I think your break was over 5 minutes ago

Just to continue my frustrated post about Internet workflow, let me describe my current Twitter problem. This promises to be a really boring, personal anecdote with little to know application to you.

I'm trying to turn some of my twitter updates into blog posts. I've got a WordPress plugin to grab the tweets. Great. But I don't want to grab every tweet, because then conversation tweets that are out of context will be grabbed. But I don't want to edit the "spontaneity" of twitter, either.

So I got a 2nd twitter account that will be the "instant blog post" account. Now I can cross-post the tweets I want to go to the blog, and keep the boring ones on the big boring feed.

But how to cross-post? TweetDeck for iPhone works great. Type the tweet, and activate the buttons for which accounts you want the message to go to. But TweetDeck for Desktop gums up my works. First, Adobe Air takes a lot of resources on my old computer. Second, I like to do everything I can in the browser (one "minimize" clears the screen. Tabs are great.)

I keep an instance of TwitterGadget going in my iGoogle page, which is a collection of frames with similar little web apps. The nice thing is that it automatically updates itself. But it can't handle multiple accounts, or log in multiple instances on the same page.

No good Twitter extensions for Chrome that I can find, and certainly none that allow multiple accounts.

So here I am, with a Twitter problem that no one has invented a solution for yet. But is my problem even really a problem? Well, no. If it was a popular problem, someone would have come up with a solution.

But this IS the problem. The workflow of the Internet revolves around helping the majority of people do the things that the majority of people would like to do. Is my need to turn tweets into blogposts in the way I want a crucial task for humanity? Of course not. And if I even thought it was a bit innovative, I might learn enough programming to do it myself. But I won't, and so here I stay, in the same Twitter rut. Which is fine. But this is not good workflow for a "manufacturing environment", if that is what I think I'm doing with all these little witticisms and links to photos of bridges and stuff.

I guess the productive environment of writing, art, and other communicative arts have never really had any manufacturing form, as it were. Certain formal skill sets yes, but because it is largely an individual practice there's been no need for assembly line dynamics. Maybe this is changing? Post-human-individual writing is definitely going to need a line. And a union. Otherwise humanity is going to treat their artist-components the way artists treat their livers. Whether the Internet qualifies as sufficiently post-individual or not is still not resolved.

The Plot Against Magic and Curses

I thought this essay was going to go into The Brutalitarian, but lo and behold, here it is on Welcome to the Interdome. Who knows why.

And once again I was on the Internet and reading the article in N+1, “The Calculating Critic” and once again, we return to the subject of plot. They always want more plot—not N+1 in particular, but these readers out there, given voice by the critics and the editors. You want it easier, more fun, smaller, shorter, flatter and more ergonomical, easy to grasp. Because this is what plot is, when it comes down to it. Plot is not the story, not the characters, not the language, not the voice—plot is the part that can be described easily, summed up, abstracted, and repeated as a mandra and motto to guide the reader through the words themselves.

“And what happens in the book?”

“Well, this is a book about X.”

Repeat these questions to yourself, this mainstream, modern mainlining mantra, and better yet, choose a book constantly repeating them for you, and if you like the experience, the reading is fun. Fun—because books are entertainment, after all. This is what we look for in life, and in our books; we wish to separate the work from the play, and do the former for that much more time with the latter. Light and dark, good and bad, salt and pepper, black and white.

It does have something to do with teenagers, doesn't it? The “the majority” always seeks easier books, in these terms “young-adult” books, is because they put reading in the category of fun, as opposed to work. Every young adult hates Shakespeare, because it is “dull, uninteresting, hard to understand, old,” and so on. Not every person felt this way in their youth of course, not about Shakespeare, nor Homer, nor Plato, nor reading in general, but this is what the majority may feel, because the majority is an entity that separates work from play. Work is what goes on in school, and play is what I want. Satisfy my base desires, and let me squeak through work as easily as I can. But for some reason, some of us found base desires easier to satisfy with certain substances and activities, during or after which it was highly pleasurable to pick up one of these classic books. Bong hits and The Illiad, for whatever reason. Shakespeare and heavy petting. Not just Romeo and Juliet either. What sort of person gets a little aroused by Lady Macbeth? Boil and bubble, teenagers in trouble. For whatever reason, our play seemed to keep crossing over into that artistic stuff, that stuff that everyone else said was supposed to be work.

If only life were flatter and easier to grasp. Not so many obstacles and more straight lines, direct passageways from one point to the next. Life can be made to mean more or less, depending on what you do with it. Push and pull it around how you want, arrange it in even rows, whatever. Words, on the other hand, will not mean more or less. However, you can still push them around. They are building blocks. Children may build castles and houses and railway stations with their blocks, but nobody is upset if they don't reflect local building codes and engineering specifications. It is a pattern with which to play. We play with the words, as we write and read them. Maybe they look like things, maybe they don't, but it is overwhelmingly odd to get angry at them if they don't take us anywhere, or fulfill our desires. They are words after all—not life itself.

