“That didn't capture my interest.”
What does that mean, that phrase? What does it mean for something to capture your interest? What is your interest?
That idiom, “My interest” has so many meanings.
But for our purposes, you interest is your curiosity. So how does something take from you your curiosity? How is it captured? Well, of course it's not – not literally. It's a metaphor, Vincent! Why do you take everything literally? Because everything has a literal-metaphorical meaning. We keep idioms around because they're useful. Because they're interesting.
So what does it mean when we say that something has captured or captivated our interest? It means that we're compelled to give the thing our attention.
But what does it really mean on an esoteric level, and why does our attention need to be captured? Why can we not give our attention to what we want to?
Because we aren't curious about everything.
I go through this all the time. There will be things I know I should be able to focus on and pay attention to and remember and that I should want to know – I just can't make myself focus on them. Worse, I can't make myself remember that I've engaged with them.
Because I haven't engaged with them.
And that's fine.
But Sargon of Akkad is not responsible for capturing my interest. He already lived his life - if I want to learn about it and find any kind of practical wisdom in it, it's my responsibility to do so. It's not just going to jump out at me like a snake in a tree.
But that's what we want, isn't it?
An idea, a concept, a piece of art cannot capture your interest. That is an idiom that you've picked up from critics and reviewers, that you've come to understand and use to mean that you, the consumer, were not planning to even like a thing but then you found yourself unable to look away from it. Or maybe you thought you would like it, but something about it has stuck with you, either demanding you to think about it or that you consume it over and over again until you know it inside and out.
That's what we all want, as consumers, isn't it? The thing we can't disengage from? The thing we didn't know we want?
We all want to be a child discovering our first favorite show again, our first favorite movie, our first favorite book - our first love.
That's why Netflix is the most influential entertainment company since maybe entertainment was invented: it's a giant box full of mysteries just waiting to be opened. And the best thing of all is that we, the consumer, don't have to rely on the box to produce quality content within itself - we know that some of our favorite people are putting their stuff in there. In other words, it's a place that we already know we can go and experience both the novel and the comfortable, where we can simulate being surprised by what we're consuming. It's like going to the same restaurant you've always gone to, but the kitchen staff and front of house are all different people every time. It's still the same menu. It's the same shit you always eat – you just think it's novel and engaging because you didn't know what to expect besides what you read in the synopsis.
It's fast food.
It's McDonald's.
Which is how we read books.
Habitual readers of books pride themselves, to a certain degree, on being able to see the merit in any piece of literature. So they use phrases like “It just didn't capture my interest” to say why they didn't engage with a book – or, more honestly, why they didn't engage with it. I have known many, many self-styled nerds who will brag about being able to walk into a library or book store and find the book for them on feel alone.
Because we want to engage with things, I think
I know that's wrong. We don't actually want to engage with the new – with what we don't know. The new and unfamiliar are dangerous. An animal we don't know, a plant we don't know, a place or an experience we don't know – these things can all end in sudden and painful death. So the unfamiliar is dangerous – and it is frightening.
And what's really happening is self-selection, again. It's all cognitive bias and motivated reasoning.
What it is is that we as humans want to be chauffeured by our brains and our bodies from one new, pleasing experience to the next - exactly like our experience was as children. Readers aren't reading because they need the books to experience the world. They have families and friends and a reliable social life for that. Readers like to think they're the protagonist of a Lovecraft novel, but really they're the people Lovecraft spent so much time talking about wanting to see genocided by a cosmic entity so great he couldn't even be bothered to attempt to describe it.
Heat-seeking H.P. Lovecraft criticism, right there.
Get it while it's hot.
So I should not be surprised when I share Rob with people and they say things like, “I just wasn't engaged – it didn't catch my interest.” Of course it didn't. You can't summon your interest. You either are or you are not interested in a topic.
Because interest in the sense we are using it in this piece is your pre-existing condition. It's the accumulation of your experiences, the things you already know you like.
It's like... it's like sex.
Once you're an experienced sexual being, there comes a point where engaging with less experienced partners becomes appealing. I am convinced this has significantly less to do with the way things look - our brains are designed to be attracted to people in our age group, but our bodies are designed to be attracted to younger DNA. It has everything to do with less experienced people not knowing what they can say no to.
Really it's about young people not knowing what they don't like yet.
That's why inexperienced, insecure, and inarticulate authors (that is, authors who either have nothing to say or who say it poorly) choose to write for children and Young Adults: the audience doesn't know what they don't like yet.
It's a lot easier to capture the attention of someone who has never been captured before than someone who is already cynical about the whole process.
I mean, that's how pederasty works.
