Last week, Taylor Swift released a new album called Folklore. Billed by the press as Swift’s “quarantine album,” Folklore’s release was teased out on Swift’s Instagram page, with new art direction redolent of loneliness, isolation, and the tropes homespun folk music (mostly black and white shots of Swift standing in an open field and the woods). Amidst the visuals, there was also a long statement, presumably written by Swift herself, kind of a diaristic letter about the creative process behind the new album and the “isolation” that inspired it.
The statement is remarkable because, reading it, it becomes clear that its purpose is that of a disclaimer. Swift is telling her audience that she is, for the first time, writing lyrics that may not have any basis in “fact” – that she is writing “stories” – so proceed with caution. Here’s the final half of her statement:
A tale that becomes folklore is one that is passed down and whispered around. Sometimes even sung about. The lines between fantasy and reality blur and the boundaries between truth and fiction become indiscernible. Speculation, over time, becomes fact. Myths, ghost stories, and fables. Fairytales and parables. Gossip and legend. Someone’s secrets written in the sky for all to behold.
In isolation my imagination has run wild and this album is the result, a collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness. Picking up a pen was my way of escaping into fantasy, history, and memory. I’ve told these stories to the best of my ability with all the love, wonder, and whimsy they deserve.
Now it’s up to you to pass them down.
That any artist feels obliged to state, almost apologetically, that while creating the piece of artwork you are about to hear/read/see/watch “my imagination has run wild” tells you something about the fragile state of art in America. That a songwriter, lyricist, entertainer, creator, or artist (or whatever you want to call Taylor Swift) feels the need to go this far out of her way to prepare (warn?) her audience for the possibility of some “made up” song lyrics is a deeply troubling indictment of the state of fiction more specifically.
As in her statement, much of the media coverage surrounding the album has taken pains to make sure you know the songs therein may not be fully “true.” In their review, The New York Times makes that known right away, stating in the subhead that on Folklore Swift “swerves away from her last few releases, embracing atmospheric rock – and other characters’ points of view.” It’s hard to overstate how bizarre it is that an artist writing from “other characters’ points of view” is a wild and crazy idea that needs to be justified, explained, and made explicit up front in a major, literate, and respected publication.
It’s worth noting that in this specific case the preemptive defensiveness found in Swift’s statement (and the media’s reiteration of same) is also obviously a hedge against the public’s extant perception of Swift’s career and her widely-known “autobiographical” songwriting (even the album title is a hedge: she had to call it Folklore or else every word would be interpreted as “true”). But I think the required existence of such a defense in the first place speaks to a broader problem in American creative culture.
In our society, there is a fear of fiction. We are skeptical of it, unsure of what to do with it, and what it might do to us. We don’t know what we can get out of it, so we don’t trust it. We don’t know what it’s for. This secret mistrust – and often blatant disrespect – of fiction feels to me like it’s accelerated in recent years. But, in fact, in America it’s always been with us, since the very beginning.
Reading fiction, specifically novels, was popular in the Colonies, but it was considered a very un-reputable way to spend your time, compared to reading the news, political writings, or “pamphlets.” In The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste, published in 1950, James David Hunt describes the many problems the first Americans had with fiction. Hunt writes that
Novels were the reading matter of the lower middle classes which rose to prominence after the Revolution, of nearly all the younger generation, and of women of every stage and station, but older, more sober or more religious citizens were generally horrified by the degradation of morality and intellect that they associated with fiction.
Hunt goes on, writing, “The novel, it was widely said, softens the mind, unfitting it for more solid reading and, what was worse, ‘pollutes the imaginations.’” He says one critic suggested fiction gave “young people ‘false ideas of life,’” and another said it rendered “‘the ordinary affairs of life insipid,’” which was a problem. In 1803, the Harvard commencement address was “directed against the dangers of fiction.”
Misogyny also ran through the Colonial criticism of fiction. An English article, titled “Novel Reading a Cause of Female Depravity,” was “reprinted in America several times after its original London publication in 1797.” And twenty-year-old John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary that seventeen-year-old Nancy “has read too many novels; her expressions are romantic … a few years may cool her down to an agreeable sensible girl.” Another critic noted that “a ‘novel-reading female’ expects attention from her husband, which the cares of the business will not permit him to pay.”