But if they are not just work or play, then what are these words to me? What is this strange power, tugging on the exposed parts of my teenage desires like magic? Magic blocks of some kind. And a good magic is hard to find. 616 is the other number of the beast, you may or may not know, the unlisted number, never dialed, and never spoken. No meaning here, nothing that you would recognize. Hidden desire and more power, or so I like to tell it. Less speaking of truth and more fuel to power. Oh—that we all enjoyed speaking fuel to fire, the cold evaporative quality of gasoline on the skin, but in words of course. But we don't really want them all in here. Not those crowds of angry, sexy youth on TV. The magic is more potent when it is spoken softly, in the dark, over pure silence, over a single naked stranger in the dark. All magic has to be a little secret.

Of course for those of us engaged in the endless war of pouring words out onto the ground, hoping they somehow, some way worm themselves into someone's ear, we often wish we could use a funnel. Shouting out our magic into the cold air off the edge of the cliff is its own catharsis, but everyone wants a little love. Some even want cash. Some care about the “health of the industry”, whatever that is. Goodness knows they've never seen a day inside the gloom of a factory in their lives. But still, we invest. So we make it into little rhymes. The easiest poetry is that which rhymes. Only so much can fit into it.

Got a bit
Of plot to spit
Meaning's little
Elementary shit.

Young folks like rap music too. Draw yourself another straight fucking line. Often about sex, drugs, cash, etc. Desires of course, set to the hard beating bop of the pounding-fuck music, and some synth on top like whipped cream on a go-go dancer. Desire satisfied, at 120 beats per minute. Don't hate the plot, hate the game. Hiphop may not be goin' out, but you sure don't see KRS-One on MTV.

The magic of youth is impressive; and I mean those teenage years, not the forgotten and repressive childhood. When the desires first start to loosen those bonds, is when we decide whether the magic is going to be the broadcast, megawatt, culture hearth, or whether we're going to listen to the empty frequencies, where we swear we hear secret agents reciting magic spells to pervert the bosses. We hang out at the reservoir at night, hoping someone is going to put acid in the water supply. We scribble in the margins of Harper Lee and Salinger, and look between the pages of our birthday present copy of On The Road, wondering why there isn't more here.

And then we grow up, at least a little bit, and we discover the secret library. Or we wish it was, and treat it like it was, sharing only with our friends, and with our imaginations. We imagined ourselves discovering Borges' fictional libraries. We looked deep into Pynchon's books for the missing footnotes, and the sourceless references. We sifted through Derrida's scattered and mistranslated postcards, looking at the pictures, if nothing else. We laughed at Heller's endless hilarious jokes, which are so funny because people actually died all throughout. We poured over Deleuze and Foucault's incomprehensible diagrams, which at least we could all agree were beautiful, and so we hung them as art. We felt the urge to listen to Glass' repetitions on repeat, or if not Glass, then perhaps at least Sonic Youth, and if not them, then certainly Joy Division.

And we didn't stop there. We revisited, and looked back, trying to find more evidence of magic through the centuries, even though we knew very well it didn't strictly existence. Because what does? When the most meaningful magic is what is secret, erased, discarded, mislabeled, untranslatable, and hard to fathom, who is to say there isn't magic anywhere there isn't a strict, straight, plotted line of meaningful existence? And so we fell in the void. We invented religion within Nietzsche, and made the biblical prophets, and Dante into science-fiction authors. And in learning about farce, we learn about tragedy. We handed out placards of deep meaning to Artaud, and to Schreber, and to others whose diagnosis and suffering was not so defined, but whose madness we minted into coin. We appointed positions within this madness, our own conquering angels in Pollock and again, in Nietzsche. We allowed the violence of every male artist or musician to ever hit a woman to be tragically beautiful, pondering rather than condemning. We did the same with Heidegger, Grass, Celine, and other tragedies of history. We elevated the drugs of Charlie Parker, William Burroughs, and Bukowski to be sacred and holy transubstantiations, which we may have sampled, or only handed off to these sacrifices. And we never wondered why Beckett, Cortezar, Ginsberg, Sartre, DeLillo, Ballard, and most of the rest all happened to be men, as if it were a total accident.

And mistakes were made, and they'll be made again. This is magic we're dealing with. This is heady, dangerous stuff, that none of us really understand, though we've got the books to back it up. We have to press forward, away from the path of plot, and keep heading on there. Keep writing secrets in our little black books, and keep our own teenage desires wrapped up in the dark. Can you blame us? What else should we do? Get a job, join the army, find a spouse, make some children? Forget any magic there ever was lurking in the corners, and pop on the radio, turn up TV, open a microwave dinner, go to the movies? Blast the silence out of us with advertisements? Blank space is wasted time, and wasted time is unrealized profit, after all. Draw the text straight, make the lines even, keep the text under 80K words, and the vocab below the level of the New York Times? Write and read topically, directly, and keep it pure and fun? Is this any better? Are we happy yet? Is it art? Is it marketable? Have we won?

