a corrupted file fails to load the necessary protocol for execution. stuck in boot loop. would you like to? would you like to? somewhere a laugh, derisive and hollow. which way? that way isn’t it, but the other way is dark. if only the circuit could be shorted. something is missing. blood red light flashes DANGER DANGER.
the Palestinians are dying. an American airman burns faster than the urgent message on the back of your retinas. what’s all this for? the trees are dying.
hooting in the night. crawling up the spine is a reminder of what’s been left unsaid. will it ever emerge? my dreams only remind me of what i’ve given up on. get out of the way or you will be destroyed.
some things I’m thinking about:
The inherent natural state of the skateboarder is the state of constant failure: Learning to exist on a board means failing to accomplish your goal over and over again. Every failure is accompanied by pain, having to pick oneself up, dragging the pain into the inevitable next try. It’s an extremely inconvenient affair.
There is no easy way of becoming a skateboarder. If you can skate, you really wanted to. If you cared for its cultural clout in the first place, the process of skateboarding converted you to a believer in its essence.
Something that’s been a constant throught Lynch’s life is that he’s like catnip to women. “There’s no malice in Dad and he doesn’t do these things out of selfishness—that’s not it at all,” said Jennifer Lynch. “It’s just that he’s always been in love with secrets and mischief and sexuality, and he’s naughty and he genuinely loves love. And when he loves you, you are the most loved, and he’s happy and giddy and he has ideas and gets creative and the whole thing is insanely romantic.”
We find [in Tibet] the singular phenomenon of the conscious—semi-“scientific”—practice of the creation and destruction of demons. It appears that in Tibet [the Arcanum of the Devil in the Tarot] is known, and it is practised as one of the methods of occult training of the will and imagination. The training consists of three parts: the creation of tulpas (magical creatures) through concentrated and directed imagination, then their evocation and, lastly, the freeing of consciousness from their hold on it by an act of knowledge which destroys them—through which it is realised that they are only a creation of the imagination, and therefore illusory. The aim of this training is therefore to arrive at disbelief in demons after having created them through the force of imagination and having confronted their terrifying apparitions with intrepidity.
this morning I read an essay written by Jay Isaac, a painter and instagram mutual of mine. in the essay, he discusses the situation of the fine artist under the capitalist ruling class, how the job of contemporary artists is essentially the creation of luxury consumer products, and how that task requires complicity in the neocolonialist genocide and resource extraction that buttresses the global capitalist system. Isaac succinctly lays all this out so as to provide a foundation for rallying workers in the creative industries to imagine ways of noncompliance outside that framework.
since I’m not a painter or any other kind of fine artist, the particulars of that problem, while of interest, and cause for solidarity, don’t exactly translate to what I face as a writer. but as I’m striving to in some way participate in the business of publishing, since I believe an artist does have a duty to at least try to interface with the public of their time, it would be useful to particularize, since I am not interested in either allowing my work to legitimize The System or in bending myself into the shape demanded by such a System, as so many careerist writers do nowadays.
the visual arts have long been entangled with the desires of the ruling class. one need only think of the paradigmatic patronage of the Medicis to see how entwined the history of painting and sculpture are with the highest stratum of society. literature, and specifically novels, have a more complex relationship to social class. in theory, reading is a widely accessible form of artistic engagement; in practice, the ability to read novels, especially those novels that partake in the high cultural tradition (value neutral: not saying these novels are necessarily “better,” not right now at least) requires, at minimum, literacy, and usually a working familiarity with the history of (western) ideas, which, prior to (and after) the middle of the 20th century, was unavailable to the vast majority of people. not to mention the leisure time to read them. if painting is the emblematic artform of the highest social classes, then novels are the bourgeois artform par excellance. and like the bourgeoisie, novels occupy an ambivalent position, equally liable to undermine traditions as they are to cozy up with power when it suits them.
that’s all very philosophical, and not where I’m trying to go right now. in practical considerations of the nature of publishing nowadays, let us consider Penguin Random House, the biggest, by a big margin, of the Big Five publishing houses. Penguin Random House is owned by Bertelsmann, a German multinational media conglomerate. “German multinational conglomerate” should be setting off alarm bells in your head, and rightfully so here: despite painting itself as a Christian publishing company that aided resistance to the Nazis in order to be granted a publishing license by the Allies after the war, C. Bertelsmann Verlag was the number one supplier of printed media to the Wehrmacht. the man in charge of Bertelsmann at the time, Heinrich Mohn, was a supporting member of the SS; his son, Reinhard Mohn, was responsible for transforming the company into the international behemoth it is today. the number one book publisher in the US is owned by a conglomerate that lied about its support for the Nazi war machine as late as 2002, when Bertelsmann was forced to apologize.
