Two New Short Stories

...are on Brute Press.

Go. Read.

I won't say anything about them, except I was inspired to finally release these to the world by the Supreme Court upholding the indefinite detention of prisoners deemed "sexually dangerous". This obviously means rapists and pedaphiles, but despite these real criminals being dangerous, the court opinion still uses the oblique phrase "sexually dangerous". Dangerous via sexuality? Dangerous to sexuality? Exceptionally dangerous in a sexual way? Or dangerous because their crimes are linked to irrepressible sexual urge? The Supreme Court doesn't make a distinction.

This country is no stranger to locking up "sexually dangerous" people for any of these interpretations of the phrase. Now they can do it beyond a court of law, because folks, the danger here, is of a "sexual" nature.

So in honor of being un-concretely "sexually dangerous", I give these stories (and especially one of them) to the world. Nothing that hasn't been written about before. Maybe nothing you haven't done before. Two stories you haven't read before.

Thinking of the children,

Adam

Atemporality/Marx: a Brutalitarian Feature

This is totally a Brutalitarian article. It wasn't even planned to be a blog post but then got too long, like many articles that eventually head over there. But, because it is crucial to my ever-increasing musings on atemporality and cyber-time, I thought, you know what, why not cross-post it to the blog? More people read my blog. They can look at my other fun stuff here. And then, if they really like it, they can head over to Brute Press to download the free PDF and ODF version of the article. So here ya go, a Brutalitarian article on Welcome to the Interdome.

There is also another new article on The Brutalitarian, also semi-related to matters of time and space, but more about poetry. This one will NOT be posted here. So you gotta go to the source for that one. Like, click here man. Enjoy--if anybody does enjoy this sort of thing other than me.

Atemporality and Marx's World-History

By Adam Rothstein

Published in The Brutalitarian, by Brute Press

Oct.1st, 2009

www.brutepress.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Read/Download this article in PDF format

Read/download this article in ODF format

“No matter whose books we've read, we're the children of capital; the love of speed is ingrained in us.”

- N+1

Certain things are appreciable whether or not we've really stopped to study them in detail. The days pass into days, whether we are asleep or awake. But there is mistrust of the progressions, an alienation from the day-to-day pattern of metered movement. We become detatched from time, from history, from others, and from ourselves. Perhaps we can get back on the spinning circle, but there will always be that separation. The segments change their length, or we perceive them to do so, whether we study them carefully, measuring them with complex physical instruments or simply with our untrained eye. Sometimes it seems nothing will ever meter out correctly, return when we expect it to, or take as long or short a time as we wish.
But then other times, we feel as if everything is precisely right. We pick up speed, and with this intensity we feel ourselves oscillating correctly. We couldn't put a number on the speed, or measure it relative to anything. It becomes an irrelative sense of time, relevant to itself and everything we see, but focused in our perception rather than our natural systems of measurement and thought. There is speed, and then there is the sensation of speed. These happen again and again, throughout our lives, and throughout history.

“Time is out of joint, time is unhinged. The hinges are the axis around which the door turns. Cardo, in Latin, designates the subordination of time to the cardinal points through which the periodical movements that it measures pass. As long as time remains on its hinges, it is subordinate to movement: it is the measure of movement, interval or number. This was the view of ancient philosophy. But time out of joint signifies the reversal of the movement-time relationship. It is now movement which is subordinate to time. Everything changes, including movement. We move from one labyrinth to another. The labyrinth is no longer a circle, or a spiral which would translate its complications, but a thread, a straight line, all the more mysterious for being simple, inexorable as Borges says, 'the labyrinth which is composed of a single straight line, and which is indivisible, incessant'.”

- Deleuze, preface to “Kant's Critical Philosophy”

Kant defined time as one of the foundations of transcendental idealism, the other being space. By having these ideals built into the framework of our consciousness, we were able to comprehend and perceive individual objects within time and space. Time was not something simply to be measured, to count in units of seconds and minutes. Time was an infinite length, the passage of which could be divided into units, but only as small subsets of a particular mental acuity. You must feel timeliness, in order to measure the passage of time. In human consciousness, there is a feature of time sensation, which must first exist purely, and then may be quantified. No extent occasion of time exist without it being a fragment of the ideal timeliness. In this way, 12:12 PM on December 21st, 2112 cannot happen more than once, because if you exist at that point in time, you would not confuse that moment with any other moment in history. (A tongue-in-cheek example, to be sure.) Space works in the same way; by every instance of physical, three dimensional space being a portion of the overall concept of space, you can be sure that two solid objects cannot exist in the same time and the same place.
From these transcendentally ideal concepts, we are able to measure the sequence of time and space in ideal units. Because we can think of the extension of a moment into a precise length, which we call a second, we can then measure one second succeeded by the next, and so forth. We can think of the extension of space in a precise length, which we call an inch, and then we can measure one inch succeeded by the next, and so on.
Through Kant, we can see that whereas we naturally think of movement—the measure of space in conjunction with a measure in time—actually requires the ideal concepts of space, and more importantly, time, before it can be perceived. We think of a ball traveling through space requiring physical space as its fundamental requirement for motion. But in actuality, before we perceive it in space, moving or not, we first require within us the sensation of time, because time is internal to us, as much as space is external. Things must be existent in duration, before they can exist in space.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”

