Month: September 2024

I was made aware of a tweet posted by Tao Lin, a photo of his bedroom. I have to be made aware of tweets because I don’t look at twitter/x anymore. the room is spartan, a mat in the middle of the floor serving as bed, with some bookshelves, makeshift bookshelves, and stacks of books on the floor. otherwise empty. the conversation around this tweet also included a tweet from Lin about his cat being a “volcel,” and another where he urges himself to think less about the “deep state.” if you couldn’t guess, the tenor of this conversation was derisive. I myself said something about how it seems like Lin’s intellectual project in the last 10 years has been to reduce everything he cares about to an equal level of banality, so that his ideas about various foodstuffs are on the same plane as the possibility that there is a “breakaway civilization/deep state/new world order” suppressing anti-gravity technology. I tend to agree with Ezra Pound that an artist is always conveying a hierarchy of values in their work, but when you believe, like Lin does, that there’s no “good” or “bad” in art, only preferences, then having convictions about what’s more or less important is all but impossible.

in this way, tao lin makes it easy to dismiss him as an intellectual. unlike most people, I actually don’t object all that much to the subjects of his various (interchangeable) fascinations. it’s true that vaccines have a bunch of additives in them that probably aren’t good for us (whether that has anything to do with autism, or if autism can be “cured,” is a different question). I also spend too much time thinking about the “deep state.” what I object to is how cursory his engagement with all these subjects is, despite the fact that he can tell you exactly how many hundreds of academic papers he’s read about them.

so I included in this mockery a tweet where he “recommends” earning a living without having a boss. that’s easy to do when your parents paid for your apartment in NYC while you were establishing yourself as a young writer. don’t get me wrong, I also don’t object to him being supported by his parents. I have been so supported at various times in my life as well. but I certainly don’t give people useless advice that makes it seem like it’s easy to escape wage labor.

but I want to save my criticisms of Lin for another time, or not share them at all. if I’m being honest, you wouldn’t be reading this if it weren’t for Tao Lin. 10 years ago I discovered what was by then the dying online “alt-lit” scene, and though I’ve long since tired of the stylistic choices that characterized the movement, I still believe, despite the direction the internet went since then, that the idea you can write whatever you want, without regard for good taste or professionalism, online where an audience can find you directly, a little magical. and whatever disagreements I have with him, or feelings of superiority I might feel over what he chooses to spend his time writing, the fact remains that Lin is almost pathologically dedicated to writing as a vocation. he’s who first showed me how totally committed an artist ought to be, and how far you can get on pure hardheadedness.

the image of a thin mat surrounded by books. a writer’s bedroom, stripped of anything not directly feeding into the Work. if only I had the wherewithal to live so radically devoted.

Can I be as I believe myself or as others believe me to be? Here is where these lines become a confession in the presence of my unknown and unknowable me, unknown and unknowable for myself. Here is where I create the legend wherein I must bury myself.

Miguel de Unamuno, as quoted as epigraph to Black Spring by Henry Miller

The doctrine inculcated since Aristotle that moderation is the virtue appropriate to reasonable people, is among other things an attempt to found so securely the socially necessary division of man into functions independent of each other, that it occurs to none of these functions to cross over to the others and remind each other of man. But one could no more imagine Nietzsche in an office, with a secretary minding the telephone in an anteroom, at his desk until five o’clock, than playing golf after the day’s work was done. Only a cunning intertwining of pleasure and work leaves real experience still open, under the pressure of society. Such experience is less and less tolerated.

Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno

finished Open Veins of Latin America this morning. it’s so dense with information that I had to give up on the idea of taking notes, lest I end up rewriting the whole thing stripped of Galeano’s breathlessly invigorating prose. I’m not treating things like homework any more: all I ever did with homework was put in as little effort as possible so I could get a decent grade. that’s not a good way of actually learning things; almost everything I know I had to relearn after I left school.

