Unsubscribed

I’ve been going through my inbox unsubscribing to any newsletter or advertising that I’ve tended to ignore or delete. This e-version of clearing out the closet has me wondering about a couple of things.

For a start, there’s language. The word unsubscribe first appeared in print in the 1570s and its antonym subscribe a century earlier. But in those days, subscribing referred to signing documents. These words didn’t gain their sense of joining something or paying for something until the early 1700s with magazine subscriptions. According to the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the most frequent collocates for unsubscribe are you can… and …at any time. I suspect similar findings in other varieties of English. My any time has come, and I’ve unsubscribed to over twenty newsletters and marketing lists.

Have I been unsubscribing or disengaging? Some of the marketing emails I’ve blocked came from IKEA and other middle-class home stores that I no longer need now that the apartment in France and the house in England are furnished and functioning fine thank you very much. I don’t want clutter in my homes or my inbox. I’ve also closed the door on sports clothing – how many wetsuits does a person need?

Reducing consumerism is easy compared to unsubscribing to newsletters. Among those to get my e-axe have been six literary magazines, one British centre-left political magazine, one leftist French newspaper and one centre-right Italian rag. I wonder if I’m disengaging from elements of public discourse out of saturation and/or utter despair. Thanks to writing courses and degrees, literary magazines are ten a penny. Wading through this glut, I occasionally find a publication of a high standard that I might want to send my own work to. I duly subscribe to their newsletter to get free samples of stories and essays. As months pass, I find myself dipping into and quickly out of worn tropes and plot devices that smack of writers’ workshops.

As a political junkie I should be basking in this mega-election year, especially when the recent UK and French elections saw victories for the left. Yet – and here is where despair comes in – the extreme right had significant gains and showed that they shouldn’t be taken lightly. And while I’m pleased that Uncle Joe has stepped aside to give the Democrats a better chance, the Republicans – who have tilted towards authoritarian far-right – are well-funded and could continue their menacing presence for years to come. These vituperative forces are currently exhausting us with their infantile and distorted racist and misogynistic attacks on VP Harris. Media outlets of all political stripes are reporting – posting in those e-newsletters – more on these click-bait comments than they are on the issues at stake in this election. I recall a remark from Kafka: ‘In the struggle that pits the individual against the world, always bet on the world.’ Disengaging, unsubscribing, call it what you will, might not be empowering, but it is therapeutic.

What I’ve been reading

Two exceptional novels of the past couple of years have been inspired by the writings and life of Charles Dickens and have kept me entertained for half of this summer. Zadie Smith’s The Fraud is an historical novel about the writer William Ainsworth, a contemporary of Dickens, who is also a minor character in the book. It explores the roles of Victorian women, attitudes about slavery in the post-abolitionist era and the famous Tichborne trial, involving a working-class man claiming to be the only surviving inheritor of an aristocratic estate. Like Dickens, Smith is a keen observer of human frailty and pretences. Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead is a more obvious nod to Dickens. Following in the footsteps of David Copperfield, this eponymous narrator recounts the story of his life from childhood to early adulthood. But this is set in modern times in the poverty-stricken hills of Tennessee amidst the opioid crisis and is a story told with caustic wit, edging at times on satire. At one point the author winks to the reader by having Demon discover Dickens and comment about how it reflected poverty and the life of orphans in a way that could have been written today.

I obviously have not disengaged from these social issues, but it helps to interact with them through the lens of creative prose.