Cinemorphosis

Category: Literary Dispatches

  • The Art of Humble Submission

    The Art of Humble Submission

    When you’re a writer, you draft, revise, despair, polish again, and then perform an ancient ritual of humility: you submit. Whether your offering goes to a magazine, an agent, or a publisher, the act is the same—a small bow before the gatekeepers. In On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche seizes on this word—submission—as the perfect metaphor for the writer’s life: a posture equal parts hope and humiliation. “Writers live in a state of submission,” he observes. “Submission means rejection. Rejection is the condition of the practice of submission, which is the practice of writing.” And digital culture has intensified the ordeal. With online forms and instant attachments, rejection arrives at industrial scale. A determined writer can now collect hundreds of dismissals a week. Ninety-nine percent will never land a deal, and those who do may make less than the barista who hands them their morning latte.

    So what exactly is a writer submitting to? Not just editors. Not merely algorithms. A writer submits to the dream that the private mind might earn a public life—that interiority, sculpted into sentences, might sustain you financially and spiritually. You write in the hope that your imagined worlds might become someone else’s emotional reality, that your pages might matter to strangers.

    Marche’s advice is blunt: persistence is not optional. Writing success is not a meritocracy but a lottery with a talent filter. The more tickets you buy, the better your odds. “Persistence is the siege you lay on fortune,” he writes—a relentless knocking at a door that may never open, but sometimes does for reasons no one fully understands.

    And this capriciousness is not unique to writers. Marche notes that actors secure roles only 7 percent of the time because of talent; the rest depends on age, look, market trends, and even “box office value in China.” Painters, dancers, musicians, designers—all create under the same unstable sky. To make art is to gamble against indifference. Persistence isn’t noble; it’s necessary, because fate occasionally rewards the stubborn.

  • From the Literary Golden Age to Algorithmic Wasteland

    From the Literary Golden Age to Algorithmic Wasteland

    In On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche dismantles the fantasy that writers can transform themselves into entrepreneurs and save the craft through hustle. He has watched brilliant minds waste their genius on branding decks and content calendars, convinced that a marketing plan can substitute for a literary life. Everyone, he notes, now arrives armed with a social-media strategy; even legacy writers chase streaming deals. Yet the “digital ad revenue” that was supposed to be salvation barely buys groceries. This notion of self-promotion on a social media platform may work for a handful, but for most of us, this plan is all chicanery. Most  writers would earn more working part-time at Starbucks than posting their book excerpts on Instagram. 

    And still writers persist, driven by an ancient question: How do you make a living by thinking? In a world where platforms shift beneath your feet, young writers must reinvent themselves with exhausting frequency—editing careers as relentlessly as they edit sentences.

    Marche reminds us that postwar America once had sturdy literary institutions: robust magazines, influential newspapers, university presses, publishers willing to cultivate voices rather than chase viral heat. That era nurtured Boomer writers who could achieve cultural celebrity and economic stability. But those scaffolds have collapsed. We live among the ruins of that golden age. Institutions fray, readership declines, and the professional writer now sits on the same endangered-species list as the white rhinoceros.

    With writing now fully digital, the terrain resembles a lawless frontier. The deep, contemplative reading that literature requires has been replaced by rapid-fire commentary. Instead of essays and books, the culture rewards short-form skirmishes and performative certainty. As Marche put it to Sam Harris, America’s most profitable export is now “the peddling of moral outrage.” Rage scales. Nuance suffocates.

    This erosion of the writing life carries consequences beyond the page. When outrage becomes the ambient air, critical thinking dries up, public trust decays, and democratic habits atrophy. To lose serious writing isn’t merely to lose an art; it is to endanger the civic imagination that sustains a republic. The crisis of literature is not an aesthetic inconvenience—it is a political warning flare.

  • The Homelessness of the Modern Writer

    The Homelessness of the Modern Writer

    In On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche shows zero patience for the self-help fable that “failure leads to success.” The myth says: suffer now, triumph later; keep grinding and the universe will eventually reward you. Marche calls this narrative pure nonsense. His friendships with writers who have made millions and basked in praise only confirm the truth: acclaim doesn’t cure insecurity, fame doesn’t dissolve alienation, and even celebrated authors carry the bruises of obscurity under their tuxedos. They remain misunderstood, jealous, anxious, and haunted by irrelevance. Success doesn’t banish failure—it merely decorates it. Celebrity is not salvation; it is a spotlight that makes the neediness easier to see.

