Month: November 2023

So you decided to undertake a wittle writing project for you blog. Look at you! Trying things. That’s great. But now you’re thinking “Hmm, writing is kinda hard. It’d be way easier to drink a beer or three, doomscroll for a bit (boy what’s happening in Gaza sure is bad, huh?), land on a post from one of your favorite pornstars, open up PornHub, type her name, click through the seventy billion pages of videos, most of them duplicates of one another, search for one you haven’t seen before, even though you really want one you have seen before but you pretend that porn actually helps introduce novelty into your life by showing you aspects of human sexuality you might not otherwise be exposed to, land on a video produced (have you really been watching internet porn that long?) 15 years ago, reflect how the people depicted in it don’t really even exist anymore, the intervening time so great that you are in effect watching ghosts fuck each other, the morbid reality of that realization inspiring the ambient concern that you somehow have become an ersatz necrophiliac, without even the courage to exhume a physical corpse, none of this stopping you from ejaculating some 15-35 minutes later, making a mess on your hand and in your pubic hair, at which point you pause the video, an obscene close up left on screen as you go to retrieve a tissue, and then another, and then another.”

But you didn’t do that! Good for you. Gold star. Still, you’re not sure what direction to take this wittle bitty project. So let’s brainstorm the FUCK out of some super awesome things you can do!

Dear Diary AKA The Livejournal Method

A long, long time ago (Star Wars reference), way back in the early Web 2.0 days, people blogged. What did they blog about? Their lives! Teens sat in class, ate lunch, hung out with their friends, went to rehearsal for the spring musical (Bye Bye Birdie), came home, then fired up that old Windows XP and logged into Livejournal to write about their secret crushes, how Dad and Mom took their Nokia away, whether they passed their driver’s test, and which Dashboard Confessional song they were feeling the most like that week. Obviously it’s “Saints and Sailors”:

Unfortunately, you may not be a teenager any more. Sad to say, but that’s the way of life. Yeah, part of the mystique of blogging was implanted in your mind at that age, and there’s some regret you still hang on to for not having thrown yourself more fully into the blogosphere back then, because maybe if you had, you wouldn’t be here now, long after the wave’s broken, thinking “if I just commit myself to an insane blog project maybe I can revitalize this stupid website that’s supposed to help me build an audience, even though no one reads blogs any more.” Maybe you’d have a successful podcast with people you met online 15 years ago, or you’d be published by New York Tyrant, and maybe you’d have moved to Brooklyn and met Honor Levy at some gallery opening. But that’s not what you want, is it? Do you know what you want? It’s not clear you do. Your compulsions and neuroses suggest you want to scold yourself and repeatedly subject yourself to the pain of trying methods you know will fail. You also clearly do not want to reveal too much about yourself, or else you wouldn’t have veered into this hypothetical, speaking in the second person, in the midst of the section about how one easy thing to do on a blog is to write about yourself. The repressed always returns.

Anyway, what was I saying?

Writing Advice

You’re a writer, write? Ha ha, puns. Why not offer up some hard-earned wisdom about the writing process? People always love that. Especially people who, rather than writing, spend hours searching for “writing tips.” Here, let’s give it a shot:

Everyone says the most important part of writing is sitting your butt in that chair, greasing up the typewriter with a big can of WD-40, winding some paper you stole from work into it, and click-click-clickity clacking one word after another. Doesn’t matter if the words are good, or if you don’t have any ideas, or if you’re just writing to aggrandize your ego without any concern for whether you have something worth saying, just put that work in, tiger! True, sticking to a routine helps train the subconscious to be ready to show up at the desk when you do. BUT! But. Routines suck. Am I right folks? And sometimes! Sometimes it’s just not working for you! We tend to get married to a certain system of working; sometimes more seriously than we do our spouses! Heck, if I was as committed to matrimony as I was my shitty writing routine, I wouldn’t be thrice divorced! And maybe I’d’ve actually published something by now. So let that go to show you: don’t be afraid to switcheridoo things up sometimes, you shitfucker! Usually write in the morning? Write at night! Usually write at night? Write at lunch! Usually write at lunch? Write only when the moon is in Scorpio! Don’t write at the coffee shop this week, or do write at the coffee shop! I don’t know what you do. How can I! I’m just a random internet voice! You don’t know me! Why would you take my advice?

Current Events

Since yesterday, amidst a sense of ratcheting intensity, characteristic of a regime who senses its time slipping away yet desperate to make the most of its opportunity, Israel has bombed ambulance convoys, three hospitals, five UN schools being used as shelters, and Al-Azhar University. The total Palestinian dead since Oct 7 is over 7000. That’s an average of about 10 deaths every hour.