Fuck that, and keep it punk. Punk was commodified, but it was the same idea. Turn up the incoherence, raise the middle finger, and if they wanted to stay, then let 'em. It was commodified, or it died. Same difference I guess, when you're crawling around in the dark on the floor, covered in something, looking for something to put in your mouth. It stopped moving around in the dark and left the room, so forget it, and if you leave this room right now, I guess I don't want to talk to you either.

And so let 'em take drugs, and let 'em fuck boys, and let 'em turn it up, or down, or play it twelve times on repeat, or backwards, distorted to hell and back, and fuck it, let's pray to hell for a change, and see who sticks around. Let them join the Nazis or the Stalinists I guess, and if they aren't killed on the back of that motorcycle maybe we'll still buy their next book. Or maybe we'll buy it only if they are killed. And I would have an intervention, but do you think he's ever going to stop using until they cut his arms off? And maybe we could send him somewhere, but would that really make him better? And maybe she should leave him, maybe they all should, but that's her decision I guess, and she still hasn't even after all the times. Maybe she should write a book. How come she doesn't? I'd buy it, as long as it doesn't come with plot.

I shoplift all my books anyhow. I steal them off my friend's nightstand, when he doesn't finish them. I accumulate late fines from the library as if it were income tax. I sure as hell don't buy them at the mall. I sure as hell don't buy them online. I have all these needs, you understand. I have to tell you want it's about. I have to understand what it's about, even though I haven't read all those magic spells. I've just got to, you understand, I need to. I got to turn away that mob, I got to fuck over the media, I got the subvert the spectacle, I got to sift a vanguard from those majoritarian masses. I got to turn those steeple bells upside down, and bury these upturned caldrons in my dark, basement pit, all of it on the right cosmological day I found referenced in this text, I got to bang in the cover of night, man, I got to play the new sound, the oldest music in my short teenage history. I got to find the forbidden, the beyond, the baddest bitches brew of them all.

And if you are still with me, still in the room, motherfucker, than you know it doesn't have fuck all to do with plot.

Multi-tracking Eno with Cyber-time: an Atemporal Metaphor

When I speak about metaphor, I'm trying to use the word in the typical sense, but also imbue a new meaning to it. There is the literary meaning, that of artful comparison, but there is also a more semiotic meaning, which I might call connotation by association. Not to put too technical of a label on it, or to call it something definitive here, but we are trying to get towards something we could consider a bit more technically than to simply say, "he rained blows upon him" is the exact same as "he hit him with blows in a way like rain falling". The metaphor is different than the basic comparison of a simile.

It is the use of two meanings together, which develops an connotation between them, as opposed to the logical denotation of "x as y". There is a certain bit of both in each, of course, but then interesting aspect is that we can refer to something as intangible as "insult" "raining upon" someone, and we all know immediately what it means, though there is nothing in the definition of "rain" which immediately refers to something so intangible, and something so clearly not liquid precipitation. We don't even need to include our word which denotes approximate similarity, "like", because simply by the juxtaposition of their meanings, we get it.

To me, it is a sort of ambivalence of meaning that combines to create greater power of expression in the long run. Children will often refer to things by the combination of words which sound strange to adults. A sheep may be a "dog cow". Teacher may be "mommy". My brother had a certain size category, which qualified as "big little". For adults, its patronizingly funny when kids describe things as "it's the same, but different". However, they are practicing how to mean things when they speak, and they haven't learned the harsh logical rules of A/not-A which are so important to adults. Even though, many punch lines to our jokes revolve around the very ambiguity of this supposed rule of logic.

So metaphor is both a close equation, and a contextual, semiotic comparison. I describe this as a prelude to some words of Brian Eno I wish to re-represent.

In this speech about the studio as composition tool, Eno directs our attention at a shift in our conception of music in relation to recording, which I believe is a perfect metaphor for what I view as the concept of "atemporality". (A guy responsible for The Long Now Foundation should have some idea, right?)

The canon of atemporality is small enough, (look towards the Twitter search--it is about as categorical a listing of sources as such a newly ephemeral topic is capable of at this time) but if I try to distill something as reckless as a definition of atemporality, I come across a general idea of "n different times pressed together", exemplified by the "Looking into the Past" Flickr pool.



While this is atemporal in a sense, I am envisioning something a bit more metaphysical to guide the concept. (How odd of me!) This is flipping the timeline of history into a cool Mobius strip, crossing it back over itself for artistic effect. All well and good. But I think our current state of technology is allowing us to approach a different sense of the term--we can move beyond the comparative logic of "historicizing" temporality, (the past is way different than the future, yet the same!) to a immediately existant atemporality (the past/future/now is past/future/now). We are not just playing with time, we are ditching it. The temporal currency has crashed, and our metaphysics can now operate outside of the constraints of the free market (otherwise known as history).

