Notebook: Opinion

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

I’m always enjoined, as a purveyor of a newsletter, to draw back the curtain and expose y’all, my helpless readers, to “my process.” This first-person premise of newsletterdom does not come naturally to me. I am by nature an editor, and what I care most about is the writers I bring to you—writers who are, for me, the best self and true heart of the enterprise. The scrawling I eek out under my own steam is some sort of provisional accident, though I care a lot about the issues I discuss, mostly because of their effect on writers. Plus I myself find the spectacle of my process inevitably dispiriting; I can’t get away from it soon enough. I stare into a screen and comb through the news trying to find some salient theme that casts light on the state of letters today. I move away from the screen to try to think and am drawn back to it for more punishing onslaughts of information. Every time I want to make something more lyrical and reflective for you, the volume of inputs reasserts itself. I am abashed that even this derivative undertaking depends on an apparatus with which I am not on wholly friendly terms—the internet. When I began my career we used to pile newspapers (on the floor) and magazines (on a shelf under the window) in reverse chronological order—so we could fish back through them looking for articles we remembered reading: literal “search.” To pursue things with more precision we had to go to the library and heave down multivolume bound indexes. Now I can sit at my little desk and summon gales of effluvium on any subject with a little obsessive pounding. Qualms about the extent to which I like everyone have cashed in my curiosity, sold my data and privacy for the convenience of access, screech by me as I rush forward into the cataract.