A stereoscope card of Vienna’s Ringstraße from 1898

Robert Musil’s unfinished modernist epic The Man Without Qualities is one of those literary ‘masterpieces’ of the 20th century that people mean to read one day but never get around to skimming for more than a chapter or two. I’ve seen the Knopf two volume boxed-set on bookshelves for years–I mean, when people still have bookshelves; the apartments I go to lately have a lot of Ottolenghi cookbooks, and that’s about it–but the novel is untouched, an aspiration or a thwarted ambition rather than book to freely live with. I can understand why the novel and all its heady, high-modernist ironies can seem like a lot to take on; but I can tell you as someone who has taken on Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (well, a lot of The Man Without Qualities, anyway) over and over again, it’s a ridiculously fun reading experience, and it’s about something very fundamental: how to live.

In this way, The Man Without Qualities has more in common with Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, or Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, than it does with other ‘difficult’ modernist novels from the 20th Century that people aspire to read one day, like James Joyce’s Ulysses.

I’m going to try something new this winter break and offer a special 5-week course on Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. I’ve taught the book before at different levels, but this will be a condensed “deep” read of Volume One of the Sophie Wilkins/Burton Pike translation for Knopf from 1996, which includes the first two volumes of the novel Musil published in his lifetime, ‘A Sort of Introduction’ and ‘Pseudo Reality Prevails.’ That second phrase alone: ‘pseudo reality prevails.’ I hear it in my ear every time I see Marjorie Taylor Greene in my news feed, or when Ye pulls on his black hood for another interview with a white conspiracy profiteer.

The class will use a free and easy-to-navigate platform for communication, sharing files, and keeping up with the weekly reading assignments : Google Classroom. [UPDATE: after experimenting with a few different platforms, I have started a private Substack for the class. Once you join, I’ll send an invitation.] We’ll also meet on Zoom three times, and I’ll be preparing a few audio lectures on specialized subject areas. Since the novel is so deliberately set in the Vienna of the Ringstraße, the Secession movement and its Art Nouveau totality, the thriving literary culture of Cafe Griensteidl and other haunts, we’ll touch on some of the novel’s cultural influences, including:

Freud and the dreamwork of early psychoanalysis.
The literary feuilleton and its masters: Peter Altenberg, Joseph Roth.
The aphorisms and political satire of Kark Kraus.
The Secession Building in Vienna and Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze.
Atonal music, esp. Alban Berg and his opera “Wozzeck.”
Architect Adolf Loos and his modernist reaction against ornament–we’ll look closely at his highly problematic design (unbuilt) of a home in Paris for Josephine Baker, featuring an indoor swimming pool with glass sides, to showcase her swimming body.

A digital rendering of Loos’s design for an interior swimming pool for Josephine Baker, by Stephen Atkinson and Farès el-Dahdah.

I’ve also commissioned new translations of some phenomenally unsettling short prose pieces by the feminist experimental writer known only as “El Hor” or “El Ha,” who had a meteorically brief career–her identity has never been uncovered by scholars. She even signed her publishing contracts with her pseudonyms.

This background material will be presented in compelling ways, and any additional reading, looking, or listening will be purely optional. This course is designed to help guide your own reading of The Man Without Qualities, to ease your journey through Vol.1 and open up the vanished world of the novel.

There are just two required books:

Musil’s first novel, The Confusions of Young Törless (translated by Mike Mitchell), Oxford World’s Classics, ISBN 978-0199669400 ($13).

The Man Without Qualities, Vol. 1: A Sort of Introduction and Pseudo Reality Prevails (translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike), Vintage, ISBN 978-0679767879 ($25).

It’s essential that you purchase these editions and not the alternate translations that are floating around. You’ll have to order these books on your own before the class starts, preferably from your local independent bookseller or through Bookshop.

The course will begin with a ‘soft launch’ on January 9, 2023, for those who’d like to start the New Year by reading Musil’s first novel, Young Törless. Let’s call this first week a ‘sort of introduction,’ too. Registration for the class will remain open during this optional week.

Then the rest of the class will begin with five weekly installments dedicated to The Man Without Qualities, from January 16 until February 20.

I will be scheduling the Zoom meetings closer to the start date.

The cost for the class is $250, payable by Venmo, Zelle or personal check before January 9 or January 16 (depending when you begin). There is a discount for senior citizens and for students. I can also offer you a discount if you’re facing economic stress. I am keeping the cost of this class low so that it’s accessible to as many readers as possible.

If you have any questions or you’d like to register, send me an email at manwithoutqualitiesclass@gmail.com. I can also be reached on my Facebook page.

And spread the word if you know a reader who might be interested.

Robert Musil in 1918, Literaturmuseum Klagenfurt

“I know how to die. I have been dying since I was little. And it hurts but we pretend it doesn’t. I miss God so badly.”

Clarice Lispector, “Brasília: Five Days,” translated by Katrina Dodson

I’ve been a writer and a semi-regular book critic for long enough now that I rarely meet a piece of writing that I can’t classify, pretty much immediately, under one of the existing literary forms. What does it mean? I can struggle over this question—and the more struggle the better, I think—for as long as I have an ongoing relationship with something that I’ve read. Do I think it’s any good? I’m rarely won over slowly, especially when it comes to more literary writing; I don’t need love at first sentence, but I do need to detect a spark of life from the outset that promises a re-ordering of the reader’s expectations. Some evidence of things unseen, as the famous line of scripture goes. Why keep on reading if the only promise a book holds within its covers is to reveal the author’s design in a mind-numbingly literal way? (This is why I’ve never been able to enjoy Ian McEwan. Sorry, but to me his fiction is overly plodding and determined to death at the writing desk.)

For the last month or so, while working on a review of The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector, the visionary Brazilian writer who’s in the midst of a revival in the U.S., I’ve been captivated by the strangeness of her work, the difficulty it presents to anyone who approaches it—out of laziness, or reflex—with a binary, “either/or” mindset. Lispector is a writer who used metafictional techniques from her earliest stories onward that Robbe-Grillet and the other practitioners of the nouveau roman thought they had invented—but she was nothing like a doctrinaire post-modernist. She diagnosed the symptoms of “the problem that has no name” in her well-heeled female characters (again, long before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique appeared in the U.S.)—but there’s little else that makes her work overtly feminist. Her novels are essentially plotless, almost exclusively interior, and they have more in common with Hermann Hesse than they do with the writers of the Latin American “Boom” (García Márquez, Fuentes, etc.), a movement that coincided with the years of her greatest fame in Brazil. Then there are the pieces of her writing that are almost undefinable, like the twin crônicas Lispector wrote in 1962 and 1974 after visiting Brasília, the Modernist insta-Capital dreamed up by urban planner Lúcio Costa and populated with mirage-like landmark buildings by the architect Oscar Niemeyer.

