Month: November 2022

a smart friend of mine informed me he’s been giving himself a break lately. rather than be upset with himself that he wasn’t doing what a younger version of himself expected him to do, he’s allowing himself to enjoy what’s at hand, free of any nagging guilt over, for example, not reading as much as he used to. “besides,” he said, “it’s not like my friends are really keeping up with literature lately anyway. no one’s reading whatever cutting edge novels are being published nowadays.” if cutting edge novels are even being published, of course.

this was supposed to be helpful perspective on how I’ve been feeling like I’m not living the life I once vaguely imagined for myself, one which rejects bourgeois society in favor of bohemian devotion to art. (inb4 “bohemian devotion to art is so bourgeois“) I do appreciate the sentiment, that as long as I’m following my impulses rather than denying them, there’s not much else to do. but what he said about reading, it only reopened the other front in my war against discouragement, namely the fear that literature has become atrophied, unable to contend or compete with the present landscape. that maybe there’s some other medium better suited to the moment: video art, performance, music, something yet to be defined.

i think it would be fun to try out some other media, and I’m still figuring how to make interesting music, but maybe it’s better, more countercultural, to stubbornly insist on working in a medium that isn’t so easily masticated into “content” served up alongside jailbait TikTokrs, lifestyle Instagrammers, and post-Soundcloud-rap Soundcloud rappers. and who cares about traditional publishing; there was a brief moment in art history when it was possible to be a total freak and have Viking throw a bunch of money at you for it. otherwise, it’s always been a struggle to get truly out there. Melville, Henry Adams, Bill Burroughs, all of them were largely denied recognition from the mainstream while they were alive. Adams was so overlooked by his contemporary publishers that he self-published his autobiography and welcomed anyone pirating his work.

there’s no neat end here, just wheels spinning, looking for traction.

a therapist called back after an over-the-phone intake in which I commented it’d be great if possible to have someone with experience working with artists to talk to. candidly I have been somewhat reluctant to find a therapist because I sort of still believe the long-debunked myth about mental illness being linked to creativity. typical of me, refusing to countenance debunkers, who are so often sycophants of an official story I’ve long since become disillusioned with. when growing up meant realizing everything taught to you was a lie, trusting any narrative becomes almost impossible. uncertainty, ambiguity, and confusion now feel more like home than my home ever did.

today I’m listening to the underappreciated art rock classic Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt by Red Hot Chili Pepper’s guitarist John Frusciante. Frusciante wrote and recorded these songs in the depths of a harrowing period marked by drug addiction and mental instability; he claims to have been in contact with the spirit world. seems peculiar of our secular age to write such a possibility off as mere mental illness, but even granting the supernatural possibility, such an arrangement demands isolation from the secular world, isolation that can only be felt as an exacerbation of preexisting alienation. sufficiently advanced schizophrenia is indistinguishable from solipsism, sort of thing.

it’s not exactly true I think mental illness is linked to creativity. what makes me hesitate isn’t that I fear I’ll be happy and therefor lose what drives my artistic ambitions. no, what I worry is that therapy will inculcate me with a certain prefab language for understanding myself that would become an obstacle in the process of crafting my own, idiosyncratic language, ie the process of making art.

but I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel blocked in some way. I have ideas and ambitions and questions, but I can’t seem to get out of my own way chasing them down, and so maybe talking to a professional would be helpful. the therapist who called apparently got an MFA in painting before pursuing therapy as a vocation, so that’s encouraging.

reading a lot about China lately. it seems important, if I want to write an encyclopedic paranoid novel about the present era, that I have a deep understanding of the geopolitical situation we’re in, which hinges largely on Sino-American relations. Taiwan, TikTok, Hong Kong, Belt and Road.

on my desk at work is the recently published translation of Clarice Lispector’s crônicas, Too Much of Life. crônicas are peculiar to Brazillian newspapers, in which a writer will write about whatever they so please. I haven’t started it yet, but it’s inspiring me to be less precious about this blog. I say it too much, but I think my sanity demands that I put things here regularly, especially since I have much more free time now that I quit Twitter and can finally think a little more clearly. the trick will be getting anyone to read this.

now if you’ll excuse me, I need to make a therapy appointment.

admittedly, I was skeptical that Twitter would actually crash and burn just because El*n’s in charge now. but after yesterday, with the rollout of the new Twitter Blue verification suite, and the continuing reports of biblical carnage at Twitter HQ, I’m starting to feel grateful I have this dumb little website already set up so that I don’t have to rely on the platform for expression. Twitter was and never will be my main avenue for expression; sure I like making bon mots, quips, oneliners, etc., but really it primarily served as a prefab network to connect with other artists and interesting people, make friends, and hopefully get my work in front of more eyeballs. but if I’m forced to take refuge on my blog as that dumpster fire smolders, then really I should take Twitter’s demise as a blessing. so I’m making effort to get in touch with the people I know there through other means, in case it does all collapse.

