Midnights at 3 AM

Midnights at 3 AM 

Taylor Swift's vaunted surprise album dropped at midnight two days ago.  It's worth a listen as she grapples with thorny issues about the writerly writer's social contract.  But then she dropped the "3 AM" issue of the Midnights album.  It's the first one of hers, I think, that flatout addresses the tone of bleakness that permeates these "new" writerly writers.  It's worth listening to certainly the first half, intensely, to see someone known to be one of the most accomplished diarists or regular writers of the moment grapple with an issue of social contract grounded in a legal dispute.  For someone familiar with social contract theory but not even with Taylor Swift, it's worth breezing through the original album for that.  It's fun to watch someone work that out almost in the real time of the album.  The second half of the album is about nearer to her usual theme, but the tone and motifs are closer to this bleakness that more and more people are beginning to express in public as the mark of the writer.  I want to mention it because it is worth mentioning that the power of writing is its catharsis, and while the tone may seem bleak, it is a bleak good humor that changes such that the bleakness evaporates over time in society's good graces, and not the good humor.  And this is not to change at all the workings of the work of writing on those of another social contract.  We are just seeing the inner workings of the "thing-in-itself" from Agamben's theory.