You’ll be forgiven for not knowing Evan Puschak’s name, even if you might be familiar with his work. On YouTube, Puschak has posted almost three hundred videos under the moniker NerdWriter: video essays ranging from “How Donald Trump Answers a Question” to “The Bear’s Secret Ingredient Is Tenderness” to “Will AI Images Change Our Memories?”. His videos are often between five and ten minutes, skewing largely toward analysis of film, poetry, and visual art. Escape Into Meaning is Puschak’s first print work and is, similarly, a collection of essays and, similarly, covers a range of topics.
Briefly, the main topics of the essays are as follows: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Internet culture, cyberpunk, the trustability of experts, Lord of the Rings, public benches, Tarantino’s oeuvre, Superman, Seinfeld, friendship, and writing a book. Each of the essays is a blend, like Puschak’s videos, of his own thoughts and a curated selection of quotations, research, and referents to help establish his central claims. The conversational tone Puschak has mastered as NerdWriter carries through in his writing, which is consistently personable and clear, if lacking a little in terms of outward flourishes of style.
While the sentences themselves aren’t exactly”‘literary,” the composition of the collection as a whole is pretty creative. There are some obvious through-lines in the work and essays will echo one another, as if conversation. The essay on cyberpunk preempts the essay on Lord of the Rings. The essay “Write a Book” calls back to the essay on Emmerson, forming an effective set of bookends for the collection.
What I find to be Puschak’s most interesting affectation as an essayist, though, is that each essay is a kind of nesting doll. One subject gets smuggled in through another. In “I Think the Internet Wants to Be My Mind”, Puschak discusses the effect of scrolling Twitter on brains, but smuggles in a discussion of Cats. The key epistemological question of “When Experts Disagree”---namely, how do you decide?---is also a vehicle that allows Puschak to discuss climate change and economic policy. The essay on “Friendship” is a disguise for an essay on Virginia Woolf’s best book (The Waves)...or is it the other way around? The most surprising essay in this respect is “Thinking in Oeuvres”, which begins as an essay on Quentin Tarantino’s films, then transmutes into an essay on the poems of William Butler Yeats before returning to the meditation on Tarantino. Never would I have partnered those two in an essay; they have such a different style, operate in such a different medium, that it’s an unlikely connection, which led to a surprisingly delightful exploration of oeuvres as a concept.
To back up a little bit, I’ll give a brief overview of some of the highlights in a more sequential order.
In “Emerson’s Magic,” Puschak provides an extended ode to finding yourself through reading. The essay heavily relies on passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson, which are inspiring in their own right, and there’s a nice autobiographical touch where Puschak outlines his admittedly lacklustre experience of school and coming to the joys of reading. LIke with other essays, though, this one isn’t just about Emerson. It’s also about individuality and its limits, another theme that carries throughout the collection.
For instance, the very next essay, “I Think the Internet Wants to Be My Mind,” explores the idea of conforming to a certain way of thought. The internet shapes our means of processing information; we scroll and scroll, the limitations of a Tweet give shape to our thoughts, and so on. Puschak explains how seeing internet consensus on any number of issues then guides our thinking towards a preemptive understanding of art (and, in particular, matters of taste). As I mentioned, Puschak couches a discussion of Cats film into the essay, serving as a representative example of how when he saw the trailer he already imagined how the internet would respond. The observations are at times a little surface level, but it’s still a worthwhile read, especially for young people, I think. It’s yet another plea to unplug and experience the world unmediated by others.
The essay “The Comforts of Cyberpunk” captures the particular joy of Cyberpunk narratives, ranging from William Gibson’s Neuromancer to Bladerunner. It’s a little funny that the book praises Cyberpunk 2077 but adds a footnote acknowledging its disastrous release. The essay talks about the limitless freedom of Cyberpunk and the anonymity that goes along with these worlds (again, the topic of individuality runs through). Cyberpunk is a genre I really like in theory, but in practice—at least in terms of literature—have a hard time engaging with. Puschak gives a great justification for the genre’s appeal.
To skip ahead a little, “Escape Into Meaning” serves as an effective companion piece to the essay on Cyberpunk. It operates as an opposite of sorts; Puschak acknowledges that his appreciation of the freedom in Cyberpunk does not mean he’d want to stay in those worlds for long, given its meaninglessness. “Escape Into Meaning” explores another genre—fantasy—and more specifically The Lord of the Rings. He explores why he finds so much joy in watching the entire trilogy more than 50 times. Quoting from some of Tolkien’s work on “Fairy Stories,” Puschak gives a critical summary of the perception that everything in Tolkien has a purpose, which is its own comfort. In the absence of any kind of other faith, the constructed world Tolkien has provided offers a sense that everything has significance. Fair enough, even though it’s not to my taste. I do appreciate that Puschak focuses on the way that the world evolves from Tolkien’s imagined languages.
