Medium Opened My Eyes: Why Write Low-Brow Essays

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I’m going to write some shit.

I mean that literally, to the extent the vulgar metaphor can be literal. I’m going to write low-brow essays.

My goal is to crank out one such piece every week, maybe two or three every week if I get good at it.

Don’t worry. I’ll still do my weekly serious column, those series of essays that form my “Existence Strikes Back” project. I (with shocking arrogance) think the story laid out in those essays is important and needs to get out there. It’s perhaps unfortunate that the story is in the hands of a nimrod like me, but out there it must get, so this Yoda will continue to plug away at it.

But I’m also going to crank out some shit.

Medium.com Opened My Eyes

Why this turn to the slop?

I have a few reasons.

First, Medium.com has made it pretty clear: A lot of readers are grobians.[1]There are writers at Medium who, quite frankly, suck at writing, if judged from the perspective of, say, E.B. White, Robert Graves, Herbert Read, or F.L. Lucas (all of whom wrote about literary style; Lucas wrote the most beautiful: Style).

These writers at Medium are bad, like they woke up one day and decided they’d start writing. “I can…