so this little project of mine i think has served its purpose, insofar as forcing myself to write a certain number of words is good training for allowing the process to be one of self-revelation and imperfection, and also for getting some momentum with writing after a few weeks where i’d stagnated. i think i’ll keep aiming to post something every day, but as i’m getting back to work on stories, i’m less concerned with hitting some word count quota for blog posts. plus, all that stylistic experimentation i wanted to try here, that’s better suited to fiction, on things i can save to rework and sit with, rather than throwing them out here. also i’m getting the sense that posting screenshots from these posts on instagram has become obnoxious.
one lesson from the experiment: it’s very helpful to write about what i’m reading, and to think through what i’m trying to write by writing about it, so i’ll continue to do that here. but i should also maybe move the more reflective, personal writing into notebooks, mostly because notebooks are better records than a blog could be, and who knows, maybe one day some library will want my archive.
last few days i’ve fired back up the old NTS receiver to listen to music. i’m hoping to be a little more deliberate with my music listening. i’m not listening to podcasts so much these days, in part because it seems a bad habit to always reach for someone(s) else’s thoughts when i’m doing dishes or whatever. there’s a similarly bad trend to use music as wallpaper for those activities like housework that invite in dreaded boredom, but until i can build up the habit of sitting down to listen with close attention to music, i think putting on NTS dj sets while doing chores is a good place to start. here are some quick reviews of the shows i listened to this veteran’s day weekend:
the first half of this is mostly sample based, hip hop inflected electronic music. i actually followed up on one track i thought i really liked and listened to the whole album, but the album was boring, so boring i don’t care to look up what it was. oddball kind-of-experimental riff loops that might have been interesting if they seemed to be about anything other than their own cleverness. but this mix i rather enjoyed, perfect for driving on a lovely friday fall day. the second half my girlfriend thought sounded like it was breaking my speakers, so i switched to the next set on this list, even though music that sounds like it’s breaking my speakers is my favorite genre.
bleary eyed dream pop, subtly shifting soundscapes, moonbase bachelor pad tunes, plus a soporific a version of the pixie’s “wave of mutilation.” really enjoyed this one, hoping to dig into some of these artists more. will definitely keep an eye out for future editions of this show.
once dinner’s almost ready, gotta set the mood with some soulful post-motown slowjams that, were i focusing on my hip-hop production right now, would make for some killer samples.
i started rereading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man a few days ago. there were 5 shorter books i pulled off the shelf to try and finish before the end of the year. i quit reading the Satyricon because i dunno it being in translation and also incomplete, i couldn’t really get into it. and Portrait was the title i chose for a reread, since i haven’t read it in probably 12 years and i don’t really remember it at all. which is a shame, because it could have been something i drew on as a model and inspiration for my often cipher-like and minimal protagonists; especially in the first 60 pages or so, stephen takes up such little space in the narrative that the reader often wonders what he’s even doing in the story at all. this is a problem i have with some of my protagonists, and it’s reflective of how i tend to want to minimize myself in fiction despite the fact that i’m the creative force and therefor it’s not possible to avoid my influence and perspective. what joyce does with stephen in the first part of Portrait is an effective way to balance the character’s vague sense of self against the structural necessity of filtering everything through that character’s impressions.
my desire to keep myself out of the work is two-fold, one fold well-meaning the other detrimental to the task at hand. i do think that it’s better to strive to use literature to dissolve the ego and direct attention outward into the world that creates the creator: it’s for this reason i often disdain overly self-involved novels like those labeled “autofiction.” i’ve mentioned elsewhere that this disdain is complicated by the fact that i do appreciate many novels that are, very explicitly, depictions of the life of the author, ie Henry Miller, Anais Nin, or even Kerouac. leaving that aside, it’s nonetheless true that I find it more admirable if I’m not distracted reading a novel by figuring out which aspects are reflections of the author’s personal life. I also personally have resolved to not write novels about writers, something I appreciate about the novels of Pynchon, or DeLillo.
that all being said, I think this is one of those intellectualized alibis that masquerades as an aesthetic principle. if I think it’s necessary to keep myself out of the work as much as possible, that tends to prevent me from digging into my soul for the sake of artistic creation, even though there’s no other place for me to dig. even if i want my art to engage with society at large, or to cast light on those who tend to be excluded from the gaze of bourgeois art, i still ultimately can only write from my “experience” in the jamesian sense of the word. and reading Portrait is helping me come to terms with that necessity, because it’s impressive how Joyce uses his stand-in Stephen as filter and center while still casting attention at the world around him.
another thing Portrait has me thinking a lot about is how lonely it feels to be an artist. Stephen is an extremely isolated figure. he rarely has dialogue, and a lot of scenes, while by definition being reported from his perspective, apparently don’t involve him at all. this is a major theme of the work as i understand it. it’s because Stephen is sensitive, contemplative, and withdrawn that he grows to be the titular “artist,” ie Joyce himself. i read fifteen or so pages of the novel with a beer at the pizza place/beer garden down the street from me as the sun set. people around me laughed and chatted with their friends. couples walked by. when i finished my beer, i strolled down Main Street, which I’ve strolled down many many times. I felt nostalgic for the time a few years ago when I had more opportunity to wander around the little downtown area where I’ve lived for 8 years. in all that wandering i’ve encountered many people, made acquaintances and friends, but none of which i would call up today to spend time with, or even check in on. this afternoon after yoga class, i stopped in a newish wine shop and chatted with the guys working there. they’re nice and generous. if i saw them around town i’d stop to say hello. but would i call them my friends? at the yoga studio some of the people recognize me, mostly the staff. i try to introduce myself to other yogis when the opportunity presents itself. but do i make conversation? do i ask people to grab coffee? i usually leave, politely thank the staff, and walk to my car. a friendly ghost, easily recognized, but easily forgotten.
my girlfriend says i’m more personable than she is. i sometimes laugh thinking that i’m a personable person, but it is true. it’s easy for me to make conversation with most people, even if when i think about it in the abstract i have no idea what i’m supposed to say to anyone. sometimes i think i’m not even really real, because so much of my life i’ve tried to make myself small, i’ve tried to pass through situations unnoticed, even though i know how big i can be, i know i can command attention and make people comfortable and blah blah blah. but then why don’t i seem to keep friends around? is it because i think i’m above people, that no one can really match my intensity, which has me tamping myself down, closing myself off, and people pick up on that sort of thing? sometimes. sometimes the people i end up making friends with turn out to be flaky vampires who don’t deserve my efforts, or else cut me out because of their own psychotic self-involvment. but even those people, i find myself wanting to reach out to them and say please let’s be friends again.
lest this become a self-pity fest, i recognize that the only thing for me to do is keep trying, keep doing what i’m doing here, namely being vulnerable and open to letting someone see me for who i am, and trusting that i can attract like minded or at least interested people only by remaining open to that possibility.
