an automaton updates his resume

some jobs higher up the organizational hierarchy opened up that I feel no choice but to apply for. this on the day I sent out a newsletter that I’m proud of but feel conflicted about, since no one cares, I’m just spinning my wheels getting no where, barely scratching the surface of what I’m capable of because any greater commitment would make it too difficult to stay on keel enough to maintain the normal obligations of a typical middle class existence. (bourgeois coward). it would be easier to feel empowered diving into the derangement process of literature if I didn’t believe doing so would only cause me difficulty and psychic instability for the sake of self-aggrandizement. like, maybe if people were already waiting to hear from me (a cushioned ego), or if I had a good literary agent (bourgeois respectability). both of those, obviously, catch-22, require that I already have work published. but the work required to get writing published is all self-aggrandizing, self-branding, self-promoting, and the pathways so esoteric to me that even if I were less scrupulous with my egotism I wouldn’t know where to start. and that’s getting worse, not better: I made a new Instagram account, thinking I would use it to promote the music I’m posting to my Soundcloud and YouTube channels, but after three days of compulsively opening the app despite there being nothing to look at, I realized I can’t handle social media any more. so that’s one fewer “democratic” means for distributing my work. but if I don’t want to do the bullshit that might maybe no guarantee probably not actually give me a chance to make art full time, then I’m left keeping a day job, and looking at my resume, thinking about further embedding myself in an organization’s structure, the decades stretching out before me like an American highway, straight, flat, and with no discernible end….there is a plot against me getting this writing done. Guilt, Embarrassment, Fear, Sloth, Pride, these conspire, contracting Agents of Distraction and Discouragement, many of whom have invaded my mind…the task must be in ferreting out these rats, these accomplices of the Organization working to steer me away from the path of righteous splendor…..

three from Dolce & Gabbana re: literature

Strange Anglo-American literature: from Thomas Hardy, from D.H. Lawrence to Malcolm Lowry, from Henry Miller to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, men who know how to leave, to scramble the codes, to cause flows to circulate, to traverse the desert of the body without organs. They overcome a limit, they shatter a wall, the capitalist barrier. And of course they fail to complete the process, they never cease failing to do so. The neurotic impasse again closes—the daddy-mommy of oedipalization, America, the return to the native land—or else the perversion of the exotic territorialities, then drugs, alcohol—or worse still, an old fascist dream. Never has delirium oscillated more between its two poles. But through the impasses and the triangles a schizophrenic flow moves, irresistibly; sperm, river, drainage, inflamed genital mucus, or a stream of words that do not let themselves be coded, a libido that is too fluid, too viscous: a violence against syntax, a concerted destruction of the signifier, non-sense erected as a flow, polyvocity that returns to haunt all relations.

As if the great voices, which were capable of performing a breakthrough in grammar and syntax, and of making all language a desire, were not speaking from the depths of psychosis, and as if they were not demonstrating for our benefit an eminently psychotic and revolutionary means of escape.

Every writer is a sellout. The only literature is that which places an explosive device in its package, fabricating a counterfeit currency, causing the superego and its form of expression to explode, as well as the market value of its form of content.

