What the Happy Few Are Saying About The Happy Few
But First: Seriously, What is The Happy Few?
Thank you to everyone who has subscribed to The Happy Few, especially to those who for some reason decided to give me money. In the very likely event you want your money back at some point, please let me know. In the meantime, if you aren’t concerned about damaging your social cache by affiliation with this newsletter, feel free to pass along The Happy Few.
If your support is edifying, it’s also a little unnerving. Given that I’m not sure what The Happy Few is — which I thought made clear in the first post — I don’t honestly know what you’re expecting.
Then again, maybe you don’t either. Most of the responses I’ve received have expressed a general confusion: seriously though, what? who? why? why don’t you ever just, will you ever just . . . ? I’m assuming that the rest of you clicked subscribe out of pity, noblesse oblige, or on accident.
The point is that, perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve gotten things off to a weird start. You want to know what you’ve signed up for, or at least why you should care. That’s an important question to ask, and I promise I’m not deliberately dodging it. Unfortunately for now all I can do is refer back to part of this society’s mission statement:
. . . It offers no insight, no expertise, no tonic. It claims no definitive judgments, targets no real goal, and cowers at the specter of appearing (let alone being) useful, lucid, or even notably coherent. . .
So again, the clearest way I can currently put it is this: The Happy Few is an experiment and an exercise. As with most experiments, it will fail. As with most exercise, it is folly.
It is also, finally, an exorcism. Whatever your feelings are on exorcisms, the argument is not that they’re enjoyable. Only that they’re hygienic.
Anyway, thanks again for reading. If you do have a suggestion for the newsletter, please send it to me. This is a society in which all are invited — even if few ever attend.
For good measure, I also thought I’d share a few responses I got from our correspondents. Let their uncertainty in some way validate your own.
Rose Tartaros
Of course it’s on Substack and of course it’s with four random probably-white dudes, several of whose names, with all due respect, read incel. Answer me honestly. What is a “Le Marquis de Impuissance,” and am I expected to dialogue with him?
Le Marquis de Impuissance:
I confess some anxiety about this endeavor. Committing thoughts to words, and words to written words, is a genuinely dangerous act. But for the poet, what is the alternative?
In a famous letter to his friend and patron Max Brod, Kafka claimed that “a non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.” Maybe. But did Kafka really believe that? In his own writing Kafka spied monsters everywhere: manic, pathetic, grotesque, inescapable. Yes, he wrote — incessantly. “I am made of literature,” he told his fiancé. “I am nothing else and cannot be anything else.”
And yet this same person burned ninety-percent of his work in his lifetime. After Kafka died from tuberculosis at forty, Brod took over as the literary executor of Kafka’s will, which stipulated that all his remaining manuscripts be destroyed.
Brod refused. Surely his friend wasn’t serious? Surely nobody devotes that much time and energy on something, effectively to the point of death, just to throw it in the fire? That would be monstrous. Insane. Even if the work was unfinished, even if it was uniquely obscure (which was saying something for Kafka), even if it was all over the place (in some cases literally, scattered in fragments across multiple notebooks) — no one could be so obsessive, so fastidious, so guarded. Surely the world can’t afford to keep a single genius secret, much less a singular one?
Brod refused. Instead he published, among other masterpieces, The Trial, Amerika, and The Castle.
. . . The danger of writing, the danger of not writing.
Cass Lowndes (text exchange):
CL: Can I write about leaf blowers?
JH: Sure.
CL: I fucking hate leaf blowers.
JH: Yes, I know.
CL: Don’t you?
JH: Sure.
CL: What else should I write about?
JH: I don’t know, whatever you feel moved to write about.
CL: What is your website about?
JH: I don’t know.
CL: You’re insufferable.