Career Development

What do people like from content? No, it’s not to be condescended to by it. No, no, it’s not to feel disdained by a product that clearly thinks very little of their intelligence. NO it’s not a narcotic escape from the pain of self-consciousness! It’s relatability! People love things that are relatable. That’s why they’re always saying things like, “That’s so relatable!” And what’s more relatable to a literary audience than getting a story rejected everywhere it’s submitted? Sharing your successes, and, more likely, failures, with publishing is a great way to pad out your writer’s blog! Plus, it just might happen to motivate you to keep sending that stupid fucking godawful story to another shithole publication no one but the extremely niche internet literary community knows about.

Growing Your Audience

It’s important to make your blog SEO friendly so that it’s reachable by search engine chatgpt israel taylor swift travis kelce matthew perry nfl scores spirit halloween black friday world series college football hamas killers of the flower moon martin scorsese leo dicaprio lily gladstone weather amazon email youtube news facebook walmart translate calculator map wordle mlb nba instagram twitter costco elon musk joe rogan podcast donald trump ukraine zelensky joe biden antony blinken ceasefire free palestine free palestine free palestine free palestine

Literary Theory

Remember manifestos? Well, the correct Italian plural is “manifesti,” but do I look-alike my name issa Giuseppe? Whatever happened to that, huh? Writers should be more annoying in the “this art is going to destroy the suffocating provincialism of bourgeois society” way and less annoying in the….well maybe you should save all the ways writers are annoying for another post.

Writing In Spanish

Es importante cuando al aprender español escribir y hablar en la idioma todos los días. De esta manera, puedes practicar lo que sabes y reconocer las palabras or la gramática que debes repasar. Quizás tu español es malo, y quieres mejorar, o tu español es muy fuerte. Escribir en español en tu blog es una idea gran por razones muy numerosas. ¡Buenas suerte!

Other Art Endeavors

Did you see a movie and think, hey! I want to make movies! Or maybe you remembered how there are a bunch of canvases and oil paints that you haven’t touched in, god, it’s been almost four years now? Having a variety of creative outlets is fantabulous, in no small part because you can blog about them! So if you do decide to learn film production, or bongo drumming, or god knows what else your terrible attention span might latch on to, just be sure to document the process of becoming fascinated by it, then totally losing interest within a week or two, on your blog!

Alienate people by describing masturbation

Well, well, well! Seems like you’ve already done this one!

imagine the ethereal, earthy tones of a native american flute. so meditative, so calm. no better way for white people to experience the pure, indigenous connection to nature felt by those noble, majestic tribes we spent the last 400 years slaughtering. actually, perhaps there is a better way: why not play Amazing fucking Grace on the instrument? who couldn’t appreciate that?

why yoga instructors think it appropriate to include native american music at all in their class playlists is baffling to me, but then again yoga is all about syncretism. the class i heard this song in was a “yin” yoga class. “yin” is chinese philosophy. yoga is indian. like, south asian indian. not native american indian. if it were native american indian then i might understand the flute music. what yin has to do with yoga i don’t know. the class is nice though. long postures supported by blocks and bolsters where you surrender to gravity, low in active (yang) effort. really gets shit opened up, and my body was very tense after traveling over the weekend then spending the first half of the week sick on the couch. anyway it’s all love to my yoga studio, on the off chance someone sees the sticker with my blog URL on my water bottle and comes here to see me talking shit about the yoga instructor.

something this little project of mine will force me to accept is that i can’t always manage people’s perception of me. sometimes i’m gonna write something that offends people. even now as i’m thinking about this, my mind is reeling with the fear that i’ll reveal the secrets that unlock what i’m up to artistically. instead of being so plainspoken (i talk about this a lot i feel) i ought to be more oblique, more provocative. but that’s not really what a blog is for. plus there’s like, 5 people maybe who look at this anyway, so if you’re one of those people, you probably already know me. but that’s not a safe refuge, because ideally more people would read this, and it’s okay if i just say how i feel! if people don’t like it it’s fine! it’s not actually more artistically satisfying to be a sphinx all the time, and being direct here, on my blog, doesn’t preclude me from being gnomic or cryptic or hermetic or whatever in fiction. separating the two out will actually probably help rather than hinder. so if i offend you, i don’t mean to, unless i do mean to, in which case, good riddance.

