This book was a most overwhelming and sensational book I have ever had the pleasure to read. As you, I had countless excerpts noted and collected.

Thank you Mr Gozli. One of the best recommendations I’ve had.

To drill into the tension between the lower and the higher while continuing with the example: the former activity has values embedded in it, which, if left unexamined, can dispirit the overall project or bend one out of integrity.

For example, the conversations around optimizing for the lower-level things you list (SEO, AEO, AI search, etc.) carry the core value of reach, a value tethered to the activity itself and bolstered by the culture surrounding optimization, which often pairs reach with attention-capture.

The solution of subordinating reach to a higher-order value — one incompatible with attention-capture — still presents a challenge: the former remains readily quantitative, hence easier to measure, while the latter remains qualitative, mainly relational, hence harder to attune to in online environments like YouTube. This challenge can be mitigated by holding regular, communal gatherings with one’s audience. A content creator who arrives this far in the inquiry then wrestles with an additional question: whom am I called to commune with?

Your careful reasoning through such matters evidently accounts for how you’ve maintained integrity with your channel.

That’s good to hear. Check out the information on the website (https://dgozli.com/reading-group-schedule) and let me know if you have any questions.

Hi Patrick — Thank you for writing and for your interest. Our small group can most certainly welcome another person. I will follow-up with an email shortly.

Thanks for your work. I’m interested in joining your reading group if the group isn’t too large. I have a solid background in Lit and writing as a private tutor and writer. Please let me know if there’s room for one more engaged and enthusiastic voice.

Best,
Patrick England

I realize you are not being quite so literal and that your larger point is the decentering. And this is a beautiful idea. But I still think the asymmetry has bearing, to the extent that the first is more on the level of metaphor and frame, and the second on the level of concrete actions. I recall you remarking elsewhere recently about the limits of metaphor, how they can be insensitive to context. Perhaps in your context you really were called, by family ties or other exigencies. In my case there was a pretext, an affordance – but still it was very much a decision I had to make alone. So it depends on how heavily you want to foreground the causality vs the relation of membership.

What does ring true for me is your proposal that we “write to unburden yourself, to relocate yourself from the center of the narrative to a place with a better view, a place that recognizes others.” This so perfectly captures what you said elsewhere about always writing *to* or *for* or *with* somebody in the background, which it how it has always felt. But for me it feels decentering not because of the thematic subject matter (e.g. a city and one’s place in it), but because of the relational mode it places me into: one of disclosure and explanation. It is not so much that the burden of the decision is shifted, as I feel myself being listened to as I am reprocessing it.

Francis Bacon was the brain behind the three books of Don Quixote; he wrote the part of the hero.
Ben Jonson took on the role of Sancho Panza, John Donne wrote the poems, “the two friends” Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher were assigned the task of writing loose stories. These authors made use of the library owned by Robert Cotton.
The printer, William Stansby, inserted concealed clues into the text, in order for the reader to be able to draw conclusions…

The Spanish translations were carried out by Thomas Shelton (DQI + DQII) and James Mabbe (the “bogus” DQ).
Miguel de Cervantes was just a poor Spanish writer who had sold his name to survive. He had told his life-story to the English, so that it could be processed into the DQ.
So: Ten people, sworn to secrecy about their collaboration in the writing of Don Quixote. Now in this book, after four hundred years, clarity is given as to the “who”, “what” and “why” of all this secrecy.
You can order my new book: the deciphering of Don Quixote & the unmasking of Avellandeda” march 2022.