-Marx, Thesis on Feuerbach, XI

Movement is change, our way of noticing difference over time. Difference over time, as we make note of it and remember it for ourselves, is history. Marx was interested in history, and specifically, interested in rescuing it from the tradition of German Idealism, born out of thinkers like Kant, who drove us to look internally for our interpretations of the world. Marx wanted us to look back to the outside world, to society, and to history, but naturally he could not completely leave behind the internal world of our transcendental faculties.
Marx's four fundamental conditions of history are simple, and take root in such material idealisms as basic as time and space to the world of perception and intuition. There are human needs, and with human needs, develop more specific needs. Then there are humans themselves, each existent and fundamentally differentiated from each other as they reproduce; and then more humans, as they run into each other and interact. These humans and their needs must arrange themselves as they seek to fulfill themselves, and so end up with a system of relations between needs, the diversification of needs, humans, and the co-operation between them to negotiate this historical sphere, which we call society.
A need is an attachment to a particular thing more than it is a hole to be filled, as we tend to think of it simply. We may have a hunger for food at a particular time, but the need itself is a desire for food, refracted into beams of light, each shining at a particular time when bent off from the whole of desire. Certain things are illuminated, and then darkened again, but the desire continues within us. We form connections, and then they break off, and perhaps form again in another location or time, driven by the engines of desire constantly running. These connections may be with food itself, or with the land required to grow the food, or with the other humans whose help we require to grow it. This network of connections is constantly oscillating, breaking and then renewing itself, as we travel over our known territories in the material world, moving through physical space and time. Marx calls the connections relations, and equates them with the ideality of language, something appearing only in our consciousness. In his day he assumed only humans (or as he writes, men) had the capacity for communication, and while with idealized communications he may be correct, we have since learned that even bacteria communicate with each other to co-ordinate their needs in space and time. There are millions upon millions of interactions and connections breaking and re-establishing between the teeming life on this planet, all of them furthering the cause of material life.
But Marx wants to juxtapose the material relations with the social relations, because as he sees correctly, there is a distinct breakage occurring between these two, a rhythm that cannot seem to re-establish itself, a timing perpetually out of joint. Nature, the physical world opposed to our mental worlds, “appears to men as a completely alien, all-powerful and unassailable force, with which men's relations are purely animal and by which they are overawed like beasts,” (German Ideology, 51). Nature and the physical world, does not always adhere to our mental conceptions of it, because our understanding of our ideal faculties is an ongoing process. As such, we oppose nature as a force opposed to our knowledge of it, and we seek to master it as best we can. We develop natural religions, using magic and fetishes and other forms of esoteric knowledge in the attempt to affect the world as best we can. Our desires are routed through our limited knowledge of the stars and the seasons, and blood and other vitreous humors, and the basic social arrangements of the family, the village, the power of humans over humans, and what other sorts of relations as we can devise. We re-territorialize ourselves to our land and each other, organizing our relations through ideas, and our relations with ideas, hoping to somehow overcome this alien force.
And this is simply the beginning. In our effort to reterritorialize, we split our mental and physical efforts into categories, breaking our inherent knowledge of space and time from our measures of physical space and time, separating our needs from our actual work to procure the responses to these needs, and dividing humans and their labors from each other to create new regimes of desires, territories, production, spaces, and times. The division of labor as Marx would have it, but as we are beginning to see, it is something much more cosmologically complicated than that.
Very cosmologically complicated, and of course, we get confused. In the arising regimes of relations, the alien sensation of Nature becomes dislocated, de-territorialized, and routed through different stations and pathways. The productions of product, desire, ideas, and relations become more complicated, and difficult for our minds to hold on to. “The social power, i.e. the multiplied productive force, which arise through the co-operation of different individuals as it is determined by the division of labor, appears to these individuals, since their co-operation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they thus cannot control, which on the contrary passes through a peculiar series of phases and stages independent of the will and the action of man, nay even being the prime governor of these,” (German Ideology, 54). The social forces have supplanted the minds which brought them about, and its controlling regime is more powerful than those who invented it. Our measures of space and time, and production and people, and desires and relations, are now more powerful our own interior, fundamental concepts of these things. What matter is your sense of time if you are late for work? Who cares about where you consider home if your mortgage is due? What difference does your skill make if you cannot find a job? What is suffering in comparison to GDP? What is sex in relation to society? Who are our friends, next to the power of our enemies? We are alienated from ourselves mentally, and therefore physically, because we cannot orient ourselves to a world that refuses to acknowledge us. Our ideals will never catch up with the physical world, because our conception of the physical world will not allow itself to be caught.
It was a natural religion which first attempted to change the regimes of ideals to match the natural world. Then, it was the State, which for convenience sake, absorbed all territoriality to itself. The it was Capitalism, and the market, which proved itself more efficient and lucrative than even the State. Will we ever catch up? Is it possible to catch up? Or should we listen to Marx, and try to find a new sort of rhythm?

“Capitalism is a bet about tomorrow—and it's always the same bet. Tomorrow will be “better” than today. More wealth will be created, more resources will be used, and, excepting recessions, the economy will continue growing forever. The bet takes the form of credit and investment—you lend or invest a sum today to get back a larger sum tomorrow, because tomorrow there will be more of everything (except oil, old-growth forest, et cetera).”

- N+1

Few, other than the lovely N+1 publication of course, are actually interested in review the ideal relations we have regarding our material conditions. It is a big project of course, and there is little way to tell when we are right in diagnosing a neurotic pathway of our consciousnesses, forever banging its head into some material wall because of something territorialized wrongly in one of those less-than-conscious pathways and relations. We can tell when we're banging our heads of course, but why? And what will make it stop? Who knows, right?
But on the other hand, we have no trouble keeping up with the speed of the times. Change is constant, and we're on top of that. We can adapt to the newest technologies without batting an eye, and we can be the early adopters, who go out and write long treatises and tutorials for our friends, with no motivation other than helping everyone out, and helping us reterritorialize to a new geography of ideas, spread over a material network moving at an incredible rate of speed. We can make social-tools of connection and communication a radical part of our lives, for whatever benefit there might be. Is there a benefit? Who knows, but we certainly won't be left behind when we all find out. We'll be there, and be on the forefront, in the vanguard of... what is it? Ah yes, an archaic term—history. We will be the ones making a change, and we won't even have to change, because change will become what we are, moving at the speed of thought.
But this is not real movement. This speed we think we are feeling is just an ideal increase of our time ideal. It is a sensation of always being in the present, and of history increasing its speed, and of us hanging on for dear life. But we are not moving. Society is much the same as it ever was, and it is only our relative sensation of speed which has decreased. As we shrink our quantitative segment of time, we assume, according to our material model of the world, that we are speeding up. We are not going faster, only our world is getting smaller. We are completely ignoring our acuity for ideal timeliness, and focusing on the passage of quantitative time segments before our eyes. We have rejected the ideal realm completely, and look to society for what we should think and feel. We have thrown away the idealism of Kant, instead trusting our most basic empiricism, as dictated to us by societies regimes. Society says Twitter is new, Twitter is fast, and Twitter is hot. But does it ever say why? Some completely ignore this toy train, but others grab a hold of it, shrieking with delight at the speed they are told they are feeling.
Marx would be appalled that we have become so propertyless, and yet our consciousnesses tell us we are rich. We have less, and are told it is more. History is stretched out to the breaking point, and we are told we are moving faster than ever before. We are so used to being deterritorialized, and having our world dragged out from under us, that we barely wake, instead just rolling over and going back to sleep.
And yet, the world is changing. We have new realms for society to inhabit, electronic realms that are virtually infinite in size. Our ideal concept of space itself becomes irrelevant to these sorts of connections and relations. Our ideal concept of time is left at the station, unable to feel any sort of time in relation to instant communication. Perhaps it is a state of constant deterritorialization, except that there are all these connections being made. All of this progress—perhaps not in a direction, or with any measureable rate of change, but change all the same. There is something happening, but we are not sure what. We connect, and others connect, and we engage, and we share, and we co-operate, and we produce, to what? What sort of production is this? The division of labor has grown into a division of cosmology, and one industry of cosmological progress cannot unify itself with the others.
The history, left confused and spinning in the dust, catches onto a gear and is pulled again into the machine. It is spread out, stretched, and multiplied, found in the strangest of places. In an article off in a corner of the Internet, an unnamed author calls out a particular social relation, explaining how it is a dirty trick, taking advantage of its participants for the benefit of a few individuals. Elsewhere, in a multi-party discussion on a web page, conclusions are offered about the future of a particular technology for connecting individuals across the world in archivable discussion. And then somewhere else, a particular person discovers a way to broadcast her personal opinion to a large number of people from her cell phone. She does so, serendipitously mentioning these two previous things, which she just so happened to witness unfolding on the Internet. Then, in a month, when the previously mentioned technology becomes available, someone searching for information about it happens across the old posts, and sees the evidence of the social injustice, and begins to test a third-party app for protesters to use with the new technology. The rest, as they say, is history.
But what sort of history is this? A history that is taggable, multi-user, archivable, constantly evolving with new uses and new developers, the very accessible fabric of which is constantly under revision, restructuring, retirement, and rerouting. Every person whose thought is routed through these series of connections becomes a part of this history instantly, though in what quantitative measurement, and to what isolated, casual effect is impossible to say. But there is an effect, there is no doubt about it.

