Welcome to my new substack column, which I have named “The Raspberry Patch.” I have called it by this name for three reasons. First, when blogs began more than a quarter century ago, I needed to create one—I was more or less ordered to create one—when I became Editor of The National Interest magazine in early 2001. I called it
“From the Raspberry Patch.” I like orderliness and harmless continuity, so the name of this substack, less just the first word of the original, links back to that first blog. At some point I may shift some of the content of that blog, as appropriate, to this venue. (Same goes for the short writing I was required to do as editor of The American Interest from autumn 2005 through early 2019.) Second, I called that blog “From the Raspberry Patch” because I had by then been growing raspberries—primacane and everybearing varieties—for some time. I grew them mainly for my wife and soulmate Scilla, because she loves them. And third, now many years later I think of myself as a gardener as much or more than I do anything else, so it is appropriate that this column take a name from current (no pun intended, really, since current and currant are spelled differently for obvious reasons) pursuits. (I don’t now grow currants but I may begin soon.)
What’s in a name, famously asked William Shakespeare. I’m no expert on the Bard, but it seems to me he implied an answer by posing the question: a lot, sometimes at least. So raspberries it is, despite my personally being more partial to cherries and plums.
If you are reading this you have a right to know not only the origins of its name, but also why I’m starting a substack. A back-of-the-envelope count comes to six reasons.
First, a lot of friends and peers have suggested I do it, and some of them have their own substack projects on the basis of which they have described to me the joys and satisfactions of so doing. I am as influenced by good counsel as anyone else.
Second, some of them make money from their work, and I can always use more of that, what with no other regular income at age 72 and five grandchildren (with one more in process) to entertain and provide for.
Third, on a substack I have an outlet for all sorts of ideas that I want to share, and that I can share without the mediation of others. I have taught at the university level and (mostly) enjoyed it, and as well as gathering satisfaction from teaching I gain it from learning—so my hope is that reciprocal relationships that may be gained thanks to this project will produce harvests of both types.
I get ideas because I am an unreconstructed thought magazine editor—that, at least, turned out to be a major part of my so-called career, with a few years editing The National Interest and then about 14 years of co-founding and editing The American Interest. People like me are habituated to coming up with ideas, and then, typically, finding appropriately credentialed and experienced others to commute them into finished products. This is what editors-cum-intellectual impresarios do, in addition to curating and ordering these products into coherent packages within and among issues of a magazine. Yes, of course, sometimes authors come up with their own very fine ideas, God bless them; but not always. You might be surprised how many famous essays started out as editors’ ideas pressed, gently or otherwise, upon mostly unsuspecting authors.
So now that I have no magazine platform from which to foist my curiosity onto more competent others, I must render the writing myself, or else let the ideas fall unrequited into the bottomless well of lost possibilities. Perish the thought, so better to publish them, seems to me. I do approach other editors from time to time. I have a piece about to appear in the Australian magazine Quillette—my first with that venue. I am also planning a short piece, with help from a newly acquired colleague, for the Edith Wharton Review, a publication unknown to me just a short while ago. I have eclectic interests, always have, don’t really regret it despite the undeniable disadvantages, and there is, it seems, nothing I can do about it anyway. Said Dorothy Parker, in case you do not know: “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” Right as rain, in my case anyway.
The fourth reason is related to the third: the impatience and self-indulgence that loom over me now at the portal to my curmudgeonly…..phase, let’s call it. I could of course take my ideas turned into prose and peddle them to extant magazines, newspapers, and so on. But then I put myself at the mercy of those whose tastes may differ from mine, and whose strictures may follow editing and style guidelines that frankly have come to annoy me. I am dismayed by the ever-growing ideologization of much journalistic and even scholarly publishing. I am dismayed by its general dumbed-downedness, too, and seemingly willful lack of wit and whimsy. I am dismayed by its narrow definitions of what can and cannot be said insofar as disciplinary boundaries are concerned. I am dismayed by line-editors ravaging my prose as if their ideal of style was the back of a random cereal box.
