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“With palmtreesonfire.com, Frank cements himself as the preeminent blogger of his generation. At turns despairing, revelatory, deranged and hopeful, Frank’s posts mark a turning point in the genre. Don’t walk; run to the nearest web browser. You won’t regret it.” – James Wood

“A master of the form. Every click will have you on the edge of your seat.” – Lee Child

“palmtreesonfire.com will be described by future scholars as luminous, urgent, and, above all, necessary. But today, in the here and now, the only possible response is awe.” – Dave Eggers

“I’d love a chance at that twink bitch.” – Bret Easton Ellis, on his podcast presumably

“No one blogging today has the gumption, the verve, the veritable panache of Cody Frank. Lesser bloggers tremble in his presence.” – Harold Bloom

“Great. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter. Let people compare me to Cody Frank by all means, but my English is patball to Frank’s champion game.” – Vladimir Nabokov

“Why do we blog in a world dominated by platforms? Where if we want anyone to read what we write there’s some compromise to be made with the platforms everyone seems to be standing on, milling about, sharing news, pictures, gossip—but of course everyone knows it’s the platforms standing on everyone because everyone supports the platforms or else the platforms would collapse? Which makes finding a “platform,” as in something to stand on, on these platforms, inaccessible? Everything pressed and kneaded into form for content dull gazes roaming the spectacle? What used to mean something? Is there anything to reach out and touch still? Has there ever been? Signs behind signs, a fun house holographic maze slithering jagged paths of intersectarian double crossings. Cast into the thrumming horror of pitch black, beating in time, when pupils dilate round enough to birth tiny globes—is it out there, or from within, in our hearts and minds? Perhaps you’ve heard of Zen Master Dogen’s Moonlight in a Dew Drop, my ecoindustrial noise project? If so, check out my other Bandcamp – Publisher’s Weekly (Starred Review)” – Michio Kaku

“I’d suck his dick if he’d let me.” – Ana de Armas

“A triumph. A vital exploration of what it means to be American in the 21st century. I read [palmtreesonfire.com] every night with Michelle.” – President Barack Obama

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.

decalcify those pineal glands, flouride enjoyers, we’re going on another trip down the rabbit hole.

Dimitri (@drposhlost)

Dimitri here is one of the hosts of Subliminal Jihad, a podcast that “[explores] deep politics, occult history, conspiracy, and ontological ops from a critical-paranoid perspective.” what exactly “ontological ops” are is beyond this humble blogger’s understanding. Subliminal Jihad is sort of like if TrueAnon had less discipline; the episodes are long and rambling, the hosts do research that they should have brought to the studio while on mic, the sound quality sucks, and the host who isn’t Dimitri has worse uptalk/vocal fry than Liz Franczak. would it fucking kill you, Khalid, to start a sentence without saying “and, like, yeah”? also what’s up with everyone saying your grandfather was OSS, Khalid? what’s that all about?

they’d be mad at me for this comparison, and it’s likely they’d use my point about their lofi production values to bolster the argument that they’re the lefty parapolitics pundits that should be trusted, not the Pritzker-backed Chapo mafia that Brace and Liz run with. last time around I was glib about the idea that Brace Belden is some kind of intelligence asset, and to be clear, I understand being wary of the man’s mercenary background and his podcast’s overnight success. but spending so much time combing through newspaper clippings for the name Belden in order to link such personages to the Rockefellers or some other demonic elite family? it reads as pathetic. even if they’re right and Belden receives checks from the State Department, Subliminal Jihad’s jihad against him seems primarily motivated by spite and envy. the other possibility is some kind of The Man Who Was Thursday situation.

it also endlessly pisses me off that Dimitri uses a screencap from PTA’s Inherent Vice adaptation as his avi, in part because additionally, the show’s merch store includes a shirt bearing the text “Dracularity: Subliminal Jihad, Every Single Episode, 2020-“. my opinion is, leave Pynchon out of this, you fucking nerds, but if you must bring him in, at least credit the man for coining “Dracularity” back in 1973 in Gravity’s Rainbow.

all that being said, I do appreciate how unrelentingly critical these two are towards the Gettys (and their minion Gavin Newsom), as well as being highly disdainful of that Coward of American Leftism, Noam Chomsky.

