This is pointless

& maybe that's why I love it

Dear friends,

This is my 35th Substack newsletter, and really what is the point. Avoiding or unsubscribing from email newsletters is one of the only paths to happiness left in the modern world, so it beats me why I’m adding weekly cobblestones to the Path of the Newsletter. Of course, there is very little news in these cobbled-together newsletters of mine, since I find the miserable practice of typing self-promotional event advertisements on par with the misery of reading them. If these are not really newsletters, then what are they, and by what standard should I judge them? (As Ayn Rand reminds us, one must never fail to pronounce moral judgment.)

Oh, never mind, it doesn’t do us any good to label these much of anything. Call them letters for now, since that absolves me of the news portion. These letters go out to about 600 people. On average one person writes something to me in response to each letter, so clearly the point is not a Conversation with the Masses. Oddly enough, this more closely resembles a letter to a single individual. I write to them, and they write back. But in this case, if you catch my drift, I’m not sure which individual I’m writing to, I’m writing to all 600, and I only find out whom I’m writing to when that person writes to me. Let me repeat that: for each (news)letter, I’m essentially writing to only one person, but I don’t at first know who they are.

I find this very exciting and mysterious.

My friend Elliot, when I was musing last year about restarting my Wicked Delicate newsletter after a decade of dormancy, suggested Substack as the platform. He has about 23,000 subscribers. I don’t know much about Substack but in trying to figure out how many subscribers I had just now, I found another pile of statistics that I hadn’t seen before, most of which are incredibly boring. But I found out that I have no subscribers in Nebraska, and that most weeks now only 64% of my subscribers open these emails. If I sent out 600 paper letters in the mail, 216 wouldn’t even get opened, just chucked into the wood stove. That’s OK. Would that my letters were mailed, and could make good tinder. Personally I have 170,000 unread or unopened emails in my own inbox, this is just the way of digital things.

But hmm, last year, when I was just getting going with these letters, it was more like 85% of people opening them. They must be getting worse! Maybe this decline will continue until 0% of subscribers are opening my letters, which I also find very exciting and mysterious. Would I keep writing if I knew no one was reading? Already my number of subscribers, compared to Elliot’s, is essentially zero, and yet most weeks I enjoy sitting down and typing out a few thoughts for an hour.

Real writers must have to think about this all the time. You write a book, you publish it, and then…do you hear from your readers? You give readings in bookstores or auditoriums, and people ask you for an autograph when they buy your book, and they tell you what the book meant to them. That’s what I hear, anyway. It’s akin to our public screenings. But what happens when you write something and it just goes out there as a book or an internet article, somewhere, with no real feedback mechanism? This is like broadcasting on television, or sending a movie to a streamer.

Our film The Search for General Tso was on Netflix for a few years, and I got the sense that a lot of people watched it on there. In fact, I think more people have seen that movie than any of my other movies, even stalwart King Corn, which made quite a hullaballoo when it came out during the heady days of the food movement. Anyway, I was getting my car fixed in western MA one time and the mechanic told me he liked to put the Tso movie on when he was going to sleep at night. He found it comforting. My movie lulled him to sleep. Feedback is feedback.

I mean, who could fall asleep looking at this?

I haven’t heard from anyone yet that my letters put them to sleep, but I would be okay with that. Sleeping is no easy feat for me, even after learning - during The City Dark - from the great Roger Ekirch that humans for centuries apparently slept in two segments, with a period of wakefulness in between. I’ve probably written about Ekirch’s segmented sleep in these letters before, since I try to bring it up at every dinner party I attend, hoping to steer the conversation away from topics where I always flounder, topics such as “Have you heard the latest ______” or “Did you see the Seinfeld episode where______.”

Actually, I subscribe to a Substack that’s a big pile of gossip from the documentary world. I can’t remember what it’s called and I probably only open it 64% of the time, but I find it hilarious fun. It’s lots of name dropping & parties in NY & various people I’ve never heard of getting hired to very super important new positions, gossip for what’s presented as the inner circle of the documentary scene, and it usually sends me packing for a walk in the woods. I don’t know what the point of a newsletter like that is, but it certainly has more news than mine. It probably makes people in the inner circle feel happy and included, and people outside of that inner circle feel unhappy and excluded. Although I’m quite happy to be excluded, so maybe it’s more complex than I thought: maybe I read it to test myself, to see whether I’m happy or unhappy to be on the fringes. Bah, I think there’s more fringe than not in the documentary world, I’m no different than the rest of the wildlings.

So what’s the point of my (news)letters? I don’t think it’s anything fancy or unique. I have an impulse for self-expression, so I write. Sure, I’m lost in the woods of middle age, and constantly puzzled at my own profession, and I like the idea of connecting to a community of friends, but probably the core joy is the collision of relentlessness & pointlessness. I love doing something that I feel compelled to do, without knowing what it’s for. You spend most of your life trying to achieve goals, and fair enough, but the wondrous unknown of doing something without knowing where it will lead — how vanishingly rare. What a monstrous delight.

If I, for example, set a goal of achieving 1,000 subscribers for my Substack, it would initiate a cascade of thoughts about the best way to lure in new readers and Zap! Just like that, the spell would be broken. The fun over. The freedom gone.

What about the opposite, of achieving zero subscribers? Despite my encouragements to unsubscribe, I’d be sad to see everyone go. But my trend line is truly impressive, we’re headed for a 0% open rate in the next 3 years, so I better get used to it. Maybe when this is all over, I’ll go back to writing letters to individual friends instead, and by then I won’t give a hoot if they don’t write back. Maybe my rambling letters could lull a restless friend to sleep, and that’s as good a point as any.