There wasn’t enough space in the review to talk about Lispector’s Brasília essays—I’m calling them “essays” out of default; they’re really more like prayers-in-prose, or prophetic language hallucinations—and since I still don’t know what they are, really, aside from being fucking brilliant in every way, I thought I would try and get closer to the bottom of them here.

This is Brasília as it looks from above today; you can see the playful, airplane-inspired shape of Costa’s master plan, which is both an homage to the Jet Age (the city was built, from scratch, between 1957 and 1960) and a reference to the means of transport that made the everyday workings of a capital deep in Brazil’s interior possible. Costa’s plan for Brasília, a lynchpin of President Juscelino Kubitschek’s larger “Plano de Metas” to modernize the country under new and more progressive Socialist ideals, was based on the principles for the “functional city” that Le Corbusier and others set forth in The Athens Charter (1933). The Machine Age, Le Corbusier believed, had brought “chaos” to the city by causing overcrowding, unsanitary living conditions, and putting automobiles on roads meant for foot traffic, carriage horses, and mules. Slums had taken over the historical city centers, workers lived in the shadows of smoke-spewing factories, and wealth had concentrated in the greener, more desirable precincts.

The solution was a purely rational urban plan that recognized the four “functions” of the city—dwelling (that is, housing); recreation; work; transportation—and brought them into better harmony. Residential towers that saw no distinction between rich and poor would be optimally placed, surrounded by buffer zones of open green space that let in sunlight and fresh air; plenty of parks, forests, beaches and sports complexes would provide the population with a respite from the built environment; long commutes from the suburbs to the workplace would be eliminated; arteries would be built for the necessary cars and trucks, while pedestrians moved on segregated walkways. “The city,” the Charter read, “should assure both individual liberty and the benefits of collective action on the spiritual and material planes.”

Clarice Lispecter, a devout individualist who scaled the spiritual plane to the apex about as often as she must have gone to the supermarket, was the perfect writer to decode this new utopian capital in the heart of Brazil. Her essays on the city, titled “Brasília” and “Brasília: Splendor” in The Complete Stories, are a kind of travel writing—but it’s inner-travel, rather than the usual tourist sights and exterior descriptions, that interests her. You’ll learn virtually nothing about Brasília that might aid you as a traveler there yourself by reading the essays, but you’ll get a remarkable record of what it meant for Lispector’s soul to encounter the new capital—in free-associative bursts of prose that hang together in a taut succession, like stars in a constellation. (“Stars, starts, I pray,” Lispector wrote in her novel Near to the Wild Heart. “The word splinters between my teeth into fragile shards. Because the rain does not fall inside of me. I want to be a star.” Translation by Alison Entrekin.)

Lispector’s first essay on Brasília, written in 1962, when the city was still blindingly new, opens by comparing its creation to the most audacious creative stroke of all: when God made the world. It is an audacious opening gambit in its own right, matching the monumental ambitions of the State’s project and returning it to scale. Lispector writes,

Brasília is constructed on the line of the horizon. Brasília is artificial. As artificial as the world must have been when it was created. When the world was created, a man had to be created especially for the world. We are all deformed by our adaptation to the freedom of God. We don’t know how we would be if we had been created first and the world were deformed after our requirements.

The opening statement, “Brasília is constructed on the line of the horizon,” places the city at a forever-like distance. It is a mirage on the horizon, shimmering there, like one of Marco Polo’s fanciful iterations of Venice in Calvino’s Invisible Cities. (A novel that wouldn’t appear in Italian until 1972.) From the very outset of the essay, then, Brasília is unreachable. It will never be found by the traveler—maybe I should call Lispector a “pilgrim” instead—despite all the subsequent language devoted to the task of finding it. It is the God who never appears. “Brasília is artificial.” This is Lispector’s next declaration. It records the simple fact that the city has been planned and seeded out of nothing; one of the goals behind the theory of the rational city was to “de-familiarize” the city as an entity, to make it strange again. Lispecter knew and understood this. But then she took Costa’s de-familiarization one leap further: “As artificial as the world must have been when it was created.” She creates a parallel between the State’s planting of a new capital deep in the rural interior, complete with a Modernist Brazilian National Congress building and a palace for the President, with God’s creation of the world—the same world that we use as the basis for all of our material facts. Does this parallel make our world less stable, or Brasília into a monumental folly? The folly of men who bungle their way into doing God’s work? Lispector only takes us deeper into the mystery of Brasília with the lines that follow about God’s freedom and man’s contortions to adapt to Him. Brasília is a kind of revolt against God’s sovereignty, and yet we are supplicants, not makers, so we are never quite at home in the little Worlds we create. The city is human Creation.

I’m not going to play the spoiler here and rob anyone of the pleasures that Lispector’s Brasília essays offer to a first-time reader by quoting them at length or analyzing them any further. They are wholly singular pieces of writing, about a city made of curves and upturned bowls and perfectly symmetrical concrete towers that unsettled and inspired one of the least rational major writers of the 20th Century. “I know there is a hidden hour,” Lispector wrote, “when manna descends and moistens the lands of Brasília.” That hidden hour arrives when you start the essays and enter a mind that wasn’t governed by the very man-like worship of all that can be measured.

I handled the inevitable pause before hearing back as well as I could. I left the house and went to the gym. I took the subway into Manhattan and spent some time with my favorite paintings at the old MoMA or the Frick. When I logged onto the internet, using my dial-up connection, and finally got the edit back from whoever I was writing the review for, I would immediately plunge into a fugue state of anger and recrimination—a kind of spell that I have associated with the computer screen ever since. They wanted me to cut what from my review? How could they? Didn’t they know I WROTE IT THAT WAY DELIBERATELY? And who told them they could just go in and muck around with my hard-won sentences?

I hated to be edited at that time in my life—it felt like a much deeper violation than it is—but I also loved to publish. So I seethed, cringed, and fumed away the hours that it took me to finish my rewrite. I haggled smaller points, argued larger ones, and, in general, made a nuisance of myself to editors who had a lot more experience at book reviewing than I did. And when the review was published soon afterwards, it was almost always stronger and more cogent than the piece I had originally handed in—I can think of a few exceptions to this rule, but not many. The reviews of mine I find unreadable now when I dredge them up online all bear the marks of my weaknesses as a writer, the faults of neurological habit and blind-spots of imagination, rather than the telltale signs of bad editing.