eleven (@eleevn)

somewhere between the extremely, ahem, hermetic, and the more mundanely parapolitical, lies eleven. when I first encountered eleven’s tweets, I thought I’d finally found someone who could balance real world political concerns while keeping an eye aimed at the high weirdness that comes with an interest in esotericism. spinning false flag attacks and psyops as instantiations of black magic meant to bewitch the masses into subservience? based. you go, girl. right there with you; fuck Michael Aquino, all my homies hate Michael Aquino. even cooler? conceiving of the fractured (“schizzed”?) media landscape as a deliberate effort to parcel people out into something akin to Alternate Reality Games, with reference to papers that argue ARGs are highly useful, if of questionable morality, for studying the behavioral effects of manipulated variables in a given environment. any content served to you by what’s colloquially known as “the algorithm” should be treated as highly suspect, even if you don’t believe there are sleeper agents awaiting activation via an MKUltra trigger.

then I got a little freaked out because she tweeted some things about graphene and about DoD officials writing papers on the efficacy of employing graphene for biosurveillance, not at a distance a la the NSA, but from within, via injected nanotechnologies; that, in fact, this graphene material is of interest to DARPA for its potential to facilitate neural interaction with machines, fulfilling the wildest wet dreams of the transhumanists and vindicating years of tinfoil hat hair.

it is difficult to immerse ones thinking in the paranoid imaginary without occasionally being struck by The Fear; there was a week or so a while back where I was basically convinced the Mandela effect was an operant means of psychological control, and that reality is even more malleable than I sometimes optimistically believe it to be. now, so as to not become insane, I don’t think about it so much.

but on this graphene-in-the-vaccines thing, a little more digging suggests that there’s not much reliable biological application of graphene technology as it is currently understood–if you trust Wikipedia, that is, and Wikipedia is a perfectly acceptable resource for many things, a gift unto humanity so far as the democratization of general knowledge is concerned. but Wikipedia is also notorious for downplaying what are understood to be actual, historically verifiable conspiracies: don’t read Wikipedia if you want to know anything worth knowing about 9/11, JFK, Franklin Credit, OKBOMB, etc. so, but, like, what eleven is suggesting w/r/t graphene is ultimately a more “studied” elaboration of the same old vaccine paranoia, that the NWO is chipping everyone with receivers so that HAARP antennae can maintain a docile population via electromagnetic frequency modulation. which, like, if that’s possible, I really don’t think any of your posting means anything, girl, so you might as well go outside, get laid, eat shrooms, and enjoy whatever version of the Simulation They’re broadcasting to you or whatever.

the day after writing the above, eleven posted a thread theorizing that, because smiling “evolved” from an expression of fear and submission in primates (literally a line from the Office’s Dwight Schrute, and also unscientific), the proliferation of open-mouth smiles and hearty laughter in artistic depictions, previously reserved for images of the insane or dimwitted, is evidence of a ruling class psyop to inculcate an instinct for compliance among the plebeians, and it’s like, have you ever met a smiling baby? this is just an reactionary argument for puritanical decorum via restraint on natural exuberance. which, and I don’t often like tipping my hand so clearly, is something I am firmly opposed to.

Unconscious Abyss ∞🔮 (@UnconsciousAby)

my apologies; I wrote all this before Aby went private.

it’s hard to take seriously anyone suggesting an ancient occult conspiracy undergirding all of society, which is recognizable by its symbols, if the person’s response to this problem is to primarily post Twitter threads about it. it’s like, homie, I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but I can’t imagine They would let you chase online clout if you’re anywhere near giving up Their game.

of course, whatever exactly Their game is, it’s hard to parse from the things Unconscious Abyss posts. they obviously have a wide range of occult/alchemical knowledge and I do not doubt the rigor of their studies, but a lot of these tweets are like, uncontextualized quotes, or like four suggestively similar images quoted tweeted with another four suggestive images, all without referent to any overarching thesis or argument (or even an explanation). are alchemists based, or are they cringe, Lord Abyss? because if they’re cringe, you seem to be exceptionally familiar with their esoteric symbolism, so why should anyone trust what you have to say about it all? if everything is part of some grand, global process of occult initiation, wherein news stories and historical events are ritual enactments of manipulation, what makes you think finding coincidences in names and shapes isn’t merely They’re way of throwing you off the trail? plus, it’s not like the Atlanteans invented the color green, so to presume metaphysical ratfuckery on the basis that two things happen to be green is just naive epistemology–superstition.

on the other hand, it is true that the Enlightenment and its consequences are extensions of western occult principles: Isaac Newton spent much of his time studying not physics but alchemy, the chemical structure of petroleum was arrived at after August Kekulé had a vision of the Ouroboros, and the alchemist’s dream of material transubstantiation is now matched by the technical abilities of modern science. if the contemporary world isn’t a result of a Freemasonic plot to install a global world order conducive to the accumulation of power by an elite cabal of sorcerers, then it sure looks like one if you squint hard enough.

