Had a great time at the Book Culture 20% off sale last weekend. It’s got to be my favorite New York City bookstore, but I haven’t done a YouTube video on it yet. I really only do the bookstore videos when I’m travelling but I should do my home city as well. There are a few good ones, but nothing is really as good as Book Culture. They feel to me like the London Review of Books bookshop, which I had one chance to visit, and on the day I went they were closed for inventory.

So yes that photo was taken on April 3rd. A sad time. But yesterday at Book Culture (of which I have no photos like this) was a good one. Got some great books and had a great conversation afterwards about the relationship of academia to the outsider, or the academic outsider, which might be a way to think about it because there are so many in the academy who suffer from crippling impostor syndrome. It’s really quite sad as these people are often very brilliant.

So there are a few relationships that academia has to the outsider:

1. Obsession – we continue to return to texts and ideas produced outside of the academy, using rules that are not the academy’s (and also not made transparent) in hopes we can explain them using our academic tools, but we keep returning no matter how good the explanation because the text’s “good” outstrips what theory can say about it.

2. It’s not bad to be an outsider – the academy and academia should be small and there’s a lot of great benefit to having really sharp, good writers taking on subjects in books and essays that are meant for a general, non-specialist audience.

3. Impostor syndrome – you are at a Q&A or wine reception for a guest speaker at the university and you don’t realize that you, and everyone else there, feels that everyone else in the room really “gets it” and should be there and you are just there by luck or will be found out soon.

So that was a good chat, and also a nice chat about writing and how it needs to be low stakes, low stakes all the time, everyday so that when the vital or high-stakes writing appears you are quite ready for it and can take it on. I think that the healthiest approach is to assume your writing is always a bit under-baked and needs some critique so you can bake it again. I think this is what I mean by low stakes, and also this is the reason for the post. I’ve been remiss on the daily blogging habit, and I think it’s so good for writing and for getting the day going in the right way, although my day has been going for a bit now and I am just now getting this thing typed.

a daily writing habit is writing and it’s important writing as it gets the norms and low-stakes attitude out there. I prefer this format because there’s an audience and they are going to read it, so I have to think about what I’m saying and how I’m saying it, which is the most interesting and important part of the process for me.

In closing, here are the books I bought! I have a massive (yet killer) reading list for December/January and I’m looking forward to a very wordy holiday.