(if i were writing a story it would be important to dramatize that above sentiment, maybe even ironize it by having it not work out exactly, rather than bail out with a “telling” instead of a “showing”, but this isn’t fiction and here i’m practicing being vulnerable)
because i needed letters of recommendation for my application to Naropa, I sent my boss, who also writes, a copy of the story i’ve been submitting around, at his request for a writing sample. involving my boss in my writing was something i really really did not want to do. i didn’t send him the full story, because the punchline wasn’t exactly “work appropriate,” and even if he wouldn’t hold anything against me, it’s better that i don’t let the more, let’s say, colorful aspects of my creative output influence how my manager views me. i’ve also found examples of his writing (he mostly writes poetry) and, diplomatically, he and i don’t exactly share artistic sensibilities. as a result, i have no idea how to take his feedback seriously. is some of what he commented useful? sure, i’ll admit that. being an artist requires that i take an objective view of my work, which means sometimes admitting that someone you disagree with might have a valuable perspective on what does and doesn’t work, what is and isn’t effective, what might be “awkward” or “distracting.” but i can’t yet make changes based on the notes he’s left, because i’m still cringing over the fact that i shared the story with him at all.
then there are other comments that i’m just like, okay shut up. i don’t care about this. these details might be obfuscating or distracting to you, but they’re important to what i think the story is up to. also you can’t just say “show don’t tell”: that seems like you don’t know what else to say about something that doesn’t work for you. it’s one of those pieces of writing advice where the essence is useful, but it’s so endlessly repeated that it itself is the kind of hackneyed phrasing that the advice is supposed to work against.
anyway, once the discomfort about the whole thing wears off i’m sure the advice will help improve the story. i recognize that a quality that separates pretenders from true artists is the ability to take criticism and work with it: i’m not so egotistical to believe someone who i don’t share sensibilities with would have nothing of value to say.
in a bit here i’m going up to the used bookstore with a stack of books i’m trading in for credit. my shelves are overstuffed, because i steal books from the donation bin at the library i work at. some of the best books i have came through that donation bin: i have a copy of the Sefer Yetzirah, Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance, a paperback Library of America edition of Leaves of Grass, McLuhan’s Understanding Media, the full Moncrieff translation of Remebrance of Things Past, a complete Shakespeare and a complete Plato, among many others, all donated to the library. And before you get all uppity about me stealing books from the library, these all were either going to be sold by the Friends of the Library for between .25 and $3.00, or else would have been shipped off to some service that they sell books to by the pound. though you can judge me for the fact that most of the books i’m taking to the used bookstore for trade credit were also swiped from the Friends of the Library, so that I can leverage them into better books for my own collection. i’ll report what if anything i end up buying at the used bookstore.
finished a story draft that i know very well is going to need a lot of reworking but i have to put it away for at least two weeks before i can think about what to do with it. it’s a mess, but there are a lot of things i like about it, and i’m trying to be okay with not knowing exactly what the fuck is going on with it. today after the bookstore I’m going to get a beer and work on a different story that’s hopefully just sort of fun and easy for me to get through; i’m feeling right now that i need to aim just a little lower than i tend to in the interest of getting stories finished and practice plotting/story/description/character, before i dive back into the unwieldy mess that is the novel i’m trying to get written.
i’ll finish the rest of this after i go to the bookstore.
ok so I didn’t write this afternoon and i’m not really writing more here because the day didn’t exactly go how i hoped and i maybe drank un poco demasiado mucho pero not that much but enough to make it hard to have sex and that’s not something i’d usually divulge here but that’s the spirit of this project and such a confession makes up for me shorting this post and skipping yesterday’s.
i bought a selection of charles olson’s writings and the savage detectives by roberto bolaño with my trade credit.
so i’ve been pretty personal in the last few posts. gross. we’re not doing that this time around. no, today, we’re gonna prove, despite our strong condemnation of the Israeli government and its actions in gaza, that we are NOT anti-semitic. how are we going to do that? by demonstrating our knowledge of the jewish mystical tradition known as kabbalah!
in kabbalistic tradition, the supreme being, God in the highest form, is a principle incomprehensible to the human mind. through the kabbalistic process of reuniting with the Godhead, many practitioners, even the most advanced, fail in the final transition, and fall into madness. only by systematically shedding all that is cognizable can the practitioner approach God undifferentiated and undifferentiatible. this is the Ein Sof, אין סוף, the Limitless, that which is without Boundary. even the Ein Sof is one step removed from an even more ultimate being, Ein, Nothingness, a totalizing fullness of No-thing. for some ill-understood reason, this pleroma is moved, and in moving introduces discontent. the fullness draws inward. withdrawing inward from its full extension, Ein Sof becomes the central point in a symbolic circle; in the area between the circle and the center lies the Abyss, but an Abyss likened unto the Waters of Creation, a “crystalline chaotic sea.” once withdrawn into Ein Sof, Ein Sof withdraws and limits itself even further, into the Ein Sof Aur, the Limitless Light. when the Limitless Light undergoes tzimtzum, or contraction, space opens up in which finite existence may emanate from the infinite. this gives rise to first of the ten sefirot, or emanations of God. this first emanation is Kether, or Crown, the highest sefira. Kether is not the Godhead itself but the closest a practitioner in the finite world can hope to arrive at union with the Godhead, for it is the first manifestation out of the primordial undifferentiated, and the light of God descends from the infinite Abyss into materiality from this crown point, Kether.
