Today on Substack.
By the way: that post where I asked people still plugged into the WordPress ecosystem to leave a comment? Nah. 850 subscribers, one like, zero engagement. My suspicion about the real number of subscribers is probably true. I also feel like maybe WordPress is dead?
I’ve been on WordPress for a long time. According to my dashboard, this site has about 850 subscribers. Are you one of them?
WordPress is great at many things, but helping creators understand their audience isn’t really one of them. I’m hoping you can help me fill in some gaps. I’m also hoping you’ll consider following me on Substack (chriscocca.substack.com).
Some of you are regular readers. Some of you are new. Some might have subscribed years ago and forgotten. Some might just get an email once in a while and skim it. Some are certainly bots. Some are people who liked a particular post but didn’t find much else of value.
The truth is, with a site as old as this one, a good half of the subscriptions are probably tied to email addresses no longer in use. A good many are also through the WordPress Reader, which is great.
However you connected, thank you.
To help me create a more engaging experience, would you do me a favor? Could you comment below with a few quick thoughts?
About My Work and Where It Fits
Another reason I’m asking is that my work has gradually spread across a few different places.
If you’ve been following this site for a while, you might know that my academic and professional training are in theology (MDiv from Yale Divinity School) and creative writing (MFA from The New School). I publish poems, creative nonfiction, and the occasional piece of fiction in literary journals. I’m also working on longer projects—poetry manuscripts, essays, a novel, and a growing collection of short stories. As I’ve focused more on that kind of work, this site has become less of a blog (remember blogs?) and more of a repository, a bulletin board for current thoughts, and a place to share updates about things I’ve been publishing.
A few years ago, I started dabbling on Substack. Over the last month, I’ve been interacting on that platform regularly. It started as a newsletter platform for writers, but now also includes an ecosystem for short Notes (basically, tweets). It combines a lot of what I liked about Twitter and a lot of what is good about WordPress. It is, by design, a more natural place for those who spend lots of time writing.
Substack is quickly becoming a place where people write more deeply (newsletters/articles) and more informally (Notes).
I usually link every Substack piece here, and I also write things here that I don’t write on Substack (mid-length things that don’t warrant their own full articles but are too long or particular for Notes).
WordPress and Substack are both good tools, but I’m curious about how much my audiences overlap. Given that Substack is designed for the subscription model (my Substack is free, by the way), I thought it would be good to ask:
If you’re subscribed here on WordPress:
After all these years, it feels a little strange realizing there might be hundreds of people quietly connected to this site whom I know next to nothing about.
If you’re out there, say hello, and let me know what kinds of things you’re interested in.
Whether you’re a new or longtime subscriber, or whether you’ve stumbled upon this site because of a random post about Gary Jules, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, or microfiche, thank you for being here! And thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts and checking out chriscocca.substack.com.
I’m looking forward to reading and writing alongside you.
When they told you it was okay to kill George Floyd over counterfeit 20s, or Eric Garner for selling loose cigarettes, did you really think they would condemn the murders of Renee Good or Alex Pretti?
As the regime falters, as the lies are exposed, two things are happening. The base is shrinking, but it’s getting more vocal. It’s getting mad at having to do the mental gymnastics, and it’s taking that anger out on everyone else. This is how systems work.
This isn’t about politics, per se, though we need political solutions.
Our system has always been tenuous, has often forced us into zero-sum, binary assumptions.
But our system has not always yielded such toxic fruit.
You can be skeptical about both major parties but also realize that the President and his closest allies are pushing specific buttons for illiberal, undemocratic reasons.
People in both major parties have always lied, cheated, and stolen. Most humans do. That doesn’t excuse us from saying other true things. That doesn’t mean the specter of actual fascism is something we just live with because both so-called sides are “equally bad.”
The truth is, they aren’t. And I’ll be nuanced: MAGA and Republican aren’t the same thing. At least, they didn’t used to be. George W. Bush created ICE, but he never weaponized it like this. Barack Obama, Democrat, deported more people than Trump could ever dream of, but he didn’t do it like this. I don’t recall suggestions from either of those administrations that ICE could or should operate with complete impunity. I don’t recall either administration begging federal judges to allow warrantless searches. I don’t remember either of those presidents suggesting that someone like Alex Pretti was probably a criminal because he was legally carrying a firearm while helping a woman who’d been assaulted by federal agents.
In a sane time, no one would need bother pointing this out. But, as Wendell Berry said:
To be sane in a mad time
is bad for the brain, worse
for the heart. The world
is a holy vision, had we clarity
to see it—a clarity that men
depend on men to make.
That’s frustrating. Heartbreaking. Maddening. Probably true.
I will have missed much in this short post. I’m white, straight, middle class. We now know those things won’t necessarily save me from ICE, but I also know they mean I’m already, by default, safer than many people I love. I may have been too gracious in parsing good-actor Republicans from the red-hatted polloi. Afterall, even many non-MAGA folks have repugnant views and vote in unconscionable ways. I’m also aware that saying we need a whole different system can present as expecting perfection from Democrats, and that’s not helpful, either.