[w/r/t a Department of Energy official]: quarked up white boy with a little bit of clearance blasts it down nuclear style.. is he DOE-ted with the sauce?

[w/r/t the anime girl in the “chill lofi beats to study/relax to” YouTube channel]: quirked up lofi girl with a little bit of chill studies hard relaxual style.. is she beated with the sauce?

[w/r/t the Try Guy cheating “scandal”]: quirked up Try Guy with a little bit of clout loses it all infidelity style.. is he Fullered with the sauce?

[w/r/t Don DeLillo’s classic White Noise]: quirked up White Noise with the Most Photographed Barn studies Hitler airborne toxic style.. is it DeLillo’d with the sauce?

[w/r/t Bob Odenkirk being shamed for following a foot fetish Instagram account]: Odenkirk’d up white boy with a little bit of ‘gram kicks it down fetish style.. is he footed with the socks?

a friend of mine shared a quote, from Cioran I later learned, that has since hung around my mind like a pall of smoke:

To have devoted to the idea of death all the hours which any vocation demands. . . Metaphysical outbursts are the attribute of monks, debauchees and bums. A job would have turned Buddha into a mere malcontent.

upon first reading this, a taunting voice arose from within and hissed “that’s you, a mere malcontent. what hope do you have for beauty if you actively wish for 40 hours each week to pass as quickly as possible? where else does this lead but the grave?”

some people go through life only barely aware that another way is possible, ostensibly happy to work for wages that can be then used for acquiring things, with their little remaining free time reserved for mindless distraction. others are so at odds with the demands of the machine as to reject and be rejected by it, and are therefor cast out into psychosis, criminality, and/or death. the dream, the ideal, is to slip between the mechanisms and find a path for remaining human, without critical (ie fatal) sacrifice.

then there’s what I do: imagine myself as strident or eccentric despite leading an extremely safe life perfectly in accord with society’s unjustified demands.

I have no desire for glory or fame; I might argue that the present historical moment suffers from a devaluing of glory, but it is not in my nature to be a Napoleon or a Lenin. I also believe that acceptance of one’s mundane existence is a step on the road to [REDACTED], and that the present historical moment suffers from an excess of people who believe they’re special, that is, outside humanity and beyond the reaches of death.

I do not wish to be God, nor do I wish to be Caesar. I only wish to have the courage of Cioran’s monk/debauchee/bum. but unfortunately I am a coward, full of regret.

this weekend my brother is getting married. I’m officiating.

I regret not being closer with my brother.

I regret that my family is only a source of pain for me.

I regret being the son of a fascist federale.

I regret that my mom has never been well.

I regret wishing this week would be over and done with.

I regret every time I did not speak my mind for the sake of politeness.

I regret allowing people I disagree with to think otherwise.

I regret preserving illusions.

I regret not making more dumb mistakes in my 20s.

I regret not cultivating broader curiosity about the people around me.

I regret being irritated when a stranger tries to make small talk.

I regret my passivity.

I regret my desire to appear “put together.”

I regret closely guarding my exuberance and my clownishness.

I regret every day I spend anxiously clicking around the internet to waste time at work.

the friend who posted the Cioran assures that “It’s never too late to change tho.” we shall find out.

when everything’s up in the air it’s difficult to find solid ground to work from. the 15th we got keys (well, technically the 13th) to our new house, which is up on the hill and has a breathtaking view of the city and ocean. but I’m mostly out of breath from schlepping boxes up and down stairs and driving them the two blocks between my old and new places. it doesn’t look like I will have finished the story I wanted to submit during September submission periods, but publication is merely an ordeal to be borne once the actual activity of art is completed, so now merely is not the time. once life is settled into routine I can resume the work of derangement via writing.

