“The idea of choice is easily debased,” George W. S. Trow writes, “if one forgets that the aim is to have chosen successfully, not to be endlessly choosing.”
We don’t know about you, but we readily debase the idea of choice on the regular. Endlessly choosing is one of our favorite pastimes. We’ve become so adept at choosing that we can get stuck in a series of nested choices for full evenings. What to read? Spend hours assessing the options against our mood. Where to read it? Take tens of minutes sorting through the pros and cons of various places. Inside? Outside? Couch? Bench? Chair? Floor? Ground? What circumstances would best suit the reading? Music? No music? Phone silenced? Phone off? Finally we’ll end up reading, but soon later: Ought we keep reading? Finish this chapter? This sentence? Maybe we should watch something instead? What should we watch?
The idea of choice never stood a chance.
The essay in which this little phrase appears, “Within the Context of No Context,” is - amongst other things - an account of how post-war American culture has worked hard to harm the idea of choice and those doing the choosing. Somewhere around the election of Eisenhower (1952 btw), Trow suggests, “[c]hoice in respect to important matters became more and more difficult; people found it troublesome to settle on a mode of work, for instance, or a partner. Choice in respect to trivial matters, on the other hand, assumed an importance that no one could have thought to predict.”
We could take issue with Trow, here, about what exactly he means by “trivial” but forcing his (dead) hand to define trivial seems, of itself, to engage in something quite trivial. Define important and trivial however you like. His broader point, about what’s happened (and is perhaps still happening) to choice, is that we are all (North Americans, anyways) hamstrung in a world where important matters seem impossible to choose (or immune to the force and effect of individual choices altogether) and trivial matters seem endowed with endless chooseability and undue significance.
Trow, as is his wont, offers no advice about how to preserve the idea of choice’s integrity. That’s not his project. He aims only to assess and lay bare the cultural landscape he saw before him in 1980. He reveals little of how he or anyone ought to react to the derangement of choice, but does occasionally share how he feels about the situation. “The message of many things in America is ‘Like this or die,’” he writes in the last few pages, “It is a strain. Suddenly, the modes of death begin to be attractive.” Implicit in this hyperbolic (but no less true) statement is, maybe, a quiet suggestion that a sense of humor might do you well in this world. You may not have effective choices or you may be faced only with infinite unimportant (but seemingly consequential) ones - but you can at least make light of the situation, offer a quip tinged with rage, and keep yourself from collapsing into a cynical heap. Laughter in the dark is, though, only effective for so long.
As much as we love Trow’s essay, we can’t spend too much time too often with it. Not because it’s depressing or self-indulgent (these are some of its most lovable qualities), but because its assessment of the world is (to our eye) so true and so total that it is hard, immediately after having re-read it, to engage actively in much of anything. The degraded idea of choice haunts our every action, the important seems further out of reach, the trivial all the more trivial, and we start circling the edge of some abyssal feeling.
All the same, we find ourselves returning to Trow again and again almost compulsively. When we get caught up endlessly choosing what to read, we often break the cycle by just choosing to re-read him. It’s a questionable habit (especially if we look at the consequences), but it’s one we’ve fallen into honestly.
Since Trow offers no strategies for living in or through our circumstances, we’ve had of necessity to develop our own. We’ll hand over the trivial choices to an algorithm or two. We’ll pretend that important matters might still feel the effects of our will. We’ll build up a structure of reason to support why a trivial thing isn’t so trivial at all. We’ll do things that are purely pleasurable and render the important/trivial distinction irrelevant. We’ll force ourselves to appreciate, fully, the rare benefits that come from unchosen things.
One such unchosen thing came into our hands by chance last week. We’d done a favor for someone and, a couple days later, they gave us the new issue of yolk. as thanks. We didn’t choose to own a copy of the Summer 2023 edition of this Montreal-based literary journal. We couldn’t have. We didn’t know it was something we could choose.
We don’t much keep up with journals. We’ll browse the racks of them in bookstores (as part of our endlessly choosing what or if we ought to buy something new to read), but rarely pick one up to flip through or take home.