(tangentially, another subsidiary of Bertelsmann, BMG, recently cut ties with Roger Waters over Waters’ criticism of Israel. Bertelsmann really loves running cover for fascism.)
that’s all only one example of course, but an illustrative one. HarperCollins is, as everyone knows, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp. Macmillan is owned by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, another German company with a Nazi past. it is only natural that corporations trend towards a corporatist vision of the world.
none of this is to say that everything published by these companies is inherently fascist. I might argue that there are certain ideological inertias that would work to prevent something truly revolutionary from being published—it’s here that I should acknowledge that I haven’t yet read Dan Sinykin’s recent Big Ficiton, about the effect that the conglomerate era has had on what kinds of works get published. but fiction, done right, is elusive, tricksterish, undefangable, a double agent in the offices of publishing executives. Pynchon calls it “the ever-subversive medium,” a characterization I want to believe in, despite the myriad works being published nowadays that seem so eager to legitimize the corrupting influence that corporate agendas have on the human spirit.
there are many small independent publishing outfits putting out what I assume is interesting work: I admit I’m not very good at “keeping up” with what’s being published. perhaps I should change that; perhaps I should also try my own hand at publishing, at building alternatives to the corporatist model that’s dominated literature for the past 70 years.
this week I’m practicing what Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way calls “reading deprivation.” a while back my therapist half jokingly recommended that I take a break from reading, because while it is important for an artist and especially a writer to read a lot and widely, reading also has a narcotizing effect, or maybe more like a benzodiazepinizing effect. too much engagement with what others have written tends to cloud the awareness, and to write with anything like power requires acute awareness with what’s going on in my own psyche. plus, I’m trying to get out more, and cultivate experiences, and the time I use to read amounts to plenty of opportunity to fuck around IRL.
but w/r/t delving into the material of my own psyche, I’ve been thinking a lot about surrealism lately. if you’ve read my newsletter essays, you know I’m pretty good at clearly articulating information; in a different life I would have been a very good technical writer. but all my fiction writing efforts in the past few months have left me cold, because what I’m writing isn’t very evocative, and the narration is boring, and the plotting is plodding. there’s no energy in any of it. literature gets its power when it’s dug out of the writer’s soul, when it deals with those aspects that don’t lend themselves to “explanation”—what can’t be articulated via technical writing. (though I’d argue even technical writing betrays itself and can suggest Mystery, but that’s a different subject). plus, dealing with reality by means of Techne is why we find ourselves in the dire straits of Modernity in the first place; privileging Magic and Mystery and Poetry is an existential necessity at this moment in history.
surrealism, in theory, offers a method for devaluing the rational in favor of the irrational, a rebalancing of the scales between the ego and the subconscious. complicating this, though, is that surrealism as it was practiced by many of the official Surrealists was boring, contrived, an evasion of the actual potential of the movement. Breton was a coward, Dalí was a fascist lapdog, Magritte treated art as a parlor game.
The False Mirror, Rene Magritte
that being said, Dalí’s method for surrealist creation, the paranoiac-critical method, nonetheless promises a way of evoking the situation of terror that the postmodern subject finds themselves in. Rem Koolhaas describes it thus:
Dali’s Paranoid-Critical Method is a sequence of two consecutive but discrete operations:
1. the synthetic reproduction of the paranoiac’s way of seeing the world in a new light — with its rich harvest of unsuspected correspondences, analogies and patterns; and
2. the compression of these gaseous speculations to a critical point where they achieve the density of fact….
imagining that there are connections unseen by the everyday person and striving to convey those connections on a level beneath (or sur-, ie “above”) the perfectly rational is the task of any artist, even ones who believe themselves to be depicting “reality.” if you wanted to be perfectly rational, you would write journalism, not fiction.
it is here that I admit I miss the practical use of marijuana for inducing such a paranoid state of mind, but before I get back to smoking fat doinks, it would benefit me to first cultivate the skills for creating from this perspective on the natch, because back when I smoked too much weed I often mistakenly thought doing so would help inspire me, when more often than not it only inspired distraction and horniness. so having practice and discipline with writing while sober would set me up to actually seize upon weed’s ability to help its users be taken by surprise by unexpected connections: exactly what the act of writing does for me, at its most potent.
what I’m doing now to try and get at that is “automatic writing,” another surrealist method. for a set period of time, 25 minutes in my case, I try to write nonstop, as quickly as possible, in an effort to bypass or short circuit the conscious reasoning faculty and give vent to the process of thought unfiltered. it is a good exercise, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to anything effective as art. sometimes it does, sometimes an image or a striking juxtaposition emerges, but this is the trouble with a lot of surrealism: it’s not enough to throw together at random elements for the sake of weirdness. in an interview about Inland Empire (the one Lynch movie I haven’t seen), David Lynch says:
[You] need to have ideas. You can’t sit down and start writing—I guess the Surrealists did, they’d just start writing anything: you, know, “The kiln is silver, and it has red.” Or whatever you see, you write down, or whatever just starts flowing. But when it starts flowing, that’s the flow of ideas, just a flow, but it may be total baloney. So, yeah, you can write pages of baloney, but you need ideas.