This is all prelude to an outtake I’m publishing here from my recent piece for The New Republic, “Teaching the Controversy,” about a class on Richard Wright and James Baldwin that I taught last fall at Bennington College. I was already working on the essay—or trying to work on it, anyway—when President Obama gave his speech in Selma, Alabama commemorating the 50th anniversary of the first march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It was a powerful moment, watching the Obama speak that day, John Lewis and the other surviving marchers sitting to his side, the iron bridge looming behind him; from certain camera angles, the name EDMUND PETTUS was hovering right over the President’s head. Pettus, of course, was a former Confederate Army General and Grand Wizard of the Klan in Alabama who was elected to the U.S. Senate twice during Reconstruction. In my essay, I write about how teaching a class on Wright and Baldwin in the post-Ferguson era helped me see, among other things, that it was Wright—with his education in the Jim Crow South and segregated north—who really knew America when it came to race. Baldwin’s doctrine of love is harder to reconcile with the legacy of racism and white supremacy that’s been unmasked all over again by the Obama presidency. Unmasked, that is, for those of us who don’t already have to negotiate it on a regular basis; who can remain, to use a word that Baldwin found so monstrous, “innocent.”

All of this was on my mind when I opened the first draft of my Wright and Baldwin essay with a long passage (about 800 words) on the march on Selma and the Obama presidency. I can see now that this discussion of the Selma speech doesn’t belong in the essay. My editor, Ted Ross, who I’d worked with once before at Harper’s Magazine, was quite right to cut it. When I was younger, I would have trembled with rage. I would have fired off a tortured email and used the only leverage I thought I had by threatening to pull the piece. (To which every editor in history has replied, “Sorry you feel that way. Best of luck placing it elsewhere.”) Now, with the benefit of experience, I wrote Ted: “I figured you would cut the opening. No problem. Let me look at the rest of the edits and get back to you.” It was a classic example of first-draft throat-clearing, and the essay is much stronger without the passage.

All of us write alone, in a vacuum of our own making; being edited, when it’s done well, frees us from the solipsism of self-flattery and the attachments that form so easily at the writing desk.

Here is the Selma opening—in all its discarded glory:

When President Obama gave his speech in Selma, Alabama on March 7th to commemorate the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” and the civil rights marches that led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the symbolism of the day was as powerful as his political oratory. There, looming at the President’s back, was Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a former general in the Confederate army and Grand Dragon in the Klu Klux Klan who was elected twice to the U.S. Senate during Reconstruction. Now it was backdrop for a visit by the nation’s first black President, complete with his sleek traveling podium, the twin teleprompters that give his more conspiracy-minded critics fits, and plenty of black draping to help with the optics. In 1965, the Edmund Pettus Bridge had delivered orderly rows of non-violent marchers into an ambush by Alabama State Troopers and the Dallas County “deputies” who enforced Jim Crow with blunt force, many of them on horseback. President Obama, seizing the role of storyteller-in-chief—just what many of his supporters, including the novelist Junot Diaz, have been urging Obama to do more forcefully since the doldrums of his first term—honored the civil-rights marchers of Selma this way:

We gather here to celebrate them. We gather here to honor the courage of ordinary Americans willing to endure billy clubs and the chastening rod; tear gas and the trampling hoof; men and women who despite the gush of blood and splintered bone would stay true to their North Star and keep marching towards justice.

The President’s speech at Selma has been widely hailed as the finest he has delivered while in office. It is novelistic at times, like when Obama describes the scene early that March morning as John Lewis, who would lead that first doomed march from Selma, arrived at Brown Chapel to find it already full of young people with backpacks and bedrolls for the four-day’s journey to Montgomery, the state capital. A doctor was on hand to brief them on the effects of tear gas; movement veterans drilled the newcomers on “the tactics of nonviolence.” The marchers took comfort in these verses from the United Methodist Hymnal, which they sang aloud:

No matter what may be the test, God will take care of you; Lean, weary one, upon His breast, God will take care of you.

These and other touches throughout make the Selma speech easily the most literary of the President’s major addresses and remind us that his memoir, Dreams From My Father, is the work of a politician who is really a writer at heart. From the hymns to the movement’s protest songs, from the Declaration of Independence to Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus,” from James Baldwin and Langston Hughes to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, Obama ranges through the canon of our National identity to make a case for the enduring impulse—he calls it “instinct”—that leads Americans of every race, gender, economic status and sexual orientation to keep perfecting the union promised in the country’s founding documents and confront injustice wherever it persists.

“If we want to honor the courage of those who marched that day,” Obama insists, “then all of us are called to possess their moral imagination.”

His speech is a call to action for the next generation to take up the mantle laid down in Selma and keep marching; a stinging rebuke to a Republican opposition that has questioned his citizenship, lobbed insults from the House floor (“You lie!”), accused him of “Kenyan anti-colonial behavior,” wagged a finger at him on the tarmac in Arizona, shut down the government rather than fund his healthcare plan, invited a foreign leader to give a speech against U.S. foreign policy in the halls of Congress, sent an open letter to the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran to try an undermine a historic nuclear deal while it was being negotiated. Standing in the shadow of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, it was clear the President felt a kinship with the Americans who had marched that day in Selma and in the days and weeks that followed, both black and white—who inflamed the forces of the white supremacist South into revealing to the world just what kind of darkness they harbored in their inmost hearts.

“Can we pray together, you and I?” a young protester named Jimmy Webb asked a Deputy Sheriff in Selma when he barred Webb and his group of protesters from trying to get to the County Courthouse from Brown Chapel, which had been barricaded by law enforcement. Webb was small and scrawny, dressed in a clean white shirt, and he stood up to the Deputy and his officers with a quiet dignity that seems almost unfathomable now. A single news camera—the cellphone camera of its day—captured it all for posterity.

“You do your prayer and I do mine, big boy,” the Deputy Sherriff answered Webb. “You don’t pray for me—“ His temper flared and he leaned in menacingly. “I don’t want you to pray for me!”

Watching President Obama’s speech in Selma on my laptop the other day, both lanes of traffic on the bridge standing empty behind him, I thought of a line from Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: A Lyric, another statement on the racial divide in America that makes extensive use of Baldwin:

That’s the bruise the ice in the heart was meant to ice.

If you’ve read the essay on LARB, you already know what I think. The museum, to me, is another example of how 9/11, having no precedent in recent American history, has short-circuited the institutions entrusted to respond to it, inspiring epic over-reactions (the Homeland Security Advisory System, the invasion of Iraq, data mining by the NSA, etc.) and blunders so elaborate that they hardly seem real.