listening to a lot of recordings of Terence McKenna talks while packing. I’m someone who before this rather enjoyed McKenna’s thought as a kind of curio, but the more I listen to him talk, the more I’m impressed with his rigor, range, and gumption. the way he explains how the world corporate state/neoliberalism works not only disavowed me of the idea that he isn’t a totally serious thinker, at least politically, but it basically summarized it all better than I’ve ever heard anyone put it, including explicitly leftist intellectuals like Michael Parenti. despite the more harebrained of his ideas generally serving as his calling cards (stoned ape theory, Timewave Zero, etc.), McKenna is an exceptionally lucid and critical thinker who is among a group of maybe four public intellectuals in recent memory whom I still hold in high esteem: David Graeber, Mike Davis, and I guess Charles Bowden, but Bowden is more journalist/writer than intellectual. once I have more time I want to devote it to writing about literally whatever the fuck I find interesting here the way McKenna seems able to discuss basically any topic that comes his way. enough of these little update posts, I want to write multiple-thousand-word essays about quantum theory, alchemy, shamanism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, literary history, drugs, paranoia, apocalypse, aesthetic theory, technology, whatever. I also want to do the s*****s and a**d that are in my fridge, and, ideally, track down some D*T to sm*ke.

currently I’m rereading Dubliners for the first time in years, so maybe Joyce is a decent place to start wrt longer-form blogging. I need practice using way more words than are strictly speaking necessary: my tendency towards concision is a good one, but it should serve to temper a predilection for babbling, which I tamp down for fear of being obnoxious. from now on I want to risk being obnoxious.

alright that’s enough earnestness from me today.

something that keeps me from writing often is the belief that I’m not privy to information unbeknownst to the people who might read me. this is an attitude reflective of my desire to be informative, which is a notion, as a fiction writer, I should probably dispense with. of course, it’s entirely possible that something I write might teach someone something they did not previously know, and all the better if that’s the case.

that being said, I am still someone addicted to learning, addicted to information, addicted to parsing the machinations of power and history and psychology, and as such I do spend a lot of time and energy trying to get to the bottom of various so-called “rabbit holes.” lucky for a 21st century writer, there are myriad freelance research assistants on the internet to crib notes from. so, what I’ve decided to do here is a brief review of some Twitter accounts I keep up with that are part of what is referred to as “conspiracy Twitter.”

despite these accounts obviously representing real people, please understand these comments as having no bearing on any real person’s character. you know, one love and all that. y’all wanna be micromedia figures in las guerras de información, shining a light on the federales, cool with us.

@RobertSkvarla

Robert Skvarla is evidently a writer/journalist/editor of some kind, listing Covert Affairs in his bio as a publication he has written for. a lot of entry level conspiracy Twitter is basically a more detail oriented version of what left media has offered for forty-fifty years now. COINTELPRO? anti-imperialism? ruling class propaganda? Skvarla’s got you covered. any self-respecting leftist owes it to themselves to be familiar with the practical methods capital uses to legitimize its power. Skvarla benefits from his experience as a journalist in that he avoids being too idiosyncratic or relying too heavily on the performance of a certain paranoid personality type. there are several accounts I could have slotted into this review that cover beats similar to Skvarla’s. in the past few weeks Skvarla has made a point of injecting nuance into the extremely dumb debate surrounding the legitimacy of the FBI, since it seems like every mainstream center-left pundit has tripped over their dick trying to worship at the edifice J. Edgar Hoover built.

and if aliens are your thing, Skvarla’s occasional comments on the UFO phenomenon and its relationship to Defense Department propaganda are fun too.

@UnionBustingBot

AFL-CIA 1312 is of course a great Twitter name that I’m glad isn’t merely a dumb Twitter name but is actually descriptive of the content the account specializes in: documenting methods used by the American intelligence community to subvert labor movements. there’s lots of history about FBI and CIA infiltration of worker organization efforts, and plenty of Insight into which unions are sold out to whom and which are favored by the feds and why. if you are somehow still under the illusion in the year of our dead Lord 2022 that three letter agencies were ever anything other than bulwarks against leftist efforts—or, if you need reminding that capital doesn’t just “win” because people are selfish or whatever, but that capital has to exercise every dirty trick it can conceive of to stop the people from demanding what’s rightfully theirs, follow AFL-CIA 1312

@marina0swald

I know (not the real) marina oswald used to hang around on the TrueAnon Discord, but TrueAnon was confirmed a psyop by other lefty conspiracy podcasts whose Discords I’ve gathered intelligence on. you ever think it’s weird that the chat platform that’s gotten really popular recently amongst tribal fanbases is called Discord? I should make a note to look into their financials later…

(not the real) marina oswald is kind of a caricature of the obstinance and blinkered myopia it takes to spend so much time ferreting out the American ruling class’s connections to the intelligence apparatus. after a certain point with all this shit, it’s hard not to groan, “yeah okay the Bushes and the Nazis and the CIA and the Kennedy assassination and Iran Contra and 9/11, I get it.” but god bless her(?), (not the real) marina oswald is not going to let it go, because why the fuck would anyone allow Them to do all these things to us?