    Marche believes the situation is worsening. We live, he argues, in a cultural moment where institutions are collapsing and traditional literary prestige has been replaced by digital noise. Novelists chase television deals. Journalists pivot into professional outrage machines. The literary public square has splintered into algorithmic micro-audiences. And in this fractured landscape, the writer’s deepest fear is not rejection—it’s evaporation. Not being debated, but forgotten.

    Even the “independent writer revolution” gets little mercy from Marche. Platforms come and go, each proclaimed the future of writing, each eventually forgotten. “Every few years there’s some new great hope—right now it’s Substack,” he writes. Then comes the hammer: “Substack will die or peter out just like the rest.” The point is not cynicism for sport; it is a reminder that technology cannot build the cathedral that literary culture once occupied. The medium keeps changing; the instability remains constant.

    As a reader drowning in subscriptions, I find his skepticism refreshing. I can’t reasonably pay $60 to $120 a year for dozens of Substack writers I admire. If I did, I’d be shelling out ten grand annually just to keep up. That is not a sustainable model for anyone but tech-company accountants. So yes, blogs collapsed, digital magazines buckled, and Substack may be next. Writers are still wandering, looking for a home that isn’t a platform built on a countdown timer. We are living in a literary diaspora—talent everywhere, shelter nowhere.

  • Why Publish a Novel When You Can Rant Weekly?

    Why Publish a Novel When You Can Rant Weekly?

    In On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche reminds us that roughly 300,000 books appear in the United States every year, and only a few hundred can reasonably be called creative or financial successes. Most books by “successful” authors flop. Most writers are failures. And then there is the vast shadow population: the would-be writers who never finish a book, yet earnestly introduce themselves at parties as working on one. If they are legion, it’s because failure in writing isn’t an exception — it’s the baseline condition.

    Lately I hear a parallel refrain: “Everyone has a podcast.” The cultural fantasy of “being a writer” — once the preferred badge of intelligence and depth — is being shoved aside by the fantasy of being a podcaster, which is the new intellectual flex. Instead of the solitary novelist hunched over drafts, we get booming-voiced men with battle-hardened beards and canned energy drinks, thumping their thighs as they dismantle “the mainstream narrative.” And if that theatrics doesn’t suit your tastes, you can choose from endless niches: politics, wellness sermons, nostalgia rants, paranormal confessionals, or gentle whisper-therapy for anxious brains. The point isn’t content; the point is talking.

    Marche dissects the layers of literary failure, but he forces us to consider a stranger threat: failure may be vanishing simply because writing itself may be vanishing as an arena where one can fail. You can’t fail at spearing a sabre-toothed tiger in 2025; the task no longer exists. Likewise, journaling and “mindfulness notes” have replaced drafts and essays, but only matter once they’re converted into soundbites on TikTok or a monologue in a podcast episode.

    If writing once demanded endurance, rejection slips, and a skin thin enough to bruise yet thick enough to keep showing up, now the danger is different: a discipline can’t hurt you once it stops being culturally real. Increasingly, I wonder whether writing, as a vocation and identity, even exists in the same form it did twenty years ago — and if it doesn’t, what exactly does it mean to “fail” at it anymore?

  • Failure Is the Bedrock of Writing

    Failure Is the Bedrock of Writing

    Stephen Marche, veteran journalist and author, says the secret to becoming a writer isn’t inspiration or networking or the right MFA program. It’s endurance. Grim, stubborn, occasionally delusional endurance. His slim volume On Writing and Failure makes one argument with relentless clarity: if you want to write, prepare to suffer. Forget talk of “flourishing,” “mentorship,” and “encouragement.” Writing isn’t a wellness retreat. It’s a trench.

    Marche opens with the perennial questions writers whisper to each other after one rejection too many: Does this get easier? Do you grow thicker skin? The response he quotes from Philip Roth is a gut punch: “Your skin just grows thinner and thinner. In the end, they can hold you up to the light and see right through you.” In other words, the longer you write, the more naked you become. Vulnerability isn’t a side effect of the craft; it is the craft.

