cody frank

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.