“The real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections. Only then will the separate individuals be liberated from the various national and local barriers, be brought into practical connection with the material and intellectual production of the whole world and be put in a position to acquire the capacity to enjoy this all-sided production of the whole earth (the creations of man). All-round dependence, this natural form of the world-historical co-operation of individuals, will be transformed by this communist revolution into the control and conscious mastery of these powers, which, born of the action of men on one another, have till now overawed and governed men as powers completely alien to them.”

- Marx, in The German Ideology, 55

We always seem to return to our history. Only now our history is globalized, but split into fragments, not determined by the national and local lines of our previous history. It is stratified, but its stratification is one of connections, not of divisions. Our connections will not unify our history, but they can make a divisive rift impossible to maintain. Once the center could not hold, but now it is the splits and segments that will always shatter. The network is always on, and always connecting. Access is the principle, rather than the exception.
Our ideal concepts of time and space may just return, once the quantitative segments we have replaced them with in our minds refuse to stay ideal. Those primary principles will help us form territorializations and connections rather than needing to be paved over. What is the day to a world constantly online? What is a border to an anonymous chat? The real ideals may return, and we will remember than time is anything contemporaneous, and space is anything simultaneous, and with ideal time and space, flows ourselves. We will no longer feel society condensing us to singularities of infinite speed, but feel ourselves expanding to moments of pure totality, as far as we can reach. We can't connect with everything it the world, but we will have occasion to connect with the right things, the positive things, and that which can help us all, cooperatively. The infinite will return to its proper place inside us, and we will be free to engage with the finitudes of space and time in the world. We can deal with finite needs, finite desires, and finite space and time in which to affect them. We can make the proper connections and territorializations, not simply unified or totalized connections with regimes of control. The ideal will be brought back into proper relation with the material, and while it will never be a unified partnership, the alienation will stop shifting from one side to the other, and can be parceled out as it should be. There will be no moment of eternal, ahistorical self-consciousness, but rather a continuous unfolding and production of timeliness against time, and existence against space, and world-historiality against the tragedies of history.
It remains on the “real ground of history,” the surmounting of ideal and material obstacles by human beings. It is production, and relation, and resolution, and consumption combined into movement, the pure movement of ideal space over ideal time, and therefore, material space over material time. It is a passing-over, a constant presence of returning, a timeliness in atemporality, and a existential nonexistence in our spaces and bodies. By feeling the speed within us, we can properly measure it outside of us, not for a unification of quantitative segments with any particular regime, but to build from the segments something we can use.
But, Marx and Kant both knew its not something that exists apart from us. Technology dramatically changes the world, but only inside our heads can we really change ourselves. And then, once we have become the change in ourselves, perhaps there will be material change we can notice.

Entering the Marketplace

Tomorrow morning I'll be out at the Portland Saturday Farmer's Market, on the south park blocks downtown. I'll be trying to sling some merchandise, which I haven't tried to do since living in New York. Didn't work too well in the big city, because people are way too good at ignoring people. Even (and especially) when you're trying to give stuff away for free!

But I'll have a bunch of stuff in PDX this time, where people can't help but hand you cash for fine-crafted printed goods, so come on down and find me. I'll have the full set of screenprinted "Found Note" prints ("Invasive Species" pictured lo-fi to the right), a new two-color print, "Compressor" (awesome!), as well as the old Brute Press swag: zines and books. If you've wanted a copy of the two Welcome to the Interdome zines I made, now is your chance.

I've really been digging me some screenprinting. Complete, quality printing, in my own basement. If had a screen fine enough to handle 12pt. text, I would totally print an entire book using it. Well, maybe. But what I totally am printing are a series of awesome stuff I've found, from some old pen & ink drawings of mine, to some re-purposed engineering diagrams, and some scans from a 1918 German surgery text (this are especially gnarly). You'll see me with more of these over the coming weeks, as I scrape enough cash together for the up-to-8-color prints I'm envisioning. I really do like screenprinting. I'll also be experimenting with some broadsheets and cut-ups of blog material, and other stuff. None of these designs have really come together quite yet, but I'm still excited for the future.

But tomorrow, I'll also have copies of Open-Faced Mushroom Blastocyst, which will be free! Yes! A book for free! Just ask!

Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled rants, and miscellany. All hype-machining now back to Twitter.

More about the Brute Press, which you care about

I made a major style change to Brute Press, eliminating the occasionally irritating formatting, improving the font (thank you, serifs), and getting rid of the unneeded and excessive categories and organizational modes.

If that isn't a good enough reason to head right over there and check out some FREE LITERATURE, then how about

TWO BRAND-NEW SHORT STORIES!!!

"As the Man Said" is a fun piece about some kids. It's hot off rejection at a small, online lit mag, whose editor told me, "What didn't work is that, for me at any rate, there wasn't enough of a story here." How's that for praise? I could describe it more, but it's short and I'd give away the awesome part, which of course, is that there is no story in the story. Yep. A lot of works about nothing, apparently.

"On Fire" was born from a need to write a story about cars. This one was rejected from a lit mag too, but without any awesome criticism to totally make me see the error in writing stories about nothing. This means, through the obvious inverse, that something definitely happens in this story.

Well, there you have it. Brute Press: stuff happens, and is now 50% easier to read.

Now Is The Time To Establish Moon Bases!!!

So, I was preparing a long post about Sci-Fi and SF, and the future of literature, but it got way too long for a blog post, and I was dreading trying to find pictures for its entire, narrow length.

But luckily, that means it became a Brutalitarian article! Now there is only one picture at the top.

You can read about human capacity for the speculative, the death of form and plot, and the routing of busty Sci-Fi sidekicks by the forces of cyber-time here.

Also! There are two new short stories on Brute Press as well. Both are very short, and very speculative. One is about a piece of paper. That's it. Just a piece of paper. The other is a short piece of action/fantasy involving wetsuits, protazoan light sources, and sexy tentacles. Just for fun, and because I thought it up.