I’m trying to be a socially conscious artist. no, a socially conscious person. that’s incredibly obnoxious to admit in that way, but fuck you. and I don’t mean socially conscious in the “In This House We Believe” stuck into the dying lawn way, I mean it in the “stare down the horror of the contemporary post-Hiroshima, post-Auschwitz, post-everything world” way. for real, though. not just by being the smartest in a roomful of people who haven’t heard of Operation Condor. could I actually tell you what happened in Operation Condor? not much beyond “we deposed Allende and backed Pinochet.” which, most people know!

nonetheless, I didn’t see the solution to my pseudointellectualism in taking more notes. it was a problem with attitude. rather than working, writing, reading, out of curiosity and humility, a lot of the time I did it out of self-imposed obligation, as a result of narcissism. this means it was more important to me that I have read than that I actually retain what I read. how little I remember of the many things I’ve read over the years can’t be attributed to smoking weed for a lot of that time, especially now that I don’t smoke weed.

anyway, I find all that boring to post here but I’m relinquishing the need to control the way I’m perceived. unleashing the tight grip on the back of my head so that I fall face first into a pile of dog shit.

Open Veins of Latin America should be required reading (god I hate that phrase. you know the only thing that should be required reading? Moby-Dick) required reading for anyone living in the global capitalist world order. nothing has so clarified my understanding of what “neoliberalism” means as reading Open Veins and watching The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire in the same week.

Open Veins was written right at the dawn of the neoliberal order, and so it’s not directly addressing everyone’s favorite political buzzword. but throughout, Galeano makes clear what the policies packaged under the misleading name “free trade” actually mean: free access to resources for European nations at the expense of colonial lands. an interesting aside highlights this for the Yanquis: during the 1800s, the United States, as we all know, was divided into the industrial North and the agrarian South. in the North, places like Massachusetts maintained strict protectionist policies that helped build their economies, using the proceeds from the robust manufacturing sector to establish economic independence from the European continent. The South, however, traded their cotton and tobacco freely with Europe (and the Northern states); some 80% of all cotton spun in European textile mills came from the Southern United States. this, however, left the South trailing behind the Progress of History, which was headed in a decidedly industrialized, capitalist direction. much like the Latin American countries who depended on proceeds from exports to buoy their economies, the South did not develop the industry it would need to hold its ground against firepower manufactured in Northern factories. of course, in Latin America, this situation came as result of violent conquest and coercive economic policy.

I’m not writing a book report, just wanted to organize some thoughts

my girlfriend moved her work desk out of our back room and into the front of the house, where it’s sunny. I moved some of my bookshelves into the backroom, where my desk is. this morning I wrote. tomorrow I’ll write. and the day after. and the day after.

I’ve had several dreams in which I’m negotiating with the deputy director of the library I work for. one of my bosses. no doubt this reflects what’s been top of mind for me this week: organizing my comrades for a union meeting to discuss issues with the library. that’s been a headache for me, because I disagree with the approach the union representatives are taking to bring these issues to the attention of management, but I’m trying to be supportive and strategic and not lose my mind seeing how easy it is for leftist organizing to fall apart.

but understanding these dreams as merely about the exoteric significance of their content is not how dreams are to be interpreted. at least not based on the ~1/4 of The Interpretation of Dreams I’ve read. so let’s dig deeper here.

the other, subtler problem I’m mulling is how to save enough time and energy for myself to work on what I really need want to work on. trying to write while fully employed is a negotiation between “management” (real life demands that require money) and the desires of the “worker” (my ambitions that don’t participate directly in the labor market).

unfortunately, I don’t remember the details of these dream negotiations. they would shed light on what my subconscious feels about how I’m allocating my efforts. there’s a vague sense I have that I’m capitulating too much to what the deputy director wants; the interactions are too chummy, too easily resolved. so often this is what a union does: back in the 40s, Adorno clocked how union leadership becomes the mirror image of management, helping to find the bare minimum of concessions that the workers will tolerate. my conscious mind knows I’m not working as much as I want to–it was a nice tweak to the way I talk to myself when I started saying writing as much as I “want” to, instead of “need” to, because that’s more accurate and more motivating (“need” to sounds too much like an order, and don’t tell me what to do!!!). but still the demands of management (my bourgeois ego) are, not even overwhelming, or strongarming, or coercing, but seducing my unconscious into betraying its ideals in the name of…convenience? comfort? two impulses that always serve Power as it’s currently exercised.

apparently even my dreams are Marxist.

