches, more embodied pitches—pitches that tell the person reading how it felt to read the book in my body. In an effort to combat this reliance on the bit that I’m seeing infiltrate everything—the canned sell essentially, but canned as stand-in for community. (Like we’re sardines!)

Because what pitches can’t do is:

• Envelope you in the rhythm of the book’s sentences, the author’s tempo.

• Get to sensuality and texture. A pitch is always going to be a flattening, but I wouldn’t say a summary. It’s meant to be a publicist holding open a door. I can add texture to a pitch with language, with transitions, with sentence variance—all the things you hope for good writing, but it’s never going to be like reading the first page of a book, or twenty pages in when you’ve been enveloped.

But these things should be the aim in my humble opinion. When I finish a pitch I want to send out for a book, I want it to feel like I got as close as I could to those things—to physicality, to humanity.

So, what do I mean by embodiment in pitches and in marketing. I mean making pitches sense-driven. (I’ve been trying to do this in my actual diary too. The reason we’re constantly quoting the diaries of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath (cue Substack joke about LinkedIn and Sylvia Plath) is because their diaries aren’t I-feel-statements (though there’s nothing wrong with that), or laborious feelings, they’re feelings imbued into senses, into place, into moments, they’re settled in the feeling because they’re settled in the sense (and in the scene), in the experiences of a human body where the feeling lives.

Some things we’ve written into pitches lately to get at this:

• “It moved over me like hives.”

• “She takes all their blame, all their guilt, all their jokes, and born there, like an accumulation of flurries, is the country of feminine fury.”

• “Here, the accouterments of midwest boyhood–Swiss Army knife, compass, wartime–waltz right into the sacred. An adult narrator knows rapture and fatherhood, and still wishes for the possibility of pregnancy–the withheld. Transfiguration, transformation, transcendence. Leotard, Hazard, or Shrapnel.”

• “It opens with a wagon and a boy and his heart, hauled behind his body.

  It opens with that boy and his heart, going off again with older boys.

  It opens with a switch.”

• “James, a neighbor whispers at the lip of your curb, was in an Oedipal relationship with his mother for many years.”

• (Zoe) “fucked by the euphoric comings and carnal stall-outs of a marriage”

• (Zoe) “the poems in [book] are frantic in the face of how much she wants.”

• (Zoe) “becomes Gay Bar in a lyric saddle, seeking out not the landmarks, but the hours, that permit the affairs that take hold (and take leave) of us. The chest of curls will stir, the sun move, the weekend overstay its welcome.”

I realize everything around us is shouting that to “sell” we have to tap into what’s already popular and familiar. Comp titles, the fact that the same seven authors are on the same seven podcasts, canned language around vulnerability & self-help, looking to archetypes to tell us everything about the universe, jokes, stereotypes, etc, rather than being actually present. I fear this in myself—that act of noticing, but not being enveloped. I can see the birds, I can think “what a beautiful Eastern Bluebird” but that’s very different from merging the self with the environment—from that space between body and feeling.

I want to get long with it, I want to feel more exasperated by other people’s thought trains, I want to try my own patience—to wait for you to round the long bend. I want to spend time and body on the banana train.

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