Questions by Siim, answers and translation by Karola.

Read the Estonian version in TULI’s blog.

Years ago, while interning at a PR agency, Karola spotted a book on content marketing on one of the office bookshelves. This instantly sparked her interest in digital marketing. Little did she know where this road might take her. 

Presently, Karola has become one of the best-known marketers in Estonia. She’s got over 10,000 followers on LinkedIn and a popular marketing blog (the one you’re reading right now). Behind are the long working days as the Head of Marketing at Bolt, Scoro, and MeetFrank. For the past few years, Karola has been freelancing for companies across the EU and the US.

When moving to Paris, France three years ago, Karola re-found her literary calling. It had always existed, since early childhood. In 2022, she published two short stories in the Estonian literary magazine Looming and was awarded the annual Debuting Writer Award by the magazine. Karola has also written book reviews for the cultural weekly Sirp and for Looming. Currently, she is working on her debut novel and beginning her MA studies at the Royal Holloway University of London. The MA course is not in Marketing – she’ll be studying Creative Writing.

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How does it work? The more you write, the less you want to work on marketing projects?

That’s how it tends to be but marketing continues to interest me as a subject. I don’t live with the illusion that writing could be a sufficient source of income, not in Estonia and especially not in Western Europe. While I dislike the word ‘hobby’, that’s the relationship I want to maintain with literature and writing – to keep it pure in a sense. I’m not forced to write or publish anything unless I want to. If writing were to become my day job, it would soon become repulsive.

I once calculated the hourly pay of writing for an Estonian publication. Sometimes it is 50x lower than the marketing salary, sometimes 10x lower. It is a sad reality as for many talented people writing actually is the main source of income. Some newspapers and weeklies pay their collaborators incredibly low fees and, on a few occasions, I have declined their invitation to contribute a piece. That would mean feeding a system that doesn’t treat people fairly.

What is it about marketing that attracts you?

I like the psychological side to it. It’s a bit like a game. You build a world and then stand back and see whether it works. As I launched my personal marketing blog, I was thrilled to write on a variety of subjects, SEO-optimize the articles, and watch my blog grow to 100,000 monthly organic readers. It’s like playing a computer game where you can steer the outcome.

Were you at the right place at the right time? Back then, there were much fewer marketing blogs.

The blogs were there but as in many other industries, the problem arises when blog articles are written by content marketers without any actual industry experience. These copywriters aren’t practitioners but look for information in other blogs; they collect and compile the existing information but do not add anything new or of practical value.

A practitioner myself, I wrote about the tips and guidelines that were actually relevant. I happened to make it in a more logical and detailed manner than other blogs. My articles got published by many big-name marketing blogs in the US (Entrepreneur, AdEspresso, CMI, Social Media Examiner) as they were more insightful than those written by some random copywriter.

To speak of LinkedIn in for a second, I am often put off by – and this is done by a lot of Estonian marketers – people who rewrite some viral posts and fail to add anything new to the topic. I always try to share observations and ideas of my own. I won’t go commenting on the Barbie movie when it’s already been done a million times. There is a symptomatic lack of originality in Estonian (but not only) marketers’ personal brands.

I still hold the opinion that even in 2023 – especially now when so much content is created by AI – it isn’t all that difficult to succeed with a blog or on LinkedIn. But the quality has to be exceptionally high, there also has to be originality. You’ve got to have a personal opinion, an angle, and you have to do proper marketing for your content. It all takes a lot of time. It’s not the case of spending a few hours every week, rather you’ll be working on it 20h/week.

You have always been interested in literature. How did you arrive at writing?

When I left my job at Bolt, I fell into a deep identity crisis. I realized I didn’t want to dedicate my whole life to working 10-12h per day; getting old, dying without making anything meaningful with my one and only life. This raised the question: so what should I do? We’re living on a planet that wilts with every minute as climate change progresses. Should I go and work for Greenpeace? Should I so to say sacrifice myself and make something truly good?

I know there is not that level of altruism in me. Literature seemed like the right path forward: I’ve always been attracted to it, it’s occupied with the soul rather than the material; it doesn’t create new waste into the world but explores that which is human about us. I am interested in climate change as a topic, especially the question: how to live in this world as a human being while knowing that every day that you live and consume and breathe, you are destroying the very planet you’re living on. 

Fiction, and literature in general, holds the potential to analyze things more broadly, to see a problem from multiple angles. It doesn’t tell you what’s the one right answer but helps, in an abstract way, to look for those answers; it invites you to think along. Half a year ago or so, I began to dabble with my very first novel and it’s a hundred – ok, perhaps a million or billion or trillion – times harder than any marketing project I’ve ever worked on.

When I moved to Paris, I began reading more fiction and made my first attempts at writing. I read voraciously, learned and learned and learned. Only after two years did I feel daring enough to write one tiny short story. I am still haunted by the question of whether I’m ready. One could keep studying literature and writing forever. In marketing, there comes a point where you feel that you’ve hit the ceiling, that now it’s become boring. But literature is endless like the ocean: you swim, and you swim some more, and there might be some small island along the way but you’ll never reach the continent. 

There is also a beauty to writing on an everyday human level. Instead of messaging or sending pictures via social media to my grandparents, I write them letters. This means of communication feels a lot more meaningful and caring. Sometimes, I think that perhaps my grandparents have forgiven me for living abroad because I’m being cute and sending them all those letters. 

Is the environment a subject that marketing actually deals with?

I am highly cynical about this one. Just recently I heard an advertisement that told people to bring their old teflon pans to the store so they can get the new one cheaper and this is the greenest deal in the world. It is often sickening to realize how ignorant such messages are and how mindless it is to believe that buying a new frying pan can in any way be good for the planet.