...Yeah, actually. I feel good about equating Young Adult authors with sexual predators, actually. I feel especially good about it because they use language like Hooking the reader, Captivating them - and children's and YA fiction is explicitly about teaching life lessons to young people. It's implicitly about molding the minds of the youth - no wonder it's all facile garbage.
And yeah, actually - I do feel good about coming at about 90% of the people who are going to read this.
Lol
I don't synopsize and I don't market Rob for a number of reasons. That said, I'm not going to elucidate them. Not obviously.
As I move forward with how I present him to the world, I've learned a few things.
First-world humans don't want what is right in front of us. There is food in the house and we will Door Dash - just because. Our lives are so abstracted from reality that we want things we've already had without explicitly knowing what those things are - in any context. Our experience is so deeply rooted in our individual pasts that we are unable to experience and appreciate our presents.
Maybe that's something I've learned from dealing for the last ten years with Rob: We don't choose in what we are interested; but we can choose with what we engage. And with whom - and how.
More importantly, we can choose when we engage.
Not being able to pay attention to something isn't a big deal. We as conscious beings are largely passive passengers within our bodies and minds, subject to an impossibly complex variety of chemical and emotional factors before whatever is the active component of our consciousness is even aware of its present stimuli. We are all of us the guy in Johnny Got His Gun: deaf, blind, dumb; our arms and legs shot off. We just think we're meaningfully engaging with a world outside ourselves.
Our interest as such is an expression of what we think we need in order to better engage with our present reality.
Which is hilarious. Because any storyteller will tell you that that is narrative conflict - the difference between what a character wants and what they need.
What you think you need, what you want, and what you actually need.
Many of us don't know why we are engaged by what we are engaged.
And I'm asking you: is it because we're getting what we think we need, or is it that we're getting what we didn't know we wanted? Or am I missing the mark entirely?
This is something I've had to learn - why I am engaged by what I am engaged by. Because I am acutely aware of in what I am interested and what it is that interests me. And the inverse. When someone asks me why I don't like a song, for example, I can give you a detailed account of why, what's missing, and what I would prefer.
That's critique.
"It just didn't engage me" is not critique. It's an admission of being a stupid person and having nothing worth hearing to say.
Ahem.
When people read or listen to Rob, so many of them just go, “No. I'm not doing this.” And they say things like it's wordy or hollow, that it doesn't speak to them, that they don't find him engaging – when he's telling them that he isn't going to engage them, that this thing he is doing is hollow. It's for his own entirely selfish reasons that Rob is doing this thing. And it's for my entirely selfish reasons that I do these things. Telling me that isn't critique. It's not even a good observation. That's just telling me you didn't listen.
That you didn't engage.
And what is sharing with me that you didn't engage? It's admitting that you're lazy and dumb. How is that critique that deserves to be anything but laughed at?
That you didn't listen well enough even to hear Rob telling you that you aren't the kind of person who is going to “get” our Work.
My mistake – his mistake, really – if there is one is that he's demanding you engage with the material to the same degree that we have to.
Every word, every phrase, is chosen with extreme care. Saying it rings hollow is saying that you hear that there is a space inside the artifice of the piece – it means that you are acknowledging that what you are interacting with is in fact a facade if it is not a container. Noting that it's hollow without attempting to open it and discover what's inside is a reflection of you – not the work you're consuming.
And that's okay.
Not everyone likes everything.
Not everyone is capable of understanding everything.
It takes me months - it has taken me decades - to comprehend simple shit that everyone understands from the time they are able to understand anything in a meaningful way.
So, look, I'm not casting stones. I'm the dumbest motherfucker in this room.
I'm just smart enough to know when I'm disengaging with something - and honest enough to say when I just don't feel like giving it my attention because what's the point in it for me?
And - look - I get that, too. I'm just some asshole on the internet telling you you're dumber than me. What's the pot of gold at the end of that turd rainbow? Just more turd sandwiches? No. Damn. Fucking turd tokens for turd sandwiches. Cheap turd-rainbow bastard!
Actually, no.
Because if you were listening, he's trying to ask for your help.
But I think that, too, is off-putting for people. When you can see that something is demanding more from you than you're capable of, and then it asks for your help - it's off-putting for a certain kind of person.
And that might be the point - to put off a certain kind of person.
Not everyone is capable of engaging with everything – and just about everyone in what I once thought was my target audience is incapable of engaging with anything on a meaningful level. At least, on a level where they can meaningfully discuss it with me.
That is arrogance. Because I don't mean that the way you assume I do.
I can get along with anyone. Next to no one seems able to get along with me.
It's all about perspective. It's about choice - about choosing to engage, and choosing in what way we engage.
So what does that mean?