This is One World Trade Center, or, as I refer to it in the essay, One Air-Freshener. The nickname is fairly recent. During my teaching year (September to the end of May) I drive past Ground Zero once a week when I’m heading back to Brooklyn from Vermont. That means that for the last two years, I’ve been watching the new tower being completed from close up. It’s weirdly stubby looking for a building so tall, and the crown on top, which I compare to an upside-down Tilt-a-Whirl in the essay, looks like it was photoshopped on as a joke by an underling at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. But it’s the slots near the top of the tower (they recently acquired some red sheathing for visual accent) that seem like the oddest design feature to me, and they inspired the nickname. For months, while I gazed up at the building from my car, I couldn’t figure out what the slots reminded me of and why they looked so out of place. But then it hit me: the grids at the top, no matter what their purpose, make the tower look like a giant air-freshener. David Childs, the architect at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill responsible for the tower’s design, had unwittingly made the tower look like a skyscraper-sized, plug-in air-freshening device.

I immediately began speculating on the scents that One World Trade Center would be emitting into the air over lower Manhattan. There was the mysterious sweet smell over parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn that had turned out to be fenugreek seeds from a fragrance plant in New Jersey; or the burnt smell of roasting coffee from D’Amico on Court Street that had some residents of Carroll Gardens up in arms. I decided that the best bet would be the smell of money, given the forces that have been battling for almost thirteen years now over the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site. With the flood of offshore capital remaking the post-9/11 city into a condo tower farm, why not fill the streets of Manhattan with the smell of newly minted $100 bills? That would keep the city one step ahead of Moscow and Dubai …

It’s the museum itself that I devote the most space to in the essay, though. I have to admit that, even after a handful of visits now, it’s still a mystery why anyone would want to subject themselves to the experience. It’s disturbing on every level. The preparation begins–at least it does for anyone who takes the subway–in the Fulton Street station, where the signage for the Memorial and Museum features the “severe clear” of that morning in its graphic design, a trigger that, to this day, makes my chest tighten and my heart-rate quicken. (Surely I am not alone in this. What about the survivors, or the victims’ families, or the first-responders who made it out alive?) The two blue bars evoking the towers in the graphic design are the first acts of coercion inflicted on the psyche and a signal of how the museum operates.

As I write in the essay, the curators of the museum seem to want nothing less than to reach inside your head and re-formulate your memories of 9/11. (The language I use is a little stronger.) This manipulation continues at the entrance, where you’re asked to pass through a replica of airport security, complete with gray tubs for your wallet and your belt–at least you don’t have to take off your shoes–and peppers you on every side while you enter the museum’s exhibition spaces. In the Times, the critic Holland Cotter likened the museum to a site of “religious pilgrimage,” complete with sanctified remains, and this was clearly one of the models for the crypt-like interior spaces and the winding descent that visitors take to the foundation floor. Davis Brody Bond, the architecture firm responsible for the design, has done immaculate work. But there are moments so jarring and exhibits so crass that you have to wonder about the motivation behind the entire project. The most obvious example is the jumper’s alcove, a recessed corner in the exhibition space devoted to reconstructing September 11th–the day itself–that features images that were placed under a press embargo after the attacks. Here is the warning on the outside wall:

I honestly can’t think of any educational or memorializing value in a dark, crowded corner of a museum where people huddle, breathless and a little giddy, to watch projected images of office workers jumping from the upper floors of a skyscraper so they’ll die that way instead of being burned alive. It’s as if, at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, there were a booth devoted to the history of the snuff film, and you could pull the curtain shut and watch people being murdered in the dark.

On my first visit to the 9/11 Museum in late May the crowds were significant (tickets had sold out a few days in advance), but there was still plenty of room to circulate through the exhibition spaces without any of the gridlock that’s so common in the city’s most popular museums. There was a somber air inside, and visitors were mostly wary, tentative. I had a woman hiss at me once for taking out my camera phone in Foundation Hall, and there was hardly any chatter in the dark warrens or along the ramps that conveyed us through the carnage and its holy artifacts.

By mid-July, when I last visited, the museum was packed with a far more raucous crowd. People posed for cellphone pictures in front of the ruined fire trucks and an architectural model of the Twin Towers. If the museum was still limiting the number of tickets sold by the half-hour, it was hard to see the evidence; there were bottlenecks through much of the September 11th exhibit, making it hard to filter through, and a scrum of gawkers was waiting to step inside the jumper’s alcove. The museum had clearly made its way onto the regular NYC tourist itinerary, alongside F.A.O. Schwarz, Madame Tussauds on 42nd Street, and Aladdin on Broadway.

Earlier, while I was making my way through the fenced-in pedestrian paths that lead you to the memorial site, a construction worker was taking a break outside of One World Trade and watching the crowd flow past. We had just come out of a tunnel onto West Street, and some of the visitors didn’t know which way they should be going.

“Just keep walking,” the hardhat said behind a fence. “Keep walking.” He let out a laugh that was hard to decipher. The crowd laughed back a little nervously. I knew where I was heading, but I hung back to watch.

“Keep on walking,” he kept on saying from behind the fence. “Just keep walking.” He was the barker who didn’t believe in the carnival. The crowd kept streaming out of the tunnel and onto West Street, heading for Ground Zero.

I wrote an essay recently about my early love of synths for The Common, a newish literary magazine published out of Amherst College. Originally they were going to use an image of the first and only synthesizer that I ever bought, a Roland Juno 6, for the magazine’s cover, but when that proved too unwieldy for the design team, they settled on the image of a ping pong racket–the essay is also about the lopsided games of ping pong I used to play with my best friend in high school. Here’s the cover of the issue:

You can purchase a copy of the Issue number 6 of The Common here, either in print, a pdf, or a digital copy for your Kindle.

So what’s my secret investment strategy? Maybe you’ve figured it out already. That white cardboard box is labeled BILLS. My net worth is in the negative, just like an estimated 20% of American households, and God knows how many of the legion who keep arriving in New York City every year with nothing more than the fancy degrees their student loans paid for and the ambition to make their way in the underpaid precincts of “culture.” I’m a writer, which means, by definition, that I am a gambling addict; every project undertaken is a bet on future earnings, a way of borrowing against the present in the expectation of beating the house. As F. Scott Fitzgerald put in his essay “Early Success,” about the manuscript that would become This Side of Paradise: “That novel … was my ace in the hole.” The box in my front hallway is where I store the paper trail of the bets I’ve lost; others that paid off, but without a life-changing windfall; the accumulated liabilities of my literary habit and the calamities that make life such a gamble no matter what you do for a living. It is the anti-fortune I’ve built by caring more about what I wanted to write next than how I could afford it.