Recently, someone shared on Instagram how they bought a new kitchen device for filtering water. The new machine has an iron filter instead of a plastic one so now they will never have to use plastic again. Had they thought about the ecological footprint of producing and transporting this new machine, they might as well have used the old plastic device forever.

In a similar way, it isn’t green to buy a new electric vehicle when the old car still drives. The electric car has to be produced and transported, the ecological footprint of electric batteries is very high. It’s hypocritical to tell people to buy ‘green’ as buying a new item is never green. What’s green is not buying.

Sometimes, I have told my clients not to launch another campaign where they plant a tree for each purchase. Because it’s plain greenwashing. This kind of tree planting isn’t green. These trees are not going to grow old and sequester carbon and even, if by some miracle they will, a single tree isn’t going to save the world. I have pushed back on quite a few greenwashing campaigns, shared some scientific articles with my clients, and explained the bigger picture.

Speaking of clients, I am offered a lot of potential projects but it’s not always easy to find the few I am willing to accept. I refuse all gibberish products and fast fashion, also food industry projects. Gambling and crypto are also a no-go. What I find acceptable are projects related to tech products, culture and education, as well as some medical and financial products. I also resist marketing any lifestyle products as I think most of these shouldn’t even exist in this world (laughs – ed.).

Last year, I was offered to join as a marketer in a project where they built an e-commerce algorithm that turns the search function more efficient and makes people buy more. The end goal was to sell the product to Amazon. I would have been given some shares in the company and, possibly, made a lot of money, but I found it deeply immoral to spend time on making people buy more things that they do not actually need. Add to this the fact that someone is building a product with the sole goal of selling it to Amazon and getting rich. 

On the other hand, I do realize that not all marketers have the luxury to choose which projects to accept, which ones to decline. I do not hold it against anyone if they do marketing for brands that are unethical in my book. Life requires compromise, sometimes we need to find a middle ground.

Aren’t you running out of products to market? Tech and digital projects also have a big ecological footprint.

Indeed, but there are many interesting recycling and re-using platforms, projects related to education and culture. Whenever possible, I try to buy things second-hand. And digital products still have a much smaller carbon footprint, however, it’s not non-existent. 

When was the last time you bought something new?

Very recently! I bought some film for my camera. Of course, I do slip sometimes and buy clothing and other stuff that I don’t really need. It is hard to resist at all times, especially when it comes to aesthetic preferences. I always feel guilty but nonetheless buy the thing. As a marketer, however, I prefer not to pour any more oil into the fire of increasing consumption; I am already part of the system as a consumer.

I suppose many readers would like to know how you manage to work for one half of the year and then take the other half off?

I’ve been incredibly lucky to have found the projects that allow me to work and live this way. For five years, marketing and blogging was all I lived for. Back then, it was super interesting for me and it still pays off, although my blog has fallen victim to neglect (laughs – ed.).

This year, I’ll end up having ca eight months of marketing work, not six. At one point, I was working on four projects at once, spending 60h/week behind the laptop screen. It’s just a highly concentrated effort. In a way, I still work full-time but it is simply more condensed and allows me to take a few months off.

You were living in Paris as a freelancer. This sounds like a dream for many people. Was this life how you imagined it?

It was a strange life. I was living on my own and during COVID, the lack of human contact was psychologically straining. On the other hand, I enjoyed working from home – I’m more efficient this way and can move in my own rhythm.

Was this how I imagined it? It was idyllic for sure. After a day of work, I went on a walk in the parks and by the riverside, eventually found friends, learnt to speak more fluent French. I had bars and cafes and boulangeries where people already recognized me and sent a Salut! my way from behind the counter. It was all very agreeable but, well, it was nonetheless a life where you’d have to work all day long. You can’t just go and walk around Paris all day eating croissants.

You’ve been working with both Estonian and foreign companies. Is it in any way different?

I was recently working for a client operating in Luxembourg, London, and Spain while expanding to New York. I admired the level of professionalism in the team’s communication, it was both polite and considerate. Even on Slack, people wrote in an organized way and only when they had a good reason for writing. The quality of meetings and presentations was top-notch. And this kind of environment makes you put in more effort, too.

International brands have a higher willingness to invest in marketing and develop large-scale campaigns. They’re not afraid of launching an outdoor campaign that costs half a million euros, or a million. Because they know that it will actually work. On the other hand, Estonian brands believe they can expand to New York by running Facebook ads for €10,000 and seeing how the market reacts. It will not react. Even a campaign that costs €500,000 and covers every 10th subway car in New York might not launch the market.

Estonian entrepreneurs are under the impression that as it was easy to launch in the Estonian market and make some profit there, it is just as easy to launch in any other market. Just run a bit of Facebook ads and done. A long time ago when Facebook ads were actually cheap, this could actually work, but it’s become a lot harder these days.

I’ve seen an Estonian brand expanding to a nearby country and for six months, they spend a low budget on Meta and Google ads. And it’s not going to work. If they spent the same budget in a single month, on one strategic multichannel marketing campaign, they’d achieve a much higher brand recognition. In the end, this one-month campaign would be a much more efficient way to spend the budget.

Another issue I see in Estonia and elsewhere is that the company’s management fails to give relevant input to all teams and employees. There are good and bad CEOs. A good leader knows where their company is headed, they’ve got a clear vision. A good leader knows that X budget or X runway allows the company to grow to Y and makes their team work towards that goal. And then there’s the opposite type of leader that tells “let’s try something and see where it takes us.” In the second type of companies, it is highly stressful to achieve any marketing results. You simply don’t know what to do. Each week, there’s some new idea and everything needs to be reworked, rebuilt from scratch. And none of the ideas and hypotheses are ever properly tested.

