Philip Sugg | Blog

If challenge of the being a writer is a subject that interests you, the New York Times had a beautiful story about the novelist Kiran Desai, and the trials of completing her new book–twenty years in the making!–"The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny."

After she won the Booker Prize in 2006 for her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, Desai arrived at high literary recognition just as she began to disappear into her next book. Alexandra Alter writes of her attempts to make progress:

When she first had the idea for the novel, Desai didn’t realize how thoroughly the story would swallow her life. At times over the years, she feared that she might never finish it.

And:

About seven years into writing, Desai was at a residency in Brussels when she decided to print out the manuscript. She was shocked at what kept spilling out of the printer; she realized she had written 5,000 pages.

What Desai experienced is (almost) the struggle of a lifetime. But the basic problem is one that any writer who has attempted a substantial writing project will have sympathy for–especially one that seems (or is) beyond his or her current powers. After seeing physical proof of her difficulties in the 5000 page manuscript, Alter quotes Desai that she “was horrified,” and “hadn’t understood what a dire situation it was.”

Writing is strange in that way: the writer can drown in her own generative powers. At first I wanted to describe Desai as “unproductive,” but that is not the right description at all. What is the right word for someone who produces, in a mechanical sense, yet has nothing to show for it? Very little of the bottom line in art is subject to being counted. The torture of Desai’s condition is being so talented and prolific, and still finding herself unable to marshal that productivity in service of the work that needs to be written. “The story had no center,” Desai said. The work keeps falling apart until it doesn’t.

A reference somewhere else prompted me to look into the poetry of Edward Thomas, the English writer who only started writing poetry at 36–and was killed in World War I combat by 39. It’s been a delight. Although his short time as a poet resulted in a modest body of work, his output feels larger because each piece holds me a for a while: I have not read very much, or have I read a lot? Thomas is one of those rare poets who manages to build both conceptual expansiveness and incredible specificity of observation into his verse:

The Bridge

I have come a long way today
On a strange bridge alone,
Remembering friends, old friends,
I rest, without smile or moan,
As they remember me without smile or moan.

All are behind, the kind
And the unkind too, no more
Tonight than a dream. The stream
Runs softly yet drowns the Past,
The dark-lit stream has drowned the Future and the Past

No traveller has rest more blest
Than this moment brief between
Two lives, when the Night’s first lights
And shades hide what has never been,
Things goodlier, lovelier, dearer, than will be or have been.

The poem is a rumination on time, on the reality of past and future. The present is never mentioned, but The Bridge could be a theory of the present. The bridge–and the stream beneath it–is a placeholder for that present. The poem works on the reader through the interplay of these temporal categories and the scene: a lone walker, on a bridge, over water. The stream is seen, the stream is: a thing that “runs softly” and is “dark lit.” We are at the end of the day. The audio-visual of the water rushing beneath the traveller’s feet loses its definition, merging with the spread of nighttime darkness. And the specific contents of the traveller’s past and future slide into wish and fantasy, without restriction or guilt (“what has never been/Things goodlier, lovelier, dearer, than will be or have been”)–and with a hint of some delight at their unreality. The anchor of the Present breaks down, the flight of the mind into reinvention–the unreality of time–succeeds.

The desire of the eye
For sky, nothing but sky.
I sicken of the woods
And all the multitudes
Of hedge-trees. They are no more
Than weeds upon this floor
Of the river of air
Leagues deep, leagues wide, where
I am like a fish that lives
In weeds and mud and gives
What’s above him no thought

– From Edward Thomas’ The Sky

Looking south of Roosevelt and west of Clark, at the “78,” one of the largest still-undeveloped tracts of land in Chicago.

My schedule changed today, and I had the chance to wait for the Metra Electric train at a downtown stop I usually pass through: the 11th Street-Museum Campus station. Stations like this have been around so long, are so well-frequented, and are such institutions that they have their own Wikipedia entry. The current name is a bit of an inelegant mouthful: it used to be called the Roosevelt Road Station.