We used to read as many as we could get our hands on. We’d spend huge swaths of our time keeping up with current or catching up with back issues of Granta, The Paris Review, Tin House, Poetry, Zoetrope, ZYZZYVA, The Believer, The Southern Review, and then complement all these big names with all the littler and local and online only ones. We’d work through these things cover to cover. We’d read writer bios, see them name other journals we’d never heard of, track those down, add them to our rotation, and continue on forever.
Literary journals served as a testament to the idea that sharing work and sharing space with others sharing work was good and enough. The journals were object lessons that someone - if only editors - were interested in reading and thinking with all sorts of known or unknown voices. Journals introduced us to writers (often) unable to support themselves by writing alone, writers who were finding a way to string sentences together in their off hours and summoning the weird mixture of self-confidence and reckless abandon necessary to keep submitting pieces in the face of (near certain always) rejection. Writers, in other words, who were willing and able to take risks that we (often) chose not to take. Reading a lot of literary journals was also, of course, a means of offloading our choice of reading onto a set of editors. We’d choose to read things chosen by others, trusting that they chose well.
Over time, for whatever reason, we stopped reading literary journals regularly and chose to choose who we read more narrowly. We remembered, we guess, that our trivial choices were significant and ours and ought not be handed over to some random names on any old masthead. We lost a willingness or desire to encounter unknown voices in the pages of some quarterly just for the sheer sake of encountering unknown or unfamiliar things.
This was, in some ways we now recognize, dumb and misguided.
When yolk. arrived in our hands we were, as we remembered we often were, a little wary. Like books, we always judge journals by their cover and yolk 3.1 has a great cover. The design is controlled, but not austere. The painterly quality and pastel colors of the cover image - a painting called Summer Breeze by Sophie Edell - offsets the stark black soft serifs of the journal name and bordering white. Why are we describing this? The journal looks like this:
If nothing else, this little magazine would be a nice accessory. We would look better reading it than not.
We flipped beyond the pretty cover, scanned the table of contents. We knew a name or two, but most of these folks were well outside our ken. This, to be clear, speaks to our ignorance and not their individual stature. We know almost nothing and no one right now. In case you’re more savvy, 3.1 features writing and art by:
Alex Affonso
Gwen Aube
Sarah Burgoyne
Michelle Caron-Pawlowsky
Max Côté-Fortin
Francis De Rosa
J.R. Gerow
Sara Horvat
Braedan Houtman
Madeleine Leznoff
JC Little
Sasha Manoli
Lyne Marquis
Patrick O’Reilly
Jade Palmer
Sabrina Papandrea
Jeff Parent
Kayla Penteliuk
David Romanda
Caitlin Stall-Packet
Richard Tippins
Meryem Yildiz
While the names told us little (like we said, we know nothing), the titles of pieces caught our attention. “Christmas Oranges, 1995” and “Tiny Marsh” and “On Hold” and “Mollusk” and “Dying Ville-Émard Parish.” We could go on. Great titles, all. Each saying something without saying something. We’re awful at titles (and worse at subtitles) so might be more sensitive to solid titles than others. In any event, not knowing what to expect, we found a place to sit in the sun and started reading. It almost didn’t feel like a choice.
We’d almost forgotten what it feels like to visit briefly with so many voices and visions. We so often find ourselves hosted (or held hostage) by just one writer, just one artist. We get accustomed to their rhythm and style, their aims and forms. This isn’t an option when reading a journal. You get to be guided, instead, from poem to visual art to fiction to nonfiction. You meet peculiar and particular angles and approaches briefly. You settle yourself across fourteen lines of poetry then, just as quickly, find that it’s said what it needed to say and you move on to the next. You have to stay sensitive, receptive, to each page because, often, that’s all the space you’ll get with this one writer or artist. You get to accompany them for a little while and then you are shepherded over to someone else doing something else entirely.
And what do the writers in yolk. have to say? Everything. Contemplations of the atom, playing games in an old folks home, meditating on waiting, lines after Donne, thoughts of Canada from Brasil, octopuses, and other important/trivial matters crop up on each page. Each piece stands with and against all the others. They are each, in their own way, distinct and singular while also, subtly, working together to elucidate different dimensions of the issue’s theme (“Legacies”). The journal’s theme, though, is explored by way of more than just words. Art of various kinds is balanced out across the issue. Abstracts and collage-esque figurative paintings and melancholic photos and penned, crying figures in a crowded world. These pieces, too, work with and against each other. They stand with and against all the words surrounding them.