Prior to accepting to work with a company, I want to hear from the CEO their expectations to the marketing team. How else should I know where to focus and which goals to set for my team? Numbers are a critically important motivation for any team. Occasionally, when the product is truly good, I still accept the project and will create the company’s growth goals on my own.

However, this “let’s just try” attitude is not going to take you far. Results have to be thought through and strategy should stem from those high-level goals. Building a strong brand message takes months, sometimes years. You just can’t try a new one every few weeks.

I’s like to encourage other marketing leads and practitioners to keep pushing the company’s leadership to spell out what numbers they want to see. If a leader doesn’t know what they want, perhaps then they’re not a very good leader. The CEO might be a great product lead but if they’re incapable of thinking about growth and numbers, it can be disorientating and stressful for the rest of the team.

Let’s speak about literature marketing as well. How to get more young people to read, how to popularize literature? With literary magazines, the problem seems to be that although they’re state-funded, there isn’t any budget for marketing.

Certainly, all the literary magazines lack money. Seen from the state’s perspective, I don’t know… just organize one less sports competition and give that money to some magazine so that they can afford proper marketing (smirks – ed.).

Tiit Hennoste recently wrote in Sirp how in the 1960s, the budget for a single issue of Looming magazine equaled 35 average salaries. Right now, the magazine’s monthly budget is 3.5x the average salary. There is a lot of talk about valuing and preserving the Estonian language but, ironically, the Estonian language was in fact more valued during the Soviet times.  

Surely there should be a marketer working for each cultural magazine but there isn’t any budget for this. Värske Rõhk (a monthly Estonian literary magazine publishing younger authors) is fairly active on social media but I assume that it’s one of their editors doing the marketing on top of their actual job. The same with Müürileht (another monthly magazine) – for them, strong social media marketing has been one of the keys to building a large readership.

Naturally, you also need good content. Marketing isn’t just about posting, posting, posting. You need people to talk about your magazine, you need to get people excited about the articles. The quality needs to be extremely high.

In large countries, every author has an agent who finds interview and speaking gig opportunities, and maintains the writer’s website. On top, there’s the publisher that does all the marketing for authors and their books.

Do any Estonian writers have websites? Not that I know of. I do but I designed it myself, hired a developer, and had it set up. I myself design all of my blog’s visuals, write and post the articles, and do the marketing and analysis part. The actual writing of texts takes maybe half of the time required to maintain a blog. No wonder writers don’t have time or skills for all this.

In the Anglophone literary industry, all authors have a personal website, they’re on Twitter and on Instagram. I have looked for some well-known Estonian authors on Instagram. Nada. No profiles. I’m not saying that it’s the writer’s job to have a social media presence but it could be something that their publisher does. Of course, the publishers don’t have any money, either. The Estonian literary scene is very small, including print runs and sales. 

Yup. The timidity is interesting in the sense that the world is headed toward everyone’s life and profile being public, everyone has to build a personal brand.

I began to think about the term ‘personal brand’ and its meaning. What is it? In a way, the term signifies the productization of a human being. A living person is turned into a product that others can consume. What a sick concept, huh? Bring to mind how people speak about ecosystem services. A chanterelle grows in a forest and it’s nature’s service. A terrible discourse.

Recently, I have grown more sensitive to the language used in advertisements. I am constantly bothered by slogans that, were you to think about it for even a second, you realize are utterly idiotic. Ülemiste Keskus, a big shopping mall, advertised with the slogan “Everything you’ve ever dreamed of.”

I should like to hope that nobody’s dreams are on sale in a shopping mall. This is borderline insulting to the readers of the slogan and the store’s visitors. To say that all you can dream of is laid out in a random Estonian shopping center.

So you walk the street and think what the hell?

I think that it’s sad that nothing more meaningful is done. It’s basically insulting – above all, insulting to the brand that signed off on the campaign. Instead of shouting silly marketing slogans, people could think about the meaning of their words. Advertising language has become awfully sloppy and blatant. Marketers should give each word and sentence a little more thought.

Is there anything else that marketers could do better? Are there any trends to watch out for? 

It depends on the marketer’s role. When it comes to brand messaging, marketers should avoid overused slogans and use their own heads to think. There could be fewer social media posts, fewer campaigns, less noise. Try to really think about the brand and what you want to say, focus on organic marketing, on word of mouth. There’s no point in creating marketing campaigns that speak to no one, just for the sake of creating something.

For instance, let’s take the company blogs. Marketers and agencies create a ton of content for those but if you start to think why anyone should want to read it, well, you don’t really know why.  On social media, there is also an overload of meaningless posts, without any meaning or soul. You might as well leave that stuff unpublished or perhaps hire someone else (laughs – ed.).

I have this feeling that marketing is headed towards further brand-building. You can’t anymore rely on just Google and Meta ads, it’s become very expensive. I see many companies switching from paid advertising to organic social media. However, the latter is also often paid as you need to pay the content creators. 

Marketers should learn how to work with TikTok and how to hire influencers to create content that can later be used as ads. And it’s about time to master the art of Instagram Reels. Both of these trends can be difficult to stay on top of. You’ve got to break your comfort zone and learn new skills all the time.

Above all, collaborating with content creators and cross-posting on Instagram and TikTok are the two things worth testing right now. There’s also a lot of talk about AI but I’m not a fan.

Why? I didn’t ask about AI as I figured that there isn’t much new to say about it, anyhow. But perhaps you do?

AI tools can be helpful when creating visuals and that’s worth looking into it. When it comes to writing marketing copy, I wouldn’t ever use it myself. Texts written by AI bots, without any original add-ons, won’t even get you ranking in Google search.

