Boo Books

Immodest proposals.

I have had several conversations with people I like and respect over the last few days centering around a longer piece of writing that I have drafted. It’s not done. Will it get done? Depends on how those conversations spin in my mind. This piece of writing would have, in the old days, been called a “book,” or a “book in training.” It has characters and plot and theme. What is it about? I only ever think about how people’s beliefs surface and submerge, how identity is constructed, how human brains navigate each day, how moral choices are presented and resolved, how we make jokes and reach conclusions based on the things we see in the street. Exciting! I know. And it gets worse. Because I spend all my time in the company of these thoughts, I have learned that I have to move with great velocity or else I start to go down into that quicksand. That means that I have come to hate longer projects and to depend upon the short burst. I get (and readers get) altitude before it all sinks back down. In a longer project, some of that sinking back down is inevitable. Which has its consequences for things like page-turning-ness. But the books I love the most are those that don’t prompt me to turn the page. Call me crazy. At any rate, I have a longer piece of writing that I drafted and sent to three people I know whose opinions I value. Their reactions varied. One was over the moon with enthusiasm. One was more guarded and expressed worries about market realities. The third asked for more time. I am fine with all three reactions. If I sent to three more people and then three more and then three more after that, they would likely fall into these camps, roughly. But it left me thinking, at my late age, about the kinds of published works that will exist over the course of the rest of my life. I never really liked novels. I don’t like writing them and I don’t even love reading them. I get through a paragraph and my mind is off on its own and it might be ten minutes before I rejoin the book in progress. Thus the shorter pieces I’ve been writing for the last five years. Part of me thinks I should only do that. But another part of me, sometimes larger, thinks that I should keep trying for something longer, and I am nothing if not a democrat of me. This particular work? Well, who knows. I am not a total idiot so I know that it is at least competent in terms of its prose. I made very specific choices regarding plot, choices that strained against the bonds of what I feel every day, which is that this world I live in and this industry I work in is getting stupider by the second, more bottom-line, more divided and conquered, more afraid of risk with no way of knowing how to work the seams and the edges. Part of this feeling comes from the fact that I am older and more bitter, meaning that all of the sugared optimism of earlier decades is gone, curdled, well aware that it was played for a fool. I am aware that complaints can come from feeling left out or underserved or overlooked. But complaints can also come from truth.

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THE RAGE

The rage that Alan felt looking across the coffee shop, through some leaves hanging down from the artificial tree, across a wide blonde-wood table, to the spot where the guy in the shorts and the dress shirt with the sweater tied around his neck was sitting, talking about how he had recently bought two new cars, one electric, one gas, and how he now needed to decide if he was keeping both, and how whichever one he didn’t keep he would probably give to his brother — the sweater’s brother, not Alan’s, Alan only had a sister, a cellist — who was in a bad way, having practiced housing law and then written a novel about it only to learn that “you couldn’t get people interested in matters that didn’t concern them,” and the guy next to the sweater, who wore a linen suit, nodded, pursed his lips like he was thinking but did not speak, which proved nothing one way or the other, only opened the door further for the sweater, who went on to explain that he possessed a “great belief in the endeavor,” which was, in his mind, the broad project of “maximizing people’s interface with digital creation tools,” which seemed to mean AI, nothing more, nothing less, which also seemed to mean encouraging people to trade idiosyncrasy for baseline competence, to create in isolation, to imagine that the noise in the echo chamber was music, to perceive everything as an expenditure or a savings, to stay out of the mud, the mud beneath the wires and metals and concrete, from which we all came, into which we all will one day return, and Alan was doodling a picture of this guy and his intolerable sweater being swallowed by the mud when a young woman came into the coffeeshop and crossed his line of vision, and her beauty, simple, unspectacular, undeniable, momentarily connected his mind to something even more primal and restless than the mud, and rested it, and he felt what he would estimate later had been one point one seconds of peace, and then the sweater said something about tokens and all the blood surged back into his hands accompanied by the desire to squeeze the life out of the guy. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]