But I skipped over an essay: “When Experts Disagree.” The central question is a compelling one: when experts disagree, how do we make a decision? I have to praise Puschak’s approach in the essay to probe facts for deeper truth. For instance, he breaks down a claim from John Oliver’s show about the consensus around climate science. Even though the conclusion is the same, Puschak provides a more nuanced analysis of the research methodology. He then attempts to do the same for economics, clearly advocating for things like a higher minimum wage, but tempered by the ambiguity of experts in disagreement. It is a nice appeal to temperance and is a very human attempt to reconcile the challenges of never being able to be enough of an expert in every field.
When delving into social issues, Puschak offers some observations that are a little pedestrian—-specifically when commenting about benches. The “Ode to Public Benches” essay discusses the benefits of public seating as creating opportunities for connection. It delves into hostile architecture, which is a topic I find interesting, but the essay as a whole was one of the weaker components of the book.
One of the highlights, though, as I touched on earlier, is the essay “Thinking in Oeuvres.” The discussion begins with Quentin Tarantino’s oeuvre. Namely, that he claims to only have one more movie left in him. There’s some discussion of the limitations of an oeuvre and of knowing you have limited space. There is some analysis of the way Tarantino has threaded certain themes through his works, but then there’s a wild change to discussing the poems of W. B. Yeats. It’s an amazing shift and an unlikely juxtaposition. It’s fully justified, though, and Puschak explains how Yeats revised his oeuvre, condensed it, reimagined themes, creating layers of symbols and deeper meaning. Essentially, it’s an essay about the coherence of a body of work and how the idea of an oeuvre is an artwork in and of itself. I loved that essay for its insight, surprise, and possibilities.
A good critic, as I’ve said ad nausuem, is someone who can make you appreciate their subjects in a new way. I suppose that is true here for Superman and Seinfeld. There’s an essay on each, and I have to say that generally Superman is of no interest to me. Puschak explains why that is and what the writers have done wrong for trying to make Superman more relatable. He highlights some of the better story-driven media that discuss the human layer of Superman and Clark Kent to refute the argument that Clark Kent is the disguise and Superman the real identity. Similarly, I don’t have much interest in Seinfeld anymore, but there’s a good argument to be made for his satire as a more generalized satire, getting at the core of an idea. The commentary on Seinfeld criticizing the advertising industry offers some good insight under Puschak’s care.
The essay on friendship once again refers to the permeability of individuality and collectivity as is found in so many of the essays here. The central premise is that our identities are intrinsically linked to our friends. It’s a bittersweet essay, since Puschuk is grappling with friendships falling apart as we age and it’s an elevation of our formative friendships,. Puschak relies on and cites from The Waves by Virginia Woolf as an exploration of the interconnectedness of our identities with those of our friends. For what it’s worth, I’ll fight to the death that The Waves is Woolf’s best book at every level. My main complaint about this essay is that it doesn’t quite go far enough to discuss the implications of our intersubjectivity (which again could link to the implications of Cyberpunk worlds).
The final chapter of the book is a more personal one in nature. It’s about Puschak’s attempts to write novels in his early twenties. Overall, it’s an encouraging piece to keep writing, to keep your routines and word counts. It’s a short piece that consolidates the text; it almost feels like a victory lap for Escape Into Meaning itself. The journey was hard, but the book is here. He pushed through.
Escape Into Meaning is like having a conversation with a good friend in a cafe. It’s relatable and sometimes deep. It’s thoughtful and appreciatory towards the texts, media, and phenomena in which Puschak finds meaning. It’s a nice collection, which I would readily sample for students or friends. I think if nothing else, it inspires a disposition of observation toward the world around you. One that requires attention and takes you out of yourself—into something bigger, as if you ever weren’t a part of it.
If you read just one essay in the piece, read the essay on oeuvres. And if you read more than one piece, I’d also encourage you to check out Nerdwriter’s videos on YouTube. I’m a little behind myself, but there is a huge backlog of what looks to be great content.
May you find meaning in all that you do. Happy reading; happy viewing!
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