the sefirot are each aspects of the Supreme Divine being. all that is in the sensible world is an expression of some mixture of these emanations. the sefirot are arranged in 3 columns and in 4 planes on the Tree of Life, a diagram of the mind of the Divine which you’ve probably seen:
emanating from Kether, on the right hand side, atop the Pillar of Mercy, is Chokmah, or Wisdom. Wisdom is the Great Father, the total experience of Kether and the Ein Sof in undifferentiated harmony, a holistic grasp of Reality. this unified recognition of the the Ein Sof as manifested in Kether then further differentiates from what was the Monad of Divinity; this differentiation is necessary for the Supreme Being to come to a rational understanding of itself. Understanding requires categorization, ratiocination, which breaks up the perfect harmony of Wisdom in Chokmah. Understanding is the third sefira, Binah, atop the left, feminine pillar, the Pillar of Severity.
the Kabbalah is an account of this process of fragmentation, of how the perfect unity of God was broken apart and scattered into the material world. the Kabbalists sought an explanation, for how this fragmentation came to be, as well as a method, for reconciling the shattered pieces of God with their original perfection. the scattered pieces of God in their totality make up the shekhinah, or the dwelling place, and the shekhinah strives to reunite these scattered aspects with the Ein Sof: the rectification of this fragmentation is known as tikkun. this rectification sounds like it’d be wonderful. who wouldn’t want to be reunited with the Divine Source of all creation? but as with much Jewish theology, there’s a dark implication: one way, perhaps the most effective way, to achieve such a reunification is via death. by extinguishing the manifestations that keep us trapped in the material realm, then the Divine Light within can dissolve back into the primordial All of the Ein Sof.
a much more arduous means for divine reunion is by painstakingly retracing the path that the Divine Light takes down from the Ein Sof to the shekhinah. After Binah, we move out of the plane of water into the plane of air. Chesed sits beneath Chokmah, on the Pillar of Mercy. Chesed is Love, the undying, unconditional, never-ending Love of God, and the devotion of the faithful for God. But balanced against Chesed, on the Pillar of Severity, is Gevurah, Strength, the unwavering judgement of God, the justification for the punishment of sin. the corresponding sefirot that sit opposite one another on the Tree of Life express the duality of divine forces: rational understanding is in a sense an inversion of intuitive wisdom, as the severity of judgement is the negative aspect of all encompassing love. were we to venture some syncretism, we might suggest that the Pillar of Mercy is yin and the Pillar of Severity is yang, though that would be confusing things a bit, since traditionally yin is feminine and yang is masculine.
next, from Gevurah, we find ourselves at a point along the middle column, the sefira with the most direct connections to the other sefirot on the Tree of Life. because of this, this sefira is associated with integration, of the synthesis for the various aspects of the Divine within the realm of actuality (the three sefirot at the top of the Tree of Life exist in an archetypal realm, a realm of potentiality). the sixth sefira is Tiferet, or Beauty. Tiferet is a reflection of Kether: it is not the perfect Monad emanating from the Ein Sof itself, but it is the integrated center of the sefirot in the realm of actuality. from Tiferet we descend to Netzach, Victory, the persistence of the Divine through and beyond Time. here as we approach the bottom of the Tree of Life, the sefirot more directly relate to the material realm, and in particular man. Netzach and its complement Hod are methods by which humanity may begin to tap into their connection with the Divine order of the Kosmos. meditating on the perpetuity of God is an important early stepping stone back up the Tree of Life towards union with the Godhead.
Hod translates as Splendor, or Glory. Hod is the hard work of submitting to God’s omnipotence. the connotation of Hod is one of grinding, of surrendering, of accepting the burden that there is nothing greater than God. prayer is associated with Hod; attempting to conquer the obstacles between oneself and Divine union is critically egotistical, but surrendering to the fact of the obstacles opens up the path of humility. Hod also embodies that force which breaks things down and makes them cognizable via language and reason: it is the mundane reflection of Binah, which is the understanding the Divine has of itself.
from Hod the Light descends into Yesod, or Foundation. Yesod facilitates the connection between the upper creative realms and that which is created in materiality. Yesod condenses and transmits the Divine Light as it has passed through the previous eight sefirot; it is associated with the phallus. The Divine Light is deposited into Malkuth, or Kingdom, namely the finite Kingdom of God as it is experienced by us.
(technically things are much more complicated than that; some sources posit that there are actually 4 realms, each with their own Tree of Life through which the Divine Light descends, meaning that there’s actually 40 sefirot.)
for the Kabbalistic mystic, union with the Godhead is achieved by working backwards up the Tree of Life, from Malkuth to Kether. the pathway I’ve described above is the “path of the flaming sword”; tracing it on the Tree of Life makes a lightning bolt pattern, and it can be seen as an allegorical flash of electricity enlivening otherwise inert material into something living. there’s lots of shit I didn’t cover here, mostly because I’m still not super clear on it: the contrast between the lesser and greater face of God, the archetypal man Adam Kadmon, the evil qlippoth that encase the sefirot on the inverted Tree of Death. this was kind of useful for me so maybe later posts will have me clarifying these more advanced topics to myself.
it’s funny that i decided to have another go today at what i wanted to talk about yesterday, publishing and submitting stories, because i got another rejection today. most of the time i don’t get discouraged but i am getting a little tired of this story being rejected. hope all those places were being honest when they so kindly and personally told me in a form rejection that it’s not about how good the story is, it’s just not a good fit for their publishing needs at the present time. not for my own edification or anything, because i really don’t care what they think, but today i used that story as the main piece of writing i submitted with an application to the MFA program at Naropa University in Boulder CO.