I say myopic though because what if like, all this CIA/FBI bullshit is a distraction from who’s really pulling the strings? like, maybe there’s something behind what’s behind the overlords? like, maybe the earth is a terrain of cosmic battle, the context and implications of which we can only perceive by accident, ironically, reflected through a glass darkly….like, what if, like, that’s what’s…like…you know?

@BoltzmannBooty

this account is my favorite conspiracy account, not for their conspiracy content but because they posted what I think is a perfect tweet:

I don’t care how easily impressed I am, this is a koan-like distillation of the only sane-ish position it is possible to hold if one believes, despite ultimate verification of nothing, that they can figure it all out.

and if anyone is going to figure out what happened April 19, 1995, the day Timothy McVeigh & Terry Nichols (et. al.) bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, it’s 12 Ball. as someone who has spent considerable time in a federal building with his Special Agent father, this conspiracy is particularly depressing. don’t read whatever intelligence-approved cumrag Jeffrey Toobin publishes on this subject next year; follow 12 Ball, who deserves one more shout out for:

what the fuck is going on??

It depends what the meaning of the word “is” is.

President William Jefferson Clinton

@crackconnoisser

[N.B.: a few days went by after writing the below and the motherfuckers got jinx. another account suspended. follow his back up account @freemaysun]

much like with crack, please use jinx edits responsibly, if that’s even possible.

my admiration for jinx’s video work can’t be overstated. no one else making “content” is better at capturing the experience of being “pilled”: I’ll put one on, be all like oh haha yeah I know this one…mhm…wait what? is that true? slow down. no, no, that can’t be right…really? that was on the news?? and all these wikipedia pages…holy fuckin shit….it’s all connected….

king of the schizoid pranksters, perennially suspected of being a fed, jinx is a true artist MK-Ultra’d to life by overexposure to 21st century media. masterfully paired with pop songs (or, more likely, Pop Smoke), these videos might shock anyone unfamiliar with the “parapolitical” landscape: what Peter Dale Scott calls “deep politics,” what exists beyond, according to Thomas Pynchon, “secular history.”

if not shocked, then you’ll be extremely confused. step through the looking glass at your own risk.

tomorrow, mañana, I go to Mexico City. in preparation, I’m studying mi español, because I’m a language pervert and would really love it if I knew more than just stodgy-ass English. no espero entenderlo todo, pero queiro practicar y aprender. as much as possible. tanto como sea posible.

in order to really learn a language, one must develop the ability to think in the language. this means submitting to what the language makes possible: affectively, intellectually, practically. it is perhaps difficult to accept if one wants to be an egalitarian humanist, but different languages create different possibilities. this doesn’t have any bearing on intelligence or intellectual ability, of course. in my experience, with trying to embody Spanish, not merely “know” it, I have found that, in leaving English, one must accommodate themselves to a more direct expression of emotion and desire that the Latin-derived languages require. it is for this reason that the Romantic movement is so named, with stuffy Northern European Anglos striving for the passion they thought the classics of the Romans (Latin speakers) expressed. this is also the source of the stereotypically fiery Latin character.

I find it fascinating to compare English and Spanish as two extremely successful colonial languages. they are languages of power and authority, as all dominant languages are, to varying extents. but the colonial, imperial projects of both the English and the Spanish are ideologically tied up in what is made possible by their respective languages. Spanish, arising out of the imperial language par excellence, Latin, is adapted for use in commerce and trade: it is a market language. this is because Spain geographically sits at the crossroads of several trade routes, where traders from Africa to the South, Rome to the East, and the Norman Celts to the North, meet and do business. Spanish is well-designed for quick learning and even quicker speaking; one can perform many transactions in rapid succession without raising one’s voice above a murmur. with these trade routes crossing through the language’s homeland, those wishing to make money had to adapt to its dictates. which made it easy to export the language in the final direction, al oeste, to el Mundo Nuevo.