Cue Mr. Eno:

The first thing about recording is that it makes repeatable what was otherwise transient and ephemeral. Music, until about 1900, was an event that was perceived in a particular situation, and that disappeared when it was finished. There was no way of actually hearing that piece again, identically, and there was no way of knowing whether your perception was telling you it was different or whether it was different the second time you heard it. The piece disappeared when it was finished, so it was something that only existed in time.

The effect of recording is that it takes music out of the time dimension and puts it in the space dimension. As soon as you do that, you're in a position of being able to listen again and again to a performance, to become familiar with details you most certainly had missed the first time through, and to become very fond of details that weren't intended by the composer or the musicians.

I would say this aspect of recording is a good metaphor for the technology of writing. Recording begins to take expressible culture out of its reliance upon a firm dimension of time--though it still relies on time, it does so in other ways. For example, you don't need to live across the street from Socrates to hear his wisdom, but you still must get a hold of a copy of The Republic.

Now, let's talk about another aspect of recording, which I call the detachable aspect. As soon as you record something, you make it available for any situation that has a record player. You take it out of the ambience and locale in which it was made, and it can be transposed into any situation. This morning I was listening to a Thai lady singing; I can hear the sound of the St. Sophia Church in Belgrade or Max's Kansas City in my own apartment, and I can listen with a fair degree of conviction about what these sounds mean. As Marshall McLuhan said, it makes all music all present. So not only is the whole history of our music with us now, in some sense, on record, but the whole global musical culture is also available. That means that a composer is really in the position, if he listens to records a lot, of having a culture unbounded, both temporally and geographically, and therefore it's not at all surprising that composers should have ceased writing in a European classical tradition, and have branched out into all sorts of other experiments. Of course, that's not the only reason that they did, either.

When we talk about the distribution of recorded works, we are in the terrain of a metaphor about the Internet. The Internet has made the distribution of writing (and of course, many pieces of music as well) as easy as plugging in. It has unbounded culture from the typical constraints of space and time. At first, communication was as fast as a man could run 26 miles. Then, it was the speed of a train. Then, the telegraph. Now it is, for all intents and purposes, instantaneous. On the Internet we still must worry about "finding things", so there is a spatial aspect, but the temporal terrain has been reduced to a singular--now. One more reliance upon the dimension of time has been reduced, by adding the technology of the Internet to the technology of writing.

So, to tape recording: till about the late '40s, recording was simply regarded as a device for transmitting a performance to an unknown audience, and the whole accent of recording technique was on making what was called a "more faithful" transmission of that experience. It began very simply, because the only control over the relative levels of sounds that went onto the machine was how far they were from the microphone - like device. The accent was on the performance, and the recording was a more or less perfect transmitter of that, through the cylinder and wax disc recording stages, until tape became the medium by which people were recording things.

The move to tape was very important, because as soon as something's on tape, it becomes a substance which is malleable and mutable and cuttable and reversible in ways that discs aren't. It's hard to do anything very interesting with a disc - all you can do is play it at a different speed, probably; you can't actually cut a groove out and make a little loop of it. The effect of tape was that it really put music in a spatial dimension, making it possible to squeeze the music, or expand it.

Scratch off another constraint of time. In addition to being able to reduce and change the space and time of the recording in our consciousness through technological improvements in distribution (from a localized there and then, to an accessible here and now), we can also shift the very expression of time and space itself within the recording. Technology allows us to modify and alter the rules of recording and playback. It is no longer a pure Distance over Time experience. The goal is not necessarily accuracy, or logical, time/space consistency. Now the goal is art--expression and experience itself. When you look at an old photo held up to "the same place" in a more modern time, you are not simply seeing both times, or the space between the two. The "ne c'est pas" is not an either/or, a now/then. It is both. You can record a chopped and screwed beat over the radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. Time is now a dimension we can play with.

You should remember that everything, including the Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, was done on four-track until 1968. Normally engineers would do something like this: the drums on one track, the voices spread on two tracks with the guitars and the piano, say, on one of those tracks, and then the strings and additional effects on the fourth track. This was because they were thinking in terms of mono output; eventually, it would be mixed down to one signal again, to be played on radio or whatever. When stereo came in big, it gave them a problem. When they converted to stereo, things were put in either the middle, or dramatically to one side, or you'd hear some very idiosyncratic panning.

Anyway, after four-track it moved to eight track - this was in '68, I guess - then very quickly escalated: eight-track till '70, 16-track from'70 to' 74, 24-track to now when you can easily work on 48-track, for instance, and there are such things as 64-track machines. The interesting thing is that after 16-track, I would say, the differences are differences of degree, not differences of kind. Because after you get to 16-track, you have far more tracks than you need to record a conventional rock band. Even if you spread the drums across six tracks, have the basson two, have the vocals, have the guitars, you've still got six tracks left. People started to think, "What shall we do with those six tracks?"