You can see that fear animates almost every one of the above criticisms: fear of the unknown, fear of ideas, and, more directly, fear of losing control of a “novel reading” populace. To retain control, since the beginning of American culture, the act of reading fiction has purposefully been disparaged, stamped with an unpleasant sense of frivolity and unethical wasted time. Hunt notes that some of the more
matter-of-fact members of the older generation asked people to “calculate the number of actual hours expended in a large family” on novel reading, and come up with a sum of time that should have been put to practical use.
This emphasis on fiction’s lack of a “practical use” – and on its ability to distract from the “cares of business” – is its most salient and durable criticism today. The stigma remains: reading fiction is still seen as entirely unproductive.
The opposite of fiction, so we’re told, is fact. And fact has always been more popular – and respected – in America. Fact, also known as nonfiction, or news, or “the truth,” is seen as unquestionably productive, obviously useful to any reader. It is the “solid reading” that the Colonists were worried that fiction was pulling people away from – no “false ideas of life” here! Nonfiction was (and is) adored for its apparently actionable content, for its easily applicable knowledge, for its abundant practical uses. Even today these supposedly self-evident virtues of “nonfiction” are never questioned – and they certainly weren’t in the Colonies. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985, Neil Postman notes how, in 1770, The New York Gazette congratulated itself (and newspapers generally) for its importance to society, writing in verse:
‘Tis truth (with deference to college)
Newspapers are the spring of Knowledge,
The general source throughout the nation,
Of every modern conversation.
And, Postman writes, Benjamin Franklin – himself perhaps uniquely responsible for our culture’s powerful obsession with constant, provable productivity – observed approvingly in 1786 that “Americans were so busy reading newspapers and pamphlets they scarcely had time for books.” Less approvingly, Alexis de Tocqueville noted in 1835’s Democracy In America, how nonfiction, or the news, produces its own kind of frivolity: “In America parties do not write books to combat each other’s opinions, but pamphlets, which are circulated for a day with incredible rapidity and then expire.”
America’s curious battle between fact and fiction got off to an early, if inauspicious, start. As Postman writes, the first American newspaper was published in Boston on September 25, 1690. It was three pages long, and named Publick Occurrences Both Foreign And Domestick. It was published by Benjamin Harris, who had previously published newspapers in London, including one called Domestick Intelligence. In England, Harris was well known for his anti-Catholic conspiracy theories and his general mendacity. After the first issue, Publick Occurrences Both Foreign And Domestick was shut down by the Colonial government because it “contained Reflections of a very high nature: As also sundry doubtful and uncertain Reports.” A second issue never appeared.
Even if your goal when reading is to get some demonstrative “practical use” out of the text, as so many people’s seems to be, then fiction is still a “viable option.” It is indisputable that there is meaning and “truth” in fiction; there is often more “reality” in fiction than nonfiction. As Norman Mailer said, “Something can be true and still be fiction.” There are also, if that’s what you’re looking for, “actionable insights” to be found in novels. But it’s impossible to quantify this sort of meaning, and that makes it nonexistent. Try it: claim to get something out of reading that is other than escapist pleasure or practical utilitarianism, and you risk sounding pretentious – or worse, unproductive.
It’s not clear at all to me why reading a narrative nonfiction history of some event is deemed out of hand more “valuable” and “productive” than reading a novel, say, written during the same historical time period. But I suppose it comes down to what people are comfortable with. Dedicating time to something (reading, watching) considered to be entertainment still makes us uneasy, so the safe option is to at least “learn something” while you’re wasting your time. And we’re talking about “learning” in the most empirical sense of the word: in nonfiction, there are real dates, real numbers, real people’s names to know. Of course, what you “do” with that real information once you have it is still anybody’s guess. But as a culture we’ve decided reading facts is more important than reading fiction.
Even film and television, realms once dominated by fiction, have recently been almost completely overhauled, pulled deep into the world of nonfiction. In a Baffler piece, published in January, James Pogue takes an in-depth look at the new ways Hollywood gets its ideas. As anyone who’s seen a movie in the last decade might not be surprised to learn, Hollywood is getting its ideas largely from the news. Essentially, studios are optioning news articles on an unprecedented scale and turning them into movies and television shows. The first real taste of this strategy’s enormous success came with 2012’s Argo, directed by Ben Affleck. Argo, which won Best Picture in 2013, was adapted from a 2007 Wired article written by Joshua Bearman called “The Great Escape: How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans from Tehran.”