As I write this, much of the country is covered in snow and under Cold Weather Advisory. Dangerous conditions, apt metaphors.
I’ve gone back and forth on this.
One thing I can say is that when I achieve flow in a short story or longer-form fiction, the last thing I want to do is open another tab and start blogging about it. I don’t want to do anything other than stay in the flow.
But no one is in always in the flow. It’s not productive to try. Stay in the flow as long as it’s flowing, but understand that your subconscious needs a break. You’re not at peak creative performance all the time. You need downtime and sleep and the daily demands of life. That’s not glamorous, but it’s true.
Don’t write drunk and edit sober. Don’t forget about sleep. REM-cycles are essential for the next day’s writing, and for bridging the brilliance of yesterday’s flow with today’s and tomorrow’s.
There are times when you can’t work on The Thing In Itself. But that doesn’t mean you can’t write at all. When the flow stops, shift gears. Dig out an old post and revise. Make it better. Re-share.
Read. Read short stories. Read books.
I’d suggest reading more than you blog, but if you have a family or a partner or a dog or a cat or a goldfish or parents or siblings or nieces or nephews or bosses or bills, you have commitments outside of yourself. Sometimes you can blog while doing other things (I do not mean driving). It’s much harder to read while your spouse watches Chopped. (You should also watch Chopped. It’s great.)
Blogging (or tweeting) does not mess up a writing life, but it needs to kept in perspective. Sometimes, it can help unlock the next round of creative flow.
That’s been my experience. What’s been yours?
Friend of the blog Jon Geeting shared my Free Market post from yesterday with some good insights and responses at his blog today. This is the kind of online discourse I really enjoy: people of good-will engaging each other respectfully across platforms. I encourage you to take part in the conversation at Jon’s blog, but I do want to share a small excerpt from my own response:
It’s fine by me that Rite Aid provides cheaper goods and medicines to Center City residents, and God bless them for it. But on the ground in Allentown, based on conversations I had downtown over the weekend, some civic leaders really are worried that it’s going to be hard to lure and place that kind of store in the near future. They’re not worried the same way about replacing the dollar store (which is also needed). Another question: why isn’t Rite Aid simply moving across the street or up or down a block? Why isn’t the efficiency of the market making it compelling for Rite Aid to stay in the city? And if Rite Aid won’t stay, why should we be confident that Walgreens will come? If the market worked exactly the way we wanted, there’d be no such thing as food deserts, or, in this case, prescription deserts, right?
For me, the immediate issue is also framed by the experiences some folks had at the three “arena open houses” last week. For months, people have been complaining about the lack of transparency that seems to be guiding the hockey arena project. Last week, open houses were held in which various stations were set up and the public could talk with city officials, developers, and the owners of the former Philadelphia Phantoms. One of the problems with this format, well-intended as it might have been, was that there was no chance for real public discussion. If I’m being cynical, I might suggest a sort of divide and conquer strategy at work. In any case, the Rite Aid concern came to me from downtown religious and civic leaders following these open houses, and they are worried. So am I. I’m not at a point where I feel confident that the market, as such, won’t create a healthcare desert in Center City.
Thank you, Jon, for picking up this discussion!
Chad Hogg, you honor me!
Friends, if you haven’t spent some time on Chad’s excellent blog (excellently named, by me, The Blogg), you simply must.
More about Chad, in his own words:
I am currently a research assistant and doctoral candidate at Lehigh University, working under Prof. Hector Munoz-Avila. I was a visiting faculty member at Mansfield University of Pennsylvania for the 2010-2011 academic year. Prior to coming to Lehigh I earned my Bachelor’s degree at Ursinus College. I maintain a more personal web presence at http://chadhogg.name/~chad/. [That is to say, The Blogg].
The topic of my dissertation research is learning knowledge artifacts for HTN planning (decomposition methods) from annotated tasks and plan traces. Files and other information on this work can be found at the HTN-Maker project webpage. See below for related publications and other resources. My General Exam document would be a good place to start.
In addition to this primary topic, I am involved in a number of other projects related to planning, case-based reasoning, reinforcement learning, and computer games as part of the Intelligent Decision Systems and Technologies (InSyTe) Lab at Lehigh. I am also interested in pursuing other broad topics in artificial intelligence, including automated planning systems; classification, clustering, and other machine learning techniques; collaborative filtering systems, data mining, and web search; and heuristic music composition.
The humble Mr. Hogg refrains from mentioning that he plays the sickest bass this side of Flea and/or Les Claypool, but let me assure you that he does. Especially exciting to me is the recent news that Chad will be returning to our mutual alma mater, Ursinus College, as visiting professor this fall. Good job, Chad! And thank you for being the most faithful reader and commenter on the various iterations of this blog!
I don’t know what anaologsoul is, but I like the sound of it. Image source here. Found via StumbleUpon.
Chris Cocca 