[It might seem low-key insane that we are describing reading a journal, but it was legit remarkable how foreign it felt after (for real) years of reading only single-authored books or single online articles here and there. Our reading habits are pathologically curated at this point, so the idea of laying our eyes on anything (let alone lots of things) that we did not expressly decide to spend time with after ample due dilligence and careful pre-scrutiny is truly wild. If you live a healthier or less severely damaged cultural life, good for you and tell us howwww.]
Anyways, we read yolk 3.1 one morning and have re-read it a couple times since. It’s clear that every part of this little journal has been attended to with care. It’s beautiful to look at, the sequencing of the pieces is purposive and effective, and the inclusion of disparate artistic and writerly temperaments is well done. The issue feels coherent, complete, even though it is populated by starkly different attitudes and approaches and styles. As much as the writers and artists get all the attention, the editors and readers and designers working behind the scenes have (very evidently) done the thankless background work necessary to showcase the work in good light.
The thing we forgot about reading a journal that yolk. recalled most vividly is that, well, nothing exactly happens at the end. The critical impulse that usually tends to kick in when we’re through reading something - deciding whether our time was well-spent, the writing well-wrought, etc. - doesn’t follow from a journal. The pieces work together holistically, but the whole doesn’t call or demand that kind of judgment. Reading a journal is, as best as we can describe it, like having gone to a small gathering for a little while where you know maybe no one and are a little unclear of why the gathering is happening at all. You are amidst unchosen company and, on a good day, we like unchosen company better than anyone. They say things we can’t anticipate, discuss topics we wouldn’t think to consider, and show us aspects of life we wouldn’t or couldn’t know to look for.
We wouldn’t have chosen yolk. We didn’t know any better. We, also, likely wouldn’t choose (sight unseen) any of the writers or artists in this issue. We wouldn’t know to choose them. Our world is small and limited and the world is enormous and vast. We so often play it safe or just return to what we know in an effort to escape all the noice of everything. By chance, we were gifted a reprieve from choice by being given an unchosen thing and, here and now, we want to (in our own way) gift you the same. We hope you’ll choose to let yolk. guide your choice of reading for a little while and spend time with a host of people trying to communicate something somehow. It’s a humble ambition and, well, a humble ask too.
Trow may still be right that the world isn’t what it ought to be, that the cultural landscape is bad and limiting and ever-worsening - but it would be a tragedy if we let his rightness close us off to all the work of all the folks who refuse to be quiet or keep themselves to themselves. The wrongness of the world that Trow identified is, to our eye today, tempered by this small, committed group of people who chose to do things and contributed something of themselves to the world regardless of any promised effect or outcome.
We don’t know whether our choice to read yolk. or write about it is anything other than trivial, but we choose right now not to really care about that distinction and instead be grateful that folks (despite all the everything) are still somehow choosing to create things that offer others the chance to choose to think and feel and respond and share and interrupt the ever-present risk of staying stuck endlessly choosing.
What a gift.
You can find yolk. online here and order the issue we were talking about. You can also find out about their submission requirements for future issues and volunteer opportunities. If websites aren’t your thing, you can check them out on Instagram or Facebook. Apparently there’s going to be a launch event for this issue at some point in the future, so maybe we’ll see you there.
P.S. We weren’t just being figurative about wanting to gift yolk. While we’d encourage you to part with money (if you have it to part with) in exchange for the journal, we would also happily pass our copy of 3.1 to someone who can’t afford it right now. If you’re in Montreal and want our copy, let us know via email and we’ll figure out a way of getting it to you.
P.P.S. If you want to read Trow’s “Within the Context of No Context,” you can read a scan of it as it originally appeared in (of all godforsaken places) The New Yorker here.
" Our world is small and limited and the world is enormous and vast." yes! and love this idea about letting go of the act of attempting to distinguish between whether a choice is trivial or not, VERY helpful!
Another impactful and thought provoking article. Writing about interesting things whether they are journals or not are always useful and appreciated. Thank you.