do i even want to go to an MFA program? i don’t know. i spent a lot of time disdaining MFAs for being scams, wastes of people’s time, and for being a product of the midcentury American empire building project enjoying the financial support of the CIA. but there’s no denying the benefits to fully devoting time to writing editing workshopping etc. so seeing if i have the option to go costs me the $60 application fee. and at Naropa at least I can take yoga classes and other woo-woo bullshit.
but submitting stories. it might be better if i stop worrying about it for now and only work on getting the stories i have finished so that i’m not just sending this one story all over the place. this morning i finally got back into fiction writing after almost three weeks out of it (due to a trip and then an illness). that story is the one that i started out just riffing on zoomer/internet slang that turned into a weird surreal thing that i felt i might have written myself into a corner on. but i think i can get out of it. something i notice about my plotting is i tend to know where i want something to go, but in the process of writing i end up somewhere totally unexpected, and then i’m faced with the choice of either scrapping what i had planned or finagling my way back to what i set out to do. with this story i didn’t have a plan so much as i had a kind of premise i was thinking of, but now i’m not sure if the premise is even good, or what. what i need to do is write more, and think less, and then if pieces don’t fit together perfectly that’s fine, but then i can shuffle elements between different stories, or take something that’s incongruous out and use it as basis for something else entirely.
fished out an old old old story i wrote that’s not at all stylistically like what i write now, not in terms of the prose anyway, and i’m not sure what to do with it, because if parts of this story that’s getting rejected everyone are alienating to publishers than this old story is even more alienating, and also it’s not as well shaped in terms of narrative/plot. but it might be worth an edit or two before throwing it around to see if i get any bites (confusing metaphors in this paragraph, fishing the story out then using it as bait?)
yesterday i had my yearly performance review that earned me a merit-based raise of 5%. my boss thinks i should really start thinking about how to embrace my role as an “emerging leader” in the organization. he at one point said “you know you’re extremely competent,” and it’s true, i know that, but i hate it about myself. i hate that i’m very good at whatever job i’m required to do because the assumption when you’re very good at whatever job it is you do is that you’ll want to further your career in that job via promotions and so on. yes i have a degree that qualifies me for advancement in library work, and yes as my boss says i can do “public library work with [my] eyes closed”–i practically do, since this i’m writing right now i’m doing at my work desk, and i can’t say i’ve really done anything beyond the bare minimum needed to keep the library operating today, and most days i don’t feel like i’m doing anything at all besides wasting my time. being competent in this job isn’t hard, i don’t feel proud about it, any dumbfuck could do what i do. (i’m thinking now about what would happen if someone who works for this library system found my blog and read this, if i’d face negative professional consequences, and in the past i might have censored myself for that reason but i don’t give a fuck any more, this library system is falling apart, the people who run it are extremely incompetent and they actively hate the people who staff the libraries. for a long time i was very careful about what i posted online for fear of alienating someone or of disabusing someone of their illusions about me, and it occurs to me now that that’s really what ends up happening when i talk about wanting to keep people in the dark about what i believe, even though in my mind what i mean is being provocative and impish and coy. really letting all this shit spool out without much concern about if it’s making sense because it’s making sense to me. but no more of this going along to get along cowardice.)
what i’m getting at is that i don’t particularly like that i’m competent or “highly analytical,” or whatever, or rather i don’t mind being those things exactly (n.b.: people are attracted to competence) but i don’t particularly want to be known for being those things. i’d rather be known for being creative or eccentric or a little unhinged, which i am, but those are sides of me that i’m very good at hiding, for fear they’ll be weaponized against me. but the only way to prevent people from relying that i’ll want to be a good little careerist is to occasionally let slip that i’m a little deranged, and i shouldn’t be counted on for anything.
(also if we haven’t all noticed, we’re adjusting the expectation of what gets done here, because i think it might be unrealistic to expect 1600 words posted and also work 8 hours at my day job and also write fiction in the morning and also read novels and also learn spanish. that’s a fine goal to shoot for, 1600, but we should be satisfied as long as some minimum is reached, and most important is posting something everyday, since i think that momentum is actually helping me, both make these minor little breakthroughs and also in keeping people engaged with my internet presence.)
probably gonna watch a movie tonight after therapy. make some tea and popcorn.
received another rejection today. my submission schedule is extremely erratic. basically once a month i send this story to 2-5 places, then never want to look at submittable again, until i remember i have to get someone to publish what i write if i want even a shot at writing regularly.
this story i’ve been submitting all year is one i like i think, but i can’t even tell any more. what little feedback i’ve gotten from venues is that they like the setting and the characters’ vernacular, but there are structural factors that make the story a little unwieldy, things i’m not willing to change about it that i recognize probably put a lot of readers off, even if they see the merits. maybe worthwhile to put that story aside for a bit and submit something else around for a while, but that would require i finish up the stories i’ve been mired on for months.
one’s a section of the novel i’m struggling to wrangle and coax. it’s a character study that only obliquely develops the larger plot, but i’m not sure how to bring it home. there’s an angle i want to take on it, that’s vindictive and cathartic and also based on how certain situations actually unfolded, but bridging that with what i’ve set up is proving difficult, though i suspect that’s because i’m just avoiding doing it. also i make it hard on myself in a practical sense, because i handwrite drafts/sketches, then type a full draft on the typewriter, then edit from that document, before ever getting the words into a word processor. also something i’m not willing to change, because i’m wary of what word processor typing does to the writing, but it’s worth noting that this might be me doing some of that self-sabotage i’m so good at.
another story is a weird first person thing that really started with me trying to use zoomer/internet language in as obnoxious way as possible, but then it took a bizarre turn where now i’m worried i wrote myself into a corner and don’t have a very good exit strategy.
so, look, honestly today’s been rough, i’m tired, and there’s more to write about this stuff, so rather than sort of half ass through it here in the half hour before i pass out i’m gonna save it, and some day job kvetching (i had a performance review today and i hate that i’m good at my job), save all that for tomorrow, take the loss for this on the day. my yoga class wasn’t very good. i’m so tired.
fuck I’m supposed to do this still? like, every day?