tangential to this: people are facing personal or professional repurcussions for speaking out about what’s happening in palestine. curiously, the only comments i ever receive on this blog are from israeli spambots, or at least i think they’re spambots, bc if they’re not then they’re very cryptically trying to scare me that i’m being surveilled by israelis. which maybe i am. the internet is not a safe place. it was designed precisely to track and control information by intelligence and military agencies. all of which is to say, i wonder if i went really hard into talking about how israel has killed 36 palestinian journalists in the past month, would some shadowy PROMIS backdoor shut down my site? if that were so, that’s pretty cool! that little ole me poses such a threat to the zionist settler colonial death program.

back to the american settler colonial death progam, I’m about to head to the theatre to see killers of the flower moon.

obligatorily, i must admit that was the longest i’ve spent in a movie theatre, maybe ever. definitely in several years. the last “new” movie i saw in a theatre (maybe the last “new” movie i saw? idk i haven’t seen many new movies since the pandemic) was parasite.

(reminding myself that this is only the second day of this project, and it’s important that i build momentum more than anything else at this point, but goddamn i really don’t want this to be like, a “blog” of my day to day life, that’s boring, and that’s not even what i’m doing really, but whatever moving on)

the trailers that played before, all 25 minutes worth of them, only confirmed my deep conviction that martin scorsese isn’t allowed to die. who else is going to make Movies, nay, Films like this? it should be illegal to promote marvel movies before a scorsese feature. also there’s this movie, from the people who made the kingsmen movies, called argylle? and with like, john cena and bryce dallas howard and sam rockwell, and like, the most memorable thing from the trailer is the horrendous CGI cat? did CGI effects get worse in the last 10 years? it’s always been bad but jesus. the writers and SAG should have included a ban on digital effects in their contract negotiations. (there were some digital effects in killers of the flower moon, because obv it’s cheaper to fill out a scene with CGI cows than it is to get a bunch of live cows on location. I’m just saying, maybe if filmmakers/studios didn’t have the option to just “add it in post” then they’d make more deliberate choices, and maybe better films.)

but the movie. (uhh minor spoilers i guess?) the last 40 minutes is really the only section that drags a bit in an otherwise supremely tight 206 minute runtime. a few bits fall kind of flat: brendan fraser overacts. we could probably do without the indian visions of owls as harbingers of death. the references to the tulsa bombing might have been better integrated.

aside from that? an incredible picture. to think that marty’s been making movies 60+ years and still he can manage something new, something that fits perfectly alongside goodfellas but at the same time feels nothing like anything else he’s made. a work of art that grapples with the brutal realities of white supremacy, the greed and paranoia surrounding the oil industry, the complex interplay between love and fear. is there a more apt and surreal image of america than a parade with Native American “Mothers of Veterans” immediately followed by the Ku Klux Klan? a true gift. he’s not allowed to die.

still not quite up to word count on this, even less than yesterday, but i need to craft a letterboxd review.

already hung up trying to be smart, researching mechanism of action for the influenza virus. not the goal here. sure we can do that from time to time, but we’re trying to get out of our own way. quit thinking so much. you don’t have to be so smart all the time. you really aren’t even that smart you know.

so what is this? well, some nerd, don’t know when, decided that november is “national novel writing month.” which nation? presumably the US, but not going to look that up. the website for NaNoWriMo is offensive to me. as though novel writing were a yearly vacation. not surprisingly, most of the participants in NaNoWriMo (hesitation over calling them “writers”…) write young adult fantasy. in one vlog documenting a woman’s NaNoWriMo, she described the premise of her novel as twins finding a room with seven doors, each door opening onto a different world, “it’d be like if one door opens onto Narnia, another door opens onto Hogwarts.” fantasy lands created by reactionary Tories. blehh.

but what we’re doing. originally seemed like maybe it’d be a worthwhile exercise, cranking out a 50,000 word novel in a month, just to finish something, practice not caring so much about how it gets done, just so long as does get done, feel? but I had that idea on november the first, and no idea to follow. well, maybe just write prose, incanting “this is a novel” over whatever comes to pass? no. there’s a novel to work on already. and stories too. what first appeared a productive exercise then revealed itself for what it was: a distraction.

the idea stuck though, like phlegm in sinuses still flushing out influenza virus. last year we set out to create a drone track every day through the month of december. but we’re a writer first, so why not do something similar, but with text? so we’re writing every day. ideally a total of 50,000 words. here on this blog. whatever it takes. reflections, screeds, explanations, games, exercises, prophecies, sermons, diary entries, raps, reviews, complaints, riffs, whatever else.