Anti-Oedipus

partial list of artistic influences

Thomas Pynchon, Emily Dickinson, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, Samuel Beckett, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Diane Williams, Francisco Goya, Cady Noland, Mike Kelley, Henry Miller, Henry James, Henri Matisse, Robert Henri, Philip Guston, Mariah Carey, Harmony Korine, Sylvia Plath, Gustave Flaubert, John Cassavetes, JPEGMAFIA, Jay Adams, Tony Alva, Lydia Davis, Baruch Spinoza, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, the Relentless Picnic, Stan Brakhage, Amalia Ulman, Bunny Rogers, Molly Brodak, Paul Thomas Anderson, Zhuang Zhou, St Francis of Assisi, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Plato, Kanye West, Remy LaCroix, Nick Mullen, Raymond Chandler, Raymond Pettibon, Édouard Manet, David Lynch, Lenny Bruce, Remedios Varo, Frida Kahlo, Charles Bowden, Britney Spears, Maya Deren, Bunny Yeager, Ezra Pound, Toni Morrison, Jack Kerouac, Black Sabbath, Black Flag, Oscar Wilde, DJ Shadow, David Wojnarovicz, MF DOOM, William S. Burroughs, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud,  Sonic Youth, Tim Heidecker, Gary Larson, Herman Melville, Dane Rudhyar, Federico García Lorca, Nina Hartley, Laboria Cuboniks, Mark Fisher, Lord Byron, William Blake, Prince, Rainer Maria Rilke, Charles Baudelaire, André Breton, Leonara Carrington, Max Martin, Marcel Duchamp, the Marquis de Sade, John Coltrane, Kathy Acker, Djuna Barnes, the Wu-Tang Clan, Buzz Osbourne, Alfred Hitchcock, Mel Blanc, Wikipedia, Dopesmoker, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hugh Holland, Aristotle, Richard Feynman, Voltaire, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabakov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, David Foster Wallace, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rocko’s Modern Life, Jimi Hendrix, Aeschylus, Ovid, Doris Wishman, Eric Stanton, John Willie, Bertolt Brecht, Dōgen, Br’er Rabbit, Karl Marx, Art Bell, Albert Einstein, Robert Graves, 808 Mafia, Francis Bacon, John Milton, Jacques Vallée, Vince Staples, DJ Screw, Sylvia Sleigh, Robert Altman, Frantz Fanon, Georges Méliès, Dante Alighieri, J Dilla, Anaïs Nin, Erich Fromm, Comte de Lautréamont, Ishmael Reed, Alexander del Mar, David Ray Griffin, Russ Meyer, Mikhail Bakhtin, Gil Elvgren, the Gospel of Thomas, Carly Rae Jepsen, Niccolò Machiavelli

YOUNG THUG ENACTS a Charlie Parker theory of trap. Virtuosity, drugginess, genius, vulnerability, an impish childishness almost as a compensation for the overabundance of talent, the superfluidity of imagination. A Cocteau from East Atlanta, he teases the beat, skipping off it like a yo-yo, yodeling, crooning, blurting, squawking, purring, working his game on you, finessing, playing ad libs like Curtis Mayfield worked strings, or scatting and growling low like Louis Armstrong if he were sweating it out in a freestyle battle with James Brown, bouncing back and forth between personalities. His polymorphously perverse sexuality is so insistently graphic and deadpan that it has virtually zero erotic charge, au courant pimp talk channeled through a kind of private board game of his own imagination, a Candyland fantasia slimed in promethazine. By contrast, his persona oozes sex. In leather jackets, ultratight jeans and Janet Jackson piercing arrangements, he’s a Mick Jagger–ish rake on the make who is also shy and easily wounded, suddenly open for a hug. A favorite and telling picture posted to Instagram account thuggerthugger1 (5.2 million followers) captures him with his arm around Sir Elton John, posing like a polite politician in photo-op mode (Obama-alt) next to Sir Elton, who is dressed in a gold-trim Adidas tracksuit and a black thugger cap.

“Notes on Trap,” Jesse McCarthy

in a humorless mood

sometimes it is impossible for me to extend the kind of generosity of spirit that usually makes me excessively empathetic and understanding–it’s like that well is just dry, and so I grow paranoid or indignant that whomever I’m interacting with only wants to stake further claim on a dangerously depleted resource of mine. I can be irritable, bitchy, nitpicky, belligerent, huffy. it is not attractive.

I need to give myself permission to express these feelings without concern for offending people or for not being understood. not like, go out of my way to be mean spirited, but I’m allowed to create an artistic space for those feelings to be sublimated into so that I don’t feel subjected to them without agency. this can produce interesting and worthwhile material, but only so long as I accept the consequences.

basically I’m trying to get to the Sontag place of going to the keyboard as I would go to a machine gun.

schemin and scamming amidst pestilence and famine

i’m plannin on standin behind a personal canon, and in fact it’s that act that maps a world beyond appearance, your adherence to dogma it’s not comin along ya wanted a name but you keep it too tame to ever deserve to be heard in this noise and glut, girl you know I’m a slut so show me that ass and grab the cash in the safe, now I’m blastin away all day with an AK, Viet Cong hit the bong movin on, song to song, all night long I be workin & lurkin & twerkin til my shit got you perkin up even if you’re sippin from a dirty cup.

