How to talk about shows you haven’t streamed
Or, 2021-upmanship
Should you read a book about how to talk about books you haven’t read?
Probably not. In fact, you should feed it directly to an ouroboros.
Just such a book was a minor publishing sensation way back in 2007, when an obscure professor’s treatise on bluffing through literature made it to the No. 3 position on the French bestseller lists.
But why be a book when you can be an app? And that’s what Blinkist set out to do in 2012: For just $50 year, they shoot swipeable Wikipedia-style summaries of bestselling nonfiction directly into your mobile device. With their app and a jug of Soylent, you can condense a whole week’s worth of pleasure into a few minutes! The gist of life without all the living!
Not that distillation isn’t good. That, after all, is what both martinis and this newsletter are all about. Take, for example, the final episode of The Ezra Klein Show, in which the host attempted to sum up all he’d learned in five years of long-form interviews. His best lesson, via Nicholas Carr: Do the reading, in part because no one else does. Our modern view of reading as a form of data mining misses its greater good as a means of contemplation. If you skim along the surface of life, you’ll miss the depths.
One depth I recently fell into via a thoughtful gift (thanks, Isaac!) is the work of Stephen Potter, the mid-century British humorist and author of Gamesmanship, Lifemanship, One-upmanship, and various othermanships. These parodies of self-help books are bluffer’s guides to life, and they influenced a generation of Britons, perhaps not always for the best. (Simon Kuper convincingly portrayed the Oxford of the 1980s as the place where the U.K.’s future leadership mastered the art of “superficial articulacy.” )
Here’s Christopher Hitchens doffing his cap to Potter in 2007 as he explained how to deflect after-dinner orations about the “essential character of any stricken or strategic country”:
Wait until the old bore has finished his exposition, advised Potter, then pounce forward and say in a plonking register, ‘Yes, but not in the South?’ You will seldom if ever be wrong, and you will make the expert perspire.
The volume I received, One-upmanship, has a handy section on Litmanship, “the Art of Knowing about English Literature without Actually Reading Any Books.” And while this was no doubt useful in 1952, upon a cursory glance it appears equally applicable to 2021’s plethora of streaming entertainments. An adapted bluffer’s guide to this bluffer’s guide:
“There are only five things which can under any conceivable circumstance be said for, not more than eight to be said against, any known book.” Same goes for shows, and Potter’s list includes:
“Delightfully fresh and spontaneous.”* (* “...which will suggest that the critic, in spite of his rather scruffy appearance, is himself pretty fresh and spontaneous.”)
“A rewarding experience.”
“Personally I found the love scenes rather embarrassing.”
“There is a certain archness which I found displeasing.”* (* “Though sensitive and cultured my peasant stock ensures that I am O.K. for passion.”)
Develop the “technique of Upright Reading — that is to say, perusing books in bookshops without actually buying them.” The Netflix equivalent would be a quick look at the show page.
Read “the kind of reviews which enable you to criticize a book without actually having read it.” Substitute tweets for reviews.
Subtly assert that you know of the show — and know better.
So when someone mentions the new book by T.D. Pontefract (or the new series from Shonda Rimes), you say, “Good old Pontefract—still churning them out.”
“There are latest books and latest books, he would imply; and after he reached the age of 44, when reading became even more difficult for him, he would make a tremendous point, though as up to date as ever, of only buying the books ‘which interested him.’”
Which is a bluff of a bluff, really: Talk about shows you haven’t watched by simply saying you haven’t watched them. Which is of, course, the correct answer.
Link link, nudge nudge
“For more than a century, English convicts (among them Oscar Wilde) were condemned to trudge for hours a day on enormous and steplike treadmills.”
— from Daniel E. Lieberman’s new book Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved To Do is Healthy and Rewarding on the penal origins of fitness equipment, with a Great Wit cameo.
Get Twit Quick
The quest to find that one perfect tweet continues. Each week, we submit a questionnaire to a Power User of Twitter.com, and each questionnaire ends by asking them to recommend the wittiest person on that problematic platform. This week, that process got us to @tweetpotato314:
Q: What’s the one word that makes any tweet better?
A: banana
Q: Edit button y/n?
A: no, life is messy deal with it
Q: All-time fave book or movie?
A: rhyming dust bunnies (kid’s book I read to my son every night)
Q: Joke, epigram, or witticism you live by?
A: less is more
Q: Best thing to put on toast?
A: peanut butter
Now that you’ve read Issue 80 of Get Wit Quick, I give you the official ALL CLEAR to talk about it. Or better, encourage a friend to subscribe. Good old Errett, still churning them out. I talk about my book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting, in this space every week. Only tap the ♥️ below if you’ve read this sentence.
I'm liking the Get Twit Quick series, though wonder if you should switch up the toast question and ask a different useless (yet revealing) question each week.