English is slightly different. it is also a language of commerce, but of commerce at a distance. English, being a mutt born from the Germanic languages, the weird Celtic dialects on the British Isles themselves, and the Vulgar Latin popular in Normandy which eventually became French. as such, English is exceptionally good at absorbing things, whereas Spanish is less malleable phonetically and grammatically, but more easily adapted to because of it. there’s probably some kind of analogy to be made here with Protestantism vs Catholicism

tengo que escribir en español todos los dias cuando estoy en México.

no sé cómo terminar este post, so I’m just gonna stop writing.

perhaps the feeling that it’s so hard to communicate nowadays, that there’s been some fateful line crossed technolinguistic-sociopolitickepistemologically, that all is decadence and alienation, perhaps this is merely the nature of being human. we seem to be on the forefront of whatever realm is dictated by the gods of language, ie Thoth/Hermes/Mercury, whose caduceus also symbolizes commercial trade and the ambivalences that endeavor requires. it is a struggle. whence the opportunity to use language, as it uses: to shape the possible, to broaden the scope of the possible. to create. “creation” and “formation” are translations of the Hebrew יְצִירָה (remember, read it right to left), yetzirah, as in Sefer Yetzirah, or the Book of Creation, which outlines a sophisticated linguistic theory for how the universe is created, out of nothingness, from the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. it is also an important work in the development of Jewish mysticism, specifically the Qabbalah (KAH-baluh, not kuh-BALL-uh). scholars generally date Sefer Yetzirah to the Talmudic pediod, though some suggest a more recent, early Medieval authorship. “early” and “recent” of course relative to the ordering of events demanded by the reign of commerce.

as much as commerce (1. social interchange broadly speaking 2. market activity 3. sex) governs the conditions of existence, the principle that gives broad shape is Time, which is felt as growth, loss, pain, transformation and death. something is changing (he says less meaningfully than those words could mean), and decisions must be made. on a long weekend desert bender, I hoped to gain clarity/distance/perspective on how to reapply myself to the task at hand, and all I thought the first day back at my job was “I need more time for Work”. there’s a job interview in two weeks. if it goes well, I will not have more time. resting from Work for six days made Work on the seventh day kind of a drag. it is likely that soon I will need to move out of my apartment. J’s roommate will be moving out of their house in two months.

too much worry, too conservative, too egotistical—all I need is space to act out ideologies, jokes, stories. combinations of words, made up of letters. also need the allowance to be a little bit, or maybe a lot bit, crazy. need to throw a short story I workshopped with friends through another edit at least. also nurturing an idea for some ~cyberliterature~.

do, for there is nothing to “be”. be, a verb? yes. here now, even. there’s no where else, is there?

when photography developed, there was a tectonic shift in the visual arts. painting’s role as documenter of vision had been displaced, leading to a crisis over what job painting could still do. this is standard art history summarizing, the advent of impressionism neatly coinciding with the rise of photography, the need for mimetic resemblance having been met thanks to new chemical processes and technology. it is a topic still discussed today, whether painting is obsolete, with the latest wave of technological innovation generally contributing to an overabundance of images, most of them digital, the rest digitally reproduced. yet painting continues.

anxiety over the supposed “death of the novel” is hardly new, nor is it new to procrastinate on novel writing by considering this anxiety. a “job” I have seen ascribed to the novel is in collecting and organizing, via aesthetic principles, information. writing novels in the 19th century and earlier involved amassing sociocultural data descriptive of whatever milieu constitutes the subject of the work. but thanks to the advent of the internet, wikipedia, mass data collection, so on, the idea that the novel is in someway responsible for organizing information might be questioned. I have also seen it said, somewhat bizarrely, that conceptual art broadly speaking took over this job from the novel in the late 20th century.

the function of language is not to communicate, since “communication,” as conceived as the expression or conveyance of privately held thoughts to another’s mind, is impossible, for reasons far to complicated to get into here. sartre, never one to skip a chance to be extremely French, has it that speaking is fundamentally a seduction. he puts it more generally by saying language causes to be experienced. if this is the case, then a writer is someone who deliberately anticipates what experiences their language is likely to elicit, as a chess player anticipates how their moves will be answered. skill or talent then lies in how many moves ahead are considered, in employing tactics that catch off guard. I’m also fond of D&G’s metaphor that language is a synthesizer—in which case a writer in the 21st century must approach their task as lee scratch perry would approach a crate of vinyl, the recording tape, the sampler, and the mixing deck.