Month: December 2022

the Empire? you say it never ended?

I’m rereading VALIS by Philip K. Dick, and the analogy I’ve landed on is that mids weed is to psilocybin as PKD is to Pynchon.

maybe I ought to write more about this, and about literature generally, like essays and criticism or whatever. I dunno tho I kind of hate my literary critic voice, plus I’m too lazy to dwell long enough on any one work or author to say anything interesting. but also it would benefit me to work out my own opinions on my influences. hmm

what I really ought to do is yell at Adam for abandoning Story Time.

two quotes on writing

A novel will be the higher and nobler the more inner and less outer life it depicts… The art lies in setting the inner life into the most violent motion with the smallest possible expenditure of outer life: for it is the inner life which is the real object of our interest. – The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting.

Arthur Schoepenhauer

Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter

Revelation 1:19

after Rupi Kaur 

when you are broken
and she has left you
do not question
whether you were
enough
the problem was
she didn't realize
she could save 15%
or more
on car insurance

❀❀❀

she grips him
with her fingers
like she's sanding
the skin off a
cucumber

❀❀❀

of course i want to be famous
but i don't crave fame for me
i need to be famous to gain
enough weed and pussy
to never write
or read poems
ever again

❀❀❀

you must have known
you were wrong
when your hand
was wrapped around me
squeezing for cream that
would not come for you

❀❀❀

clown on bullshit artists
all you want
but who's 
a New York Times
bestselling poet?

- not you

ok garfield

what’s the qualitative difference between a typical level of hating work and an “admit to yourself you’re unhappy with your life and should probably quit your job to figure out what to do with your time in this material plane or else ceaselessly slip into regret” level of hating work? may be just a case of the Mondays, but usually mine isn’t delivered until Tuesday.

G**gle searches inform us that persistent dread over the prospect of showing up to work is a pretty reliable indicator that maybe quitting is the best option. dread’s not exactly the word for this grey miasma hanging over five days out of seven, but those other two the gloom never quite clears from the horizon.

The System is adhered to despite Sakyamuni’s preachings on nonexistence, with real actions dictated by phantoms and other entities no intelligent person believes in in this secular age. what’s the worst that can happen? death? that’s coming whether things are safely played or recklessly dared. so whence all this fear? is the unknown more unbearable than the remorse of passivity? 

writing practice goals for the new year

  • use blog for writing exercises, imitations, riffs
  • migrate all necessary notes out of Google Drive
    • corollary: resist Google-gemony as much as that’s possible
  • do all “serious” writing drafts either by hand or on the typewriter
  • prioritize finishing work over following new ideas
  • actually interview people
  • focus when at work; resist the desire for distraction
  • write from the heart, not from the head
  • read more poetry

Mary Oliver on the poet’s ambitions

Various ambitions—to complete a poem, to see it in print, to enjoy the gratification of someone’s comment about it—serve in some measure as incentives to the writer’s work. Though each of these is reasonable, each is a threat to that other ambition of the poet, which is to write as well as Keats, or Yeats, or Williams—or whoever it was who scribbled onto a page a few lines whose force the reader once felt and has never forgotten. Every poet’s ambition should be to write as well. Anything else is only a flirtation.

Mary Oliver