    Marche’s bleak comfort is that every writer feeds off failure. Success is accidental—a borrowed tuxedo, worn briefly. Failure is the body underneath. Even the authors smiling from dust jackets look like rescued hostages, blinking at daylight before returning to the bunker of their desks to keep going. They don’t do it because it’s glamorous. They do it because not writing would be worse.

    I understand the pathology. After decades of cranking out what I believed were novels, I finally admitted I couldn’t write one—not at the level I demanded, not at the level worth inflicting on readers. That revelation didn’t spare me failure; it merely revealed strata of it. There’s the failure of rejection, the failure of the work, and the quiet, private failure of recognizing your own limits. Perhaps I could’ve spared myself time and spared literary agents grief. But failure has its curriculum, and I attended every class.

    Marche’s book is a sober reminder that writing is less a triumphal march than a pilgrimage carried out on blistered feet. Failure isn’t a detour; it’s the terrain. Rock layers of it: topsoil doubt, subsoil rejection, shale humiliation, limestone stubbornness. Dig deeper and you hit coal—compressed ambition under impossible pressure, black and combustible.

    Failure isn’t fashionable grit or a TED Talk slogan. When executives brag about “learning from failure,” they’re dilettantes. Writers are the professionals of defeat. To be a poet today is to live like a post-apocalyptic monk, scribbling in candlelight, shadow thrown against the cave wall, not out of masochism but because there’s no other way to stay human. The world may not care, but the work insists.

  • Against Mythmaking 

    Against Mythmaking 

    In The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, Hyam Maccoby doesn’t treat Paul as a saintly architect of faith. Instead, he brands him a slick opportunist — a theological con artist who sidelined Jesus’ Jewish disciples and reinvented the movement to glorify himself. In Maccoby’s telling, Paul isn’t the earnest apostle of Sunday school murals; he’s a résumé-padding religious entrepreneur with a flair for self-promotion.

    Luke, author of Acts, doesn’t escape scrutiny either. To Maccoby, Luke plays the role of breathless publicist, polishing Paul into a heroic Hollywood lead — all charisma, no contradictions, halo firmly secured with narrative glue.

    Yet as I reread Maccoby, I can’t ignore the irony: in exposing Paul’s myth-making, Maccoby may be engaged in his own. If Luke sculpted Paul into a glowing protagonist, Maccoby chisels him into a grand villain — less apostle, more Bond antagonist with holy stationery.

    My relationship with Paul is messier than either portrait. At times he reads like a puffed-up moralist enthralled by his own authority; at other moments, he achieves startling spiritual clarity — like his definition of God as self-emptying love in Philippians. Myth-making, whether heroic or malicious, flattens figures like Paul into cardboard cutouts, sanding down the contradictions that make real people aggravating, compelling, and occasionally profound.

    So while Maccoby offers a seductive, neatly packaged explanation for Christianity’s break from Judaism — Paul scheming his way to divine stardom — it feels too tidy. Real history rarely sticks to clean villain-hero binaries. 

    My life would be defined by resolution and an ability to move on if I could see Paul that way Maccoby does, but before I can toss Paul into the narcissist bin and slam the lid, I have to admit that Maccoby — like Luke — might be seduced by narrative neatness. Paul’s letters show someone less like a cartoon schemer and more like a man painfully aware of his own weakness, insecurity, and failure. If he were a megalomaniac mastermind, he was spectacularly bad at the role: beaten, jailed, mocked, shipwrecked, chronically ill, and constantly sparring with congregations who treated him not like a guru but like the world’s most irritating substitute teacher. His theology isn’t the product of a slick PR machine; it reads like a bruised mystic wrestling with power, ego, and surrender. 

    You can see it in Paul’s grudging boasts, his trembling confessions, and his moments of ecstatic humility — that strange mix of cosmic ambition and self-annihilation that marks someone grappling with God, not angling for a corner office. 

    It may be comforting to imagine Paul as either saint or sociopath, but the textual record points to something far more inconvenient: a brilliant, exasperating, self-contradicting human being who stumbled toward transcendence while dragging his flaws behind him like rattling tin cans tied to a wedding bumper.