new moon in aries

bruh I hate this blog. okay, that’s not entirely true, but I have a lot of writing that is better put to other ends, so right now I don’t really care enough to ensure this is a thriving source of varied content. but what then do I want from this? I’ve made lots of plans and thought up plenty of ideas for what might be good topics to regularly blog about, but the fact is right now any writing that isn’t going into the novel I’m working on is generally being avoided. a story and some newsletter essays, but that’s it.

I’m in the process of dedicating myself further to my artistic endeavors, trying to make better use of my time, so there’s probably some to be devoted to maintaining a more regular supply of posts here, but fact is, blogging is very low on my priority list. but the idea of having a blog is to have something to offer as evidence of the work i do without the hassle of convincing some website or legacy publication to publish me. and if that’s the idea then I should be writing all kinds of things here, because I write all kinds of things, but with the intention of submitting them for sanctification via publication.

this week is the week I’m thinking of as “starting in earnest” ie making myself work on or plan what’s next in this novel. I’m not hitting the word quotas I made but I’m letting myself get up to speed. because I’m limiting how much more research I do at this stage until I have actual drafts to work with, I don’t have time for anything like that here. but I should do something else here. maybe text generating exercises; cut-ups, algorithmic games, parody, so on. anything to keep me occupied throughout the day so I don’t spiral into despair or distraction, as is my wont. make myself laugh, write jokes, whatever. something every day. let’s do it.

music’s going well too, though of course I have renewed energy and focus for the studio when I should be putting my time in in front of the typewriter.

aries is the sign of the self so this is about me.

[blink-182 voice] work sucks. you know.

recently some of my friends got into a discussion around a general sense of “I don’t know what to do.” with COVID fading into the background, destined to be another source of misery and death for the rest of our lives, and not a single lesson having been learned by the World, any hope that perhaps habits of labor and care might change has proven naive.

at the time of the discussion, I didn’t feel these concerns as acutely as my comrades did/do, since as of late I have been absorbed by writing projects that keep me preoccupied, if not exactly content. plus I’ve been more social in the last few weeks than I have in a long time, finally pinning down some friends of my who have been, let’s say, difficult to reach. but I am always at odds with myself about what I want to do. I have commented on this often, so often that I’m sick of hearing myself talk about it if I’m not going to do anything about it.

there’s something I don’t seem to get, something everyone agreed on at some meeting, or maybe there’s some memo I never received, about the inevitability of conformity, about the necessity of murdering your inner child, along with its ideals for what it means to live well, for the sake of submitting to the world of Work. I understand intellectually, but can’t abide it, not without the vertiginous sense that Death approaches. in my grandiose mode, I mystically imagine ways we as a people might change, what sort of resistance or revolt is necessary to alter course, something I don’t think is impossible like some more melancholic leftists might believe. but absent large-scale political action and organization, the social changes necessary to improve everyone’s lot remain pipe dreams.

I spoke with a friend of mine about all this this morning, about wishing I could quit my job, about the sense that I will need to make certain compromises soon, about feeling like I make too many decisions out of fear. despite being much better off than many people nowadays, I still feel the precarity that by design creates anxiety around employment, health care, etc., and so cannot imagine how exactly to operate without the guardrails of employment.

the conversation made me feel a little better, in that I shouldn’t bother trying to form some escape plan from the straight world and should instead continue to focus on writing, while in the mean time determining what my actual options are, rather than merely the easy/obvious maintenance-of-course ones. like, for example, I could sell my car and with that money I could afford to live without a steady income for quite a while, maybe a year or two. just, as an example.

here are some specific, concrete actions I can take while I continue to assess my options for avoiding regret:

  • first and most importantly, continue writing.
  • sell/get rid of what I don’t need.
  • take stock of what is “necessary” to submit to vis a vis technological control, vs. what is “convenient”/”easy”/”seductive.”
  • make an effort to be more of a diva and a clown, and less of a goody-goody all the time.