i’m making brownies for the first time in a while. i pulled them out a bit too early, but didn’t realize it til after i transferred them from the pan to the cooling rack. some hemming and hawing. transferred the parchment paper and brownies back into the pan and turned the oven back on. now the oven timer is beeping at me. nope, still a little underdone. typing typing typing for about a minute more, didn’t put another timer on just going by feel. this post i think might be an important one, but only for me. up til now i’ve been studiously avoiding mentioning my therapist. who likes to hear about someone’s therapist? no one! fuck “normalizing taking care of your mental health.” like, that’s great and all, (hold on brownies are done) but a real conversation about mental health would involve how social conditions are making everyone depressed anxious borderline bipolar whatever, and so when employers and corporations are all saying like, “normalize mental health!” i can’t help but roll my eyes and do the jackoff gesture.
but my therapist and i have been working on a lot of the blocks and neuroses i have about writing, why i can never finish things, why it’s hard for me to broach certain topics, what emotions i feel like i can and can’t express. i haven’t talked to her about this project yet because i haven’t seen her since starting it, but i think this is a good project for brute forcing me into facing some of the things i avoid thinking about and therefore writing. if you read me at all, i think it’s pretty obvious i feel a lot more comfortable writing about things that aren’t me, and not just because i say all the time that i don’t like writing about me. the confidence and skill that comes through when i’m, i dunno, explaining what i understand about the FTX collapse, it’s very different when i try to talk about myself. i become evasive, less playful, more vague. but what this project will inevitably run up against is: i won’t always have something to explain in a pithy way, just because coming up with something like that, and doing enough research to sound convincing, isn’t possible on the time constraint i’ve given myself. sometimes that’s what these posts will be, for sure. but today, i avoided even thinking about what i’d write because i had no idea what to write about. started this with what i was doing at the time: making brownies.
alright, the straight dope, what’s been bothering me the last few days, and not some abstracted geopolitical problem that yes is important but does not actually affect my day to day life right now. my therapist thinks when i abstract into complaining about “social conditions” or political issues that that’s me subconsciously skirting something in my psyche that’s uncomfortable, upsetting, whatever. like i mentioned yesterday, the repressed always returns, but in mutated, veiled, symbolic, or some other disfigured form. so what’s bothering me? well, the way my life is right now, no one around me, not among the people i interact with daily, face to face, in non-virtual spaces, no one has any of the same interests as me. that’s fine, i guess, i have niche, particular interests that most people don’t share. what the problem is is that i’m not someone who will be sort of arrogant, or publicly standoffish, about that fact; rather than tell people i think the books they’re reading are popular trash that offend my sensibilities, or else are works intended for children that adults shouldn’t read, i say “oh no I haven’t read it, I’ve seen it at work a lot, I know a lot of people like it smiley face.” this requires that i continually dumb myself down so as to be pleasant dinner company, and repeatedly performing that role becomes an impediment to fully being what it is i feel i am, namely, an intelligent and gifted literary artist who is overall disgusted with the present cultural and social landscape.
when my radar senses that someone, or the company i’m with, is not someone who i “vibe with,” my tendency is to half-dissociate, avoid looking at anything in particular, pay enough attention to smile or laugh or make a witty comment, but otherwise just sort of wait til i can get the fuck out of the scenario. this prevents me from being a present and fully observant person, which makes it hard to, you know, write from my experience. if my experience is always being halfway to checked out, then all the details to draw on melt into a miasmic haze of indiscernibility. why this is my tendency is not something i’ll divulge here: see, cody, writing plainly here can help you tease out what you should save for fiction! it’s working!
anyway, i recognized myself doing this, this strategic deployment of an attention deficit, last night at dinner with my girlfriend’s parents, who know the chef at a popular ojai restaurant and so chatted with him. i did not like the chef, but why isn’t important: what i realized though is that instead of depriving the situation of my attention, giving just enough to survive the interaction, what i ought to do when feeling that way is pay extremely close attention, and start tactically clowning. withdrawing is one way to create space for myself, but it’s passive, and strategically weak—there’s probably an Art of War quote to support this notion but this post i think i need to work only with my thoughts. advancing, by playing a ridiculous character, this also creates space for myself (not to mention potential writing material), but actively, assertively.
on a separate but related thread, i saw a carl jung quote in a dumb meme somewhere today, the quote about how loneliness isn’t about being physically alone, but is what happens when you feel like what you have to express won’t be understood by those around you, making the prospect feel helpless. loneliness is the isolation of perceived solipsism. and not only do i often feel lonely in this way, but also i feel it is a detriment to my prospects as a writer. great artists almost always come out of scenes where lots of other artists are thinking about and discussing ideas about art, culture, politics, together, and i don’t have that, especially not where i live, which is as culturally barren as it is geographically beautiful. it’s possible this is a me problem: i don’t look hard enough, or i don’t make myself open and vulnerable enough to potentially be surprised in places i might have already written off. i’m feeling this more acutely lately since some of the online spaces i once found stimulating no longer satisfy the need for interesting conversation, plus i’m just not sure i’m the type of person who can navigate The Internet™️ effectively. i just never really figured out how to interact with Platforms in that way. i was always a lurker and a lowbie. not that i want to be Internet Famous, but there’s not much hope for an artist these days if they don’t have connections in their industry or if they can’t independently build an audience so that agents/publishers/galleries can capitalize without doing the work that agents/publishers/galleries once did, namely help artists find an audience. i admit that part of my problem with gaining traction is that i tend to not be very consistent, but hey, this stupid project? it means i have to do this every fucking day. grindset mindset bro.
truly hate this post for how unguarded i’m being but that’s why it’s good for me. if it’s good for you, please comment, or send me an email: palmtreesonfire at protonmail dot com.