But in the ten or so minutes I had in the early evening, waiting for the train, I came to feel this is one of the more beautiful Metra stations south of the Loop. You get more distance from the city here: close, but not so close that you lose a sense of its stature. The main skyline of the city can be viewed to the to the north of the platform. The imposing residential towers of the South Loop are on one side, and the Museum buildings make up a third.

Above: the sun eclipsed by a building in the South Loop

I do my share of mostly casual endurance sports. Ever since I started running in high school, I have been familiar with the high-profile athletes in this world–especially in long-distance running. Right now one of the foremost athletes of extreme endurance is Kilian Jornet, a Spanish ultrarunner and mountaineer who has been winning some of the hardest distance events in the world for some 15 years.

More recently, however, he has distinguished himself less by his achievements in formal races than by self-designed challenges. Examples include his “Summits of my Life” project, where he attempted and set speed records for high peaks (Mont Blanc, Denali, etc.) on various continents, and his just-announced “States of Elevation” project, in which he will climb 40 or more of the highest peaks in the US spanning from Colorado to Washington state, travelling only by bike between each peak, several thousand miles in total. To add to the demand, he aims to do it all in less than a month.

It’s obviously an exhausting and demanding challenge, that much harder to assess because it’s never been done before. And since Jornet not competing against anyone else, how would one measure this effort? Probably by whether he completes the challenge at all, under the limitations he sets out for himself.

I will follow his progress, and of course be impressed by some of the numbers he puts up: by his pace running on trails at high altitude, by the number of miles run and biked day after day, etc. I can respect the artistry in designing your own event. Extreme distance running has this basic conceptual problem: you could always go further. And for the endurance athlete, the experiences of most events–even the traditional distances and competitions–is mostly that of a competition against oneself: can I be convinced to go a little faster, for a little longer? Jornet’s evolution as an athlete has something of a final frontier quality to it. By deciding not to run a regular race over a repeatable course and distance, it’s as if he’s saying: “I will define what long–really long–means for me.” The athlete not only runs the event, he has the chance to interpret it. Most athletic achievements have a “stands-for-itself” quality. Athletes are famously–maybe necessarily–inarticulate. But not here: Jornet has to tell us why this combination of feats is important. There is also a chance for the spectators of the event to evolve in their understanding as the event happens. Long distance sports are also slow motion sports: we have a chance to change our view of them as they unfold.

A lot of great writing is about being in the right place at the right time. And achieving that is usually not an accident. Some writers are so obviously on another level at finding the right subject, at the right moment in history, and knowing how the specific details relate to some kind of story. Ever since I read Anne Applebaum’s book on the Soviet Gulag system, I have thought that she was one of those writers.

She has a new piece out this week in the Atlantic on latest chapter of war in Sudan: “The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth”:

The end of the liberal world order is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in conference rooms and university lecture halls in places like Washington and Brussels. But in al-Ahamdda, this theoretical idea has become reality. The liberal world order has already ended in Sudan, and there isn’t anything to replace it.

If you want to write well about something, it helps a lot to have firsthand knowledge. Sometimes all the imagination and descriptive powers in the world can’t make up the difference, and this piece is a great example of that. Applebaum recently travelled twice to Sudan this year, in what must be one of the most dangerous places to visit. She describes getting stranded in the desert near the end of her trip, watching a jeep filled with unidentified gun-toting militia approach her small group in the dark. One of them happened to be related to her guide: “In a lawless world,” she writes, “you are perfectly safe as long as your relatives are the ones in charge.”

About a week ago, I took a look outside my bedroom window, aimlessly, and saw a hummingbird. It hovered, then zipped, toward the branches of a nearby tree. For a few seconds I wasn’t sure what I was seeing–if I had even seen a bird at all. Then I saw that the bird was still there, and that it was sitting in a nest it had built on a thin descending tree branch, a few feet from the window.

I’ve been checking on it ever since: looking at it through binoculars, photographing it, watching. If the nest were any closer to the building, I wonder if my presence would bother it. Sometimes I think that the bird sees me, is staring back trying to figure out what I am. Mostly–uncharacteristically, for a bird that is always on the move–it sits.