yesterday I had lunch with an artist friend of mine. we met working at the same library a few years ago. I was complaining to him about how sick I am of working, how I can’t stand sitting in my cubicle trying to pass the time every day only to have free time that’s also squandered. he said that I should work towards getting a book published, that that would offer a kind of escape hatch. I quickly retorted that I don’t anticipate ever making very much money from books. he acknowledged that yes of course it’s difficult to make money from publishing, but having published work creates new opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise be available. rather than hoping to get on the NYT bestseller list, or land some uberlucrative advance, it’s better to seek out novel (lol) experiences only afforded by putting quality work out into the world.

this synergizes well with the other thing I’ve been reminding myself of, which is that I don’t even really want to be a super mainstream popular artist. I don’t want to be on the bestseller list. I don’t care if the New Yorker wants to profile me: in fact I’d be kind of ashamed if they did. I’d rather quietly make superlative work, and if it doesn’t benefit me in my lifetime, then I leave it up to karma whether it will make an impact in posterity. but here and now, I’ll focus on making work that’s pleasing to me, taking myself seriously enough to pursue publishing/promotion on my own terms, and maybe I’m looking into getting some music together and performing it locally. because I can eschew the spotlight all I want, but I’m still a diva who craves attention.

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this last week I read the first 150 pages of A Naked Singularity by Sergio de la Pava. the first chapter bangs hard; once all of Casi’s clients are introduced and the carousel of bail hearings start, I was ready to be all on board for this novel, which obviously gave de la Pava a much needed outlet for his righteous fury over the American legal system. but the ensuing chapters quickly devolved as de la Pava was forced to fill out his world beyond the court room, resulting in very stilted passages where characters whose importance I was unsure of held lengthy discussions on philosophical topics which are about as insightful as a night spent ripping the bong in the sophomore dorms. 100 pages later and I’m uninterested in continuing, so I put the book down. which is a shame, I was excited to read a big ambitious 21st century novel. the main takeaway I got from the book is that it’s possible to self-publish successfully—not a trivial lesson, esp in context of the above. also make sure there’s a good editor around to keep a novel from being a kind of scattershot exercise in thinking out loud.

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planning to start doing some posts about albums I like, because I don’t know who reading this knows this but I used to write music reviews for a rinkadink blog start up that never really got off the ground so it’s nice to reconnect with that aspect of my personality. especially since I dug out an old iPod of mine and have been revisiting music I forgot I liked, which is reminding me how much I love music, to the point that I sometimes wonder if I’d be better off focusing on music and forgetting all these literary ambitions. I won’t do that ofc because I can do both I think, but yaknowwaddaimeen.

after a long day of sitting in my stupid cubicle, staring at a screen that probably isn’t good for my eyes, I feel spent, drained, as though something’s been drawn out of me. that something is my attention, which a certain esoteric rightwing tweeter I mentioned in my last conspiracy review correctly identifies as our most valuable resource. if it weren’t such a valuable resource, why would the social media companies be striving to get your eyeballs looking at your phone every waking second? these companies require growth to survive. their primary revenue stream is on the Google model: collect behavioral data and sell it to advertisers. the only way to increase revenue on this model is to coerce us to giving more and more of our attention, usually by way of technologies originally developed for digital slot machines. it is a meth dealer’s idea of a business strategy.

beyond, or perhaps beneath, the sociopolitical ramifications of such a trend, I’m tired. I hate feeling like this. I hate that every day I tell myself I won’t log into [social media platform] until [time later than I usually do] and every day I break this resolution. just a quick glance, I say. I’ll get back to whatever else it is I want to be doing, right after I check in, just for a second. An addict’s compulsion to surrender agency. I want my life back. I would love it if everyone logged off. first I need to log off.

there’s a terrible bargain artists are forced to make nowadays: garner attention for their art by using the platforms competing to colonize every waking moment, thereby serving as unpaid labor in this diabolical scheme, or else disappear. I don’t buy into the idea that there’s no life outside The Internet, but I worry that life is withering away.

soon I’m going to get off social media. I will try to find ways of keeping in touch with the lovely people I’ve met on Twitter, because the rub is that I have made friends online. but I don’t think the benefit is worth the cost any more.

besides, Elon’s gonna tank Twitter anyway, and Meta/Facebook’s valuation has cratered.