You can read "With Due Warrant" here.

You can read "Around Me, Dark Tentacles" here.

I'm finding my sci-fi-leaning work getting shorter and shorter. Largely in line with the arguments I put forward in the Brutalitarian essay: it seems difficult to advance a long SF plot without straying into territory that has been covered elsewhere, and by others. That's okay though. The short stuff is fun. Also, if you don't have to spend a long time figuring it out, you can write more of it, and more like a fun exercise or a break. And besides, who wants to read a long cephalopod romance/action/adventure novel?

I sure wouldn't. Nope.

You can read a few more author notes about each piece on the front page of Brute Press, if you're interested.

On the Efficacy of Free Novellas...:An Author's Note

I feel like the novella gets shit on... a lot. Sure, maybe it is unpublishable by itself, unless you are Melville House. (Isn't that the most retarded name for a publisher you have ever heard? Yeah, I get it. It's stupid.) But there is also all this, "it's not a short story, it's not a novel, so what the hell is it?" bullshit. What is that supposed to mean? What is anything? Is a mini-van a car or a bus? It has to be one of them!

I think a good 75% of what I know about writing short stories comes from Philip K. Dick. I'm not going to dig out the introduction to something-or-other in which he said, this, so I am going to paraphrase. And maybe he didn't even say it. But that doesn't matter, because I think he said it, and also it holds true for his stories.

He said, (so I say): "A novel is a story in which you get to know a bunch of character's involved in a situation, and watch them play it out. A short story is a story so short you barely have time to get to know one character, and kind of figure out his situation."

Great! So what do you do if you have a few characters, and you have maybe half of a situation you want them to play out? You write a novella. Isn't it obvious? There are some ideas that are too long for a short story, and hence, are not short stories. If you have multiple characters, or a character doing a whole sequence of things, you do not have a short story. But if the plot is not a clear narrative, or if there is only one and a half characters, or if there are any sort of complications in the typical "a bunch of people do stuff and change" novel format, then you sure as shit don't have a novel. What do you have? You have Salinger's later writing. You have many of Kafka's works. You have Dostoyevsky's The Double. You have Thus Spake Zarathustra, if Nietzsche had known when to stop writing. You have real good literature, not selling itself short, or with delusions of gradeur.

Not to say that Open-faced Mushroom Blastocyst is anything close to these works. (Okay, I think it's a better read than Zarathustra. It had better be!) But I think there is a lot of life in the novella as a form of literature; and furthermore, there are some stories that simply are novellas, despite their attempts to be anything else. My other novella I have finished (I'm actually editing a third), Scab Suite, is actually four short stories, involving the same two characters. Maybe it should even be only one or two short stories, but it is a suite, and they would not work individually with the others.

OFMB was always a novella, however. From the very point of inception. You have a character who is no more than a channel for all the mythology, angst, desire, and paranoia necessary for the founding of a eschatological religion, a love interest whose main role is to play the archetypical love interest, and a entire epic's worth of hallucination and death drive imagery. You sure don't have a short story or a novel. Bingo--your seventy-some pages are pretty much a tailor made novella.

I had a lot of fun writing this. It came very easily. The plot was hashed out at the very beginning, and the gaps just kind of came together as I was writing. Of course, it is not the most readable thing ever. There are parts of it that should not be easy to read--such an experience as the one the character is undergoing are not easy to get through. Hopefully, if I did it right, it will be just hard enough for the reader so that s/he reacts to the text correctly. Well, we'll see.

I decided to release this story in versions--inspired by the "unbook" hypothesis, and others around the Internet who are writing about new POD models and forms. I'm not sure what the response will be to this book, or if there will be one. But because it is sort of an unconventional strategy for a piece of writing (novella form aside, large-scale hallucination is not something as easy to write as it would seem to be), I thought I would try and experiment towards the version direction on the publishing side of things. And that's why I'm giving the book away free. Yes! Hopefully to get as much feedback as possible, I printed up a number of copies at my own expense, and I am giving them away. So far no one has asked for one. That's okay, I guess. There is an awful lot of writing available for free at the present. But hey! They're still here.

I also drew the cover. This is the second cover, for the second novella, both of which I sat down without knowing what to draw. And both of them came out really well, I think. Want to see it closer? Send me your address--I'll send you a copy for free!

This ended up being a note more about the form of the work than it's content, which is cool, because this is probably more important to note than what occurs in the book. However, if you are still on the fence about whether you want to read it, here's a bit about it:

OFMB is an unfolding apocalypse; it is a narrative of specialist, revealed knowledge about the construction of the cosmos and those who dwell with in it, fighting for control. It is a timeless description of orgiastic, organic brith trauma, told through the drug-addled, self-forgotten, fated romance of young persons who don't know a goddamn thing about breeding. They are the prophets of an age that has lost all powers of theological inscription, and must instead start the painful process of learning again to carve the battle messages of the ghostly forces writhing within the unconscious upon their brains and bodies, with their dripping flow of paranoiac ink. Is it a game? Or is it a dream? Neither. It's just a story.

Cool? Cool. Find it, and the other two short stories at www.brutepress.com.

"It Had Better Hurt... or What's the Point?": Author's Note

Most of my writing ideas are inspired by a sensation, or an experience, which often I write down quickly in the form of a vignette, and then go back later to think about themes to develop, or characters and plot. Some I never return to, and they form a lovely little quilt of bizarre thoughts and notions, which hopefully I save and accumulate until they, in their totality, prove worthy of some sort of use.

I could talk about the inspiration for this story, "It Had Better Hurt... or What's the Point?" because I clearly remember it, but the idea was the ending, and I don't want to give it away.

Instead, I'll talk about developing some of the themes.

Pain has always been very interesting to me, especially pain in the context of pleasure--so accordingly, sex. There are also volumes and volumes about this topic, so I'll spare you the theory and the metaphysics.

I wanted to write about pain and sex, but not from the purely metaphysical side, like Freud, and not simply from the vague "thrill" of writing about something deemed by some people to be explicit, like Sade, or countless others. In fact, I wanted to keep arousal as far away from the writing as possible--clearly that in itself can be a very fun game, but I don't really have the need to share my sexuality with the world (most of the time).

I've tried to approach this subject and failed, several times. These attempts should probably be destroyed, to save someone the grief of ever accidentally stumbling upon them, but I can't do things like that, and I won't. But all the same, I didn't have anything written I felt good about.