throat aches. hurts to swallow. it’s hard to get a KN95 properly sealed around my face, with my bony narrow nose, so when I’m sucking a Ricola, herbal exhale rushes through the gaps into my eyes. like skiing in the alps without goggles. ahhhhh. getting over the flu. early yesterday, I spent hours lying on the couch, doing nothing. sleeping maybe 25 minutes. I wondered how I would ever feel better again. do I wake up one morning rid of the headache, the bodily fatigues, the shivers and fever? do symptoms gradually fade away? will life always be this miserable? late morning I was sweating and hot. sat outside to read in the sun. slightly uncomfortable, but I forced myself. 10 pages. that’s 15 minutes. the sun, it’s good for you! (no idea why I think this.) and you know what? I was right! I went inside, showered, and realized, hey! I think I’m getting better! just like that! fever’s gone, less fatigue, I can practically skip around the house! the flu comes on and departs rapidly, unlike the plodding inevitability of a cold.

the mechanism of action for the influenza virus is thus: as everyone know, flu travels on droplets and aerosols expressed when someone talks, coughs, sneezes, or breathes. these particles can travel up to two meters before they fall onto some surface, where they can persist for some time, depending on the surface. when an influenza virus successfully lodges in the mucosa membrane of the upper respiratory tract, buddy, you’re fucked. that’s why you’re not supposed to touch your face. me, though, I fucking love rubbing my eyes. no greater physical, nonsexual pleasure. well maybe eating when really hungry. whatever. sometimes you have to make ridiculous claims for the rhetorical effect. look I don’t always speak super precisely, okay? fuck you! who ever said language was precise anyway? language is a paltry, pathetic attempt to make sense of a fundamentally insensible situation known as the cosmos. the cosmos are much more than what we perceive, and therefore way way way much more than what we can say. so don’t expect words to be exact. we aren’t adherents of the ‘correspondence theory’ around these parts, alright? fucking vulgarians, that crowd. though the characterization just now that language is an attempt by humans, that’s not exactly right either. way too much agency granted to humans by that framing. language infects humanity, infected humanity a long time ago, and we are mutated by it as much as it is mutated by us, via antigenic drift/shift. a symbiotic relationship that seems, frankly, in the long run, more parasitic than symbiotic, and not to the benefit of humanity. at least, that’s what the current era seems to suggest. we may yet find some balance, something to ground us again.

whew really coming out the gate hot with this huh! already talking about language as a virus are we! maybe shouldn’t haved watched that not-very-good documentary about bill s burroughs yesterday! it’s not very good because often it’s not very interesting getting a peek at the lived world of a writer. it only titillates the voyeurs and the faithful. plus the production is kind of whatever. it’s hard to understand what burroughs is saying a lot of the time. better just to read the books, and if you’re really set on it, maybe a biography. what’s up with that barry miles anyway? how’d he get stuck doing all the hagiography for the beats? seems like a bum gig. but what do i know.

when i was in the sun reading yesterday, what i was reading is The Man in the High Castle. pretty damn good book. dick is a weird writer, and I don’t mean he writes about weeeiiiirdd stuff, man. he does, that’s true. but he’s a strange case because the writing itself is kind of unremarkable. he sometimes lands a nice line, sometimes gets the prose to sing, but more often you can sense that he wrote a ton due to financial pressure and also thanks to all that sweet, sweet 60s speed he was gobbling up. numnumnumnumnum. mmm, benzedrine. where would the twentieth century be without it? but because of all that, he doesn’t seem the most attentive self-editor. he earns a lot of credit for how prophetic the ideas are, but as like a literary artist…i dunno. i’m torn. a lot of really reputable writers really love him; bolaño was a big fan. i read somewhere without citation that pynchon read a lot of dick.

ok but! but! i didn’t bring this up to say i don’t like PKD! I like PKD! The Man in the High Castle is very good, much funnier than i anticipated, and up to very weird metatextual shit i wasn’t entirely expecting even though i knew about it coming in. to say the novel is an alternate history where the axis won wwii really does it a disservice. that’s the plot premise, sure, but it uses that as a base for a deeper exploration of artifice vs reality, fiction vs nonfiction. the way fake historical artifacts resonate with the plot’s premise, and how the plot’s premise is double inverted with the in-world alternate history novel that’s about what if the allies won wwii? incredible. it’s also great to see PKD riff on his usual questions, like how does fantasy conflict with reality, is there a difference between fantasy and reality, in a setting that places them on a little firmer politco-historical grounds. i’m about halfway through.

another reason I’m doing this is because with the genocide of the palestinian people going on, it’s hard to feel like my dumb little writing projects deserve my attention. but it’s not like anything changes if i don’t write, so i should keep writing.

it’s a struggle to not care too much about what this is. also a bit of a struggle to get to the word count goal. calling this one for today. we’ll see how this goes: don’t anticipate it all being like this. we want to get some range here. we love NaNoWriMo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!