    In any event, I shall continue rereading Maccoby. His strident reaction to Paul continues to fascinate me.

  • The Temu-ization of Everything—Again

    The Temu-ization of Everything—Again

    I’m reading Cory Doctorow’s freshly minted Enshittification. Early on, he revisits Facebook circa 2010: the honey pot that lured billions before curdling into a slurry of compulsion loops, conspiracy gristle, and industrial-scale data mining. It’s sharp, it’s punchy—and it gave me déjà vu. Then my stomach dropped: I like the coinage, I like the thesis that we’re living through the Enshittocene, but the insights feel old. Jaron Lanier mapped a lot of this terrain eight years ago in Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, a book I’ve taught over the last seven years.

    Doctorow’s Amazon chapter triggers the same shrug. The platform seduces us with convenience, tightens its talons, and gradually morphs from glossy marketplace into Temu-adjacent bazaar. True, and thoroughly litigated across a thousand essays and think pieces. We’ve been warned about the house always winning; we don’t need another tour of the casino floor.

    What I wanted—and didn’t get—was a deeper dive into the anthropology of the rot. Black Mirror’s “Nosedive” or “Joan Is Awful” doesn’t just wag a finger at platforms; it autopsies the psyche and the systems. New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka nails the gap: Enshittification is “pointed and efficient,” but reads like “professional blogging extended for three-hundred-plus pages,” leaving you hungry for a larger cultural x-ray that goes beyond the usual suspects.

    To be fair, packaging a messy discourse into one memorable term matters; not everyone read Lanier or binged Brooker. Doctorow’s snark has its uses. A clean label can move an idea from seminar rooms to dinner tables. But once you’ve named the disease, the next move isn’t to repeat symptoms; it’s to map vectors, power centers, and countermeasures with fresh cases outside the Big Tech pentagon.

    So yes: I love the word. But the book left me underwhelmed. Doctorow has given us the bumper sticker; I’m still waiting for the field manual. The Enshittocene doesn’t need another catalog of platform sins—it needs a blueprint that shows how to break the flywheels, where policy and design can bite, and why our appetites keep refilling the trough. Name the era, sure. Now show us how to survive it—and, if we’re lucky, how to end it.

  • The Eight Ages of –ification

    The Eight Ages of –ification

    From Conformification to Enshittification: how every decade found a fresh way to ruin itself.

    The Age of Decline, Accelerated

    In Enshittification, Cory Doctorow argues that our decline isn’t gradual—it’s accelerating. Everything is turning to crap simultaneously, like civilization performing a synchronized swan dive into the sewer.

    The book’s subtitle, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, suggests that degradation is now both universal and, somehow, fixable.

    Doctorow isn’t the first prophet to glimpse the digital abyss. Jaron Lanier, Jonathan Haidt, and other cultural Cassandras have long warned about the stupidification that comes from living inside the algorithmic aquarium. We swim in the same recycled sludge of dopamine and outrage, growing ever duller while congratulating ourselves on being “connected.”

    This numbness—the ethical anesthesia of the online age—makes us tolerate more crappiness from our corporate overlords. As the platforms enshittify, we invent our own little coping rituals. Some of us chant words with –ion suffixes as if they were incantations, linguistic ASMR to soothe our digital despair.

    When I saw Ozempic and ChatGPT promising frictionless perfection—weight loss without effort, prose without struggle—I coined Ozempification: the blissful surrender of self-agency to the cult of convenience.

    Now there’s an entire liturgy of –ifications, each describing a new layer of rot:

    • Enshittification — Doctorow’s coinage for the systematic decay of platforms that once worked.
    • Crapification / Encrappification — The transformation of quality into garbage in the name of efficiency.
    • Gamification — Turning life into a perpetual contest of meaningless points and dopamine rewards.
    • Attentionification — Reducing every act of expression to a plea for clicks.
    • Misinformationfication — When truth becomes a casualty of virality.
    • Ozempification — Replacing effort with optimization until we resemble our own avatars.
    • Stupidification — The great numbing: scrolling ourselves into idiocy while our neurons beg for mercy.