Indeed, AI can be used to compile drafts or to collect talking points. But I wouldn’t go any further than that. You’ll lose originality as another hundred marketers have used the same AI for the same kind of text. And anyhow… If we, as humans, delegate the last of our capacity to think to AI, will there be anything human left in us?

Coming back to marketing trends, it is also worth mentioning that there’s been rapid economic growth for the past 10+ years. It was possible to successfully launch lifestyle products like sustainable toothpaste, there are a million small fashion brands now. Competition has reached an unprecedented height and as the economy begins to cool down, so will those small brands fail.

What might help is focusing on a specific niche and building a strong brand, a loyal audience. Instead of focusing on growth right now, companies should look into loyalty programs and community-building. Not so far in the future, there simply won’t be enough room in the market for everyone to stay.

So the relationship has to be more meaningful than just brand and consumer?

That’s it. And more than the simple fact that you sell your product cheaper than a competitor. You’ve got to have a high-quality product and a clear product-market fit. But even that won’t be enough: you also need a strong brand that attracts and engages people.

What I’m hearing is that often the problem isn’t bad marketing but there are many average products that are hard to sell?

Yes. One of the reasons why I reject new projects is that there isn’t yet a proven product-market fit. I decline a project because I know I wouldn’t be able to market and sell the product.

Marketing won’t save a bad product but it can certainly help to bankrupt you faster (laughs –ed.).

Autor: Siim Kera, TULI

The post Interview: Karola Karlson x TULI appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

But it wasn’t just due to the Godardesque SMS* sent by the planet that turned literature into a handy medium of escapism. Writing this article has been obstructed by the fact that all the books & magazines I read from January to August are packed away in cardboard boxes, 2573km away from where I dwell now – Paris. 

Moving to the new city (that was soon quarantined) redefined the weekends. Instead of routine social gatherings that set a stamp of tiredness on the two following days, I would spend most of my free time on reading – novels, essays, literary magazines (The New York Review of Books now arrived to my mailbox routinely, contrary to its (non)delivery in Estonia). The geeky confined lifestyle turned out to be more enjoyable that I’d expected, it also explains why bookstores are reporting a record year.

Against the popular belief, I think the world would be a better place if people would read & think more, Netflix & business less. And no opportunity to try and lure more people to read should go wasted. So here they are, my reading recommendations from 2020.

— 

*The reference to Godard’s SMS originates from a recorded interview of his, befitting of year 2020.

“Do you know what SMS means? You send them all day long and you don’t know what it means. “Short Message” and what then? No no… I know what it means. It means “Save My Soul.” People they send the SMS like we used to send the SOS because they are all alone, they want to be with someone. That’s what in means, “Save My Soul.””

2020 reading list

The below list features most of the books I read in 2020, with a few missing casualties caused by lacking memory. There were many that I could indefinitely go on raving about, and others that didn’t speak to me as profoundly – either because of the subject matter or due to the cadence and articulation that the author used for self-expression.

In some cases, my reaction to a book was shaded either by the high expectations from reading the same author’s other works or just not being in the mood for a particular style or form. The lists’ order is random, a mishmash of fiction and non-fiction; essays, novels, and poetry. A note to self for 2021: limit reading the 20th century canon of American authors, and look up more European and Eastern literature.

Fave & deeply moving:
Coventry (2019) by Rachel Cusk [link], Decreation (2005) by Anne Carson [link], The Art of the Novel (2003) by Milan Kundera [link], Democracy (1984) [link], Salvador (1982) [link], The White Album (1979) [link] by Joan Didion, Intimations: Six Essays (2020) [link] & Feel Free: Essays (2019) [link] by  Zadie Smith, Essayism (2017) by Brian Dillon [link], The Years (2018) by Annie Ernaux [link], Walks with Men (2010) by Ann Beattie [link], The Sea, The Sea (1978) by Iris Murdoch [link], The Whole Story and Other Stories (2004) by Ali Smith [link], Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018 (2019) by Peter Schjeldahl [link], Chairs (1952) by Eugene Ionesco [link], Sculptor’s Daughter (1968) [link] & Fair Play (1989) [link] by Tove Jansson, The Paris Review Interviews, I (2006) by The Paris Review [link]

4 out of 5 points:
Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency (2020)  [link] & The Lonely City (2016) [link] by Olivia Laing, The Poetics of Space (1958) by Gaston Bachelard [link], The Joke (1994) by Milan Kundera [link], Miami [link] (1987) by Joan Didion, The Society of the Spectacle (1967) by Guy Debord [link], The Rings of Saturn (1995) by W. G. Sebald [link], Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2020) by Jia Tolentino [link], The Pond (2015) by Claire-Louise Bennett [link], The New Yorker Stories (2011) by Ann Beattie [link], Confabulations (2016) by John Berger [link], The Courage of Hopelessness: Chronicles of a Year of Acting Dangerously (2017) by Slavoj Žižek [link], This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2015) by Naomi Klein [link], An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1974) by [link] & Things: A Story of the Sixties and a Man Asleep (1965) [link] by Georges Perec

No chemistry:
Dept. of Speculation (2014) by Jenny Offill [link], In the Dark Room (2019) by Brian Dillon [link], Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951) Theodor Adorno [link], Late Writings (2007) by Clement Greenberg [link], Mythologies (1957)  [link] & A Lover’s Discourse : Fragments (1977) [link] by Roland Barthes, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (1975) by William H. Gass [link], Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013) by Deborah Levy [link]

Reading through 2020

The one author whose works’ overarching mood feel most suitable to the year 2020 is Joan Didion. Didion with her calculated and artful reportage on the politics and zeitgeist of the Americas in the 70s through to 90s. 