Go ahead, have at me. Call me just another artist type who feels entitled to a free ride while he scribbles to no one’s benefit in an $18 notebook. I’ve heard worse, and that was on Goodreads. The line about scribbling in an $18 notebook? I sometimes turn it on myself. I am trying, at 44, to change my attitude about money, and that involves some soul searching. It’s not easy to stare down an ever-shrinking road to the thing that used to be called “retirement” and realize that you’ll be working until you drop—that is, if I am lucky enough to still have my teaching job. It’s not a given, and with tenure-track jobs in academia in steady decline, according to Inside Higher Ed, I might just be looking at a future measured out in temporary contracts. That seems great now, but what about if I’m up for review again at 55 while my son is applying to college? With no savings to fall back on for his tuition payments and that white box still following me around?

The future is already here, and I am not prepared for it. Elvis Costello has a phrase for everything, and this is mine: I’m a man out of time.

Net worth has been a lot on my mind lately. And not just for the reasons that I’ve described above. While I’ve been lugging my box of liabilities from apartment to apartment, trying to stay one step ahead of the booming rental market in Brooklyn, everyone else, it seems, has gotten rich. In Park Slope, where I lived for two years in a constant state of terror that my next late payment would get my son kicked out of preschool, the professional nannies ruled the sidewalks by day and every weekend in Prospect Park felt like Casual Friday at the law firm. Next came Clinton Hill, where I watched the population in the elevators of my rent-stabilized building turn steadily younger, hipper, more monied and white; let’s call it the Flea-ifying of the neighborhood. I’m in Boerum Hill now, which I hardly recognize when I go out and walk the streets. All the house numbers are brushed aluminum; the windows give a glimpse of spacious, airy rooms furnished from Design Within Reach and gleaming kitchens that look like Donald Judd installations. Some of the custom bins for trash and recycling that abut the sidewalk look like nice places to live. I’ve thought about making an offer before, but what about the foot traffic? Or if someone went dumpster diving for expired truffle oil in my living room?

Even the city’s new fleet of shared bikes come emblazoned with a bank logo; three Citibikes sliced past me in Ft. Greene the other day and they looked like bank cards with pedals. Do they also come with a PIN and overdraft protection? If I ride a Citibike, will it somehow result in more payouts to Bob Rubin and Larry Summers?

Everywhere I look this summer, I see the wealth I might have earned if I’d made it more of a priority—if I’d studied engineering in college instead of English and gotten into software coding early enough to make a fortune and retire at 35; or if I’d gotten an M.B.A. right out of school instead of an M.F.A. in fiction; or even if I’d just started teaching earlier and banked my book advances instead of blowing them on foreign travel and living expenses. I’d have a nice little nest egg to go along with a retirement fund with TIAA-CREF, either that or I’d own a house in a less expensive city and my book advances would now be equity I could count on. (That is, unless my mortgage was upside-down.)

In the spirit of schadenfreude, the German compound word for taking pleasure in the misfortune of others, I’ve come up with a new term to describe the dreamy state I find myself in this summer: verdienstausfallbedauern. It comes from verdienstausfall, or “the loss of earnings,” and bedauern, “to regret.” Mashed together in the German way it means “the regret of lost earnings.” There is a hint of eigenkapitalunmut (“net-worth chagrin”) implied, and also vermögensbedauern (“wealth regret”), which eventually hits us all. The causes of verdienstausfallbedauern are many, and there is no telling when it will find you with your defenses down. Maybe you’re out of work. Maybe you took a big risk and started a business that failed. Maybe you showed up for your first divorce hearing to discover that your spouse was represented by Raoul Felder. Or you could just be finishing up that novel manuscript and preparing, after three or four years, to confront your pile of unopened mail. In any case, you’ve reached the point in life when your mistakes about money have all come home to roost, and you fear the damage—this time—may be permanent. You are fresh out of second acts.

The symptoms of verdienstausfallbedauern are not always easy to identify, but here are a few warning signs to look out for:

(1) Do you tear up while standing at the window of realty offices, staring at the obscene rent for apartments you used to able to afford and asking prices for brownstones that look like they’re in Italian lire?

(2) Sometimes, do you find yourself computing the prices in your head of the different items that a stranger’s child is wearing, starting with the light-up Skechers on their feet ($44)?

(3) That Audi S7 parked on the street—I repeat, parked on the street—do you feel the urge to fall to your knees and kiss the front grille?

(4) When you pass the brunch crowd milling around outside a trendy restaurant on weekends, are you tempted to sidle up to a group of strangers and pretend you’re part of their party so they’ll take you out? (Brunch is not in your budget when you have a case of verdienstausfallbedauern.)

If any of this sounds familiar to you, don’t worry. You’re not alone. There’s no need to see the psychopharmacologist and have your meds adjusted. You’re in the grip of a common regret that, up to now, dared not speak its name in German. And there might be no earning your way out of it.

There are two kinds of people in the world: memoirists and everyone else. We all have a memoirist in the family, or sleeping in our bed, or working at the next cubicle over with a headset on; they’re the ones who share their lives with an eerie fluency no matter how intimate their disclosures or how many strangers are within earshot. Often they’re lurking in a train compartment nearby, fingering their iPads harmlessly or tapping out a private code on their laptops—until the phone lets out a chime, the air in the train car changes, and the memoirist suddenly starts to write.

“I’ve been thinking about my first margarita all day. I’m obsessed, I really am. Rocks with a rimful of salt …”

“The team doesn’t know Brian. I’m telling you: the team knows nothing about Brian. They know zilch. He’s a chameleon. He’s a hanger-on … That’s the thing about Brian.”

“On Thursday there’s my colonoscopy. My colonoscopy, I said. Can you hear me? I said it’s my—can you hear me? Are you still there?”

“I love you, kitten. I do. Oodles and oodles of noodles. Now pass the phone to Momma.”

Memoir is all around us. There has never been more of it in our daily lives. It doesn’t take an interesting life to qualify, or a literary apprenticeship to get one off the ground. You don’t even need a publisher to share your memoir with an audience, should you be the literary type; you can post it on your blog for next to nothing, tell it episodically to your Twitter followers in 140-character chapters. If you work in one of the more renegade forms of memoir from which none of us can escape—the Cell Phone Rant, the Bodily Function Update, the Decision About What to Make for Dinner—this your golden age.

I’ve always been a reluctant memoirist, especially with a cell phone in my hand, and I never thought I’d actually sit down to write one. Why dwell on myself, after all, spend more time in the skin I’m already living in, when I can get lost in the mystery of other people? When I can plumb the depths of someone else?

In the fall of 2010 I found myself at place in life where I’d never expected to end up. I was 40, still wrecked from a divorce I hadn’t chosen or wanted, the father of a son who I only saw eight days a month. My literary career had been stalled for longer than I cared to admit and felt like it might just sputter out. I was in debt—to friends and members of my family, to credit cards and banks, to the government for back taxes, to hospitals and doctors for medical treatment I needed when I didn’t have insurance—and looking for work wherever I could find it. I’d just moved in with a new girlfriend who I was in love with and we had started to talk about having a family, but my instability was already taking a toll on her trust and I worried that she couldn’t wait for me to find my way back to solvency. I was lost. It was an awful feeling. I lived in a state of more or less constant desperation, and no matter what I tried, I couldn’t catch a break—I couldn’t get a job, or snare a magazine assignment, or convince anyone I’d worked with before to take an interest. It felt like I was just a failure now, and the world had moved on.