So you decided to undertake a wittle writing project for you blog. Look at you! Trying things. That’s great. But now you’re thinking “Hmm, writing is kinda hard. It’d be way easier to drink a beer or three, doomscroll for a bit (boy what’s happening in Gaza sure is bad, huh?), land on a post from one of your favorite pornstars, open up PornHub, type her name, click through the seventy billion pages of videos, most of them duplicates of one another, search for one you haven’t seen before, even though you really want one you have seen before but you pretend that porn actually helps introduce novelty into your life by showing you aspects of human sexuality you might not otherwise be exposed to, land on a video produced (have you really been watching internet porn that long?) 15 years ago, reflect how the people depicted in it don’t really even exist anymore, the intervening time so great that you are in effect watching ghosts fuck each other, the morbid reality of that realization inspiring the ambient concern that you somehow have become an ersatz necrophiliac, without even the courage to exhume a physical corpse, none of this stopping you from ejaculating some 15-35 minutes later, making a mess on your hand and in your pubic hair, at which point you pause the video, an obscene close up left on screen as you go to retrieve a tissue, and then another, and then another.”
But you didn’t do that! Good for you. Gold star. Still, you’re not sure what direction to take this wittle bitty project. So let’s brainstorm the FUCK out of some super awesome things you can do!
Dear Diary AKA The Livejournal Method
A long, long time ago (Star Wars reference), way back in the early Web 2.0 days, people blogged. What did they blog about? Their lives! Teens sat in class, ate lunch, hung out with their friends, went to rehearsal for the spring musical (Bye Bye Birdie), came home, then fired up that old Windows XP and logged into Livejournal to write about their secret crushes, how Dad and Mom took their Nokia away, whether they passed their driver’s test, and which Dashboard Confessional song they were feeling the most like that week. Obviously it’s “Saints and Sailors”:
Unfortunately, you may not be a teenager any more. Sad to say, but that’s the way of life. Yeah, part of the mystique of blogging was implanted in your mind at that age, and there’s some regret you still hang on to for not having thrown yourself more fully into the blogosphere back then, because maybe if you had, you wouldn’t be here now, long after the wave’s broken, thinking “if I just commit myself to an insane blog project maybe I can revitalize this stupid website that’s supposed to help me build an audience, even though no one reads blogs any more.” Maybe you’d have a successful podcast with people you met online 15 years ago, or you’d be published by New York Tyrant, and maybe you’d have moved to Brooklyn and met Honor Levy at some gallery opening. But that’s not what you want, is it? Do you know what you want? It’s not clear you do. Your compulsions and neuroses suggest you want to scold yourself and repeatedly subject yourself to the pain of trying methods you know will fail. You also clearly do not want to reveal too much about yourself, or else you wouldn’t have veered into this hypothetical, speaking in the second person, in the midst of the section about how one easy thing to do on a blog is to write about yourself. The repressed always returns.
Anyway, what was I saying?
Writing Advice
You’re a writer, write? Ha ha, puns. Why not offer up some hard-earned wisdom about the writing process? People always love that. Especially people who, rather than writing, spend hours searching for “writing tips.” Here, let’s give it a shot:
Everyone says the most important part of writing is sitting your butt in that chair, greasing up the typewriter with a big can of WD-40, winding some paper you stole from work into it, and click-click-clickity clacking one word after another. Doesn’t matter if the words are good, or if you don’t have any ideas, or if you’re just writing to aggrandize your ego without any concern for whether you have something worth saying, just put that work in, tiger! True, sticking to a routine helps train the subconscious to be ready to show up at the desk when you do. BUT! But. Routines suck. Am I right folks? And sometimes! Sometimes it’s just not working for you! We tend to get married to a certain system of working; sometimes more seriously than we do our spouses! Heck, if I was as committed to matrimony as I was my shitty writing routine, I wouldn’t be thrice divorced! And maybe I’d’ve actually published something by now. So let that go to show you: don’t be afraid to switcheridoo things up sometimes, you shitfucker! Usually write in the morning? Write at night! Usually write at night? Write at lunch! Usually write at lunch? Write only when the moon is in Scorpio! Don’t write at the coffee shop this week, or do write at the coffee shop! I don’t know what you do. How can I! I’m just a random internet voice! You don’t know me! Why would you take my advice?
Current Events
Since yesterday, amidst a sense of ratcheting intensity, characteristic of a regime who senses its time slipping away yet desperate to make the most of its opportunity, Israel has bombed ambulance convoys, three hospitals, five UN schools being used as shelters, and Al-Azhar University. The total Palestinian dead since Oct 7 is over 7000. That’s an average of about 10 deaths every hour.
Career Development
What do people like from content? No, it’s not to be condescended to by it. No, no, it’s not to feel disdained by a product that clearly thinks very little of their intelligence. NO it’s not a narcotic escape from the pain of self-consciousness! It’s relatability! People love things that are relatable. That’s why they’re always saying things like, “That’s so relatable!” And what’s more relatable to a literary audience than getting a story rejected everywhere it’s submitted? Sharing your successes, and, more likely, failures, with publishing is a great way to pad out your writer’s blog! Plus, it just might happen to motivate you to keep sending that stupid fucking godawful story to another shithole publication no one but the extremely niche internet literary community knows about.
Growing Your Audience
It’s important to make your blog SEO friendly so that it’s reachable by search engine chatgpt israel taylor swift travis kelce matthew perry nfl scores spirit halloween black friday world series college football hamas killers of the flower moon martin scorsese leo dicaprio lily gladstone weather amazon email youtube news facebook walmart translate calculator map wordle mlb nba instagram twitter costco elon musk joe rogan podcast donald trump ukraine zelensky joe biden antony blinken ceasefire free palestine free palestine free palestine free palestine
Literary Theory
Remember manifestos? Well, the correct Italian plural is “manifesti,” but do I look-alike my name issa Giuseppe? Whatever happened to that, huh? Writers should be more annoying in the “this art is going to destroy the suffocating provincialism of bourgeois society” way and less annoying in the….well maybe you should save all the ways writers are annoying for another post.
Writing In Spanish
Es importante cuando al aprender español escribir y hablar en la idioma todos los días. De esta manera, puedes practicar lo que sabes y reconocer las palabras or la gramática que debes repasar. Quizás tu español es malo, y quieres mejorar, o tu español es muy fuerte. Escribir en español en tu blog es una idea gran por razones muy numerosas. ¡Buenas suerte!
