A Peak Behind the Curtain

Sausage is made with a lot of, well, sausage.

My notes files and drafts are always considerably larger than any essay, chapter, or column entry I’ll release for publication. I overwrite and overthink and then boil it down and pack it tight into a skin, so that when you eat the hotdog, you are not aware how many calories you are taking in, or what form those may be taking on a chemical level.

I hear I vaguepost a lost on social media, and this is true, but I vaguewrite, too, in general. I am not an explanatory journalist. If I use the inverted pyramid, it is for the opener, it is an opener, and that is all. I will use a three step elementary school essayistic structure or the news item inverted pyramid like a can opener or a punch card. You know I have been there, but the job is not done solely in that act or with that tool.

I owe all who do those tasks wholly and fully and earnestly because without them, I would have to. Somebody has to.

We need summaries. We need capsule reviews. We need promotional materials and simple, delimited monographs and histories. We need line item reviews. Walking tour essays.

We need hay bale maze essays, too. Labyrinths. Solitary confinement cells. Meditation rooms. Rock gardens. Paper walls. Plaster moonscapes.

Without the clean, direct, simplifying-it-down writers, I could not slip whole mountains under the tablecloth and tell you not to pay attention to the peak behind the curtain.

Particularly in light of AI tools replacing real people doing real work, I think vaguewriting takes on new value. Because AI is no good at hinting or allusions. AI is not so useful when it comes to sentences or threads which do double, triple, quadruple duty.

AI, right now, does not do so good when it comes to making a reader do their own research, make their connections.

We can do that.

And, the interesting thing, to me, is that in doing so, the only times I truly see complaints are instances of someone disliking that I have brought up queer things. Anymore, right now, that is it. It’s, “I don’t see why you wrote this,” or “Am I missing parts?” angrily, when it covers queerness, be that trans existence, homoeroticism; the disenfranchisement of women.

Otherwise, people miss things or are unsure, but keep going, or go on about their life.

I think there are things missing in 4/5 of the Los Angeles Times or Los Angeles Review of Books things I read, but I do my own research and I go on about my life.

We mostly all do. We’re smart people.

I can stall out an entire audience with one pun, especially if they learned, sometime, deep in their integrity, that the pun, taken on surface, is always incorrect.

The gag used to be that machine intelligences wouldn’t be able to parse or use contractions. The reality seems to be more that some machines, like some people, refuse to process anything they are trained to disregard as processable.

But, we aren’t writing for them.