But to start from the very beginning of 2020, my January days passed with Kundera’s brilliant non-fiction, The Art of the Novel (1986), and Peter Schjeldahl’s art criticism, Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018 (2019), which itself turned out to be an artwork molded into literary cast. A few weeks before Covid hit, while on vacation in Paris, I stumbled upon Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967), and it occupied a spot on my side table for the next 4 months from where it was occasionally lifted up and read. It was followed by Zadie Smith and Jia Tolentino essay collections, both acute reflections of our modern society and its spectacles, if only a bit skewed towards posing questions relevant to well-off Western metropolitans.

Late spring, to complement the quarantine depression, I read a book on climate crisis by Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2015). As much as I admire Klein’s knack for anticapitalist subjects and her work as a researcher – she reads up on her subject for years before writing a book – the proposed solution to climate crisis (native people demanding historic rights to their land, thereby stopping the oil industry’s expansion) felt all but naive and sugar-coated for a comfortably well-off Western reader. If Klein had pondered on the issue for longer, she may have concluded that the demand for the dirty oil starts from consumer choices, and had thereby suggested to her readers to plainly consume less. I also looked up some classics such as Mythologies (1957) and A Lover’s Discourse : Fragments (1977) by Roland Barthes. The prevailing quarantine-age mood may be to blame, but both books read as a pretentious and outdated meditation on subjects that many contemporary, and especially female, writers have illustrated more convincingly.

Early summer, I switched to lighter reading, taking on my solo trip to Helsinki a couple of Tove Jansson’s books: her autobiographical short story collection Sculptor’s Daughter (1968) and the novel Fair Play (1989), also autobiographical, which depicts the relationship between two female artists, living at opposite ends of an apartment building, their studios connected by a long attic. Jansson’s short stories offered a nostalgic lookback into childhood, with our family on boat trips on Finnish lakes and exploring the forest paths, acutely experiencing the animal and plant life around me. The Sea, The Sea (1978) by Iris Murdoch was a shamelessly amusing novel to read, a modern-day Netflix show with all its unforeseeable turns and a pace that refused to slow down right until the end. Murdoch’s book was also entertainingly British with its egomaniacal protagonist, a retired actor and theater director Charles Arrowby, voicing Latin aphorisms and cooking eccentric dishes such as an egg poached in hot scrambled egg. (Iris Murdoch explained the critics of her enlisted meals in the book: “But me and John eat like this all the time.”) As a review in The Guardian put it, Murdoch wrote novels of ideas about love, as well as the occasional love letter to ideas. 

Reading the collection of interviews with 20th century writers and poets The Paris Review Interviews, I (2006) felt like binge eating literary popcorn. Each interview was brimming with references to fellow authors, and I finished the book with a list with 50 additional books to read, each feeling urgently major. This also made me complicit in what the British author Rebecca West may have had in mind when she claimed in her own Paris Review interview: “People have no desire to read anything new…. They don’t even look onto the past. They look onto the certified past.” But, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, there is entirely too much good literature around, and something must be done to stop it. The only possible way to deal with this seemed to find and read all those books.

I read most of my 2020 canon while in Paris, first in the lush fern-laden oasis in the midst of Jardin de Tuileries, then confined in my apartment in Paris 3rd. During this period, I grew more interested in exploring what a friend called “writers’ writers” – authors whose works carry a substantial essence while also being admirable for their form and phrasing. Reviewing my reading notes and Goodreads’ “Read” list, I detect an inclination towards female writers and literary forms more stylized (William H. Gass, Ali Smith, Rachel Cusk, even Annie Ernaux) and at times eccentric (Anne Carson, Brian Dillon, Claire-Louise Bennett) than the traditional novel: essays, short stories, interviews, reportage, poetry.  As most of these books are still effectively in my mind, I expanded on a selection of them below.

One contemporary author I like to return to is Zadie Smith. I’m a longtime reader of Smith, her White Teeth (2000) being a landmark novel of my early 20s. This year, I read her short essay collection on Covid19-induced changes Intimations: Six Essays (2020) and Feel Free: Essays (2019) which I’d recommend to anyone looking for intellectual yet humorous reportage on our modern society. Pondering on similar subjects was also The New Yorker reporter Jia Tolentino’s book Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2020), yet the essays fell short due to their lack of cultural and socio historical context, making the book’s subjects ephemeral, something that I suspect will not happen to Zadie Smith’s or Susan Sontag’s writing. Tolentino’s was nonetheless a blissful and entertaining book, you can check out the opening essay here.

Another essayist I read, this one writing mostly art criticism (for Frieze), was Olivia Laing. Her 2020 collection Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency was an intelligent excursion into the lives of artists and literary figures such as David Wojnarowicz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Agnes Martin, Joseph Cornell, Derek Jarman and Hilary Mantel. Laing’s other book, The Lonely City, written four years earlier, also relied on art as a medium for exploring the loneliness of metropolises (enter the works of Edward Hopper).

Strolling in the Shakespeare & Company bookstore, I spotted The Rings of Saturn (1995) by W. G. Sebald, an author revered by many of my friends, in a bookstore and gave it a read. I can’t say that I disliked its quasi-philosophical meandering from one 19th century curiosity to another (consider the history of silkworm farming, or herring fishing, or Rembrandt’s paintings), but the style was not what I was currently interested in. 

In November, the anti-capitalist stars aligned and I happened to watch Godard’s Masculin Feminin (1966) while reading Adorno’s Minima Moralia (1951) and Perec’s Things (1965), each a meditation on and a disapproval of consumerist society. Together with Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967) and Ernaux’s The Years (2018), these works made me wonder how intellectuals were criticizing capitalism already 60 years ago and regardless, it has steadily advanced, both for better and worse. Ignorance is bliss, and one probably shouldn’t read these books unless willing to feel discomfort for daily lifestyle choices.