    But the crown jewel of this lexicon remains Enshittification—Doctorow’s diagnosis so precise that the American Dialect Society crowned it Word of the Year for 2023.

    Still, I’d like to push back on Doctorow’s suggestion that our current malaise is unique. Yes, technology accelerates decay, but each era has had its own pathology—its signature form of cultural rot. We’ve been creatively self-destructing for decades.

    So, let’s place Enshittification in historical context. Behold The Eight Ages of –ification: a timeline of civilization’s greatest hits in decline.

    1950s — Conformification

    The age of white fences and beige minds. America sold sameness as safety. Individuality was ironed flat, and television became the nation’s priest. Conformification is the fantasy that security comes from imitation—a tranquilized suburbia of identical dreams in identical ranch homes.

    1960s — Psychedelification

    When rebellion became transcendence through chemistry. Psychedelification was the belief that consciousness expansion could topple empires, if only the colors were bright enough. The result: self-absorption in tie-dye and the illusion that enlightenment could be mass-produced.

    1970s — Lustification

    A Freudian carnival of polyester and pelvic thrusts. From Deep Throat to Studio 54, desire was liberation and the body was both altar and marketplace. Lustification crowned pleasure as the last remaining ideology.

    1980s — Greedification

    When morality was replaced by market share. The decade baptized ambition in champagne and cocaine. Greedification is the conviction that money cleanses sin and that a Rolex can double as a rosary.

    1990s — Ironification

    The decade of smirks. Sincerity was cringe; irony was armor. Ironification made detachment the new intelligence: nothing believed, everything quoted, and feelings outsourced to sarcasm.

    2000s — Digitification

    Humanity uploaded itself. Digitification was the mass migration to the screen—the decade of Facebook envy, email anxiety, and dopamine disguised as connection. We stopped remembering and started refreshing.

    2010s — Influencification

    When everyone became a brand. Influencification turned authenticity into a business model and experience into content. The self became a product to be optimized for engagement.

    2020s — Enshittification

    Doctorow’s masterstroke: the final form of digital decay. Enshittification is what happens when every system optimizes for extraction—when user, worker, and platform all drown in the same algorithmic tar pit. It’s the exhaustion of meaning itself, disguised as progress.

    Epilogue: The 2030s — Reification

    If trends continue, we’ll soon enter Reification: a desperate attempt to make the unreal feel real again. After decades of filters, feeds, and frictionless fakery, we’ll long for something tangible—until, inevitably, we commodify that too.

    History repeats itself—only this time with better Wi-Fi.

  • Comparison Is the Mother of Misery

    Comparison Is the Mother of Misery

    The mother of misery is comparison. In fourth grade I plunged into despair because I couldn’t draw like Joseph Schidelman, the illustrator of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. About the same time, baseball humbled me: my bat speed wasn’t in the same galaxy as Willie Mays, Dick Allen, or Henry Aaron. In my teenage bodybuilding years, I had muscles, but nothing like that of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sergio Oliva, and Frank Zane; I wisely retired the fantasy of becoming Mr. Universe and managing a gym in the Bahamas. In college, as an aspiring intellectual, I flogged myself for lacking Vladimir Nabokov’s wit and velocity. My chances of becoming a famous novelist were equal to my odds of winning Mr. Olympia. Later, when I flirted with composing and singing, I heard Jeff Buckley’s soul pour through the speakers and realized my voice would mainly trigger a neighborhood dog-barking contest and a chorus of angry neighbors. Decades passed. My classroom persona faced a generation handcuffed to smartphones and ChatGPT. I scrambled for “edutainment” tricks to dodge irrelevance, but the gap widened no matter how I danced.

    The sting doubled when I watched Earthquake (Nathaniel Stroman) flatten an audience with a preacher’s cadence and bulletproof wisdom. His special Joke Telling Business left me muttering, “If I had Earthquake’s power, I could resuscitate my teaching career and stroll into old age with a shred of dignity.”

    Meanwhile, fresh incompetencies arrived like junk mail. I broke two Samsung TVs in one day. I failed to sync my new garage door opener to my phone. My wife had to rescue me from my own maladroit tech spiral. The result was predictable: I was condemned to the Shame Dungeon.