In Offenbach’s opera Les Contes d’Hoffman there’s a moment from the third act when Hoffman, a poet, trades away his reflection in the mirror. He’s horrified when he looks into the glass again and doesn’t see himself. That’s what it felt like to lose my way, to wake up at 40 and ask, What happened to my life? I know now that it’s a common affliction. I didn’t then. Not until I published Too Good to Be True. I’ve since read letters and emails and messages on Facebook from people who’ve been through the same, heard stories of sudden changes in fortune that make mine look like a minor setback. The book has led people to share their lives with me, send out excerpts from their own memoirs.

It was memoir, actually, that would lead me out. I started waking up early in the morning—4 or 5AM, before the collection calls started—and sitting on my son’s bed with a notebook and pen on the days he wasn’t with me. Writing an account, in longhand, of exactly where I found myself, no matter how difficult or embarrassing it was to admit it; of where I’d wandered off the more familiar path, and why; of the early memories that still haunted me into adulthood—held an eerie power over my fate, or so I thought. Too Good to Be True, long before it ever became a book, started out as a reckoning, a way of seeing life clearly for what it is, early in the morning, in the same pen and ink I had used when I first started writing. It was a reality project. A way of ordering experience so I could make sense of it. A memoir that brought me back to life.

Reader, I did it anyway. I put my qualms aside and continued my experimental foray into the Twittersphere. I even kept on following Salman Rushdie, and his Twitter feed grew on me a little, although I did find that when I turned back to my favorite book of his—Midnight’s Children—the entire enterprise was newly suspect. Does Saleem Sinai really have to be born at the stroke of midnight when India gains its independence? Why not 12:05 or 11:47? And the telepathic powers he shares with the other “midnight’s children”—isn’t the whole contrivance just a little Twittery? This is part of what makes spending time on Twitter so tiresome, at least for me: the endless personalizing of events both great and small, the human need to play pundit with the forces that overarch our lives, to feel like we’re participating.

I did like exploring Twitter as a new written territory, though: seeing what was possible to communicate in a 140-character tweet. Who did it well and found a voice of their own despite the limitations. Who didn’t bother to tweet coherently most of the time and still had a million followers begging for attention. I clicked more links on Twitter than I ever do on Facebook, partly because the veneer of personal connection has been stripped away and the communication is so much more telegraphic. Facebook is where you post your vacation pictures or connect with old friends; Twitter is all about work.

That’s another reason why I never cottoned to it. It did feel like work—and the wrong kind at that. It’s all ephemera, meant for instant consumption and destined for replacement by the avalanche of tweets to follow. (If you don’t believe me, look at some of the estimates for the lifespan of a typical tweet. This excludes, of course, the data being hoarded by the N.S.A.) I’d done some homework, so I had a pretty good idea of how often I should tweet in a day; that I should be sparing when it came to retweets; that following was a good way to gain followers; that if I wanted to gain an audience on Twitter—and keep as many of them as possible from un-following me—I had to offer something beyond a promotional platform for my book, an endless stream of reviews, events, links to Q&As, retweets of the users who read the book and tweeted me directly. Then you might as well be Tide laundry detergent. (But wait, Tide has 101,983 followers on Twitter! Who are they? What’s wrong with them?) I had to give my followers ‘me’ the writer, or at least some version of me that would amuse, enlighten, or strike a chord in 140-character bursts, make their lives better for following me, or at least more interesting. If I could do that, the marketing wisdom goes, they would show their loyalty by buying my book, pushing it on friends and coming out to my readings. Or at least I hoped they would.

That was the bargain. It wasn’t quite a devil’s bargain. But it felt murky enough to me that I could never quite buy in all the way. I felt needy.

I came to Twitter because I had a book to sell, and my misgivings about the whole enterprise meant that I would never be any good at it. A phrase comes to mind: I was “pissing into the void.”

For 1 year, 4 months and 22 days—or 508 days total—Twitter became part of my daily thinking ritual. Should I post that thought as a tweet? How about a picture of that lost parrot poster I saw at the park? Would that be funny? If I’m in Berkeley, is it worth tweeting about the reading I’m giving tonight in case some of my followers live out here? I never really tweeted enough to make it a worthwhile enterprise, not by any honest cost-benefit analysis (hours devoted to Twitter v. book sales), and I’ve come to doubt Twitter’s value as a marketing platform anyway. It’s much better at delivering news from the ground in a crisis or providing color commentary for the Super Bowl ads. But I did like having an outlet for ideas that had no other place and would have vanished otherwise.

I also liked hearing directly from the readers who found me on Twitter, like the one who tweeted this picture from Instagram of my memoir in her handbag:

But really, aside from these nice side benefits, the whole thing is a boondoggle, at least it is for us. And by “us” I mean anyone who isn’t already a celebrity, a media star, an established brand, the literary equivalent of a laundry detergent. And even then I have a hard time seeing what being on Twitter gets you, other than the open and never-ending opportunity to waste a shitload of time you could be spending a lot more productively elsewhere. (Unless your personal assistant or your team of interns handles your Twitter feed, in which case I hope you’re enjoying your nice hot bath while the staff takes turns reading the daily blogs aloud to you.)

Joining Twitter doesn’t really make any sense for most writers. I mean, if you love it, go ahead. Keep Tweeting your heart out. You have a steelier one than I do. My friend A. was right when he said that you had to enjoy Twitter for it make any sense. But here is why I think joining Twitter actually works against the writer’s interests—starting with the obvious and moving on from there. This list is totally unscientific and probably incomplete, so fire away in the comments if I’ve missed anything.

That Giant Sucking Sound? It’s Your Life.

Twitter isn’t planning to go public in 2014 with an estimated market valuation of $11 billion because it’s in the democracy business, or disaster recovery, or it likes helping out with your local Neighborhood Watch. It’s that valuable in market terms because it wants to own your eyes, and everything on Twitter—from its look, to its speed, to the 140-character limit of a Tweet—is designed to create a hunger in you for what it offers, to keep you coming back for more. It’s fucking diabolical, but we’re all used to being hopeless click-addicts now. (I mean, I carry a warm Satanic object with me everywhere and pay $120 a month to let it steal my life.) Twitter works in direct proportion to how much time you spend on it: if you’re willing to burn entire days on end, you’ll have a satisfying time on Twitter with lots of links consumed, comments favorited, pithy exchanges with your followers and friends. If you just dip in from time to time, you’ll find that your response rate plummets. It’s the nature of the beast that you have to do your time if you want to join the conversation. If you don’t, you’re a stranger in Twitter Village and you’ll be treated accordingly by the natives: no replies, no retweets, no new followers, and a slow attrition of the ones you’ve already gained.