It means, one, that it's okay to laugh off bad critique. In fact, it's okay to laugh in the face of a bad critic. It's better to laugh at them and their attempt to condescend to you than to engage with and take them seriously.
I'm giving you life lessons here, whether you know it or not. I don't mean literary critics. I've not actually gotten a literary criticism. And like Sean Taylor bristling at the media for laughing at him getting a shaving cream pie to the face, I will bristle that anyone thinks they get to critique me.
But that's the extreme confidence of the anti-social more than it is genuine arrogance. You can't know what it means to accurately no one's self. But I do.
But that's what they want: Critics, reviewers, they're like the hair algae that grows on the plants in my aquarium, feeding off the nutrients that collect on their leaves: Diverting and in that way stealing the sunshine the plant has worked to gather for itself. And sunshine is a good metaphor - because the plant has its roots in the ground. It needs that sunshine both to be beautiful, but also to produce more beautiful things. The algae just kills the beautiful thing, devours the corpse, and clings to the next thing it can devour.
We use that term 'Grounded' of athletes and artists - and I suppose successful people in general, I just have exactly no interest in "entrepreneurial types". What we mean is that their feet are on the ground, that they are, in their way, a lightning rod. And that terminology comes from trees. Planted. Rooted. Firmly upright. The kind of person who isn't going to suddenly change on you.
Which is why audiences and fans hate when an artist changes their "style".
But that's different. Sort of. I'm still talking about comfort and discomfort. But now I'm not coming at readers as a class, I'm coming at the people who deign to influence readers:
Critics and reviewers want attention. They're that kid who interrupts everything in class to make sure you know their opinion. They want attention and can't get it with their own work, so they attach themselves to the work of others, leeching nutrients here and there and supplementing their own sense of self-inadequacy. Critics, journalists - writers writ large - do this. It is their industry.
And that's okay.
It really is.
So long as you, as a creator or as a consumer, as a critic and reviewer, are aware of it.
Because I promise you that they - those successful few whom the rest are aping - are not.
I'm different, and I get that. When I consume new things, I don't get annoyed when they're too new or too different or too unusual. I get annoyed when they are too familiar. Like in music for instance: Metallica's Lulu, even if I don't think it sounds good or is fun to listen to, interests me more than anything by bands like Greta Van Fleet or Ghost – because I've never heard anything like Lulu; at least it was adventurous; Ghost and Greta Van Fleet are more of what I've already heard, just with nothing to say.
And that's the difference, right there, between the edifice being hollow and having nothing I want to find in it versus being hollow and not bothering to open it.
This is the same for me in any medium. If I can glance at your work and tell that it's derivative of something else and I don't already like that something else - actually, if I'm being honest, especially if I do like that something else - I'm going to come at the work with a negative bias. If I can suspend my disinterest (you should log that phrase in the back of your mind. Popularize it. Use it. Creators need to know that they're asking us to suspend our disinterest and our disbelief) long enough to engage with the work and I can tell that the creator didn't take the time to distinguish themselves from their source material - those aforementioned bands, for example, or nearly all of network television - I immediately put it down and forever remove the artist from my consideration as someone worthy of my time.
Because there is always something new I can learn from Plato.
But I wouldn't tell them their work rings hollow.
I'd tell them that the space inside their work is empty - or that what's inside it isn't for me, so thanks but no thanks.
The problem isn't just that artists don't have anything new to say. The Teacher spoke accurately when he wrote that there is nothing new under the sun.
The rub lies in the fact they have nothing to say at all.
And I feel like that's what it's about.
Because everyone (not everyone – everyone who has ever given me bad critique) just tells me to be more like their favorite author. To be, in other words, what they've already read. What they already know they like. What they know they don't have to think about, don't have to engage with.
And that's okay.
Because we're taught how or that we even might engage with a piece of art in school by teachers who are wholly incompetent to the task.
I'm not so sensitive to the trauma of your education that I'm not going to call you out if you give facile or vapid criticism to me. Sorry, not sorry. School was just another place I was unsafe in my life- so I took the lessons that were there to take and disengaged from the actual teachers of those lessons. If you couldn't do that....
Well, that's probably why so few people are willing to try with me:
The college educated see the skills they honed as students as skills of a child and not applicable to their adulthood, and the rest have been taught to be wildly anti-intellectual and that thinking both hurts and is scary.
So I don't know who my target audience is, anymore.
I thought it was college-educated women. But that's a dead end. It's worse than a dead end. It's a bottomless pit into which I've thrown thirty-five years of my resources.
And that's okay, too, actually.
We all have an audience. Mine just isn't who I thought it was.
Which is funny - because I thought that was my audience because that's the demographic of human beings who buy books.
But I'm not looking to sell books, am I?
I'm looking to change the world.
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