Letter From The Editor
A Question for the Readers of The Happy Few
Gardeners and florists speak of fillers, spillers, and thrillers. When arranging flowers or plants in any kind of container, ideally you’ve got a mix of all three. Thrillers are the showstoppers, the first objects to catch the eye. Spillers are intended to literally spill out and tumble from the container, shoots of wildness amid a den of domesticity. Fillers take up space. If you need more depth, put in a filler. If you need more coverage, put in a filler. If you need more texture or contrast or “garden variety” variety in your garden, put in a filler.
This is a filler post. I am working on a longer piece — which, as it continues to twist, turn, and extend its messy tendrils, is growing more spiller — but, three months in, I’m realizing that the The Happy Few needs to establish a balance. In particular, the newsletter needs a way to find room for fillers: the blog-y, haphazard pieces that I mentioned in the introductory post. On the one hand, fillers would act as a through-line and provide a little more consistency, meaning we’re not hopscotching from Stan’s music picks to Ernst’s thoughts on how to inhabit time to Cass’s rants on nerd culture. I can understand how that might induce a sense of whiplash.
On the other hand, filler pieces could buy me some time. To be honest, I simply have no idea how often new posts should be published, nor do I have any idea how often readers expect new posts to published, nor do I have any idea if anyone other than me cares. But thrillers and spillers do take a minute.
In the event you do care, I’m open to any thoughts or suggestions, especially if you’re helping fund this venture. What would you actually enjoy or stand to benefit from? What could you reasonably look forward to? Understanding that your mileage may vary on whatever Le Marquis de Impuissance manages to muster up — if he’s able to to muster up anything — what lowish-labor, mid-ish-value “service” can The Happy Few offer? Select links? [Blank] of the week? A media diet digest? Mail bags? Happy Few AMA’s? Amateur weather reports? Expert investment advice?
Leave a comment below or email the newsletter at happyfew@substack.com.
The answer may be, “no thanks.” After all, do we really need more filler? Where I live, a garden can turn into a Kudzu forest overnight.
I’ll only say that, even as The Happy Few develops a clearer identity, it will continue to be an exercise, experiment, and exorcism — but also a juvenile, vain, and feeble act of resistance. Because while I don’t know how often any of you think I should post, I do know how often other, larger, invisible, and intractable forces think I should: that is, constantly. Endlessly. Ad nauseum. What forces? I don’t know ... the internet, the algorithm, the market, Mammon. Stuff like that.
Fortunately, per its mission statement, The Happy Few isn’t necessary. Which is to say, it’s superfluous. Blissfully superfluous. And if it’s not needed in the first place — and, wow, is it not needed! — then it doesn’t need to fulfill any demands. It can simply be.
So here’s another way of describing The Happy Few: “Always superfluous, never redundant.” That is, “always too much, but never too much of the same.” I’m offering you something you definitely don’t need, but I’m also not offering you anything that you already have. Make sense? The Happy Few is lagniappe.
There’s a chapter in Umberto Eco’s medieval murder-mystery, The Name of the Rose, in which the narrator, a novitiate monk named Adso, visits the monastery’s church for the first time and is overawed by the stone-carved gothic doorway; the description of the door’s ornate design extends for several heady, borderline hallucinatory pages. Initially Adso is struck by the rendering of the divine, the “Seated One,” crowned, robed, and haloed, with a full majestic head of hair, and a beard that flows around his “stern and impassive” face like “the waters of a river.” A celestial thriller, even if the iconography is pretty standard.
But the closer he looks, the more chaotic and fearsome the scene becomes. It’s a scene of Armageddon. Beneath the Seated One — located where we might expect some complementary but ultimately secondary ornamentation — the narrator witnesses a dizzying tangle of “sainted limbs and infernal sinews,” a swarm of the saved and the damned, all present (if not all pleased) before the final judgment. Triumphal and ecstatic, the happy elect are unnerving in their own way. But the unhappy remainder are on another level.
I saw a voluptuous woman, naked and fleshless, gnawed by foul toads, sucked by serpents, coupled with a fat-bellied satyr whose gryphon legs were covered with wiry hairs, howling its own damnation from an obscene throat ...
This bestiary of prurience and perversion goes on and on, a phantasmagorical pandemonium, eventually reaching the point that it’s less terrifying than it is simply confusing. The thriller is obscured. Adso is lost, and so is the reader. Together, we’ve wandered into a wasteland of images where nothing is distinct and everything crowds inward — a diabolical Kudzu forest.
Well, part of what’s going on is a sincere representation and exploration of medieval aesthetics, in which Eco was a specialist. But I think Eco is also having a little fun. We shouldn’t forget that we’re witnessing an allegory, and a particularly indulgent and decadent one. The mere length of the passage, in all its overwrought wonder, tilts toward comedy. Stare at a word long enough and it becomes meaningless. Stare at a door long enough and it will too.
Later that day, Adso happens across one of the victim’s psalters: a rare, vellum-bound volume, i.e., an extremely expensive item, not to mention a sacred one. Inside the book the monk has doodled all over the margins, like a mischievous schoolboy. What’s more, the doodles are absurd:
... humans with horses’ heads, and horses with human legs, fish with birds’ wings and birds with fishtails, monsters with single bodies and double heads or single heads and double bodies ...
Adso has to suppress his laughter. But maybe the artist is on to something. Should faith, or reason, preclude creativity? Can’t a monk dream?
Seven hundred years later, Michael Scott, in a moment of extreme despair and religious doubt, wonders aloud about the existence of some powerful forgotten deity whom he can offer a sacrifice to:
... some sort of monster, like something with the body of a walrus with the head of a sea lion. Or something with the body of an egret with the head of a meerkat. Or just the head of a monkey with the antlers of a reindeer. With the body of a porcupine.
You see, filler can excite the imagination. Filler can be fun — when done in proportion, and responsibly. But how? By what method? By what mechanism? Because here I am again, spending more time on a piece than I’d planned on. This could’ve been a four-sentence request for ideas.
Filler? Nay. My blog spilleth over.