Twitter wants your life. Don’t give it up so easily.

Tweets Won’t Gain You Followers. Publishing in the Real World Will.

I know there are tweets that go viral and wind up getting quoted in the mainstream media. There are #hashtags to carry every little tweet far and wide and retweets to carry you into a whole new universe of followers. But in my experience, the only way to give a consistent boost in your follower numbers is to publish something in print, or give an interview on broadcast media (TV or radio), or have a Q&A run in a prominent paper or literary website. It wasn’t anything I ever did on Twitter that attracted more followers—it was being a writer in real life. Which demands the same time that Twitter wants, except you get a much more palpable return from it.

There is Such a Thing as Too Much Cleverness.

Exhibit A. That’s all I’ll say on the subject.

Tweeting Doesn’t Connect. It Makes You Lonely.

The glowing screen has a funny effect on the heart. It makes it want things that are elsewhere, always elsewhere. There is a longing built into our online lives that can lead us to healthy attachments with multiple partners, a kind of polyamory of the mind, but it can also encourage the furtive transmission of waxed-chest photos and cock-shots. (Sorry, Anthony Wiener. I can’t vote for you. I love a good second act as much as anyone, but the relentless pandering gets me down.) These are extreme examples of the kind of lonely misfires that Twitter allows, but I felt the temptation to seek comfort from my Twitter feed often enough to realize that it was only a matter of time before I did something embarrassing, reached out to a stranger in a too familiar way or revealed something in a tweet that I would later regret. I’d written a memoir dappled with embarrassments so I already knew what that was like, and I wanted to retain whatever was left of my dignity.

For me, there was one sure way to tell if things were getting risky: I checked who I was following. If I’d followed ten women in a row who all looked fantastic in their avatars (journalists, writers, the odd fashionista), it was time to take a break from Twitter and attend to my romantic life. And there are lots of crush-worthy avatars out there.

Picture a scene: it’s 10 in the morning, the coffee is already cold and I’m riveted to Maeve Reston’s Twitter feed for the second time that week, reading from the bottom up as she tweets from a Rand Paul rally in Simi Valley, California before heading to a three-day Mitt Romney retreat in Park City, Utah. Maeve, I type in my head, are your thumbs made of gold? The Romney keynote stirred me. Will you run away with me?

That’s what Twitter does. It chains you to your neediness.

Proximity Has a Price.

Distance is the writer’s friend. It’s nice to break out from your seclusion every now and then and give a reading to a room of actual people, or visit a college class that’s reading one of your books, or introduce yourself to someone on the subway who’s got his nose in your first novel. (I’ve actually done that before and it’s fun.) But for the most part the old adage holds true: You should never meet your heroes. And if your heroes are writers, you really don’t want to meet them. Writers are generally vain, and needy, and shut inside for most of the day listening to the voices in their head, so when they come out, their behavior can be erratic. There was the famous poet who once cornered the only black student in my graduate program at a party and fell into his arms from a combination of pills and liquor, murmuring “You look just like Prince …” Any woman under 30 who attends a summer writing conference like Breadloaf will learn who the gropers are right away and how to dodge them as artfully as possible.

Thanks to the whole ‘Thank you, Whitney’ episode I stayed away from Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton when it came out this past fall, and I wonder if I’ll ever read it now that I don’t trust Midnight’s Children the way I once did. Mystery plays a big role in our love of books, and by using social media to promote yourself, you’re only demystifying your work for everyone who follows you. And that makes you lose potential readers.

My Twitter account is deactivated now. I won’t miss it. I’ll let that nefarious little bird with its stock-options sing in someone else’s ear. The next thing to go is my Facebook Author Page. Will anybody miss it? No. Then I’ll go back to being a writer again. Just a writer. Not a writer who’s wasting his time on social media.

It’s a natural enough impulse to find a nice high perch in the trees and start broadcasting. I mean, isn’t this what the birds do? The name, though—Twitter—was an obstacle for me from the start, in part because it was so patently stupid, but also because I recognized that it was stupid in just the right way and would probably make the people who coined it billionaires. I’d seen this principle at work during the Tech Boom of the late 90s, albeit in nascent form—take a pre-existing idea, like home-delivery service, slap a goofy name on it that could only have originated in a conference room with a whiteboard (kozmo.com!), offer the product online for free, then wait for the V.C. money to start falling from the sky.

It was thrilling, in a way, to watch whole swaths of New York get remade by Silicon Alley before the tech bubble started to deflate, to see the packs of start-up rascals with their exalted titles, younger than me by less than a decade but already a generation apart, palming their mysterious devices on the subway, bouncing with energy in their $150 retro sneakers, free of the self-consciousness and fear that I’d always understood to be necessary for survival in the city.

“How did the world change so quickly?” I used to wonder from my seat nearby, holding a notebook open in my lap, full of tiny scribbles, or a paper copy of the Times before it shrank to its current size, which will never look right to me in proportion to the world. “Why is what they have so fucking valuable?”

I’ll admit it: I did a lot of muttering then, both aloud and under my breath, about the stupidification of New York by dot com capital, and whenever I was in a mood I used to howl at the Yahoo billboard on Houston Street, or give a surreptitious kick to the kozmo.com drop box at Ciao Bella on Mott while I was walking out with my fancy ice cream. It was professional envy, plain and simple, one small revolt against the change in natural order that was already underway—and still hasn’t stopped. Print would be dethroned by the glowing screen; authority was no longer earned, but freely available to anyone who seized it; forget about reflection, care, “craft,” meaning, value, and all the other slow-twitch talents I’d spent my life trying to master, the age of fast-twitch thinking had arrived, and the click was now king.

It’s not as simple as that, of course. I have learned that outcomes, at least when it comes to technology, are not as Manichean as we believe them to be in the moment. I’ll take my media intake today—and that includes the links I click on thanks to the far worldlier people I follow on Twitter and Facebook—over what was available to me in the year 2000 any day of the week. It’s no contest.

And yet. I’m leaving Twitter. I’ve had enough. Just writing those last two sentences makes me feel better than a guy with sideburns describing his first Cronut on Yelp. My stay in Twitter Village was brief: 1 year, 4 months and 22 days. I’ll freely admit that I never really got the hang of it, never felt the buzz of a perfectly composed tweet, the thrill of communion with a multitude of fellow travelers united by a hashtag. I came. I saw. And now I’ve had it. No más.