Some of these doleful developments may be business-model related. Even non-profit operations have to pay attention to market-share, meaning how many people and what sort of people read them. No point in paying for what it costs to run even just an e-zine, not to speak of an actual print publication, if no one reads it. So as deep literacy continues to erode, and not just here in the United States, publications anticipate the reduced standards and tolerances of their readers and dumb-down in anticipation accordingly, which only accelerates the dumbing-down process itself. Trade publishers of books are similarly affected, of course, and are responding similarly as well. I have been toiling now for almost three years on a manuscript tentatively titled The Age of Spectacle—you will hear more of that later if you stick around. I had an agent, a good one, too, near the beginning of this effort. But he could not sell the pitch: too complex, asks too much of the reader, he was serially told. So I was advised to streamline and simplify. I tried. I failed. I then realized that I was being asked, in effect, to construct what was inherently a one-thousand piece jigsaw puzzle by using only four hundred and thirty-five pieces.
Not me. I am struggling with that book manuscript to make it the best it can be, whether it ever gets published or not. I am a great fan of the late Dick Gregory’s advice: “Start with the truth before you tamper with it.” How can I know how to tamper until I have figured out what the truth, in this case, actually is?
I’m tired of the downward spiral of standards and expectations I and others fortunate enough to have been well educated have witnessed now over several decades. I don’t choose to put up with it, and so I won’t. Substack is my escape hatch from all that. I will write long-form if the subject demands it. I will invent neologisms and use wit if I feel like it. I will mix literary insights with policy prescriptions if I want to, since some aspects of human nature can only be properly appreciated through fiction. And if I am thus left with few readers, I am satisfied with that because they will be the right readers. In this I follow one of my mentors, the late Owen Harries, who swore by that credo all the while he edited The National Interest, and he attracted many readers all the same. Owen didn’t know or care much about baseball, but he took a very natural field-of-dreams type approach to thought magazine editing: If you build it, they will come.
The fifth reason, aside from the general benefit of keeping my mind active via the inherently brain-exercising and integrating task of writing, is that it may serve as a kind of journal for my children and grandchildren, so that they will be able to mine a granular sense of what the Old Man was all about after I am no longer vertical. I am not, I think, a particularly morbid person, not like, as David Rieff recently told me, his justly famous father Philip was. But I do fret over the manifest ebbing of intergenerational responsibility in our culture—the moral kind, that is, not the fiduciary kind. That’s one reason why the current crop of environmentalists encourages me, even when some of their tactics and some of science-challenged convictions rub me the wrong way. Some of us, at least, must think of posterity, whose prospective lives certainly do not deserve to bear the full weight of our generations’ irresponsible selfishness.
The sixth and final reason for starting this substack is to tell stories. Kafka once wrote that God created mankind to tell stories. Perhaps so. I’ve got a bunch of ‘em, to be sure, some of them true stories about real people whose names may not be entirely obscure to you. Someone once suggested that my incidental shoulder-brushings with famous people made me something like the Forest Gump of Washington, DC. (I never did see the film, alas, but I take the point anyway even as I demur from its less complimentary implication.) One of my other mentors, the late Harvey Sicherman, taught me the marvelous and self-defining neologism “anecdotage.” I don’ know if Harvey invented this corker himself—he was certainly capable of it—or borrowed it from someone else. Either way, it’s wondrous and hopelessly applicable to me these days. At the audiologist’s office one day just this past week Scilla learned that she needed hearing aids, while the verdict on my “perfect hearing” nearly pushed her to barbed jibes and stiff finger jabs. All it meant to me was that my random impromptu addresses to her, in the kitchen, in the back yard, the front porch, and the sunroom, would need to be delivered a bit louder, and in a somewhat higher tone.
In the end it comes down to taste and temperament, as do most things suspended between the absolutely necessary and the to-be-avoided-at-all-costs. A few will like like it here, and maybe even fork over a few dollars for the privilege of entry and bemused dwelling. Most will not, and that’s fine. After all, it takes a lot of spirals to make a whorl.