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Five Hundred Columns

I've contributed a column weekly to Splice Today since April 2016. I take a few weeks off each year, but occasionally have done more than one in a given week. I figure that makes about 500 articles.

When it started, I was in a professional and personal crisis qua philosophy professor and qua human. I'd just been fired that month from my job at Dickinson College (though later I was reinstated due to legal action) and I'd reached the point of thinking of my life as a failure. I'd also done a lot of writing and pitching opinion columns for the previous 30 years and had many scores, starting with the Nashville Banner and moving on to dozens of columns for The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Baltimore Sun, and The Los Angeles Times.

Eventually (around 2000), my column was syndicated by Creators. I'd wanted to be a syndicated columnist since I was a child reading The Washington Post, and thought that I'd really made it. But pickup on the column was light, and I was also working fulltime and raising small children, which was kind of overwhelming. I returned to freelancing, eventually appearing fairly often in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Freelancing has its drawbacks. You have to pitch and pitch and pitch some more. You gather up contacts, who may eventually quit, move, retire, a built-in hazard that’s grown worse as the news industry has floundered. You also, likely, have to take some heavy editing. This can improve your essay, or just compromise it with someone else's opinion or argument. These mainstream outlets often had a strict word count. You couldn't cuss in these publications, and there were many other restrictions on what you could say and how.

I managed to sneak a bunch of anarchism and Kierkegaardian existentialism into these mainstream outlets, which impressed me, even if it didn't end up building a devoted audience. But if you’re writing for The Los Angeles Times, it's going to have to appear mainstream, even if it's not. I spent too much time and energy on rhetorical strategies and sneak attacks, when I would’ve preferred simply to wallop you over the head with my funky-ass positions.

The advent of Splice Today coincided with the decline of the opinion page: every American city used to publish several every day, as when my (in my youth) hometown of DC featured The Washington Post, the Daily News, and the Evening Star. Now people tweet instead, even if there’s vestigial essayistic activity, much of it now moved to Substack and suchlike. I don't know whether "opinion journalism," on which I once taught courses, still exists. But it’s been transformed. I still pitch occasionally, but don't seem to know the editors anymore and I'm still pretty sick of jumping through the hoops.

I think I ran into a link to Splice Today on Twitter and became curious. I liked the simple, colorful, blocky layout. I liked the variety of material and writers and the fact that it had no particular ideological slant (though maybe just a touch of libertarian, which I can live with happily). It published all sorts of material on all sorts of matters and in all sorts of voices, without imposing a house style (except that the editor strongly prefers contractions: no “is not” shall pass).

After I dipped in a couple of times, I found that Splice Today was edited by Russ Smith, known as "Mugger" (after his vast weekly column in the 1990s in New York Press, a rival to the Village Voice that Smith owned and edited). I'd done a series of columns on country music (the "Farm Report") for it, early-2000s. But Smith had also been one of my first editors, when I was writing rock criticism for his Baltimore City Paper in the early-1980s. Anyway, I realized I had a connection, and that's the kind of thing that a freelancer notes.

I pitched a couple of things, which went well, and then asked Russ if we could go weekly. He agreed, and we increased my modest fee. (I’ll note that I rarely got over about $250 from anyone, and that fees slumped in the 2010s to the point at which a long essay in The New York Times might bring you a check for $150.)

From my point of view, it's been something of an ideal relationship. I can take any position I please, with no hedging or gratuitous concessions. I can write however I like, from a crafted essay to an almost-random screed. I can write to any length, and have probably gone as short as 500 words and as long as 5000. I can write about anything, and shift from pop music to academic philosophy to politics, whatever the moment or the mood may dictate. I like being edited, lightly, and you'd be surprised, or maybe not, at what sort of mistakes and infelicities can creep into my unchecked copy.

I have an informal deadline with Russ: eight a.m. on Sundays, for publication on Mondays. Generally, I get up around 5:30, make coffee, and mess around on the internet looking for something to write about. I usually find something, or else I have to look back on my phone to see whether I've noted any ideas this week. Sometimes it comes easily or even urgently, sometimes I have to force it out.

I've written some series, such as Why They Suck, attacks on people (such as Bob Dylan and Ludwig Wittgenstein) whom I regard as overrated, and Resounding, trying to remind readers about or introduce readers to music that’s been superseded or neglected.

I'm petering out a bit, not only as an opinion writer, but as a human, especially since I retired from teaching (in another legal wrangle). On the other hand, I still love a 1000-word essay as a form to read and to write. I've felt burned out before, and thought I'd come to the end of the rope, only to get re-energized somehow by a new set of figures or ideas. I'm sitting here (7:36 a.m. on Sunday April 5), hoping for a little writerly resurrection. My New Year's resolution this year was to write a book. I haven't started yet.

Meanwhile here are some of my favorite of my Splice Today columns from over the years. And thanks, Mugger!

Trump, Clinton, and the Science of Communication

Loving the Female Artist: A Guide

Richard Rorty: An Intellectual Memoir

Who Is America?

The Worst Major City in the USA

Repress Mathematics Now

There's One Terrible Problem for Classical Socialism

On Bluegrass Gospel

The March of Euphemism

The Powerlessness of Words

Boys: We Will Survive