Other Art Endeavors
Did you see a movie and think, hey! I want to make movies! Or maybe you remembered how there are a bunch of canvases and oil paints that you haven’t touched in, god, it’s been almost four years now? Having a variety of creative outlets is fantabulous, in no small part because you can blog about them! So if you do decide to learn film production, or bongo drumming, or god knows what else your terrible attention span might latch on to, just be sure to document the process of becoming fascinated by it, then totally losing interest within a week or two, on your blog!
Alienate people by describing masturbation
Well, well, well! Seems like you’ve already done this one!
imagine the ethereal, earthy tones of a native american flute. so meditative, so calm. no better way for white people to experience the pure, indigenous connection to nature felt by those noble, majestic tribes we spent the last 400 years slaughtering. actually, perhaps there is a better way: why not play Amazing fucking Grace on the instrument? who couldn’t appreciate that?
why yoga instructors think it appropriate to include native american music at all in their class playlists is baffling to me, but then again yoga is all about syncretism. the class i heard this song in was a “yin” yoga class. “yin” is chinese philosophy. yoga is indian. like, south asian indian. not native american indian. if it were native american indian then i might understand the flute music. what yin has to do with yoga i don’t know. the class is nice though. long postures supported by blocks and bolsters where you surrender to gravity, low in active (yang) effort. really gets shit opened up, and my body was very tense after traveling over the weekend then spending the first half of the week sick on the couch. anyway it’s all love to my yoga studio, on the off chance someone sees the sticker with my blog URL on my water bottle and comes here to see me talking shit about the yoga instructor.
something this little project of mine will force me to accept is that i can’t always manage people’s perception of me. sometimes i’m gonna write something that offends people. even now as i’m thinking about this, my mind is reeling with the fear that i’ll reveal the secrets that unlock what i’m up to artistically. instead of being so plainspoken (i talk about this a lot i feel) i ought to be more oblique, more provocative. but that’s not really what a blog is for. plus there’s like, 5 people maybe who look at this anyway, so if you’re one of those people, you probably already know me. but that’s not a safe refuge, because ideally more people would read this, and it’s okay if i just say how i feel! if people don’t like it it’s fine! it’s not actually more artistically satisfying to be a sphinx all the time, and being direct here, on my blog, doesn’t preclude me from being gnomic or cryptic or hermetic or whatever in fiction. separating the two out will actually probably help rather than hinder. so if i offend you, i don’t mean to, unless i do mean to, in which case, good riddance.
tangential to this: people are facing personal or professional repurcussions for speaking out about what’s happening in palestine. curiously, the only comments i ever receive on this blog are from israeli spambots, or at least i think they’re spambots, bc if they’re not then they’re very cryptically trying to scare me that i’m being surveilled by israelis. which maybe i am. the internet is not a safe place. it was designed precisely to track and control information by intelligence and military agencies. all of which is to say, i wonder if i went really hard into talking about how israel has killed 36 palestinian journalists in the past month, would some shadowy PROMIS backdoor shut down my site? if that were so, that’s pretty cool! that little ole me poses such a threat to the zionist settler colonial death program.
back to the american settler colonial death progam, I’m about to head to the theatre to see killers of the flower moon.
obligatorily, i must admit that was the longest i’ve spent in a movie theatre, maybe ever. definitely in several years. the last “new” movie i saw in a theatre (maybe the last “new” movie i saw? idk i haven’t seen many new movies since the pandemic) was parasite.
(reminding myself that this is only the second day of this project, and it’s important that i build momentum more than anything else at this point, but goddamn i really don’t want this to be like, a “blog” of my day to day life, that’s boring, and that’s not even what i’m doing really, but whatever moving on)
the trailers that played before, all 25 minutes worth of them, only confirmed my deep conviction that martin scorsese isn’t allowed to die. who else is going to make Movies, nay, Films like this? it should be illegal to promote marvel movies before a scorsese feature. also there’s this movie, from the people who made the kingsmen movies, called argylle? and with like, john cena and bryce dallas howard and sam rockwell, and like, the most memorable thing from the trailer is the horrendous CGI cat? did CGI effects get worse in the last 10 years? it’s always been bad but jesus. the writers and SAG should have included a ban on digital effects in their contract negotiations. (there were some digital effects in killers of the flower moon, because obv it’s cheaper to fill out a scene with CGI cows than it is to get a bunch of live cows on location. I’m just saying, maybe if filmmakers/studios didn’t have the option to just “add it in post” then they’d make more deliberate choices, and maybe better films.)
but the movie. (uhh minor spoilers i guess?) the last 40 minutes is really the only section that drags a bit in an otherwise supremely tight 206 minute runtime. a few bits fall kind of flat: brendan fraser overacts. we could probably do without the indian visions of owls as harbingers of death. the references to the tulsa bombing might have been better integrated.
aside from that? an incredible picture. to think that marty’s been making movies 60+ years and still he can manage something new, something that fits perfectly alongside goodfellas but at the same time feels nothing like anything else he’s made. a work of art that grapples with the brutal realities of white supremacy, the greed and paranoia surrounding the oil industry, the complex interplay between love and fear. is there a more apt and surreal image of america than a parade with Native American “Mothers of Veterans” immediately followed by the Ku Klux Klan? a true gift. he’s not allowed to die.
still not quite up to word count on this, even less than yesterday, but i need to craft a letterboxd review.
already hung up trying to be smart, researching mechanism of action for the influenza virus. not the goal here. sure we can do that from time to time, but we’re trying to get out of our own way. quit thinking so much. you don’t have to be so smart all the time. you really aren’t even that smart you know.
so what is this? well, some nerd, don’t know when, decided that november is “national novel writing month.” which nation? presumably the US, but not going to look that up. the website for NaNoWriMo is offensive to me. as though novel writing were a yearly vacation. not surprisingly, most of the participants in NaNoWriMo (hesitation over calling them “writers”…) write young adult fantasy. in one vlog documenting a woman’s NaNoWriMo, she described the premise of her novel as twins finding a room with seven doors, each door opening onto a different world, “it’d be like if one door opens onto Narnia, another door opens onto Hogwarts.” fantasy lands created by reactionary Tories. blehh.
