42: Celine Nguyen - Nurturing Your Mind in Public
All links and transcript available at dialectic.fm/celine-nguyen Celine Nguyen (Website, Substack, X) is a writer, software designer at Watershed, and literary critic. She writes personal canon, a newsletter about literature, design, art, and technology that has grown to tens of thousands of subscribers. She has also written for The Atlantic, Asterisk Magazine, and more. I discovered Celine with her reflection on two years of writing her newsletter, where she made the case for living a life of the mind, reading great things, and writing online: "After 2 years, I’m convinced that reading and writing are the most dignified and worthy activities that anyone can do—and, in fact, are activities that everyone should do." She also has written viral essays on research as a leisure activity and a case for reading Marcel Proust’s 3,000 page novel, In Search of Lost Time. In another favorite, she critically analyzes the mechanics of how great writers begin. Celine makes intellectual life and very serious books feel accessible and exciting rather than obligatory. We spoke about much of her writing, taking your intellectual growth seriously outside of academia, and how she has become an influencer in a good way. She believes you can expand the market for what you love, and her success is evidence that there is a market for more than the low-hanging fruit that dominates much of the internet. Celine sees reading and writing through the lens of becoming, and I was inspired to raise my own bar. I hope you can say the same. --- Dialectic is presented by Notion.
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Speaker A: people want to make things the more things they consume. I think fan fiction, which I have a deep love for, it's like people read this work that inspires them so much, they feel so moved by it that they're just like, I have to write about this. A lot of fan fiction writers end up becoming novelists themselves. Speaker B: You say, as a human being, intellectual discovery and gratification are your birthright. Speaker A: The term birthright for me indicates that it is something that everyone should do, like not just if you're a scholar, not just if you're an academic or a critic or a journalist, but everyone has a right to produce their intellectual worldview.
This newsletter kind titled No One Told Me About Proust. And it was my argument for, you know, there's this great work of modernist literature, it's 3,000 pages long. I think this is one of the best books I've ever read, and I want to make a case for it that is not like, oh, this is a very important book, this is very long, this must be read. And what I want to do is transmit a love for literature, but kind of in a new, maybe like in a new market context or to people who are socialized with different values.
So I was kind of like, you know what people love today? They love gossip. They love like understanding like the weird intricacies of people's sexual and romantic lives. Proust has that, and that's why you should read these 3,000 pages. I think there are certain things where it's like the reason you put them off is because you have overthought them, or they are so kind of like psychologically load-bearing. You're afraid of failure, you're afraid of getting things wrong. And so sometimes the only way you can start those things is by seizing the moment and being very impulsive.
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