Approaching this story with a character who is quite young and who's inexperience is manifested in excitement seemed to be the key for me. I love how teenagers will babble incessantly about sex--they say some really funny things if you listen to them. Once you grow older you either stop talking about sex, or always talk about it in the same ways. You learn a vocabulary, and you learn phrases, and you learn ways of enunciating and stepping around the actual description, "....you know what I mean?" If you ever are so lucky to happen to overhear a fifteen or sixteen year-old first using the word, "cunt" to actually, qualitatively describe the female genitals, try and remember it, because it is truly a beautiful thing. Not because of the sexual content, but precisely because of the lack of it. S/he is testing out the word, fitting it between the thought and the lips (the verbal lips, jerk) for the first time, to see it it works correctly. Like watching someone first pick up a tool and make something correctly. The experience is even better for the speaker, but of course you don't realize it at the time. It's somewhat like having sex for the first time, not actual coitus, which is polluted with a thousand social connotations of very little use, but more like the first experience of oral sex, or manual sex--like a small fragment broken off, the ache of a splinter in the skin, something that sticks with you for the rest of the day, or even the week. Do you remember the first time you ever talked dirty in bed? You might remember that. A whole different sort of rush than having sex, a certain, "those words are coming out of my mouth!" and getting used to how it sounds.

I couldn't use the word "cunt" in the story--that was too explicitly what I was going for, and besides, it would be me using the word, no matter how I tried to write it, and not the character. But the character could say a ton of other things, awkward, teenage, overly-excited things, rushing out of his lips before he thought about them, and each one warming his face with the glow of stolen liquor. That sort of sexuality has a power to it because it is limited by time--and no one can hold onto it forever. You can tell he's is rushing back to his room, because no matter how sure he convinces himself that he is, she might not be there when he gets back.

It's this sort of ebullient, quiet panic I was trying to develop--the sort of nervous tension that can drown inhibitions as well or better than the warm beer you are probably drinking out of the can. The body's own pushing upward, a welling intensity, causing the the teeth to bite on the lip or neck so the hips can feel the spasm, caught against bone and muscle, like two young bodies enveloped in the tight dance of two people who are so obvious going to get it on, sucking so much face that you wish they would just go do it already, because it is a painful memory to those who have moved on, already gone and bought the beer so many times that now we buy it at the grocery store, because our sexuality has moved on to a different stage, like a butterfly looking at a cocoon with slight disgust at it's crusty, unflying sheen.

Some people have moved on from this stage--but then again, there are some people who never get there. The ending of the story has a thousand different parables and messages within it. But after all, that is the point, now isn't it?


Stay tuned for the last post, an author's note on the novella which is newly available, just like the short stories, from www.brutepress.com.

"The Bridge": an author's note

So, read anything good over the weekend? Like, any of the stuff on Brute Press?

Nah, it's cool. I mean, don't worry about it too hard--like whenever you get around to it, you know.

But in case you were wondering why you should read it, if those single line descriptions didn't grab you, I thought I might wax at length about the three fiction pieces I put up.

You might remember that a little while ago I mentioned, oddly enough in the act of talking about my writing, that I never talk about my writing on Welcome to the Interdome. Well, pah! Who else am I going to talk to about my writing? The dinosaur and My Little Pony on my desk? No--they are far too caught up in their delightfully naughty inter-unreal-species love affair to care about me. So that leaves you, gentle blog reader.

Besides, if you are reading my blog, there's a good chance you might enjoy my fiction as well. Of course, it doesn't tackle such wonderfully timely issues that relate to the very real world of the Internet, new models of digital production, and death drives in the free market system... or does it? What is there about memory and speculation about the experience of death that could relate to the way we cognize our living death drives in the world? What is there in the ecstatic joy of teenage sex that could inform us about our political communication in the age of digital culture? What is there in the depths of our daily psychotic breaks with phenomenological escatology that could help us interact with literature, both that which we create, and those that we read?

What? Don't get it? Think I'm merely posting an obscure billboard for my own self-promotion? You're right, on both accounts! Let me begin to explain it to you...

The Bridge, a short story by Adam Rothstein, available on Brute Press

The original image I was working with in this story is as follows: a man is crossing a sort of Orphean bridge to hell, and in looking over the side of the bridge, he notices a mirror image of the bridge beneath him, and what's more, a mirror image of himself crossing it from the underside. However, he is somewhat amazed to notice it is not a reflection, because his double is crossing the bridge in the opposite direction from him--leaving hell, and returning to the world of the living.

The story is much different from this, but the bridge remained. For one, although our character is identified from the second paragraph as being dead, and therefore, presumably, no longer in the world of the living, it is not clear where he is going to, or where exactly he is coming from. I thought the liminal space of the bridge to be much more interesting to write about, especially when the story is already uncanny in the fact that we know our man is dead, and yet he is still walking around, thinking, feeling, and trying to remember certain things about his life. Where is he? Who knows. But it's a pretty compelling setting in which to begin describing a scene.

The other element I decided to add to the original vision was the force of the wind. I'm afraid of heights, or at least pretty damn uncomfortable around edges which lead to great heights or the lack thereoof, though no more so than I feel it suitable for a rational being with no powers of flight. The vibration of bridges is always a bit unnerving for me, as is the swaying of tall buildings. I wanted to get that across, but it didn't seem that evocative, especially if you were not afraid of such things. But the wind, on the other hand, can grip any of us in its icy, breath-sucking fingers. I was driving one day, fighting the wind's push upon the car, and I said to myself, "The wind! How can I have forgotten the wind! Fire, cold, light, and dark--these are all pretty easy to express, and easily expressible in the context of human emotions. But the wind is such a mystical force, not easily shelved into an archetype. In the book of Genesis, few remember that before god created light and darkness, and caused the earth to seperate out the heavens, there was NOT nothing. The earth may have been a "formless void", but there was "a wind from god swept over the face of the waters." Only later when he makes the dome of the earth, does it "seperate the waters from the waters". No heaven, no earth, but a void filled with the motion of wind sweeping over water. Not an undifferentiated void, but a great chaos, filled with sensation. Can you think of anything more fearful that a massive ocean, with wind sweeping across it, whipping it up into such a void that there is nothing that is not water? Waters, waters, wind, and more waters! Talk about your eschatological metaphysics--how awesome is that? It pisses me off so much when people assume god began with light; its a very heliocentric, unicentric reading, besides missing the first sentence of the bible entirely!

Anyway, without furthering into a rant about theology, let's just leave it at that--death, memory, bridge, wind.

But what about the memories? Where did this idea come from?

Well, time has always been an issue of great interest for me, from a metaphysical standpoint. I'll spare you referring to the text on this one (for now), but memory's relationship with our conception of time, especially with the ending of life, is very fecund ground for speculation. I'm hardly the first one to think about this sort of thing, and those who have before have always been very interesting reading for me. You know who, I'm sure. A lot of it goes into my writing, but I think I have a perspective that's a bit unique--at least, the story doesn't sound quite familiar, at least not to me.

So yes: a dead man crossing a bridge, surrounded by wind, dealing with his own time through his experience of memory. Sounds like it may be an interesting read. Maybe.