but what we’re doing. originally seemed like maybe it’d be a worthwhile exercise, cranking out a 50,000 word novel in a month, just to finish something, practice not caring so much about how it gets done, just so long as does get done, feel? but I had that idea on november the first, and no idea to follow. well, maybe just write prose, incanting “this is a novel” over whatever comes to pass? no. there’s a novel to work on already. and stories too. what first appeared a productive exercise then revealed itself for what it was: a distraction.
the idea stuck though, like phlegm in sinuses still flushing out influenza virus. last year we set out to create a drone track every day through the month of december. but we’re a writer first, so why not do something similar, but with text? so we’re writing every day. ideally a total of 50,000 words. here on this blog. whatever it takes. reflections, screeds, explanations, games, exercises, prophecies, sermons, diary entries, raps, reviews, complaints, riffs, whatever else.
throat aches. hurts to swallow. it’s hard to get a KN95 properly sealed around my face, with my bony narrow nose, so when I’m sucking a Ricola, herbal exhale rushes through the gaps into my eyes. like skiing in the alps without goggles. ahhhhh. getting over the flu. early yesterday, I spent hours lying on the couch, doing nothing. sleeping maybe 25 minutes. I wondered how I would ever feel better again. do I wake up one morning rid of the headache, the bodily fatigues, the shivers and fever? do symptoms gradually fade away? will life always be this miserable? late morning I was sweating and hot. sat outside to read in the sun. slightly uncomfortable, but I forced myself. 10 pages. that’s 15 minutes. the sun, it’s good for you! (no idea why I think this.) and you know what? I was right! I went inside, showered, and realized, hey! I think I’m getting better! just like that! fever’s gone, less fatigue, I can practically skip around the house! the flu comes on and departs rapidly, unlike the plodding inevitability of a cold.
the mechanism of action for the influenza virus is thus: as everyone know, flu travels on droplets and aerosols expressed when someone talks, coughs, sneezes, or breathes. these particles can travel up to two meters before they fall onto some surface, where they can persist for some time, depending on the surface. when an influenza virus successfully lodges in the mucosa membrane of the upper respiratory tract, buddy, you’re fucked. that’s why you’re not supposed to touch your face. me, though, I fucking love rubbing my eyes. no greater physical, nonsexual pleasure. well maybe eating when really hungry. whatever. sometimes you have to make ridiculous claims for the rhetorical effect. look I don’t always speak super precisely, okay? fuck you! who ever said language was precise anyway? language is a paltry, pathetic attempt to make sense of a fundamentally insensible situation known as the cosmos. the cosmos are much more than what we perceive, and therefore way way way much more than what we can say. so don’t expect words to be exact. we aren’t adherents of the ‘correspondence theory’ around these parts, alright? fucking vulgarians, that crowd. though the characterization just now that language is an attempt by humans, that’s not exactly right either. way too much agency granted to humans by that framing. language infects humanity, infected humanity a long time ago, and we are mutated by it as much as it is mutated by us, via antigenic drift/shift. a symbiotic relationship that seems, frankly, in the long run, more parasitic than symbiotic, and not to the benefit of humanity. at least, that’s what the current era seems to suggest. we may yet find some balance, something to ground us again.
whew really coming out the gate hot with this huh! already talking about language as a virus are we! maybe shouldn’t haved watched that not-very-good documentary about bill s burroughs yesterday! it’s not very good because often it’s not very interesting getting a peek at the lived world of a writer. it only titillates the voyeurs and the faithful. plus the production is kind of whatever. it’s hard to understand what burroughs is saying a lot of the time. better just to read the books, and if you’re really set on it, maybe a biography. what’s up with that barry miles anyway? how’d he get stuck doing all the hagiography for the beats? seems like a bum gig. but what do i know.
when i was in the sun reading yesterday, what i was reading is The Man in the High Castle. pretty damn good book. dick is a weird writer, and I don’t mean he writes about weeeiiiirdd stuff, man. he does, that’s true. but he’s a strange case because the writing itself is kind of unremarkable. he sometimes lands a nice line, sometimes gets the prose to sing, but more often you can sense that he wrote a ton due to financial pressure and also thanks to all that sweet, sweet 60s speed he was gobbling up. numnumnumnumnum. mmm, benzedrine. where would the twentieth century be without it? but because of all that, he doesn’t seem the most attentive self-editor. he earns a lot of credit for how prophetic the ideas are, but as like a literary artist…i dunno. i’m torn. a lot of really reputable writers really love him; bolaño was a big fan. i read somewhere without citation that pynchon read a lot of dick.
ok but! but! i didn’t bring this up to say i don’t like PKD! I like PKD! The Man in the High Castle is very good, much funnier than i anticipated, and up to very weird metatextual shit i wasn’t entirely expecting even though i knew about it coming in. to say the novel is an alternate history where the axis won wwii really does it a disservice. that’s the plot premise, sure, but it uses that as a base for a deeper exploration of artifice vs reality, fiction vs nonfiction. the way fake historical artifacts resonate with the plot’s premise, and how the plot’s premise is double inverted with the in-world alternate history novel that’s about what if the allies won wwii? incredible. it’s also great to see PKD riff on his usual questions, like how does fantasy conflict with reality, is there a difference between fantasy and reality, in a setting that places them on a little firmer politco-historical grounds. i’m about halfway through.
another reason I’m doing this is because with the genocide of the palestinian people going on, it’s hard to feel like my dumb little writing projects deserve my attention. but it’s not like anything changes if i don’t write, so i should keep writing.
it’s a struggle to not care too much about what this is. also a bit of a struggle to get to the word count goal. calling this one for today. we’ll see how this goes: don’t anticipate it all being like this. we want to get some range here. we love NaNoWriMo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
