whensoever you are tempted to tweet, instead pray

I. We Should All Stop Reacting in Public...
...he wrote, in a newsletter. Still, authors are now witnesses to a much weirder life cycle of their own work:

All it takes is one podcast host with a grudge and a modest following, like an Evangelical pastor of yore, for a small hell to break loose in your mentions. Your authorial control disintegrates. What you wrote is eclipsed by another person’s idea of what you wrote. It’s the reader’s text now — and so are you, an authorial construction, another text to be bandied about.

The trend of online mob-criticism is particularly toxic in YA, apparently. The article quoted above is about essay-writing, though, and I think we can all agree it's time we just selected gladiators from our respective political tribes and let them kill each other in our names. Champion gets to dictate social media policy. Losers forfeit their thumbs. 
  II. Friends Don't Let Friends Read Ayn Rand
I read The Fountainhead in college and didn't hate it, but I'm maybe an odd case because I already knew Ayn Rand was a tadpole of a philosopher. Her individualism in print is idiotic to the point of parody. Her fiction is basically Golden Age Hollywood pastiche; all the bad parts, too, the exaggeration and melodrama. But the book was like a lot of science fiction I read when I was young - hammy, unskilled, and all the more interesting for its rhetorical baldness. I was 19 or 20, and Ayn Rand was essentially a populist megaphone of Big Ideas she herself mishandled and misrepresented. I will admit, though, that the story of Roark the architect is more interesting as an artistic obsession than as anything political. A friend of mine put that in so many words first, but I think I read Rand with the same bias. I didn't care about politics. I did, however, care about writing.

All of this is to say that Flannery O'Connor was pretty wise about the literature she read, and even wiser about the literature she despised:

I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

III. Joyce Maynard, Novelist

[T]hough I believe that if the book I wrote 20 years ago were published today it would be received differently, it does not appear that enlightenment concerning the abuses of men in power extends retroactively to women who chose to speak long ago, and were shamed and humiliated for doing so. As recently as last fall — on the occasion of my having published a memoir about the death of my second husband, a book in which Salinger never appears — I was referred to as “the queen of oversharing.”

IV. Libraries are for Books, and Books Should Be in Print

We shall not understand what a book is, and why a book has the value many persons have, and is even less replaceable than a person, if we forget how important to it is its body, the building that has been built to hold its lines of language safely together through many adventures and a long time. Words on a screen have visual qualities, to be sure, and these darkly limn their shape, but they have no materiality, they are only shadows, and when the light shifts they’ll be gone. Off the screen they do not exist as words. They do not wait to be reseen, reread; they only wait to be remade, relit.

V. Opinion
Everyone should pray. I recommend hesychasm.

Happy Autumn! Autumn is good.