C and I drove through my neighborhood. The leaves were dead, the houses ornate, the air was crisp.
“I just…didn’t love it.”
Taylor Swift’s newest album Midnights was not playing on the speakers. We hadn’t deigned to turn it on, the 10-minute version of “All Too Well” bathing the interior instead with regret, nostalgia, and unrequited vindictiveness. It was November, anyway. Certified Red season. We didn’t need Midnights muddying those sacred waters with its tepid beats and lackluster lyrics. A tired output from a tireless performer. I was displeased. And let C know about it all the way to the movies.
“It’s just, I know it sounds stupid, but I thought this was gonna be my album, you know? Like my Taylor Swift album. The aesthetic was all there - love the Mary Tyler Moore office chic look she was going for. And yeah, whatever, the lottery ball thing was gimmicky, but she is such a good marketer. Like SUCH a good marketer. Half of creative work is just getting it in front of other eyeballs. You can’t create in a vacuum. Well, Emily Dickinson did, but she shouldn’t have. Anyway, loved the look, loved the vibe, but the production was soooooo- god I hate when I quote Internet language but the album was so mid. Mid, oh my god, I sound like a thirteen year old boy. Mid. Eugh. But that’s the best way I can describe it. Aggressively average. I’m assuming that’s what the kids mean when they say it, but yeah.”
We hadn’t even hit peak Taylor yet. Matty Healy hadn’t crawled back up from whatever sewer he resides in while the sun is out. Travis Kelce was a twinkle in the eye. Joe Alwyn was there though. Still. Still there. Hanging.1
The cracks had started to emerge on the facade of Taylor Swift, soulful artist. Two re-releases had come out prior to Midnights: Fearless and Red.2 Two more were on the horizon: Speak Now and 1989.3 All recorded, presumably, around the same time as the squeaky clean new one. Five albums in two-ish years is impossible to fathom. Sure, four of them had already been written, but she needed to devote time to their refreshment: inject with Easter eggs, devastate with new bridges, collab on vault tracks with up-and-coming indie artists/established 00s-era pop punk bands. Not to mention execute the marketing campaigns for said albums: TV appearances, social media posts, Scooter Braun digs. That’s a lot to worry about while writing your newest album. “Newest album” underlying a steady maturity as an artist, expanded oeuvre of themes and sounds, maybe a drastic risk or two. Or several. How can you innovate when you spend your time selling your old selves back to the masses, repackaged and upcharged?
But this hustle, this constant drive, this refusal to rest is why Swift is where she is. Not because of the quality of her work, oh no. Only some of her music speaks for itself, away from the pap walks and football games and roster of celebrity friendships. “no body, no crime” is a lightning bottle of storytelling, but could a career of tracks like that ensure her cultural domination? Would they have placed her on the warpath to unconquerable heights, the Genghis Khan of pop girlie superstardom? No. Only the shrieking of ME EEEE EEEEEEEE could accomplish that. Banal Top 40 hits fund the “real” stuff.
The ouroboros has swallowed its tail. In her quest for omnipresence, Swift has diluted her most recent art into platitude. Introspection takes time. Introspection requires honing, crafting, chipping away. Swift merely reacts now, her songs a knee jerk instead of an exploration. She is so immersed with the project of Most Famous Woman on the Planet that she has lost the self-reflection needed for songwriting. And why wouldn’t she? She’s been rewarded by this loss tenfold over, and she’ll be remembered as a titan amidst gods long after oblivion has settled over the Earth. Who cares about flops when the machine keeps chugging along, cementing a legacy with every release from the conveyor belt of hits. A hollow legacy, but a legacy nonetheless. What do you have to say for yourself, huh? What have you achieved in your paltry life, sitting on your bed, scrolling the seconds away? What have you done? What will you do? What can even happen at this point?
I am worried I am out of time. Yes, Hamilton is gauche, I know, sue me!, but Mr. Manuel Miranda really hit me with the little “why are you writing like you’re running out of time” chant. I don’t do that. I don’t do that! I don’t do that and I feel awful because that’s how creativity is supposed to go, right? Like you are an untapped well full of fireworks, bursting with ideas that must be captured before they swim away, the Muses’ flash like a minnow in the stream.
My discipline is sluggish. I write like I’m immortal, eons to go before I need to publish something of worth, put something of value out into the universe. I’m scared that, exhausted by my jobs and daunted by the complexities of world-building, I’ll get so overwhelmed that I’ll stop altogether. I mean, why stop there? Why did I go through with any of this in the first place?4
Shut up. Pick up the pace. If I try hard enough, I could make an army of AI ghostwriters and become the next James Patterson, cementing myself in the zeitgeist through extreme fertility. But I could also become the next James Patterson, scam artist and cultural punchline. Excellence requires patience, durability, and time without limits. Whoever slapdashed a masterpiece? George Eliot wrote an entire macrocosm of an English community in the 834-paged Middlemarch. Emile Zola has his 20-book-long Les Rougon-Macquart cycle. Ever heard of the BIBLE?
