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I’ve worked at The New York Times long enough to remember when reader comments arrived in envelopes, often addressed by hand. Even when they were critical — which was most of the time — I was grateful for these letters. They meant that someone was sufficiently engaged (or enraged) by an article I had written to sit down and write something themselves.
Before long (I’m not that old), email overtook handwritten letters, followed by what we used to call Twitter, now X. Though old-fashioned snail mail still crosses my desk from time to time, most reader feedback now arrives digitally. Technology has bridged the distance between journalist and reader, making us more accessible to one another, though not always nicer.
Recently, having fled the savage squalls of social media, I’ve found a civilized refuge in the comments forum on Times articles, where readers are often opinionated but rarely obnoxious, and where I can mix it up with them through the Reporter Reply feature.
The process is as simple as it sounds: The reader comments, and the reporter replies. But I don’t exaggerate when I say that the feature has transformed the way I approach my job as a critic for The New York Times Book Review.
When I reviewed movies for The Times, there was a lot to argue about but not always much to discuss. Readers either agreed with what I had to say or they didn’t, and I’ve always believed that the best thing for a critic to do once a review is published is to step aside and let moviegoers have their say. You thought “Joker” was a masterpiece? Cool! You hated “Sausage Party?” Oh well.
Now that I’ve moved to the Book Review and away from weekly reviews of new stuff, I find that there’s a lot to talk about. In my essays, I’m not so much stating an opinion as pursuing a line of thought, drawing on books I’ve read, on the ideas of other writers and on the noise in my head.
New York Times readers — I’m happy (though hardly surprised) to be reminded — have their own ideas and air them out in the comments forum.
When I recently wrote about one of my favorite poems (Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke With You”), I was delighted to hear about other people’s favorite poems, by O’Hara and others. Last year, after Cormac McCarthy died, a comment on my appraisal of his work mentioned D.H. Lawrence’s “Studies in Classic American Literature,” which inspired me to pick up my copy of that still-explosive masterpiece and write an essay about it.
Earlier this spring, I wrote about how, and why, writers borrow words from other writers — not plagiarism but its more respectable cousin, the literary allusion. Working on the piece was like rummaging through a cluttered attic, namely my own brain, which has been vacuuming up snippets of poems, shards of pop songs, television commercials and other linguistic flotsam since before I could read.
The resulting essay was a bit like a garage sale, with used words from Shakespeare, Yeats, Milton and others piled up for curious readers to sort through and take home with them. In the comments forum, though, readers turned it into more of a swap meet, offering up their own gleanings along with thoughts about what the practice of quotation-mongering signified. Laziness? Pretentiousness? Inspiration?
All of the above, maybe. I greedily scrolled through sparkling bits of the Bard, Bob Dylan and the Bible in the comments forum. Then I replied to many of them, using only quotes from other writers, ransacking my bookcases and the deep crevices of my memory for somebody else’s mots justes.
Once the idea occurred to me, I had to follow through on it, which was harder — and more fun — than I expected. I worried both that I would run out of quotes and that I wouldn’t be able to stop quoting.
Would that be so bad? “These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me.” Walt Whitman said that, and nobody was more original than Walt Whitman.
So what about the rest of us? We can take comfort in Whitman’s idea that the point of writing isn’t so much to invent something new as to discover what we have in common. Every writer is a reader, and every reader awaits a reply.