During my last weeks in Paris, I rediscovered the short story collection The Whole Story and Other Stories (2004) by Ali Smith, the writer that seems to have a whole lot of fun writing her books that are a treasure trove of puns and playful use of form. I recently heard someone asking why Smith is so “unfriendly towards her readers,” the question implying that her books are unnecessarily literary and difficult to follow along. I’d object and ask “what kind of reader?” as it is exactly for this unapologetically whimsical style that I appreciate Smith’s writing the most. Here’s Ali Smith in her The Paris Review interview: 

“Puns were originally sacred. If you look back at the beginning of the writing down of language, in sacred rites, puns are everywhere. Ritualists in religions used puns to mark the important, the holy, or the sacred places in the ceremony. A pun heralds or marks the point at which transformation takes place, where a magic thing happens.”

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“We carry with us all the people who have made us and the people we make and the lives we make, and the world we make continues on from what we make of it.“

2020 Fave short fiction & longform essays

An even more random list of short stories, interviews, and essays that caught my attention, skewed towards works published in the past three months + what’s available online.

Short stories: 

Color and Light by Sally Rooney, link
A Temporary Matter by Jhumpa Lahiri, link
The Winged Thing by Patricia Lockwood, link
1 = 1 by Anne Carson, link 

Essays & reportage:

What Have We Done to the Whale? by Amia Srinivasan (New Yorker), link
Between Light and Storm by Esther Woolfson (Granta), link
The World Brain by Mark Alizart (Purple Magazine), link
The World Brain by Mark Alizart (Purple Magazine), link
Plants Know by Emannuele Coccia (Purple Magazine), link
The Secret Lives of Fungi by Hua Hsu (New Yorker), link
The Oldest Forest by Lucy Jakub (The New York Review of Books), link
My Three Fathers by Ann Patchett (New Yorker), link
Cooking with Iris Murdoch by Valerie Stivers (The Paris Review), link
How Leonora Carrington Feminized Surrealism (New Yorker), link
Eileen Gray’s Infinite Possibilities by Martin Filler (The New York Review of Books), link

Thoughts on + clippings from 2020 favourite books

While every single book in the “Fave” list above left its undeniable mark, some were especially consequential. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t recommend the below-listed books to everyone, especially to readers who are into literature with a consistent narrative and little patience for literary flâneurs. Of these authors, Rachel Cusk Annie Ernaux, and Tove Jannson are the least eccentric yet no less moving authors.

Coventry (2019) by Rachel Cusk

“Every so ofter, for offenced actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me. There’s a funny phrase for this phenomenon in England: it’s called being sent to Conventry. I don’t know what the origins of the expression are, though I suppose I could easily find out.“ 

Playful self-aware irony is the trademark of Rachel Cusk’ writing, one that can divide readers into two groups: acolytes and critics. While her writing style is radically pragmatic, the borderline cynicism is recurrently asking for remittal via an occasional display of vulnerability. The statements of Cusk’s essays sprout from a delicate exploration of human nature and relationships, topics varying from driving a car, making a home to contemplating a divorce.

As a collection, Coventry can affect one as the ultimate empathy-builder, all the while distancing the reader from the author. Going through the essays, it is difficult not to start questioning Cusk’s arguably selfish ways of life and the effects her choices have had on others, especially the close family. Contemplating about Coventry reminded me of Joan Didion’s essay on self-respect. Didion wrote that “character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.” It is Cusk’s acceptance of her choices that makes her writing agreeable and enchantingly reflective.

Naturally, the best person to propose the most apt explanation of her subjective writing style would be Cusk herself. Here’s a passage from her interview with The Paris Review:

“But yes, it’s an ethical situation. I think I could hew that close to the line in a sustained way because I had studied and questioned the ethics of human interaction so intensely in my own life. My lack of ego, of subjective self-regard, has been very useful in that way, even if it’s made experience more painful than it perhaps ought to have been. But it meant I could use myself dispassionately as an example. It gave me a chance to find what was universal in the particular circumstances I had in front of me.”

Passage from Cusk’s essay Coventry via Granta:

“Stories only work – or so we’re always being told – through the suspension of our disbelief. It’s never been altogether clear to me whether our disbelief is something that ought to be suspended for us, or whether we’re expected deliberately to suspend it ourselves. There’s an idea that a successful narrative is one that gives you no choice in the matter; but mostly I imagine it’s a question of both sides conspiring to keep the suspension aloft.”

Passage from Making House via The New York Times:

“The house a woman creates is a Utopia,” wrote Marguerite Duras. “She can’t help it — can’t help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it.” The domestic, in other words, is ultimately more concerned with seeming than with being: It is a place where personal ideals are externalized or personal failures made visible. These ideals, as well as the forms of failure they create, are ever-changing: The “search for happiness” is a kinetic state, and it follows that the most seductive of all the illusions of homemaking would be the illusion of permanence”

Democracy (1984) and Salvador (1982) by Joan Didion

Recently, everyone I discuss books with seems to have looked up Joan Didion, a writer already venerated in her contemporary literary and journalistic circles. And she’s in vogue still – The New Yorker recently published an essay-long ode by Brian Dillon on a single image caption that Didion wrote for Vogue when working there in the 1960s. The latest New York Review of Books featured its own tribute, written by Hilton Als who had found adept words to describe Didion’s writing: “… there’s an energy to her writing—what she might call its “shimmer”—that goes beyond a given piece’s surface story, and that sheds an awful and beautiful light on a world we half see but don’t want to see, one in which potential harm is a given and hope is a flimsy defense against dread. Didion’s ethos is a way of seeing what’s particular to the world that made her, and that ultimately reveals the writer to herself.”