From that impulse two things happened: you got an additive approach to recording, the idea that composition is the process of adding more, which was very common in early '70s rock (this gave rise to the well known and gladly departed orchestral rock tradition, and it also gave rise to heavy metal music - that sound can't be got on simpler equipment); it also gave rise to the particular area that I'm involved in: in-studio composition, where you no longer come to the studio with a conception of the finished piece. Instead, you come with actually rather a bare skeleton of the piece, or perhaps with nothing at all. I often start working with no starting point. Once you become familiar with studio facilities, or even if you're not, actually, you can begin to compose in relation to those facilities. You can begin to think in terms of putting something on, putting something else on, trying this on top of it, and so on, then taking some of the original things off, or taking a mixture of things off, and seeing what you're left with - actually constructing a piece in the studio.

I can think of two aspects of atemporality which are interesting in different ways (at least, so far). There is the dissolution of the timeline of history, or the flexibility of the timeline as a dimension for expression, which we have just discussed. Is it really a lo-fi tape from the 70s, or a tape recorded to sound that way? Is it truly antique, or simply steampunk? The difference is arbitrary, or at least artistically mutable.

But then there is also our sensation of speed in expression, which is expanding rapidly. So you have sped up the tape, recorded parallel tracks, and sampled some vintage recordings, or made a huge high-def video collage comprising an entire century of material, which plays in different ways depending on the current orbit of the planets. But you're not out of tracks yet.

What is really interesting about the "Looking into the Past" Flickr set is not that time changes, or that b/w photography is old school. The interesting thing is that any number of people can contribute to this artistic comparison, upload it to the Internet, and add to an infinitely replicable viewing experience for an unlimited number of people, who will all no doubt see and experience any part of the set in different ways. The set has 1,063 members. You could join too. Digital photographic technology is one thing, but networked-participant-enabled digital photography is something else. More important than the ability to Photoshop, to record and re-record, is the ability to alter the speed of the consumption of the photograph, by networking its distribution and consumption. In typical math, if D/T = S, and you let T go to zero, you get an unworkable solution. The Cartesian child asks, "how could viewing the picture differently possibly change the content? Isn't it the same picture, just faster?" But in math which does not rely on the real number set, you get an infinite amount of possibilities in the same situation. Your specific time=T definition is no longer applicable, and now we are in the terrain of the atemporal. The atemporal child responds, "all your RTs are belongs to us." Is the Internet fast, or really fast? How do you measure how fast "things end up on the Internet" or how quickly "things begin trending"? It doesn't really matter--because there is only "as soon as you know about it". Speed is now a joining, a multi-tracking, a conjunction, and a metaphorical form of expression. If you are moving at speed, the only things you can see are those also at speed. The difference between them is purely relative. What is truly atemporal is not just immediately available, but always on; it is not just multi-faceted, but multi-authored and multi-consumed; it is not just immediate, but currently-being-expressed/experienced; it is not just Heideggerian presence, but a headlong dive into Bergsonian duration, the first-ever expansion of Kant's Transcendental Ideal of time into new territory (sorry about that last one, folks). We can produce and experience more, and in a new way, all beyond our previous constraints of mere "time".

Of course, everyone is constrained in one way or another, and you work within your constraints. It doesn't mean that suddenly the world is open, and we're going to do much better music, because we're not constrained in certain ways. We're going to do different music because we're not constrained in certain ways we operate under a different set of constraints.

If you have been stuck in a D/T dimension, making your speed infinite seems like you are exceeding the limit. Hence, the singularity folks who think that when we get neural implants we will all "become" singular. I don't think this is true. There are limits to the human capacity for experience and expression, surely. However, I don't think these limits are space and time, at least in the way our technology has forced us to conceive of them. We are not limited to history, or to our conscious memory, or our imagination and planning of the future. (The limits of our unconscous memory is another topic.) As our technology allows us to adapt new, atemporal ways of thinking, we will be in a new domain of metaphysics, which I've been referring to as Cyber-time. Note that I say we will adapt atemporal ways of thinking--a plural, multiple sense of the term. There is not one atemporal asymptote we will overcome, vaulting into the blinding white light of gnostical infinity on the other side. But, in comparison to our current defined boundaries of Cartesian time-space, we will make changes as mind-bendingly different as a "Wall of Sound".

The effect of the Internet on the human culture of expression and experience, in the medium of sound, photography, and writing, is huge, in metaphysical ways. Many consider the Internet to be just a vast, digital library--but I believe we forget just how drastic a concept the library was when it first came about. We are building an instantaneous library, which cannot burn (at least, not completely), which is so big that our scholars are not simply concerned with adding material to it, but simply being able to search it.

SF Epilogue:

On a distant, alien world, there exists a library so large, it would take the entire lifetime of its curators to simply walk from one end to the other. However, they have never managed to invent the wheel. Suddenly, Earthlings land, and hand out roller skates. The wearers of wheels are known as "rollers", and their new conception of the world in terms of gradients, inclines and declines, and smooth and flat surfaces are ridiculed, in favor of the old custom of viewing the world in "paces". But under the rollers' guidance, vast amounts of knowledge are now accessible. Slowly, the cultural structure of the planet begins to collapse.