One last little note, about the couplet, towards the end of the story. I was terribly unsure about this part. I wrote the couplet three seperate times, thought it was great, only upon re-reading it to re-write the whole thing. I had a hole in the text, and I didn't know what to put there. I decided the couplet was a good idea in principle--semiotically, it worked. But that's not shit unless I could get a good couplet in there. I'd rate the current version a straight B. Originally it had much more to do with the imagery of the story, but it moved away as I rewrote it. Now it's sort of the flaw in the story--don't get me wrong, I think it still works--but I can't look at the story without that damn couplet standing out to me. It's supposed to stand out, but too much? Too corny? Too... biblical? But anyway, there it stays. For now.

Well, there you have it--a introductory discussion about the short story. That's all that's really interesting to say, without me giving away too much of what I think it might mean. Not only would that spoil it, it would also be stupid to say so. Who the hell knows what it means? Not me. I'm the last person you should trust on that, anyway.

Stick around to check out my little blog discussions of the other story, and the new novella, both also available for free on www.brutepress.com.

Happy May Day!

NEW ON BRUTE PRESS

NEW - Article in The Brutalitarian (digital), "Nearing the Machines": Merce Cunningham, the aesthetics of machinery, architecture, and human narrative

NEW - Short Story (digital), "The Bridge": A man dies and then the story begins...

NEW - Short Story (digital), "It Had Better Hurt... or What's the Point?": A story about thinking about getting lucky with a crush....

NEW - Novella (print & digital), Open-faced Mushroom Blastocyst: Fungus is a delicious food, but it makes a confusing way of life. We're lucky most eschatology is written in books, rather than in the heated course of the blood vessels in our stomachs.

NEW - Totally New! (print), Interdome Monthly: a zine digest of more essay-like posts from Welcome to the Interdome, plus some original drawings, and more!

NEW - Brand New Brute Press site, on Word Press!

Happy May Day, everybody.

Normally I treat everyone to a long rant on May Day, either about labor history, or the labor future, or the future of labor history, or the history of labor's future.

But today, I want to give something back to those few of you who make writing this blog fun in reading it. Some fruits of labor for you, gentle friends.

Well, I suppose not simply to you--but mostly to you, because you are my only real captive audience on the Internet.

I have been working my ass off for the past two weeks, and now have blurry eyes from staring at LCDs, because I have been preparing:

A MAJOR BRUTE PRESS UPDATE!!!

Brute Press is my entity for self-publishing. It's been going on in various levels of intensity for two or three years. I like publishing and printing almost as much as I enjoy writing, and since it is a little bit frustrating to put one's entire hopes of seeing one's work in print in the hands of publishing companies who neither know you nor care much either way, it makes sense to do it myself. Because it's actually fun! After all the work, of course. And it's on the Internet, which is what publishers are doing, right? I'm actually a better publishing company that most. (hell, I haven't lost a dime yet!)

Originally, the idea was to publish other people's work as much or more than my own--but in these days where everyone is PODing it all GTG up on Internets, it's hard to find submissions when you're a one-guy operation. "You want to digitally print and bind my book by hand, and sell it yourself?" "Yeah." "Shit, that's a good idea--I'll do it myself."

So anyway, it's a forum for my own writing, an excuse to tailor things up a bit more than a blog post, practice on designing projects, and a way to set writing deadlines. If you've never visited, but find my blog posts somewhat amusing, you should check it out.

BUT WAIT!

Now you should really check it out, because I have uploaded and changed a whole bunch of stuff, all for you!

Do you want to hear what's there?

Do you?

Okay! But you have promise to tell everyone you know, post it on all your blogs, wrap your auto in a vinyl description of how awesome it is, and spray paint my praises on the good table cloth to wave in the air at the next big game. K?

Oh wait, I already did. Well, just have a good May Day, then.

I'll post more details about the various items over the weekend, because there's a lot to say. But go check it out. I bet you'll like at least some of it.

I'm especially excited about the novella. I've been working on it for about seven months now, and I would say its the (completed) writing I'm generally most happy with to date. It's also available for FREE in both print and digital (and so is most of everything else on the site). It's being released in versions, similar to the unbook hypothesis. More about that on the site. So check that out first.

Also, none of the writing is SF. For a change. Just to let you know. In case it matters.

Myrna Loy--Oh, and my writing too

Hey hey hey it's Monday.

I posted late Friday about my new article in The Brutalitarian--but I know most of you are weekday blog reader sort of folks (how do I know that? Well, why don't you think about it tonight while you're tossing and turning, trying to get to sleep...) so there it is again.

But ALSO: I have a new short story up, on Brute Press Live. It's SF--cyberpunk, time-travel, aktion, the works. If you're at all into that sort of thing, you should read it, and let me know what you think. I'd be interested. It's a fun story too, you might even like it.

I don't know why my only two SF stories have been the only ones to end up on BPL, but that's just it. I think another one will be going up soon, however, which will NOT be SF. So, yeah. Look out for that.


In case you haven't put it all together, Brute Press is my web publishing imprint. Not constrained to only my own writing by rule, but as of now it is only my own writing, just because nobody else is really interested. So this is why you might hear about it here, intermittently.



Anyway, cheers; and let's try and not have as braindead a week as my weekend was, okay? I mean, that's more to myself than it is to you.... but, still.

And LASTLY (but not leastly): Here is the lovely Myrna Loy--just because.


Thanks, Myrna! For all that you do!

The Rabbit Hole of Ambition

So I was kind of stressing about Rabbit Hole Day. It sounded interesting and fun to blog with a Halloween costume. But, as the day loomed, I was having trouble finding a project. Anything that I could blog about with any real intensity, I pretty much already do. I thought about masquerading as a gadget blogger, or a hardcore liberal political blogger, or a philosophy blogger, but I kind of do these things already, albeit in my own way. I thought about making up a blog post like a teenager's MySpace page, but did that satire already with my own MySpace page (which unfortunately seems to be lost to the depths).

Then I read Cory Doctorow's Rabbit Hole post on BoingBoing, (where you can find out what it is, if you haven't Googled it already) and thought that was the perfect idea. Safe, perhaps; but at the same time, isn't revealing details about oneself that one never would a perfect mask to hide behind? Hiding behind the facade of the truth, which is essence is supposed to be a fundamental element of blogging: millions of anonymous strangers revealing details about their life to the world, which they wouldn't ordinarily tell their own mother. I've always taken the opposite approach in my online writing. I have never used a pseudonym or screen name, and only write things that I am prepared to represent as written and published by myself. So, now I am going to take the opportunity to cut in a completely different direction and tell "you" all about a part of myself. (This also fulfills half of my promise regarding my Blog Poll; I received two responses, so I must blog about the chosen "favorite topics" at somewhere near half-quality. Paula responded that "she doesn't like math"--I still haven't figured out how I'm going to blog about that. But Betabug, kind fellow that he is, chose to (perhaps lie) and say that he reads because of me, even though he doesn't know me. So, this post is about me! And maybe only halfway-readable!)