As I watch this creature stay still, waiting for something to happen¹, I keep coming back to life and the acceptance of risk. The wind blows, the tree bends. The branch bounces and sways, tipping the bird and its nest. It could all fall–sometimes these nests do fall–at any time. This bird survives by being fast and nimble in the air, but it has given all of that up. The nest is camouflaged, but it is out in the open. I have seen hawks perch on this tree. Other hummingbirds approach her territory.

The nest could be a small risk, an average risk, compared to the 500 mile migration it will soon undertake, across the Gulf of Mexico.

On the relationship of bots to text and language:

If I am to understand these bots as “thinking things”¹, then their thinking substance is the text, words.

Yes, bots can ingest images, produce video, and speak back to me with a synthetic voice. But, for the moment, they still stake most of their claim to intelligence on their facility with language. More specifically, on the written text, to which these models are indebted for their origins. Large language models would be inconceivable without the collected work of the textual internet.

Text is the interface that I use to converse with bots, to enter into a back and forth with an Other, and to come to know it.² I type things, they answer back. In short order we have an essay–mostly from the bot’s side. They have the capacity for a speed of reply and volume of text that exceeds anything I could have produced on my own. Intelligence–in the “Turing Test” sense of that word–is an effect, a performance that the machine pulls off. One reason that people credit these bots with intelligence may be that they produce so much text, so fast. You could write a history of Western literacy according to its accelerating rate of textual production: from single characters and words etched on tablets by hours of human labor, to millions of fully-formed pseudo-reports slopped out every second by data centers filled with GPUs.

I wonder a lot these days about how the automated production of text is changing everyone’s relationship to it. Even before the bot explosion, it would have been arcane to point out that writing–the written word– was a technology. In a historical moment with mass literacy and information explosion, ordinary human labor had already produced more than enough text to render it unremarkable. Fifty years ago, even, it would have been ludicrous to attach any kind of fascination to the mere appearance of a text, as if writing itself was exceptional. If anything the ontological status of the text had flipped. Maximalist pursuits like advertising spread text across every possible surface: the empty air, the bottom of the ocean. Writing had moved closer to the status of litter, another form of spoilage by human development. Another definition of nature: the absence of text. Text had become just another efficient vehicle for information, competing with other media.

John Guillory, imagining new prospects for humanities PhDs no longer in the profession:

I argued further in my MLA paper that the best way to accomplish this goal is to introduce graduate students to as many alumni of the system as are willing and able to speak to them about their careers after graduate school. Many of these alumni, we know, did not get tenure-track jobs but escaped the trap of adjunct labor; many are now employed in nonacademic professions. Let us invite them to return and tell us what they got from their experience in graduate school. Many of these former students do not regret having spent time working on a doctorate, whatever the benefit of the credential in their later working life. But to the graduate schools they have left behind, it is as though they disappeared from the face of the earth once they entered new professions. This is a waste, the loss of considerable talent and passion to a diaspora.39

Can these former students maintain a relation to literary study without the organization of the profession, without the structure of graduate school? To ask this question is to put the intellectual seriousness of the literary disciplines to the test. Literary study in its disciplinary form obviously cannot be separated from the organizational structures of the university and the departments of which it is composed. But it is surely within the power of these departments to reconnect with former students and bring them into contact with graduate students currently in the system. To do so would be to enlarge, in small increments, the sphere of intellectuality by tapping the intellectual sociability in the corps of former graduate students. There is no reason why intellectual engagement with literature has to exist only in the form of a profession, however gratifying professional life may be, however abundantly scholarship has thrived within the academy. I gesture here to the realm of what Merve Emre calls the “paraliterary,” all those sites where literary study is cultivated outside the purview of graduate education.40 At these sites one might find long-standing projects such as the “medical humanities,” but the more promising locations in this context are less disciplinarily organized. These are sites (for the most part) of intellectual exchange on the internet, new versions of “little magazines,” such as n+1, or of journals such as The Point, as well as the now vast proliferation of blogs on cultural matters, some of which host high-level exchanges.41 Such sites disclose the widespread desire for an engagement with literature and culture that is more serious than the habits of mass consumption and that demands new genres and forms of discourse.

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