In Which We Get Depressed By Looking at Graphs

I had a shitty day at work. Now you're gonna hear about it.

Work is always shitty because it's not what I want to do. What I want to do I can't get paid for, and anorexic bohemians and dharma bums aside, it means I have a day job. My day job could be worse, in fact, its probably the best job I've ever had. But this doesn't change the fact that it is not what I want to.

And what I want to do does not include selling my hand-blown glass bongs, or visiting monasteries, or anything like that.

What I want to do has changed a bit over the years, but it has always involved producing.

At first I wanted to teach philosophy, and I went to school for this. I finished school for this. I didn't earn a PhD, so now I can't teach for this, but I did get a Master's Degree, which means absolutely shit.

Here's a graph of median incomes and employment rate against education level, from BLS. I cribbed it from Calculated Risk, my #1 source for graphs.



Well, that's depressing. I have the third highest grossing education level, but my average weekly pay is less than the median for high school graduates. Furthermore, I write two checks a month to banks, because I went and got educated. Goddamn, when I think what I could do with $1200 a week. I could buy a house. I could get a new car. I could work half the year. I could save money. For what? I don't know. Something really good. I could even afford to have a kid if I wanted to.

I stopped moving down the "teach philosophy" road, because I had idiotically entered grad school under the assumption that unlike undergrad, grad students would actually be interested in the material for reasons bigger than the "I own this knowledge" possessive approach, or the "I want to succeed for succeeding sake" professional approach. Maybe, like me, they would think the critical power of philosophy should be turned into a massive engine, swinging around the direction of education and the human species in general, and maybe even breaking a few chains while we were at it.

Actually, most of them weren't even very good at drinking, though this was something they claimed they really were good at.

Not that I am opposed to a little hard work. I've always been ready to take up a challenge, argue the underdog position, etc. And since I decided to quit academia and fight it out on my own, I think maybe I am a bit too interested in hard work. What I really dislike is willful lack of desire to make a difference. This is all over the academy. Education is a sinking, sinking ship, and nobody cares. Activism is for causes only--and higher education can't fathom causality any further than what it takes to gain acceptance.

So now I'm off, writing on my own. When I got here, I was wondering if I should even go for it. But now as I see all these other people out doing it on their own, I'm more motivated. I guess I'm not the only one, right? I'm not totally crazy to want to do what I want to do--to make high quality material, and maybe earn a living doing so.

I guess. Until it seems "earning a living" is itself crashing.

Perhaps it's still my fault, for some sort of optimist's idiocy, thinking that some sort of labor conditions might be possible under which those of us who are actually willing and able band together, and make something under our own control, and distribute it to interested and thankful folks. It's starting to look like the only people who can actually get this together are Food Not Bombs. Food Not Bombs may not be able to cook too well, but every time I've ever been told they were going to be somewhere, they were, with absolutely free, and often hot food. Delivering on the promise, every time.

I was reading this book review in BookForum about Andrew Ross' new book about the failures of neoliberalism in the work world. This part caught me:

"Under neoliberal economic rule, Ross maintains, a perverse trickle-up dynamic has taken hold: Contingency and upheaval have spread upward from low-skill, low-wage labor sectors in the global economy. The condition he describes as “precarity” now cuts widely across class, occupational, and geographic divides. What differs is how it is experienced: as freedom and autonomy in a subcontracting biotechnology lab or as “flexploitation” in a sneaker factory. In this new set of labor arrangements, Ross argues, the artists, designers, writers, and performers of the “creative class” occupy a “key evolutionary niche on the business landscape.” Casual labor is now commonplace in glamorous or highly paid creative fields, from filmmaking to software design. Such well-rewarded occupational niches have doubled as virtual infomercials for the cool, humane, and service-driven appeal of neoliberal economies as industrial capital has continued to take flight. “Cultural work was nominated as the new face of neoliberal entrepreneurship,” Ross notes, “and its practitioners were cited as the hit-making models for the intellectual property jackpot economy.”

Oddly enough, Ross points out, “the demand for flexibility originated not on the managerial side but from the laboring ranks themselves,” most notably as part of the “revolt against work” that plagued managers in the early ’70s. To alleviate workforce anomie, managers drew employees into the decision-making process, made work schedules more flexible, and sought to liven up alienating workplaces with a range of feel-good activities. But these came at a price, Ross notes, as managers introduced greater job risk while casualizing the basic terms of work.

As industrial employment continued to hightail it to points south of the developed Western world, this “two-handed tendency” remained in place, Ross writes, reaching its “apotheosis in the New Economy profile of the free agent, when the youthful . . . were urged to break out of the cage of organizational work and go it alone as self-fashioning operatives, outside the HR umbrella of benefits, pensions and steady merit increases.” Risk aversion had been the old economy’s fatal flaw. Risk appetite was the new economy’s badge of virtue."