I'm going to write about my writing. Not my blogging here, that is. I mean, write about the fact that I want to be a writer. I am one of those people. To prove it, here is a list of asshole-wannabe-writer things that I have done recently:

-I have been non-apologetically expressive about my personal coffee fetish

-I have read pretentious literature and compared my own work to it

-I have struggled to write short stories about an author struggling to write

-I have "worked on a novel"

-I have felt a deep sense of annoyance at a rejection letter, "because my work is better than everything those assholes print"

-I have used a typewriter

-I have written in a Moleskine notebook, possibly while sitting in a coffee shop

-I have finished writing in a Moleskine notebook and looked up to see another person at the same coffee shop writing in a similar notebook and thought about how they are probably not as good of a writer as myself

Quite guilty. But of course, you knew I was a jerk, so why would anything change once I picked up the pen? So let's not talk about that. Instead, I'd like to share more about my writing and my writing process, for no other reason than that I have never done so before.

Originally I thought that I wanted to write SF. I even started, a couple of summers ago, writing a SF noir about a cyborg-alien detective investigating a strange streak of "psycho-terrorism" on a planet that's entire economy was based on tourism. It was called "Vacation Planet"--all my working titles are base and simply self-descriptive. The character, by name of Enoch (which has been the name of at least three separate potential characters since) finds the lush resort destination disconcerting after traveling from his own desert planet at the expense of the Tourist Board. He tries the vacation lifestyle, meets the underground resistance organization of the service class of the planet, and eventually determines that it is not terrorism, but a self-induced psychosis brought on by living in a world that is a constant buffet line for outsiders. I had the idea while visiting my brother in Orlando. While my plane was landing, I saw strip mall, hotels, and amusement complexes and their infrastructures all the way to the horizon. I imagined what it would be like if I had to live there. It was such a full, bright city, but empty in a way that only Disney World's Main Street USA can be.

I worked on a few other SF projects, only one of which ended up finished. I found my attention mainly drawn to the brainstorming. Simply writing out my idea after all the fun of thinking it up was a bit of a chore. When it came to the actual writing, my interests were leaning towards a speculation of prose, rather than of concepts. To speculate with literature itself, I found it more helpful to stay with the most basic plots. Naturally one can do both; but I'm only a beginner, after all. Here are some examples: a derelict of a man eats a sandwich on a subway, disgusting his fellow passengers. A man dies, and finds that the afterlife consists of walking over a bridge. A middle school boy listens to his peers, perhaps more closely than anyone of that age should. These are ideas that are not really original or enlightening in themselves, but I try to think about a way that I could tell them so that the mundane appears exceptional. I like to think that this is my skill: what I am able to do with words. Perhaps I succeed, and perhaps I don't.

I think that I do succeed. I feel that my writing is not just good, or readable, but I think that it shares something new and creative, in a way that might be called art. I write a lot on this blog about what I think "creativity" is, or what "literature" is, but in truth, I don't think of my own work in any terms other than "worthwhile" or "worthless" once it is sitting on the page. Most of it does seem "worthwhile", and so I keep making it.

I have to, in a way. If I end a week with less than 20 new pages (pages that I am happy with), I feel anxious and disturbed. After work, if Megan is working, I might be able to get 3-5 pages, if I'm not too tired. Then I try and set one weekend night aside for writing; I nap in the afternoon, and then begin to up my caffeine level. If I can write for 8-10 hours (normally resulting in anywhere from 5-20 pages), I consider it a success. I normally shoot for Friday nights. If I come up empty on Friday, then the pressure is higher for Saturday, and my anxiety builds. The anxiety isn't bad in itself--it can act like a wave, pushing me once I start, and keeping me going rather than letting my mind head off towards the Internet, video games, too much alcohol (during the writing) or other things. But when I'm sitting with a blinking cursor, or trying to "have fun" knowing that I've only written 3 pages in the last 10 days, the anxiety can be a lot less than comfortable. I haven't really analyzed this or tracked it down in my psyche. I think I'd rather not, at least for now. I consider myself lucky to have it. Tomorrow I could be old, and content with my day job, and willing to just push that anxiety back and let life take its course. Psychoanalyst's translate it as "drive" for a reason, I think.

To be completely honest, I do hope to be a well-known writer some day. Not famous, necessarily. I wish for these two things, specifically: one, to make enough money with the writing that I like, so that I may live comfortably and concentrate solely on my own projects; and two, to have enough of a following in readership that I can easily be aware that others care for and appreciate what I write. I don't think these are selfish or unreasonable goals. Of course, the publishing industry isn't really a well of hope right now. I've thought about the possibility that almost all writers would have to work for free (or almost so) in the near future. I think I would be okay with that, though it would be fun to live like Hemingway or Capote. But weren't they both independently wealthy before they were authors?

State of the Author: thus far, I haven't had anything published (not counting self-publishing). I have two pieces submitted, I have been asked to read at a literary reading in April, and I put a piece on Authonomy recently. As part of my "let's figure out where we're at" process, I made this tally last week:

Finished Work: seven (one novella, four short stories, an essay, and... err, Punk song-lyrics)

In Editing: five (one novella and four short stories)

Writing/Stalled: four (one novella, two short stories, and a poem. Novella is almost finished, the rest might never be, though the poem is close)

In the Aether: four (two novels, one short story, and one essay)

Even More Vague: I have a shit load of ideas scribbled down. Some of them are really good. Others are really funny. A few are illegible. At least one is probably really offensive, and I would tear it out of my notebook except that I can't bring myself to do it because that would make me feel even more guilty. My plan is that eventually all the unused ideas will be compiled into an epic poem of sorts. I write my notes in complete sentences or at least phrases (I always have) so it actually reads pretty well, if a bit esoterically.

I think one of the novels in "the Aether" could actually be something. This is what I'm working on now. My plan is to finish all the short stories that can be finished, bomb the shit out of the journals, and write the damn novel. I'm literally bursting with ideas for the novel, so I think it's going to be good. I'm actually worried that I'll ever come up with something to match it once I'm done. Of course, this could all change tomorrow, and it could go back into the stack.

I hate, absolutely hate, submitting my work. The entire process is so antithetical to why I write. Of course, I write largely to fulfill my inner desire, so getting rejection letters is obviously antithetical to my ego's pursuits. But I wouldn't mind being rejected if I didn't have to wait five months to get a form letter. It's disgusting--everybody bitches about how literature has gone to shit, and then they treat potential authors this way. Naturally, most potential authors aren't about to be the saviors of literature. But it certainly seems to be an odd system of improvement and support. Imagine if education was run in the same way--you work hard at some abstract task for nine months, turn in your work, and then wait for months to receive a form with almost no feedback except for "yay" or "nay", which itself is largely subjective or at least meaningless to a point where it might as well be. Oh, wait... that is how education works! Well, no wonder people like TV. Television is always there and loves you just as much, no matter what you watch or for how long.