Didion was a prolific writer in a multiplicity of forms, from magazine articles to movie scripts, personal essays to political reporting, a novel now and then. The Didion I enjoy reading most is her magazine writing from the 1980s. The “prolonged amnesiac fugue” that she writes about in her calculated reportage of contemporary American politics is hauntingly fitting to 2020.

I revisited Didion’s Democracy (1984), one of my favorite works of fiction for its distantly objective writing that’s yet acutely emotional, both for its nation and characters. I also discovered that Didion’s reportage slash literary essays Miami (1987) and Salvador (1982) were both initially published as 3-article series for The New York Review of Books and read both together with her other essays, many of which were published in the collection named The White Album (1979).

This passage from Miami seemed like a good example of Didion’s writing: 

“…words from a language in which deniability was built into the grammar, and as such may or may not have had a different meaning, or any meaning, in 1963 in Miami, where deniability had become in many ways the very opposite of the point.”

If you’re interested in reading something by Didion, start with her books Democracy (1995) or The White Album (1979). Or look up the essays Hollywood: Having Fun about 1970s film industry, and New York: Sentimental Journeys on the Central Park jogger case.

Here’s the beginning of Didion’s reportage on the LA scene:

““You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don’t understand. It can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.”

—Cecelia Brady in The Last Tycoon

To the extent that The Last Tycoon is “about” Hollywood it is about not Monroe Stahr but Cecelia Brady, as anyone who understands the equation of pictures even dimly or in flashes would apprehend immediately: the Monroe Stahrs come and go, but the Cecelia Bradys are the second generation, the survivors, the inheritors of a community as intricate, rigid, and deceptive in its mores as any devised on this continent. At midwinter in the survivors’ big houses off Benedict Canyon the fireplaces blaze all day with scrub oak and eucalyptus, the French windows are opened wide to the subtropical sun, the rooms filled with white phalaenopsis and cymbidium orchids and needlepoint rugs and the requisite scent of Rigaud candles. Dinner guests pick with vermeil forks at broiled fish and limestone lettuce vinaigrette, decline dessert, adjourn to the screening room, and settle down to The Heartbreak Kid with a little seltzer in a Baccarat glass.”

Essayism (2017) by Brian Dillon

If one is able to surpass the notion that Brian Dillon’s writing mimics the very authors he is writing about, Essayism can offer a rich literary feast. The book’s impracticality is also its charm. Regardless of its few shortcomings, at least in my opinion, such as melancholy divergences into the storyline of Dillon’s personal depression, the book is a constellation of essayistic and highly articulate writers and their works. 

Dillon introduces the reader to the etymology of the word essay: essayer dates from the 12th century, derived from the Latin base exagium, meaning a scale. An essay is an act of weighing something outside of itself, a weighed consideration, control. Essayism amounts to nothing less than a considerate and controlled attempt to write a tribute to Dillon’s most revered authors. It was also the book I left with the most underlined, scribbled and jotted down pages.

The authors mentioned include Francis Bacon, Michel de Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, Theodor W. Adorno, William H. Gass, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, Jacques Derrida, Elisabeth Hardwick, Cyril Connolly, Emil Cioran, Susan Sontag, W. G. Sebald. The list is incomplete.

Here’s the 1st sentence (also the 1st paragraph, the 1st page, and a good part of the 1st chapter) of the book:

“On essays and essayists. On the death of a moth, humiliation, the Hoover dam and how to write; an inventory of objects on the author’s desk, and an account on wearing spectacles, which he does not; what another learned about himself the day he fell unconscious from his horse; of noses, of cannibals, of method; diverse meanings of the word ‘lumber’; many vignettes, published over decades, in which the writer, or her elegant stand-in, described her condition of dislocation in the city, and did it so blithely that no one guessed it was all true; a dissertation on roast pig; a heap of language; a tour of the monuments; a magazine article that in tone and structure so nearly resembles its object, or conceals it, that flummoxed readers depart in droves; a sentence you could whisper in the ear of a dying man; an essay upon essays; on the author’s brief and oblique friendship with the great jazz singer; a treatise on melancholy, also on everything else; a species of drift and dissolve, at the levels of logic and language, that time and again required the reader to page back in wonder – how did we get from there to here? – before the writer’s skill (or perhaps his inattention); a sermon on …”

As a Joan Didion fan, I also logged Dillon’s musings on her reportage.

“… Let’s join Joan Didion in 1967 at the Hoover Dam, in a scene of ominous calm that I have read and reread and whose consoling power I cannot explain. Or rather here is Didion three years later, in her Essay ‘At the Dam’ in which she tells us that since her visit there the dam has never been entirely absent from her imagination, though she cannot quite tell why. In the middle of a conversation in New York or Los Angeles, the dam will come to her mind, ‘its pristine conclave face gleaming white against the harsh rusts and taupes and mauves that rock canyon hundreds or thousands miles from where I am.’ Aspects of the dam loom to mind: roaring generators, ominous intakes and outlets for the water that powers them, bronze sculptures that recall the optimism of 1930s, power cables snaking away into the landscape, the seeming emptiness of the place, cranes moving above her ‘as if under their own volition.’ Neither the dam’s history nor the power (with transparent sexual overtones’) embodied there will explain why the structure lives in her mind almost daily. “There was something beyond all that, something beyond energy, beyond history, something I could not fix in my mind.” Then she recalls the star map incised in marble which, her guide told her, was carved to inform future visitors, long past human habitation, about the date of he dam’s construction.

“Of course that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realizing what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its absolute isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is.”