And you know, it's true. Reading about the graphic arts industry, or the writing industry, or any other "creative" industry, you get all these people talking (and no doubt, blogging) about how it's hard to "go it alone" as a freelancer, but in the end, "totally worth it." Of course, they can do it, no problem. Because they were so creative in the first place.

This is the thing--we think we've let the air out of the oneupmanship, the individualist corporate hierarchy, the big mountain of caterpillars climbing other caterpillars. But really, its been so solidified, nobody even realizes it. Why are you a "creative"? Because YOU are so creative. Why are you making it? Because YOU are making it. Because YOU know the secret to viral literature, design, or whatever your creative skill set happens to me. Everybody is just so damn creative, all the time. And they are fighting each other for the freelance money thrown out like corn to chickens.

I often find myself refusing to take part. I'm not one to stand in lines. I wait until everyone else has gone in, and then I go. If there is limited admission, then I get there early enough to beat the line. If I can't get there early enough, then fuck it.

Why is this the way it is? Are there really already so many people on earth that talented people can't make a living at what their talent? Or is our system of making a living totally fucked? Whatever happen to the unions? Say what you want about technology, the definition of a living wage, strikebreaking, or the five day work week, but what ever happened to the spirit of collectivity? They used to break unions on race and nationality, because it took deep-seated self hatred to break the collectivity. Now they just tell you you're an individual.

You're so talented, you are better than all the rest.
You're work is so much better, you have nothing in common with them.
You're creative, you're different than the workers who are guaranteed payment for time and effort.
You're unique, and don't need a union.
You have potential, and you could get rich, so don't worry about heath care or retirement.

People always think unions are for the lowest, the greatest common denominator. The people who break rocks with their hands are the ones who need unions. The anybody and everybody who can't get anything better, who need to be protected just like the old need medicare.

Well, they do need unions. But unions are for talented people too. Skilled laborers, they used to call them. People who work, but work creatively.

I've been watching the second season of The Wire, and it has got me wanting to be a longshoreman. Those guys, they are in a dying industry, feeling the push of technology on one shoulder, and condo developers on the other. But despite that, they never think about deserting the collectivity of the union.

It's not even about the union itself, or the bargaining, or the organization (though benefits would be nice). It's about the work itself. It's about working on something and putting real effort into something and know it's not all for nothing. It's about knowing you have a place to work every morning, and a supply chain into which to put your product. It's about knowing quality is appreciated, and not just tolerated. Maybe you can get these things on your own. But most likely, you don't.

I wish there was a local writer's union. I wish I could apply for membership, show them what I've got, and then they could say, "You're in. Here's your card, and we'll call when we've got work." Or they might say "Beat it, pal. And don't let us catch you scabbing, neither." That's fine. Then I'd amble on down to the next union I've got some skills for, and see if I can earn a living at that. Instead, I feel like one of the horde of potential miners standing outside the gate, wondering if chance will let my family eat or not. Everyone's so supportive of everyone trying to be creative, but they're only going to give you a little bit of generalized "support", not anything that will really help. Because after all, this is a competition. Any maybe, when it comes down to it, they can't really give it anyway.

I put my work on the Internet, and at least a few people look at it, so thank goodness for that. Kind of like digging a bit of coal out of my own backyard. Otherwise I might be holding people at knife point in the park and forcing them to read my essays, which is probably not the best place to win readership.

That's for free, of course. I don't have a problem with that. Many people don't. Maybe everything will be free, eventually, and business will become a niche at best. I can dig it. But I hope real estate, food, and medicine hurry up and catch up with the creative industries. I'm hungry.

The union better call soon, or I'm never going to finish this goddamn novel.

And lo, we have invented a new technical variety of literary wrongness

FUCK! Gerrr... ahk, goddam... fuck!

Okay, I'm doing it.

I promised myself that I wouldn't. But here we are.

I promised myself I wouldn't write anything about Tao Lin or Muumuu House. And yet here I am doing it.

I wasn't going to, because everything obvious has been said by his detractors, of which it seems there are a certain number (like anyone with an Internet presence). And second, what good would it do, really? There are plenty of shitty artists, artists I don't agree with, artists that fall short of their pretensions, and everyone in between. I try to only call out the people who really make me angry, or of whom I think I can make a good example for a particular point, mostly unrelated to the actual person. Attacking someone personally rarely has a positive effect outside of the rhetorical.

But as I said, here I am, and here we are.

I think the fact that he keeps being interviewed is what has brought us here today. Not who he is being interviewed by--some blogs, maybe written up by Nylon or TimeOut. (I would like to see a hipster Left Behind in which every person, place, or thing written up in Nylon, Paper, and TimeOut NY are suddenly vanished from the face of the earth, and those of us left behind actually go out on Friday night and have a pretty good time.) It is all about what he says in his interviews, which really gets me.

But it isn't a "grind my gears" sort of get. It's hard to explain--and this is why we are here.