Well, so there it is: Adam Rothstein, the hopeful writer. Probably not too different from most hopeful writers, but hey, I'm me, goddamn it!

I don't discuss my writing on my blog because my blog is not about my writing--or at least not about that writing. It's nice to keep them separate. This blog is a publishing tool: a portal to a certain audience to whom I write in a consistent voice more my own conversational tone than anything else. My subjects are things that I am interested in, and about which I choose to comment. But, this does not really include myself, or the things that I write about when I write. When I write off-blog, I am crafting individual pieces, works that would stand alone unchained into the subjective network of the Internet. I am in those individual works, but as "author", not specifically as the narrator. My blog is more of a pipeline that I log into, after which I begin to transmit straight from my own mind. Therefore, I let Author Adam do his own pretentious work, and here Writer Adam just tells it like it is for the peoples. They interact, of course. But form is as important as substance, and the Author in me knows his form, and the Writer in me knows his as well.

Have you enjoyed hearing about Adam the Author? I tried to tell you about him as truthfully as possible, though I am certainly a bit biased. It was a bit of a release to just talk about him freely, in this blog form. Certainly different than my usual rantings and ravings about the economy and technology. If you ever do want to read some of his work, you can always check out Brute Press, where he publishes online. I'll update you about him from time to time, of course.

Okay, I'm going to cut it here. I seem to have slipped into a disconcerting third person, which has some humorous, ironic possibilities, but also is starting to allude to the fact that this split-writer personality internet-publishing-form thing might have more uncanny consequences than we'd all like.

Happy Rabbit Hole Day!

"Walter Benjamin's Blog"

My article, "Walter Benjamin's Blog," was just published on The Brutalitarian, Brute Press' online theory center. It's available under CC license in pdf, html, and odf format.

If you've paid attention to any of my posts here about the future of literature, production and consumption in the digital age, or Internet and Information theory, you may find this essay interesting. It is a summation of my thought regarding all of these, compiled into a (fairly) well-organized article. I think some parts are pretty entertaining. In addition, I do feel that the conclusions I draw about the future of literature and digital reproduction should be taken to heart by many involved in the affore mentioned. In other words, the article is not just rants or musings, but a contribution (I hope) to theory on the subject.

It's very serious! But, it's also not written expressly for people with a Master's degree in philosophy, so [you] can read it too!

I'm also pretty excited about it, and happy that it's complete. So you might here me echo it's existence through my various internet channels. Just fair warning.

Prose Fragment: It was...

I have made it somewhat of a rule not to publish any of my fiction on Welcome to the Interdome; not because I shun the blog format, but because this is more of a personal, narrative space for me than any of my finished writing is. Besides, I have Brute Press for that (though the poor beast has been a bit neglected of late in actual posted material).

But, I stumbled upon this fragment in my own personal data cloud and for the life of me can't remember or find any note relating to what the purpose or direction of this prose might be. And, as opposed to some of my other fragments, I quite like several bits of this. So, why not throw it out there?

Here: enjoy a bit of disjointed, unedited prose--think of it as unavoidably intentionally poetic, though not intended it as such.

I should add that I never write "this way". I typically write what I feel to be very direct, very transparent and lucid, though dense, prose; I don't like writing that is purposefully vague and bordering on meaninglessness. I consider this a flaw of my training in philosophy.

The title of this fragment is the file name under which it was saved.


It Was...


Somewhere in the universe is a writer that cannot sleep. And I say this after all the people are dead.

Tiresome, wakesome, troublesome truth is in insomnia. No sleep is a passing symptom--soon recovered, soon relapsed--suffering and celebrating: out-of-desire-made-dreary-in-duty to a deeper, underground, transcendent, NOTHING.

Nothing to do with sleep. It is the big, fat, dead gray of the difference between before the sun and after.

I press the button again and again and again. Out comes the most horrible, piercingly drab monotone beep--it is the sound of nothing. I hang up and look at the phone, expecting it to exist for ever.

That phone is the lord; cower in fear, launch the blasphemies that have been carefully sculpted over thousands of bloody short lives, praise its name and its pure holy tone. I reach to press it again, but my hand is thinking, thinking of nothing, and it knocks god to the floor; it clatters and its battery skitters out on the concrete.

"YOU SHOULD REALLY GET SOME SLEEP"

Nothing to do with it, not me or anyone else. It's the corpse of a whale, eaten by sharks, finally on shore. The journey is complete, and it was dead long ago. I've been awake the whole time and finally getting somewhere.

If I slept, who would know? Upon its single axis gravity foot the world spins free of the constraints of my consciousness. Sleep, wake, sleep, wake. How many days have passed? How much rest do I need? What do I do to need more rest? What do I do to get more sleep?

These questions are futile. The answers are easy.

There once was a writer who traveled the entire world in a paper sack. The sack was as big as a full-grown child, and he would ball himself up to that size and crinkle the worn fibers down over his head under the paper mouth kissed the floor. From inside his bag this man could fly anywhere that he chose, as long as the bag was there and he was inside it. One day, when feasting with emperors and dancing with queens, he hiccuped on the wine of some exotic locale, tripped, and split the sack wide open. He tumbled out of his tiny corporeal ball, and laid across the floor, stretched out like a whale on the beach. Home isn't home if you know you can never leave again, and so he cursed the journey as much as the destination.

Both the journey and destination are cursed if they're one and the same. Insomnia, and its twin, the increasing, daylight now, are the spawn of that unholy lord.

"YOU SHOULD REALLY SEE THE BEACH"

Press to the Next Level

Brute Press just launched their next project, a set of "business poems". Bet you never even heard of that before. They are cheap too, only 10 cents each, or the complete set of six for only a dollar.

Since I have a vested interest in the Press, and think that there material is absolutely the best stuff I have ever seen for the price, I am suggesting that you go check them out here, and then go find them out and about and buy either the cards or their issue "A", which is still available, and also still cheap. I'll probably be hanging out with them tomorrow at Union Square around 6-7pm, so come say hi.

Cool.

Have you heard about this "Brute Press?"

So through certain "connections" I have been made aware of the launching of a new independent press out of New York City. They are called Brute Press, and publish small works and compilations of cutting-edge literature and art. They just released their first publication, appropriately titled "A".

A short story of mine and a couple of (shitty, but apparently worthy for publication) poems are published in it, but regardless of that, you should check them out, tell your friends, or just show them a little love. It's hard to be in the print business in this digital age, they deserve some props. I've seen the issue, and its actually pretty cool, and only costs $2, including postage. If you invested in it, you wouldn't be disappointed. I mean, hey, where can you get quality literature these days for only two bucks?

Check out their blog and their MySpace.