Dispatch from the Marketplace of Ideas
It's rarefied up here!
Dear Friend,
It is I, your footloose correspondent! As you can tell from the condition of this handwritten dispatch (creased, swollen by sea air, smudged with grime), these words have traveled a great distance. I am in a place far, far away from (and, judging by the view, a good deal higher than) the hum-drum, pedestrian pathways of the unexamined life.
That’s right: I’m in the Marketplace of Ideas. The air is thin in this rarefied bazaar, and the discourse is heady. You wouldn’t believe the folks wandering around! Jia Tolentino is here, I’m told, and so is Anna Wiener. But I haven’t seen them yet. Presumably they’re at the center of things, and I haven’t figured out where that is. It’s something of of a labyrinth. Where I’m at, it’s mostly dudes on Substack.
How did I get here? In the last week, I pitched two (2!) essays to two (2!) editors at pretty reputable magazines. Did it cold. No attachments or inline samples to evidence my sparkling turns of phrase, just that bare, hard, mother of all goods: the idea.
I have never done this before. Sure, I have published some stuff, but it was always written before I shared it with the editor, and the editor was always someone I knew personally. So this is a new moment for me.
And that is exciting! Because I always wanted to be in the arena of people who produce text for faceless strangers. But up until last week or so, I could never muster the chutzpa to go online and see what my non-dead contemporaries had written on the thing about which I wanted to write: immersive art, the eclipse of handwriting, light pollution, you name it. People are on this already! Capable people! And there’s nothing more damaging to the tender radicle of a newly rooting idea than to find that its clone has already seen the light of day in a 2018 Vulture think-piece.
My fragile system couldn’t take it. I am tremendously competitive, and competition makes me tremendously anxious. The thought that my duende might be elbowed out by another, more muscular metaphor was low-key dreadful. So I resolved to write in isolation and dedicate myself only to topics so self-referential or arcane that nobody else could ever think to write about them.
What changed? IDK. My recent realization that I simply want to make books, and that there’s no use in justifying or problematizing this desire, probably has to do with it. I want to make books! Punto. To do so, one must put out pieces that gesture at the possibility of a book. The question of writing thus becomes a concrete, strategic one, rather than an endless concession to the vague spiritual/political identity-based demands I had previously imposed upon it.
The gentle encouragement of my girlfriend, Rai. Advice from an older writer, too. In any case, a switch flipped. So the other night I went fetal on the couch and, using Rai’s phone, scanned all of the articles and essays I could find on the trend I hoped to write about. There were five or six, from middle-tier online publications, but a few from the Big Hitters. I did some quick copy-paste jobs to the Notes app to stymie the paywalls. Voila.
It was all less freaky than I had feared: yes, other people had commented on this stuff, but not in the way I hoped to. What’s more, responding to these existing ideas helped me clarify my own! Who knew!
Duh. This is how anything worthwhile comes into the world: through conversation.
So here I am, weighing my wares and hawking my stock. In practice, this means refreshing my email every half hour in hopes of a gushing reply. Nothing so far. I’m beginning to get the sense that participation in the Marketplace of Ideas entails mostly waiting. Since “arriving,” I’ve spent more time grating parmesan than doing whatever it is these guys are doing:
But there’s a real point to be made in reference to Plato & co, if not in this image, exactly: that once upon a time, the Marketplace of Ideas was a real place. Not a metaphor! (Just as the economic market was once a real place — the Roman forum, say — rather than a metaphor.) One consequence of this fact is that there was no single Marketplace of Ideas, but rather many, geographically specific ones.
Consider, as exemplar, a book I discovered last year:
Libreros de Viejo en La Ciudad de México (Used Booksellers in Mexico City) is a collection of interviews with the old men who peddled used books in and around the city. The stories are fabulous — many of these guys (and they are mostly guys) were illiterate when they entered the business. This was the case with Ramón Nava y Nava, who arrived in the city at twenty-five years old, and was promptly put to selling books by his older brother. I don’t know how to read, he protested, to which his brother replied: They have the price marked on them. Just look at the numbers.
What’s most striking about the collection is how much time these booksellers spend discussing street names (Isabela la Católica, Córdoba, Colonia Morelos) and places (the cigarette kiosk across from the Cathedral). To this generation, the story of the books, and the ideas they contained, was inseparable from the urban geography through which the books circulated, and the people who sold them.
(In that spirit, I suppose I ought to specify where I found this book [at Liberia del Fondo de Cultura Económica, Av. Tamaulipas 202, Hipódromo, Cuauhtémoc, 06100 Ciudad de México, CDMX, Mexico] and who recommended this place to me [my brother, Henry]).
This is not the case anymore. It is hard to say exactly where my ideas reside — here in my apartment in Brooklyn? In the Protonmail inbox of Zach from The Baffler? On some server farm in Kentucky? Even more distressing is the loneliness of it all. In this totally dematerialized digital “Marketplace”, there is no possibility of the chance encounters that make real marketplaces centers of sociality: bumping into old friends, making new ones, eyeing what other folks are buying, reveling in the vitality of human exchange…
But I am of the twenty-first century laptop class, and the immense, unreasonable privileges that this entails outweigh any grounds for complaint. So the most that I can do is report back from this strange terrain — and perhaps hear from YOU in return.
Because, hey, this world can feel desolate (particularly the one behind your screen). If ever you feel moved to respond to any of the above, please do:
rustmenagerie (at) gmail (dot) com
Stay tuned. More writing in the pipe, down the pike, etc.
Yours,
P