    Down in the basement of depression, I noticed another casualty: my YouTube channel. I usually post once a week and have for over a decade—mostly about my obsession with diver watches. But as sanity demanded I stop flipping watches, I ran out of new divers to discuss. I tried pivoting—open with a little watch talk, then segue to a wry misadventure with a morsel of human insight. If I nailed the landing, I’d get a few thousand views and enough comment energy to believe the enterprise mattered.

    But with my sixty-fourth birthday closing in, the doubts got loud. I don’t want to do “watch talk,” and I’m too mortified to perform a perky, self-deprecating monologue about my misalignment with the universe.

    I keep hearing Mike Birbiglia in my head: you must process your material before you present it; the set has to be a gift, not your live catharsis. The healing happens before you step onstage. You speak from the far shore, not mid-drowning. Otherwise, you’re asking the audience to be your therapist.

    So I’m stuck at a fork: Will this current fear and anxiety about age and disconnection pass through the refinery of my psyche and emerge as something worthy? Or will I remain in the Shame Dungeon, comparing myself to Earthquake, and decide that with talent like his prowling the earth, my best move is to hide under a rock?

    Here’s the dilemma plain: Hiding isn’t viable; it starves the soul. But serving the world a plate of unprocessed mediocrity is just as unforgivable. If I’m going to tell a story about breaking two TVs and my garage-opener meltdown, I have to deliver it with Earthquake’s power and confidence. Otherwise I’ll stay home, mope on the couch, and binge crime documentaries—losing myself in bigger, cleaner tragedies than my own.

  • David Letterman Killed Disco, But Can He Save My Class?

    David Letterman Killed Disco, But Can He Save My Class?

    In one fell swoop, David Letterman killed disco. Not just the music, but the entire polyester empire of rhinestone smarm and sweat-drenched earnestness. Letterman wasn’t seduced by mirror balls. He walked on stage with his arctic deadpan, and with irony as his weapon, executed disco in front of a live studio audience.

    I was just starting college then—a lifelong bodybuilder and Olympic weightlifter who could hoist a barbell but couldn’t hoist a personality. Muscles, yes. Presence, no.

    I didn’t just want to be David Letterman. I wanted to graft his sardonic detachment onto the icy brilliance of Vladimir Nabokov—a cocktail of late-night sarcasm and literary menace. I didn’t know what I wanted to be, exactly, only that it had to involve confidence, storytelling, performance—something that allowed me to “give a presentation.”

    By accident, I stumbled into teaching. In 1987, the chancellor of Humanities at Merritt College launched a pilot program to deliver classes at Skyline High School in Oakland, and none of the full-time faculty wanted the job. My neighbor, Felix Elizalde, whose kids went to school with me, threw me a lifeline. One gig snowballed into another, and soon I was a full-time college writing instructor.

    That was thirty-eight years ago. For most of them, I would have told you the hardest part of the job was grading essays—an endless swamp of half-baked theses and misplaced commas. But now, in 2025, grading essays is only the second hardest task. The first? Something educators and administrators alike love to call “student engagement.”

    I don’t know if it’s the black hole of smartphones or the simple math of age—I’m nearly forty-five years older than my students. Probably both. Either way, I can no longer stand in front of a classroom, channel my inner Letterman, and spin stories until the room vibrates with attention. Instead, I stand beside a giant screen plastered with Google Slides. My students are “visual learners,” raised on swipes and emojis.

    I could go back to the Letterman Method, earn some laughs, maybe even spike engagement for a few minutes. But at what cost? The Google Slides aren’t as funny as my comedy routine, but they do hit the sacred “core concepts” and “Student Learning Outcomes.”

    I’ve become a ghost haunting the pedagogy manuals. Occasionally I slip, crack a joke, earn some chuckles, channel my younger self—but then I reel myself back in, because the templates for counterarguments and rebuttals won’t teach themselves.

    The students aren’t fooled. A few of the candid ones smirk: “Don’t worry, McMahon, ChatGPT will do it for us.”

    And so, as I enter my mid-sixties, I keep trying to stay aligned with the modern world. Yet every step forward feels like five steps backward, as if I’m not teaching writing anymore but rehearsing my own obsolescence.