Since then, with the proliferation of streaming services and the greater need for content to put on them, this practice has only increased, turning into what Pogue calls a “machine.” The New Yorker writer David Grann’s articles are especially desirable. “Getting a sneak of a draft of a Grann story is a point of pride in Hollywood,” writes Pogue. “In this case a shaggy forty-page .docx … could serve as the seedbed for a film that makes hundreds of millions.” Pieces from Wired, GQ, and New York magazine are all routinely optioned. And, Pogue adds, when
the rights to Nathaniel Rich’s interminably long “Losing Earth,” written for The New York Times Magazine, sold to Apple for at least $300,000 last year, according to one underbidder, it was a less an indication of the way the world is headed than it was a confirmation of a shift that has already taken place.
In 2014, Bearman co-founded Epic, an online publication that attempts to dispense with the guesswork common in journalism and commissions articles purposely written to be turned into film and TV adaptations. Pogue describes Epic this way:
Epic’s business model is, in part, to commission and place pieces that are designed to feed the new rapacity of tech and media companies for buyable IP. They offer a remarkably full-service product: they assign stories with an eye to how valuable they’ll seem to Hollywood’s buyers, and they negotiate magazine placement and the sale of rights in advance.
But, Pogue wonders, what kind of articles does Epic, Hollywood, and this machine want? As a possible answer, he quotes the description Epic has on its website:
As fun as fiction, but full of facts. You know that feeling you get when a good true-life tale grabs you right from the start? You can’t stop turning the page – because you realize incredible things happen to real people – and it’s hard to believe that what you’re reading is nonfiction. That is the kind of story we like to tell. Epic writers travel the world searching for encounters with the unknown. Wartime romance, unlikely savants, deranged detectives, gentlemen thieves, and love-struck killers: stories that tap into the thrill of being alive.
Pogue says, “This is more or less how most editors I know describe what they want these days.” He also quotes an email he recently received from an editor that sounds strikingly similar to the Epic description. The editor was asking for
ripping yarns, stories of true crime, of loves lost and won. Rivalries in sports, tech, and entertainment. Chronicles of dreams realized and broken. We want to take readers on spell-binding adventures, introduce them to powerful jerks they don’t know (or don’t know enough about), weirdos, eccentrics, and folks in search of redemption.
We can all think of examples of this kind of writing and the films and TV shows it produces. It draws its interest not from its quality or its creativity, but from its claims to having “actually happened.” As Epic puts it, “You can’t stop turning the page – because you realize incredible things happen to real people.” This narrow yet popular style of nonfiction is even more sanitized than it sounds. As Pogue writes, the editors commissioning this writing “never talk about politics.” And
They do not talk about voice or literary style. They do not ask for excavations of an inner life or the forces of history or any of the things that once would have made a work of writing lasting … The desire is always for work that puts narrative ahead of all other considerations, and this is the kind of writing that now dominates our literature: it describes the world without having a worldview.
There are uneasy echoes of some of the Colonial critics’ cries against fiction in Epic and its ilk’s “ripping yarn” descriptions of the ideal kind of nonfiction: it is designed precisely to not give people “false ideas of life,” to not make “the ordinary affairs of life insipid.” There’s something oppressive and almost counterintuitive in the mandate for writing that is “As fun as fiction, but full of facts.”
And this machine seems to be just getting started. Late last year, talent agency WME signed New York magazine as a client, giving the magazine a direct line to TV and film production in Hollywood. And just this week, The New York Times followed suit, announcing plans to push into Hollywood with “10 scripted TV show projects in development, as well as 3 feature documentaries coming out this year and several other documentary projects in development and production.” Caitlin Roper, senior editor of The New York Times Magazine, was promoted to executive producer in charge of, per the Hollywood Reporter, developing “Times reporting into scripted TV and film projects.” (Before joining The Times, Roper spent seven years at Wired.)
In a memo sent to Times staff on Monday morning, Sam Dolnick, assistant managing editor, wrote,
To bring Times stories to the movie screen, Caitlin will work closely with reporters, editors, our Hollywood agents, and a collection of best-in-class screenwriters, producers and directors. Anyone with an idea for a story to be adapted should get in touch with her.