Lost Highway, David Lynch
(interestingly, despite his status as the most widely popular Surrealist in film history, David Lynch doesn’t much care for Surrealism as such. elsewhere he admits to not even having seen many of Luis Buñuel’s films.)
compare Thomas Pynchon on surrealism:
Having as yet virtually no access to my dream life, I missed the main point of [Surrealism], and became fascinated instead with the simple idea that one could combine inside the same frame elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling effects. What I had to learn later on was the necessity of managing this procedure with some degree of care and skill: any old combination of details will not do.
all of which is to say that automatic writing can be a useful exercise (David Lynch says as much elsewhere), but it’s only useful as an exercise. what’s produced by it can be mined for “ideas,” or can provide “access to my dream life,” but it won’t in itself create anything with power or energy. power and energy being somewhat mystical concepts I’m using to describe writing that I think taps into whatever it is that feeds the greatest works of art.
the utility (or necessity) of surrealism is something of an open question for me still: the world we live in now, with the media landscape acting as a kind of electrified miasma permeating the ether, schizophrenizing reality, makes us all paranoid subjects locked in personalized solipsistic hells. here’s Rob Horning on the matter:
The “false facts” we might spontaneously generate in interacting with social media — whether we are feeding our paranoid fears or indulging in their flip side, unrepentant self-aggrandizement — are no more or less false than the ideological interpretations of reality that pass as “real facts,” the ones convenient to power and the reproduction of existing distributions of privilege and so on. In fact, they fit that ideology’s individualist bias, the belief that it is our duty to aspire to fashion a private reality for ourselves and that our social status hinges on the success of that project.
Videodrome, David Cronenberg
a reactionary tact to take against the individualized surrealist thrust of electronic mass media would be to reassert, in a High Modernist way, some contrived metanarrative, to derive from Tradition the Source of Ultimate Meaning despite the waste lands created by a fractured reality field. surely there’s value in seeking new meaning from sources of old meaning. but rather than turn away, paranoiacally, from the general motion of the world as it futher splinters, is there not the possibility that running with that trend might lead to some hitherto unglimpsed wholeness? perhaps ahead lies only disintegration: it’s what the laws of thermodynamics suggest anyway. I have no answers, and I no longer wish to provide coherent analysis. instead I’ll skip above the widening cracks in the melting ice of reality until I inevitably slip down into whatever abyss lies beneath.
“When we speak of ‘seriousness’ in fiction ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death—how characters may act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn’t so immediate. Everybody knows this, but the subject is hardly ever brought up with younger writers, possibly because given to anyone at the apprentice age, such advice is widely felt to be effort wasted.”
“It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.”
“Get to too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.”
“My overuse of the word [‘tendrils’] is a good example of what can happen when you spend too much time and energy on words alone. This advice has been given often and more compellingly elsewhere, but my specific piece of wrong procedure back then was, incredibly, to browse through the thesaurus and note words that sound cool, hip, or likely to produce an effect, usually that of making me look good, without then taking the trouble to go and find out in the dictionary what they meant. If this sounds stupid, it is. I mention it only on the chance that others may be doing it even as we speak, and be able to profit from my error.”
“This same free advice can also be applied to items of information. Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything—or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance. Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person’s mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well. So as a corollary to writing about what we know, maybe we should add getting familiar with our ignorance, and the possibilities therein for ruining a good story.”
“Though it may not be wrong absolutely to make up, as I still do, what I don’t know or am too lazy to find out, phony data are more often than not deployed in places sensitive enough to make a difference, thereby losing what marginal charm they may have possessed outside the story’s context.”
“Fascinating topic, literary theft. As in the penal code, there are degrees. These range from plagiarism down to only being derivative, but all are forms of wrong procedure. If, on the other hand, you believe that nothing is original and that all writers “borrow” from “sources,” there still remains the question of credit lines or acknowledgements.”
“Lest others become enchanted as I was and have continued to be with [the technique of looting reference sources for plot material], let me point out that it is a lousy way to go about writing a story. The problem here is like the problem with ‘Entropy’: beginning with something abstract—a thermodynamic coinage or the data in a guidebook—and only then going on to try to develop plot and characters. This is simply, as we say in the profession, ass backwards. Without some grounding in human reality, you are apt to be left only with another apprentice exercise.”
“Having as yet virtually no access to my dream life, I missed the main point of [Surrealism], and became fascinated instead with the simple idea that one could combine inside the same frame elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling effects. What I had to learn later on was the necessity of managing this procedure with some degree of care and skill: any old combination of details will not do. Spike Jones, Jr., whose father’s orchestral recordings had a deep and indelible effect on me as a child, said once in an interview, ‘One of the things that people don’t realize about Dad’s kind of music is, when you replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a C-sharp gunshot or it sounds awful.'”
“Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one’s personal life had nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is nearly the direct opposite. Moreover, contrary evidence was all around me, though I chose to ignore it, for in fact the fiction both published and unpublished that moved and pleased me then as now was precisely that which had been made luminous, undeniably authentic by having been found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more shared levels of the life we all really live.”
(from the Introduction to Slow Learner, by Thomas Pynchon)