How to balance? The value of “eras'' versus the prestige of quality. I suppose the answer, unattainable to literally all of us, is be Ursula K. Le Guin. One of my favorite writers, Le Guin wrote “23 novels, 12 volumes of short stories, 11 volumes of poetry, 13 children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation.”5 An enormous amount. An obscene amount. And she’s regarded as one of the best science fiction & fantasy writers of all time because of this breadth and depth. How? How did she accomplish this dilemma, this impossible feat? Produce a large volume of high quality works. Not to mention she began her illustrious career raising three kids in the 50s and 60s. The 50s! And 60s! For godssakes! Housewife valium years of childrearing. That’s fucking crazy, to be prolific in a time and with circumstances like that. I wanted to know more, absolutely everything, about her work ethic - it just had to be made out of titanium.
This interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books broadened my perspective.What stood out to me the most was her mixture of practicality and joy as she confronted the grunt work of writing. When asked how she paced herself, she stated that she “did not work on a deadline” and “never promised a book,” yet trudged up to her attic every night after her kids went to sleep and wrote diligently until midnight. Even when she was exhausted. Over and over and over again. The source of this drive? Happiness (if you can believe it!) Simple and effective. She loved writing, she loved her writing, and she set aside the time to engage in it despite all the chaos that inevitably came up in her life.
Trying to rethink my mentality along these lines, and this particular quote from her pushes me in the right direction:
“One of the troubles with our culture is we do not respect and train the imagination. It needs exercise. It needs practice. You can’t tell a story unless you’ve listened to a lot of stories and then learned how to do it.”
A beautiful approach to everything: sourcing, craft, outlining, putting the goddamn nose to the grindstone. And I see how hard she “practiced her imagination” while reading books from earlier in her career versus later on in her life. I’ve read the first three novels in her Earthsea saga, and while those were fantastic, they pale in comparison to her final novel Lavinia. The way Le Guin pulls from ancient Roman history and classical literature, imbues them with the vitality of fiction, and then envelops her story in a metatextual contemplation of the creation of art itself? Breathtaking. And how could this have been written if Le Guin hadn’t lived a full life of excavation? Reading, watching, listening, writing it all down?Practice practice practice.
There are no perfect conditions to write. I need to accept that. I must. Sometimes you just have to push through a diabolical heat wave with no AC, one hour of sleep because your newborn kept you up all night, the daily hopelessness regarding the state of the world. Embrace the cobwebs that muddle the mind and persevere.
Not to pit two women against each other, a grievance that can only be rectified by the enforcement of the Geneva Convention, but Le Guin’s philosophy on productivity is more sustainable in a world that hammers the Taylor Swift Work Ethic over our heads. It is comforting to know that a Colossus of literature, lionized to a beatific degree6, took her goddamn time. But still made the time nonetheless. I love her outlook. Obsessed with it. She kept going, little by little, absorbing what she needed from the outside so she could fine-tune her work in the nightly attic sessions. Productivity isn’t an albatross around the neck when we can idealize it as a mechanism towards personal contentment. Slow and steady wins the race. So they say. Gotta keep that perspective.
What I’m Watching (because I’m still reading One Hundred Years of Solitude AND Las Madres.)
Showing Up, dir. Kelly Reichardt
My first Reichardt film and LOVEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!! Love love love love love. Weirdly coincides perfectly with this post as the plot follows the banalities of life problems getting in the way of making art. The slower pacing works very well with the beats of the narrative. Reichardt has a beautiful visual eye, camerawork is top tier, André 3000 is in it AND contributed his flute to the soundtrack????? Perfect. No notes. Michelle Williams and Hong Chau are fantastic (subtle quiet acting that is still powerful and emotionally resonant? yes please!)
Also (so silly lol) it’s my birthday tomorrow!!!! I’m actually very excited about turning twenty-six/getting older in general (I mean…it can only go up from here). Second half of my twenties here I come!! Will be celebrating by dogsitting, buying a piece of chocolate fudge cake, and renting Bottoms (in Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott we trust 🙏). Hope you’ve had a lovely Cancer season so far, thank you so so much for reading.
1
I really don't mean to sound shady, he seems like a lovely guy, I just have absolutely nothing else to say about him lol
2
yes yes, (taylor's version), i know
3
IT'S (TAYLOR'S VERSION) STOP YELLING AT ME
4
attention. duh!
5
https://www.ursulakleguin.com/biography
6
at least in MY mind - "went platinum in my house" etc.