I’ve written my last tweet.

I’ll be posting an essay here on my experience with Twitter and why I think the social media presence typically recommended to writers when they’re publishing a book is a tremendous waste of time.

What follows is Part One: “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.”

I joined Twitter on February 2, 2012 (#dayone) because of a conversation I had over lunch at Schnipper’s on 8th Avenue with my friend A., a novelist who I’ve known since we were at graduate school together in the early 90s. Back then, you were a tech-savvy writer if you carried enough change in your pockets to check your answering machine messages from a payphone, or brought a Sony Discman when you went running on the treadmill. I used to communicate with my literary agent at the time by letter; I saved my work on 5 ¼ inch floppy disks and printed it out on sheets of dot-matrix paper that I tore by hand; I didn’t own my own fax machine yet, but I did have a pretty deep and sincere attachment to my off-brand P.C. Aside from personal computing, which made editing and printing manuscripts a lot easier, the business of being a writer hadn’t changed much since Flannery O’Connor was hammering away at her typewriter at home in Milledgeville.

“Two pages a day!” the director of our M.F.A. program, Frank Conroy, used to bellow in workshop, a single crooked finger pointed up as if to teach us a lesson in the value of cognitive dissonance. “Two pages a day!” You did the work methodically; you stared and cursed and tore your hair out and tried to will the words to do your bidding; you stacked and ordered your pages until the book was done, and then you started writing it all over again from the beginning. That was the writer’s work, and it was a sacrament—a ritual handed down by the Gods of Good Clean Prose on onionskin paper. Everything else was publishing—imagine the word delivered with a weary sigh—and the only thing worse than publishing was working for a living.

Alone among the writers I knew who’d studied with Frank, A. had started blogging early on and continued to stay active. In the years between his published books the blog had given A. an outlet for ideas that wouldn’t easily fly with magazine editors, and a means to build an audience of readers. He spent a lot more time on Facebook than I did, and he had enough followers on Twitter to make him something of a guru in the literary world when it came to social media. When writers had a book coming out, they often sought him out for advice. Just like I was doing.

“If you don’t enjoy it,” he told me right off, “you’re wasting your time.”

“That makes sense.”

“Everyone will know you’re faking it.” He delivered this line with one eyebrow raised, like a character planting a clue in a Peter Lorre picture.

“They will?”

“Trust me.”

A. gave me a lot of other good advice that day—I hope I at least picked up the lunch tab; sorry, A., if I let you buy your own burger—but the biggest take-away for me, especially when it came to Twitter, is that you have to tweet because you want to instead of feeling like you have to because a publicist implied that it was necessary. When you publish a book these days, you’ll be encouraged to do three things: (1) build an author’s website (which generally costs between $2500 and $5000 of your own money); (2) create a Facebook fan page (this is free, but completely useless, unless you have an intern or a spouse who’ll post on it more or less constantly to take advantage of Facebook’s internal algorithms); (3) get on Twitter to build your new Gaiman-like following by any means necessary.

This is already much too long for a blog post, so I’m going to cut right to the chase. I spent the next week or so lurking around on Twitter with a dummy account to see what other writers were up to with their feeds, from a performance artist like Gary Shteyngart to the fiercely distilled aphorisms of Jenny Diski. Once I was better acquainted, or so I thought, with the Tweet as a formal exercise and what you could do with it, I dove right in.

The first few days were fine. I followed friends and they followed me back. I followed journalists I admired, and writers whose work I read, and lots of editors and publishing people who tweeted about the book business (I was working on an article at the time and this was a big help for my research).

On February 12th, or #dayeleven, I was doing some work at home with Twitter open on my web browser when I saw this Tweet from Salman Rushdie in my feed:

That’s strange, I thought. Whitney who? And why is Salman Rushdie thanking her on Twitter? I’d followed Rushdie out of idle curiosity on one of my first days, having given up on reading his work after Fury, which has to be one of the five worst novels about New York ever written. (It makes sense, I guess, when your view of the city originates at Indochine or from your regular table at the Waverly Inn.) Was he thanking the Whitney Museum for a favor? Or was I just missing something?

A few clicks and I found out the reason behind his tweet. Whitney Houston had died, found floating in the bathtub at her hotel suite in Beverly Hills. The news wasn’t particularly meaningful to me—I have a weird indifference to celebrity, even when I’m in the same room as a movie star—but it did feel completely wrong that I was hearing about Whitney Houston’s death from Salman Rushdie.

After his first tweet about Whitney’s death, Rushdie followed up with a tribute of his own:

It was too much to think about. I’d had my fill of Salman Rushdie on the death of Whitney Houston. It was too much! My mind lit upon on a series of images that got progressively more morbid: In the first, Salman was at his computer typing “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” into a Google search and waiting too eagerly for a response from the overloaded servers (“But wait,” Salman thinks, “should I post ‘How Will I Know?’ instead? ‘All the Man I Need’? That might add a nice touch of irony …”); then Salman had opened up the video for “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” and was watching it with a wistful smile on his face, one tear running down a powdered cheek; and last, Salman was shaking it to the song on the dance floor, somewhere small and packed in Manhattan, like the old Bungalow 8, his raven haired partner, much younger, beaming back at him with sweat glowing on her skin and laughing as she twirled.

“Salman!” she yelled over the music. “I didn’t know you could boogie down!”

I went about my day without dwelling on it too much. Twitter, of course, was all aflutter about Whitney Houston’s death, filling up with personal tributes, links to performances, jokes to test the boundaries of what was “too soon,” expressions of sadness and outrage—the collective wail that goes up from the village square whenever there’s a shared trauma to expunge or an injustice to protest. The whole thing made me feel uneasy. It seemed wrong, all of a sudden, to be privy to such an outpouring of emotion on Twitter; rather than an enlargement, a moment of shared empathy, it made everyone seem smaller, like mourners competing for attention at a public funeral. Or maybe the problem was me for not caring enough about Whitney Houston? For not bowing to force of history?

I tried to put it all out of my mind, but I couldn’t. Twitter had opened up a portal to unwanted intimacies with a literary celebrity, to unspeakable things on an imaginary dance floor, and that night I couldn’t sleep because I was implicated in the whole sorry business. I had joined Twitter, crossed over to the other side, joined the endless clamor coming over the hills from Twitter Village. Wasn’t it bad enough that I’d written a memoir? Did I really want to start live-tweeting my reactions to events that had no relation to me and links to songs on YouTube?

The next morning I woke up from a dissatisfying couple hours of sleep and lay on my back with my eyes wide open.

Thank you, Whitney.

“I can’t do this,” I said to ceiling.

The next installment of this essay will be “Lessons Learned.”