Decreation (2005) by Anne Carson

Picked up at random at a bookstore’s poetry section, Anne Carson’s unfathomably creative collection of poems, essays, opera librettos, screenplays and other forms was a mind-altering read. All the wildly imaginative literary plots, moving the reader from Aphrodite to Antonioni to Demosthenes, mélange as a meditation on decreation – an activity described by Simone Weil as “undoing the creature in us.”

Decreation is a mixture of poems and essays, one on solar eclipse, another on sleep (“There is so much sleep to be read, there are so many ways to read it.” … In Aristotle’s view, sleep requires a “daimonic but not a divine” kind of reading. Kant refers to sleep as “involuntary poetry in a healthy state.”); one on Antonioni, interpreting his visit to a madmen’s asylum. Carson is as excellent as a scholar as she is inventive as a poet. Decreation was certainly the strangest and the most beautiful book I read this year.

The poem Guns and Desire I by Anne Carson:

Guns and Desire I 
What does it matter to me that there were other people to love

Guillermo’s Sigh Symphony by Anne Carson:

Guillermo’s Sigh Symphony
Do you hear sighing.
     Do you wake amid a sigh.
           Radio sighs AM,
FM.
               Shortwave sighs crackle in from the Atlantic.
           Hot sighs steam in the dawn.
    People kissing stop to sigh then kiss again.
Doctors sigh into wounds and the bloodstream is changed for ever.
        Flowers sigh and two noon bees float backwards.
               Is it doubt.
                  Is it disappointment.
                     The world didn’t owe me anything.
                         Leaves come sighing in the door.
                  Bits of girl sigh like men.
           Forgeries sigh twice.
Balthus sighs and lies about it, claiming it was Byron’s sigh.
        A sigh may come too late.
               Is it better than screaming.
                  Give me all your sighs for four or five dollars.
                                A sigh is weightless,
                     yet it may interrupt the broadcast.
                  Can you abstain.
          What is that hush that carries itself up each sigh.
        We hunt together the sigh and I,
sport of kings.
          To want to stop is beyond us.
The more sighs shine the more I’m in trouble – some kind of silvery stuff –
                        you thought it was the sea?

The Years (2018) by Annie Ernaux

The Years by Annie Ernaux, one of the most acclaimed contemporary French writers, is an autobiographical memoir that blends personal and public life from the author’s birth in 1940 through to 2006. The chronologically moving storyline is narrated as a collective and impersonal “we” or “one,” eluding the use of “I.” Ernaux’ telling of the her generation’s story nonetheless has an ever-present author, reminding herself to the reader via mnemonic photographs inserted at the beginning of each chapter.

Having recently moved to France, this book was a welcome window into the French sentiment towards the second half of the 20th century. The detail-oriented and anthropologically curious Ernaux has also managed to intertwine into her book the story of 20th century rise of capitalism together with the side effects of a sinuous appearance of radio, TV, MP3, and PCs into our lives. In her own words, “All was derision and gleeful, festive fatalism.” And later in the book, “With all the intermingling of concepts, it was increasingly difficult to find a phrase of one’s own, the kind that, when silently repeated, helped one live.”

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“And we who were undeceived, who seriously examined the dangers of advertising with our students; we who assigned the topic “Does the possession of material goods lead to happiness?”, bought a stereo at Fnac, a Grundig radio-cassette player, and a Bell & Howell Super-8 camera, with a sense of using modernity to intelligent ends. For us and by us, consumption was purified. The ideals of May ‘68 were being transformed into objects and entertainment.”

With delightful observations that at times required that she invent her own terms to describe something barely explicable (such as palimpsest sensation – a sensation of re-experiencing past moments while adding a new layer of current thoughts. A manuscript on which the original writing has been scratched out to make room for new writing).

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Fin.

The post 2020 Favorites: Books, Essays & Other Writing appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

September 2020

An essay by The Correspondent (sewing together many facts and pieces you already knew) on how the US has for long not been a democracy but a kleptocracy: Dear news media, stop covering the US as if it’s a democracy

A brief yet painfully anguishing story in The New Yorker on how humans have been destroying our oceans’ whale populations for hundreds of years, with an ever-growing recklessness. The author Amia Srinivasan asks: What Have We Done to the Whale?

A nostalgic interview with The editor at The Paris Review, Maxine Groffsky. On her longwinded path to becoming a TPR editor and her years in their Paris office, sidelined by trips to Italian villas and last-minute visits to their printer in the Netherlands.

March 2020

The New Yorker profile on Yuval Noah Harari: Yuval Noah Harari’s History of Everyone, Ever

Essay in The Times Literary Supplement on our addiction to documenting our lives in pictures: Visually speaking: The new ubiquity of photographic images

The New Yorker story on the environmental impact of eating meat & the brands working on alternative solutions: Can a Burger Help Solve Climate Change?

An essay from the Purple Magazine’ Brain issue on how plants experience the world through their completely different body structure: Plants Know

Another essay from the same Purple Magazine issue on how our brains have become increasingly wired through technological advancements and globalization: The World Brain

An essay from Frieze on the climate impact of flying (from an art world perspective, but applies to all of us): Can the Art World Kick Its Addiction to Flying?

The New York Times story on the KitKat craze in Japan: In Japan, Kit Kat Isn’t Just a Chocolate. It’s an Obsession

Joan Didion’s Essay from the New York Times’ archive: Why I Write

Interview with Milan Kundera on the purpose of literature and his writing style: Milan Kundera, The Art of Fiction No. 81

What else to browse:

The New York Times’ section covering climate and green topics: Climate and Environment

More essays and interviews from the Purple Magazine: Latest issues

For more literary & anthropological essays: Times Literary Supplement

The interviews section of the Paris Review: Interviews

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