Feed Me

This morning I received my first electronic missive from Stephen Elliott’s “Daily Rumpus” email group. A friend of mine recommended that I subscribe because, in addition to being a good writer, Stephen does the thing we admire most: he writes something interesting every single day. And it’s good enough to share with the world! Take this paragraph as an example (it appears in the middle of his 28 August 2010 post, just a toss-away paragraph that reviews two recent movies better than any full-page review I’ve seen):

And yet, the movie makes sense. There’s a logic of violence and parable established in the opening scene. There are people in this film that are nearly impossible to kill, they stroll through rooms casually dismembering men with machine guns. AK 47s are no match against someone who knows how to use a knife. Once you’ve accepted this (and the excessive gore that accompanies it) the film never deviates. Which, if you think about it, is the opposite of Inception, where new rules were continually being introduced to make the story tenable. First you have to believe they can enter your dreams. Then, you can die in your dreams. Eventually, when it’s convenient, you have to believe that time moves slower the deeper your dream state. You also have to believe that only Leonardo Di Caprio has demons. Two thirds of Inception was spent explaining Inception. Machete never explains itself. This is the world you are in.

To be honest, I’m writing this post before I even finish reading Stephen’s email because his delivery method seems so brilliant and simple at the same time. Most of us have so many demands on our time (what percentage of my friends, most of them readers, has been able to finish more than one book this summer?) and so many social feeds competing for our fleeting attention that we don’t give content its due.

But email. If I care enough to subscribe to you, I’ll spend the time to open the email, read the first paragraph to see if I’m drawn in, and, shit, I might even write a response. You aren’t needy. You aren’t asking me to go searching for you. And if I don’t feel like reading you today, no big deal. You’ll give me another try tomorrow.

Of course, there are readers and RSS aggregators and other ways to gather massive amounts of content to you. But even those get clogged and require tending, like some garden where it’s easy to plant everything under the sun, but much harder to do the reaping.

So, kudos to Stephen Elliott for doing two things well: creating excellent work every day, and making it very easy to get your hands on that content.

Now I’ve got to finish reading my first delivery.