The Work, Creative K-Holes, Dead Forever

Genius Loci readers:

It’s me, Jeremy Bassetti, giving you another opportunity to gaze upon the strange species of animal called Scriptor dayjobicus strangulatus, more commonly known as the domestic writer-strangled-by-his-day-job.

In this month’s email, you’ll find a personal update, followed by notes on the joys of falling into creative K-holes, author platforms, some podcasts on books and writing, and the music of the Grateful Dead.

The year is 8.7% complete! This fact alone doesn’t unsettle me as much as accounting for how little of this time I’ve been able to spend forging ahead with The Work — the good work, the real work, the writing and thinking work, the research work, the creative work, the difficult but satisfying work, the work that you’d do even if it doesn’t pay the bills. And yet, time is what you make of it. Despite feeling pressure from the classes, the grading, the emails, and the meetings — ¡Jesúcristo! the emails and meetings! —, I’m realizing now that I’ve written over 6,500 words and done quite a bit of research. A good month can thus only be measured by how much of it is spent above ground,¹ surrounded by friends and family, and adding some bricks to that pyramid we call The Work.

While 6,500 sloppy words does not seem like an impressive amount over the course of a month, I’ll put it in my wins column given my constraints. I need to remind myself that I’ve managed to write 6,500 words despite a full-time job and a toddler at home. A toddler who has been having night terrors. A toddler who had an ear infection and the stomach flu for the better part of a week. A toddler who passed along his stomach flu to his parents. A toddler who took great pleasure in imitating the sound of his father retching. A toddler who plastered his father’s sweaty, cold, trembling body with glittery stickers of cute dinosaurs and pink hearts.

Like their quantity, the quality of those words is nothing to gush over. Them words are sloppy — loose. They’re half-formed and incomplete. They’re half drunk and in need a literary intervention. But they are the raw material of The Work. The bricks of the pyramid will eventually get adorned with a veneer of polished limestone. One hopes so, at least, but that’s for another day.

Creative K-Holes

I spent a large part of my free time in January researching the Virgin Mary for a chapter I’m working on. I’m particularly interested in her appearances on and around mountains. Mary might be a mountain climber, given her propensity for alpine appearances. The two best-known Marian apparitions happen to be ones on or around mountains: in Mexico (Guadalupe) and France (Lourdes). In Mexico and France (as in Bolivia and elsewhere), the Virgin Mary was loitering in mountainous areas.

I read two books about Mary. I started with Leith’s accessible The Virgin Mary: A Very Short Introduction, which provides an overview of Mary’s role in the church and charts the history of Marian devotion in the past two thousand years. After reading Leith’s book, I dove into Carl Anderson’s Our Lady of Guadalupe. Anderson’s book is too apologetic — too evangelical — for me, but it is the best kind of book in that it opened new research directions and threw me into what I can only describe as a K-hole.² In this case, the state is caused not by ketamine but by research.

When lost in creative K-hole, one feels time, the environment, and the body almost dissolve. They slip away and we enter a trance-like state. Unlike an actual K-hole, it is a desired state, an overdose of curiosity and absorption. While in a creative K-hole, it is common for the fiend to look up at the clock perplexed that they had spent the last three hours, say, browsing through an online database of Nahuatl hieroglyphs.

This is why it is important to confront, entertain, and consider books you would otherwise dismiss, like I could have done with Carl Anderson’s book. You never know what insight, lead, idea, or turn of phrase you might find in them. In addition to the Nahuatl glyph database, Anderson’s book somehow led me to a small trove of primary sources like the marvelous Florentine Codex and secondary sources like the fantastic book El Altépetl, Origen y Desarrollo.

Academic studies like El Altépetl are among the books that matter most. They’re products of deep research, experience, and expertise. They’re often the distillation of years or even a lifetime of thinking and work. They are real contributions to history. But they rarely sell more than a few hundred copies, probably only to historians and academic institutions. Society gives less attention to what is more important.

Email Lists & Author Platforms

At the end of my winter break, I was thinking about my newsletter and my “author platform.” Authors often feel compelled to “build an audience” or “build a platform” because, as you know, publishers and agents like their authors to reach readers. Having an established platform does help with promotion, marketing, and sales. Forget about building social media profiles. One of the best tools of an author platform is an email list. Email lists are the gold standard, and there are strategies to build and maintain them. My own email list — the one that delivered to you the email you’re reading now, unless you’re reading this via RSS or on my site — actually shrank last year. This might not be a bad thing, after all. But size and growth is often a metric of reach and resonance. I discussed my mistakes with my email list last year so you can learn from them. Avoid my mistakes, grow your email list, and build your platform.

Podcasts

I’ve been limiting my podcast consumption lately, but when a friend sent me a podcast episode on Dante’s Divine Comedy I couldn’t resist. The podcast is called Old School and, from what I understand, its host Shilo Brooks interviews interesting people about the books that changed their lives. The episode was a wonderful conversation about the power of the poem, not least because of the guest’s harrowing story about losing his wife in a car accident when she was 8 1/2 months pregnant. The guest, a literature professor named Joseph Luzzi, found solace in Dante’s story. Reading Dante was part of his grieving process.

Near the end of the episode, Luzzi discussed academic writing and popular writing. He noted that while popular writing is often characterized as being simpler than academic writing, and academic writing is characterized as being more complicated than popular writing, the opposite is really true. He argues that popular writing is more difficult because distilling complex ideas into simple terms takes a great deal of time, energy, and skill. As I wrote before, academic writing is easier because style, clarity, and the ability to communicate the idea is subordinate to the idea, “original argument,” or disciplinary contribution itself. If communicating complicated ideas in ways that resonate with non-experts is a superpower, it is so because it is super hard.

I also stumbled onto an interview with author Tom Junod sharing his thoughts on writing. I especially enjoyed his ideas on use of AI in writing. Junod notes that writing is hard work as much as it is heart work. It is full of life, energy, and — for lack of a better term — soul. Those who use AI for their writing must think poorly of writing itself — as a soulless, heartless activity. And yet, using AI for soulless, heartless writing like social media posts, TPS reports, and data analyses is okay. But if you’re writing for a reason that matters, if you’re concerned with taste, beauty, ideas, and connection — is this not the stuff of writing? —, then AI can’t help.

Dead Forever

I dropped off a few rolls of film to get developed at a new film lab in town. The rolls were the last three to develop from 2025, shot in the months of May, September, and December. The May roll contained images I took during a Dead & Company concert my father invited me to at The Sphere in Las Vegas. On the day I developed the photos, news broke that the band’s singer and guitarist — Bob Weir — had died. The news caught us off guard. The music of the Grateful Dead has been in my father’s life since he was a teenager. It has been with me all my life, my father playing their albums in our home and car through a variety of media: vinyl, cassettes, CDs, and MP3s. But the live music was always the best. One mild April evening, my father took me to see my first concert: the Grateful Dead with opening act The Black Crowes. I was too young to fully appreciate what I was experiencing, but I knew it was weird. And weird was good. Between April 1995 and May 2025, my father and I have seen the band and its various incarnations play around 15 shows. The music had grown on me, but my main interest in going to the shows was to go with my dad and to see him fall into a sort of K-hole of his own, absorbed by music he loved and knew so well.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

JB