I’ve been rereading Blood Meridian. Cormac McCarthy said that writing that doesn’t “deal with matters of life and death” is “not literature”; writers who he felt fail to meet that standard include such fêted names as Henry James and Marcel Proust. I won’t go so far as to condemn those two writers, if only because I’ve only read one of their books each. but what I would gain by passing such harsh generalizations is undeniable.

my writing lately is stagnated in plots I find small and inconsequential: a love story, a tale of a cracked homeless man, a domestic story with a sheen of psychosis. they’re fine, I need to finish editing them and get some feedback, but I haven’t found an expression for the deeper, wider, stranger subjects that draw me to my favorite works of literature—I agree with McCarthy that literature ought to address those questions that have long haunted humanity through its somnambulant tottering towards annihilation. no doubt love, eroticism and epistemology are among those questions, but striking at the heart of them requires a much more forceful stab than what I’ve mustered so far.

reading McCarthy has me thinking a lot about what the writing life demands. he was someone who totally dedicated himself. he didn’t work a day job. granted, it was easier to get by in 1976 not working a day job than it is in 2024. but granting that isn’t an excuse for not writing. friend of the blog jordan sent the groupchat this tweet a few weeks ago:

it’s been a struggle to build better habits and structures. distraction is so easy—the way the world is now, everything is competing for everyone’s attention. the past few weeks have been a process of quieting the mind. but even that’s become a method for procrastination. all that’s needed is to do.

outlining a novel, an idea that’s come upon me suddenly that I feel is necessary to work through before I can move onto other, grander ideas. but McCarthy can teach me two other lessons: work on multiple things at once, and quit outlining. the current idea for a novel, I’m treating as though it were a screenplay, with a semi-definite idea of genre and an eye for structuring the plot into scenes beforehand; but I’m running into a problem where I feel ill-equipped to make the pieces of the plot lock together. this, I hope, I can avoid by starting with the premise and writing by feel, contra what I thought about outlining to get basic beats down so that I could be more spontaneous in the writing. total coherence is also unnecessary, especially on first pass. this idea’s a kind of slacker noir thriller, a la the big lebowski.

how much of these gestures towards questions of life and death, whether the universe is hostile or hospitable, if eroticism isn’t inherently dangerous despite the liberal insistence that shame around sex is merely a cultural artifact of puritanical societies—are these only a matter of rhetoric, and not a matter of content? need a novel be about a marauding mob of murderous misfits to pose questions rooted in gnosticism and nietzschean horror?

well, no, but sometimes extreme gestures help give perspective on what’s necessary.

because my email inbox was more disorganized than an Italian airport (I’ve never been, that’s just the simile that came to mind, sorry to the Italians whose movies and culture I adore), I missed or ignored the notice from my webhosting service alerting me to an upcoming renewal charge. so yesterday my card was charged $360 for the next three years of webhosting. I could have disputed the charge with my credit card company, since I’m really trying to save money right now (more on that later). but I don’t really want to delete this blog. but I do need to find something to use it for consistently. and now that I’m out $360 for it, I feel pretty motivated to do that.

