two quotes on writing

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

Arthur Schoepenhauer

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

Revelation 1:19

after Rupi Kaur 

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

❀❀❀

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

❀❀❀

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

❀❀❀

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

❀❀❀

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

- not you

Mary Oliver on the poet’s ambitions

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

Mary Oliver

early thoughts on Neon Genesis Evangelion

about halfway through the second episode it occurred to me just how few fucks the creators of this show give. absolutely none of the plot makes sense, probably on purpose as satire on the absurdity of shonen mecha shows. like, it has to be a joke that Shinji has zero experience at all and yet this shadowy multinational intelligence agency trusts him to be the first line of defense against supernatural apocalyptic destruction, right? as a non-weeb English-speaking anime naïf, I can only assume as much.

props also to the writers for blowing past the niceties of explication in favor of throwing the audience into the action without any clarification or orientation. about ten episodes in now and I barely know what’s going on beyond sweet vibes, Kabbalistic diagrams, “boom anime babes,” and everyone seeming very sad.

“48 boxes—70 linear feet”

that is reportedly the size of Thomas Pynchon’s archive, which was recently acquired by the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. this news comes to my attention less than 24 hours after I discussed with my therapist my habit of putting off finishing, or even starting, work on a writing project because I think I need to do more research, or learn Greek, or brush up on the classics: things I think I need to be able to write at the level I believe myself capable of. “I want to be Dante, I want to be Rabelais,” I told my therapist, two examples of highly erudite writers whose work I’ve only read a fraction of.

there were a few times in session I felt sheepish, as though a light were being shined on me while I had my dick in my hand. it’s sort of astonishing how many deflection plays I have, and how often they work, and how disarmed I feel when someone won’t fall for my feints. a good therapist relationship should feel at least a little antagonistic. not that it’s your business what exactly made me feel that way.

it’s easy to compare myself to Pynchon regarding research, even without his archive being so quantified. less easy, due to his secrecy, to compare myself on his dealings with the sordid business of publishing, which I am realizing is much more of a block to me than anything else. even here, now, writing this, I feel like I’m failing, like I shouldn’t be open about my ambitions, I shouldn’t talk about myself at all, it’s more noble to quietly work and leave the business of posterity to fate. but I wrote a 4000 word newsletter, put a lot of effort into it, and a few dozen people read it. thank you if you did, but it’s not enough for me. if someone denies being hungry it does not leave them satiated. and yet I still feel it “beneath” me to put the effort into submitting for publication, into (groan) networking, into promoting what I work really hard on. as though hugely successful literary author Thomas Pynchon didn’t “play the game” at least to some extent.

anyway I’m reading John Berryman’s Dream Songs right now and readjusting my ambitions away from “be Pynchon” towards “write continuously and get things into peoples hands, whatever it takes.”

Praise for palmtreesonfire.com

“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

#9

intoxicant iridescence recedes, leaving the ground beneath fallow, perhaps for good. there is nothing left for you here. vivacity is elsewhere, banished by black magicians with delusions of grandeur, at costs perpetually deferred until too late. what is it to be deprived of contact if not a kind of spell, as in dry. look around: crests have fallen, illusions dissipated. trees become barren. a tiny wheel in a big machine whose only function is to drain sputters, but this is by design. or, not design exactly, but in keeping with the mechanism’s propensity. design implies rationality. there is none. whirr and cough, there’s no need for niceties. this was a misery so eloquently denounced that it couldn’t help but return eternal. this enchantment is true to its meaning. whether a waste land is renewed depends on whom Scylla captured, et cetera desunt.

#8

leitmotif of emptiness, yawning across time lost. why should one hole up in the nothing of consciousness when so much is left out in the cold? echoes of knowing reverberate in the abysmal expanse, giving an impression of solidity that evaporates on closer listen. wherever one sets down, from Abydos to Luxor, is not home. undertaken as mortician’s work is the burden of maintaining, though a slip into chaos beckons seductively. there is nothing but depth, with surfaces mere shimmers of interference run on behalf of a Man who may or may not be behind the curtain. light escapes, revealing pomegranates of blue that either bait the trap of knowledge or point the way out (in?). wherefore this wandering? distances recede the faster they’re chased, and branching alternatives sprout in every direction exponentially, leaving one to reel in vertigo. the day is deep as the night is long. flaming spirals whirligig within, inspiring equally the urge to build a world, and to tear one down. in the midst of paradise, no one remains. cast down into material to search in the dark, we are lost without a polestar.

with a .45 held against the baby yoda’s head

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.