Dolnick added that Roper “is a perfect bridge from the newsroom to Hollywood.”
Also this week, HBO announced that it would be adapting The First Shot, a forthcoming “non-fiction narrative book by The Atlantic and New York Times writer Brendan Borrell” about the search for a COVID-19 vaccine. The not-yet-written book was sold at auction to publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and apparently will “explore the companies and individuals putting everything on the line to save lives, the science that it is based on, and the challenges playing out around politics, access, and safety.”
Attached to the project is none other than Adam McKay, the doyen of the nonfiction film and pioneer of the schematic blockbuster (McKay directed The Big Short, about the financial crisis, and Vice, about Dick Cheney). According to Deadline, McKay has been busy since launching his production company Hyperobject Industries and signing a five-year, first-look television deal with HBO last year. The first project under the deal will be a limited series based on Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie K. Brown’s upcoming book about Jeffrey Epstein. And McKay’s LA Lakers project, based on Jeff Pearlman’s nonfiction book Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s, was ordered to series in December.
Given his background and wheelhouse, it was practically a foregone conclusion that McKay would be involved in a big COVID-19 project, but the details of The First Shot deal beg some interesting wider questions about the nature of nonfiction, fiction, and media. What does it mean for a filmmaker to option a nonfiction book that hasn’t been written yet, about events that haven’t happened yet? There is no vaccine. We don’t know how long it will take to develop one, or when it will be safe to administer it. We don’t, actually, know very much about COVID-19 in general. Nor is the pandemic a thing of the past, by any stretch of the imagination. But what we do have now is news confirming a new nonfiction television show that will dramatize the – presumably successful – development of a vaccine and its – presumably successful – introduction at some point in the future.
In general, COVID-19 has thrown our ideas about art, or more accurately, content, out the window. Our deep-seated belief that it’s imperative to produce is at odds with the pandemic’s new imperative to stop and withdraw. Sensing, perhaps, some superficially simpatico relationship between withdrawal and fiction, The New York Times Magazine dedicated its entire June 12 issue to fiction, commissioning and publishing 29 original short stories by different authors. Dubbed “The Decameron Project” after Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, a collection of stories dating to the mid-1300s, the issue is a heavy-handed attempt to link the bubonic plague in Italy in 1348 to our current “moment,” and, more to the point, to then link fiction with some sage-like healing power, or some form of higher understanding. This is fiction, the project seems to announce, be careful and only take as directed: this is powerful nontraditional medicine we can’t possibly understand, but it might work, in small doses.
The cover of “The Decameron Project” issue, which utilizes hokey folkloric faux-woodblock art direction and typography throughout, features the large headline, “WHEN REALITY IS SURREAL, ONLY FICTION CAN MAKE SENSE OF IT.” In addition to the headline (and the backhanded compliment contained within it: when reality is not “surreal” but just merely reality, i.e., any other time except right this second, fiction is worthless), a sense of fetishizing/patronizing fiction-as-other pervades the project – and is especially palpable in essayist Rivka Galchen’s introduction.
Recounting some live penguins she saw back in May, Galchen writes, “Those penguins themselves had something of the startle of art – the reveal of the ever-present real that’s hidden, paradoxically, by information.” And then: “Reality is easy to miss, maybe because we’re looking at it all the time.” And finally Galchen asks: “When there’s a radical and true and important story happening at every moment, why turn to imagined tales?” In response to this leading yet valid question, she quotes artist Robert Filliou’s idea that “Art is what makes life more interesting than art.” This, Galchen says, suggests that “we don’t catch sight of life at first glance.”
Galchen’s repeated insistence of the idea that fiction’s purpose is to provide us with a second look at real life sounds to me like the lady doth protest too much. Sure, that’s something it can can do. But, reminiscent of Taylor Swift’s statement and her album’s media coverage, this emphatic defense of fiction – this attempt to justify it, to pigeonhole it, and make it palatable or acceptable – undoes any progress the “The Decameron Project” may have hoped to achieve. The dead giveaway is that fiction doesn’t (shouldn’t) need this much (or any) justification: it deserves to exist on its own terms. But not anymore – now you must “learn” something:
In all these cases, the stories, in one way or another, are lifesaving, even as their being entertaining is one of the main ways they can save a life. Reading stories in difficult times is a way to understand those times, and also a way to persevere through them.