the details of all this are too onerous to get into here, but the short version is that the library I work for is more disorganized than an Italian airport. I have suspicions about impropriety with the budget, but only suspicions. administration has been less than forthright when we union representatives demand answers about how payroll funds are being allocated. the upshot is that they’ve shuffled around, collapsed, or disappeared positions in the organization to the point that everyone who works on the floors of our libraries knows we’re short staffed and can’t keep up operations. I am trying to lend my efforts to the union’s push for transparency in the hopes of correcting the poor work conditions that have resulted. but if you’ve ever worked against the forces of capital, you know it’s almost always a losing fight, if not immediately, then in the long run. when I learned the latest development in this wanton crusade against us, I wanted to quit. not quit rabble rousing, but quit the library all together. I don’t see this organization improving any time soon, if at all. and as much as I believe in libraries, as much as I want to be on the right side of this struggle eroding the final democratic institution left in America, I don’t want to make my name as a librarian. it’s a fine thing to fall back on, something to be proud of, but, as naturally as the work comes to me, I don’t feel it’s my “calling.”

these past few weeks, I’ve been home alone while my girlfriend was out of town. top of my priorities was watching as many movies as possible. I’ll post something about movies soon. but internally, my priority was clearing away the noise that’s built up in my head over the years to better hear what is in fact calling to me. because my mind had become more disorganized than an Italian airport. I built strategies that made looking at my phone less appealing–making the phone as “dumb” as possible. the removal of social media access caused flair ups in the addiction response that manifested as lurking subreddits I don’t care about, checking in on chatrooms I no longer participate in, and, most recently, cleaning up my email inbox. the irony is that all these habits, which aim at alleviating me of the burden to think and feel, brought me to years old emails I sent to people I care about but no longer speak to, or drafts of essays, stories, ideas that I never followed through on. try as we might, we can never escape ourselves.

what’s calling to me is a better version of myself who isn’t so afraid to make a go at being an actual artist, and not just someone who flatters himself by judging other harshly while never risking being so judged.

in La dolce vita, which I watched for the first time about a week ago, Steiner warns Marcello against following his example. Steiner lives a comfortable life of domesticity, with two children and his wife, and he and his friends fancy themselves the intelligentsia of Rome, an estimation it appears Marcello shares. but Steiner admits that he doesn’t have the goods; he laments that he’s “too serious to be an amateur, and too much an amateur to be a professional.” the stability of his bourgeois life precludes him from being overcome with the teeming bustle and drama of the cosmos, a prerequisite, Fellini seems to be suggesting, for the kind of passion that fuels the brightest creative minds. the ultimate fate of Steiner suggests what Fellini thought of such pseudointellectuals.

when Steiner said he’s too serious to be an amateur, and too much an amateur to be a professional, my own disembodied voice whispershouted in my ear: and so are you, asshole.

being ambitious is hard work. because the library I work for doesn’t care about my success as an employee, I’ve been seeking librarian positions elsewhere. but the process of applying for public sector jobs is grueling and slow. if I hear back from a library and they deemed my resume satisfactory, I have to take a test, then depending on where I’m ranked among test takers, I’m placed on an eligibility list that hiring committees refer to for anything that opens in the year or so after the creation of the list. and if I get hired and I want to be promoted to a new position a few years down the line, I have to do all that over again, after having dedicated myself to proving my competence for the position I held. none of this is appealing to me. it sounds like a whole lot of fucking work. but I can’t skate by on some low level position forever, both because the pays not good enough, and I’m not someone content to skate. I’ve long skated through life, and it’s not satisfying. so if I know I have to put hard work into something, I should put it into what I care about. which is writing.

another movie I watched is There Will Be Blood. in one of the film’s many famous scenes, Daniel Plainview tells someone that “I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed.” this time watching, I wondered how much Daniel’s Machiavellianism is an exaggeration of Paul Thomas Anderson’s own ambition. how ruthless must an artist to be to achieve greatness? posed that question, perhaps you would preach equanimity and grace, that worldly success is not worth sacrificing one’s humanity over. to which I say, “I drink your milkshake” before beating you to death with a bowling pin. spoiler alert or whatever.

saving money will come in handy in the event that I decide it’s not worth it to even do the bare minimum of work at my job, and that I need to skip town or bar back or do something else that would free up more time to really commit to what I’m meant to do: lay waste to the myriad mediocrities that make up the contemporary publishing industry.