The stories that make up “The Decameron Project” are passable. Some well-known authors are included, Margaret Atwood the most notable among them. Commissioned by the magazine specifically for the project – “inspired by the moment,” they say – the stories are mostly very short and are largely voiceless, lifeless, and, somewhat ironically, read like dull diary entries or quickly written news reports. Almost all of them are set explicitly during the pandemic, with tiring references to “blue masks,” “hand sanitizer,” and the like. Reading through “The Decameron Project,” it was hard to shake the idea that The New York Times is (intentionally or not) further discrediting fiction. The Decameron this collection of stories is not. (It’s also relevant here to note that Boccaccio didn’t finish, or publish, The Decameron until a few years after the Black Death ended, giving his work some valuable perspective that this project lacks.)
Maybe “The Decameron Project” began as a valiant attempt to elevate fiction writing, but the end product reeks of a fundamental misprision of what fiction actually is – and seems to move fiction backward, not forward. Even in such a luxurious package, fiction is still disrespected, relegated to nothing more than a wisened break from “the moment.” It also seems to suggest that the best bet for fiction is to use it to try to see something a reporter might have overlooked on the first pass. In any case, something about the project strikes me as misguided, as a kind of bait-and-switch. Nonfiction is still at war with fiction, and now it’s on nonfiction’s turf. Despite the praise, “The Decameron Project” can’t hide its lurking wariness of fiction, and goes to great lengths to force it into “practical use.” In “the Italian of Boccaccio,” Galchen writes, “the word novelle means both news and stories.” That’s convenient for a newspaper.
In June, Knox Robinson, a writer, runner, and founder of the running collective Black Roses NYC, was interviewed on Rich Roll’s podcast. At one point, the conversation turns to the “reading lists” that became so prevalent after the murder of George Floyd. Invariably, the lists contained didactic nonfiction works like White Fragility and How To Be An Anti-Racist. Robinson says he’s been puzzled by this, stating,
One thing I don’t understand about these lists is there’s very little fiction. I mean for me, a white ally has read Toni Morrison’s Song Of Solomon. If Black culture is part of American culture, and Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, like everybody here on Instagram talking about allyship and all that, if you don’t have Toni Morrison on your bookshelf, if you’re just not reading our Nobel laureate – fiction – then what’re you doing with all these self-help books on your shelf?
This is an important and rarely raised question. And I wish I knew the answer. But my sense is, if Benjamin Franklin were alive today he would approve of our current nonfiction-dominated culture. And he would need to update only slightly his 1786 observation: Americans are so busy reading newspapers and watching movie adaptations of pamphlets they scarcely have time for books.
Live Bait 🧜🏼♀️
Today, the CEOs of Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook will testify before Congress.
Jeff Bezos has become “Amazon’s D.C. Defender.”
Casey Newton: “tech” versus “journalism.”
The New Yorker: “Silicon Valley’s war against the media.”
Tinder hired ex-CBS Interactive president Jim Lanzone as its new CEO.
Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, was appointed “co-CEO” of the company; CEO/founder Reed Hastings said in an earnings interview, “To be totally clear, I’m in for a decade,” and added that the new co-CEO situation is “two of us full-time, it’s not like a part-time deal.”
Chris Nolan’s Tenet will be released internationally before being released in the US.
The Ellen DeGeneres Show is under internal investigation by WarnerMedia following “numerous accounts of workplace problems.”
HBO and Adam McKay are developing a limited series about the hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine, adapted from The Atlantic and The New York Times writer Brendan Borrell’s book The First Shot. (Mentioned above.)
The New York Times is getting very into TV and film: as Axios reported, the Times has “10 scripted TV show projects in development, as well as 3 feature documentaries coming out this year and several other documentary projects in development and production”; The New York Times Magazine senior editor Caitlin Roper will serve as executive producer. (Mentioned above.)
The New York Times is buying Serial Productions, the production company behind the Serial podcast.
Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times, was interviewed on Longform’s podcast.
The Economist: “How objectivity in journalism became a matter of opinion.”
What does “Challenge Accepted” mean?
Ben Smith takes on Hearst.
Adults are listening to bedtime stories.