I read his blogposts to Muumuu House, and his interviews because it is inspiring to me as a writer. We have some commonalities. We both write, and we both aspire to publish ourselves and others whom we admire or appreciate. But he does it in the absolute, complete opposite way I would ever want to. I read his Internet presence because everytime I do, I feel better about my own work and more determined to continue.

I don't mean that I think his work is shit, or even that I don't like it. I think it is absolutely wrong.

This is the opposite of what they teach you to say in liberal arts general-absorbtion-nontheoretical-aesthetics, otherwise known as "upper-middle class culture". They teach you to say, "it's writing, sure, but I don't think it's very good; I just don't happen to like it." Contrary to this, I would say this is the wrong way to write. I believe it fails.

I'm not attacking his format, either. I am all about blogs, Twitter, Gchat, or whatever else. You want to generate writing in new ways, go right ahead.

Tao Lin writes in what he refers to as the style of "Kmart Realism". If you have never had the experience, there are some pertinent examples on the Muumuu House site. I haven't seen him actually describe his own writing in these terms, (which is important, and I'll get to it in a minute) but he writes an essay on Kmart Realism here, a genre in which he groups Ann Beattie, and then in this interview he claims to mimic her work, so I suppose that is a fair, round-about Internet presence self-indentification if ever there was one.

I myself am not to certain what Kmart Realism refers to, or its context, other than feeling as if I generally get the joke but don't specifically enjoy it. For your own reference, I suggest you check out the work on Muumuu House, because I don't know anything about the other writers he references, and don't really care in relation to this.

Call it what you will, it is what it is. It is short-worded, choppy sentences, presented actively, with no metaphor, few adjectives that aren't treated as states, ("I felt weird.") loose descriptions if any, an overall first person tone, a psychological poise (lots of talk about how narrator "feels"), an auspicious ironic tone, and a certain misplacement of ideas that passes for humor.

It is, regardless of what a high school English teacher might think, literature. I can accept that. I, for one, seriously admire an adherance to a form. Most writing these days is so overarchingly auto-narrativistic without realizing it, it makes me want to burn things. I appreciate an approach which makes this tendency the rule, by making it obvious and part of the style. I also can appreciate the terse, shortness for what it is (as long as it lasts, which thankfully isn't long). Additionally, for a time I myself thought of swearing off metaphors, until I decided to embrace them completely. Despite my own writing's difference from these points, I can appreciate someone who sets out some rules, and keeps them as part of their art.

Here, in the same interview as previously linked, Tao Lin gets about as close to describing his prose as he ever does:

TL: The next two books are really detached. It has no adjective. They’re just told as simply as possible.

EN: Do you feel personally detached…?

TL: No, the prose style is detached. There’s no judgment or rhetoric at all. It will just say if it’s a house, it’s a house. It’s also lacking em dashes, semi-colons, similes and metaphors.

He does this sort of thing well, and he and his associates write pieces that still can be read, despite slashing long-proven elements of the English language out of their tool box. For this they should (probably) be congratulated.

But, I still don't buy it. It's still wrong. Not because they are revolting some sense of English-language hegemony deep within my phallus, but because I don't believe they are rejecting anything. Why throw out semi-colons? Why em dashes? Why not en dashes? Why not exclamation points? There aren't many of these in their work either. What is the argument for any of this? What is the rationale?

But, as I imagine the argument, it's not really about a logical argument for these tactics; it's about a feeling.

Oh wait, I didn't imagine that at all. He said it, in the interview. Numerous times. Let's count all the times he talks about how he feels.

"I feel like I’m reading stuff like I’m reading fiction. If it’s amusing I’ll feel excited, even if it’s talking shit about me."

"If I’m writing something that feels like a gimmick, I try to avoid that. I don’t think the term gimmick… I don’t know."

"Well, on my blog, it’s really how I am. I feel like that’s what I’m thinking, just not what I’m saying."

"I don’t feel like I put personal stuff on my blog. If I do, it’s just a lie. Because I treat it as a work of—not fiction—but a work of art. I delete anything I feel uninterested in. I go back and edit. I want someone who goes to it read the entire thing and feel like they’ve read a novel or something, instead of someone just talking without editing."

"I feel like some people will edit everything they do. Some people will just not really edit."

"Without the internet, I feel that I would have a job right now…"

"I feel like probably people wouldn’t want my life because I don’t have any money. With writing, I’m surviving in the way anyone could survive. This is just what I chose to do. I’m not really like living off of writing. I’m not willing to get a real job. Most people in my position would feel a lot of pressure to get a job but I just… don’t like jobs."

"No. I think most people probably have higher expectations that me. Especially NYU students. Maybe that’s why I don’t feel like I’m living the dream."

"I don’t think I think in terms of humor for my books. I don’t feel like I’m approaching it in that way. So it must be different."

"If I wrote all my other books right now they would be different. But I just feel like that’s a natural change. I feel like I’m always gonna keep changing. Not for the better or the worse. So I wouldn’t change it."

Okay--there are a lot more, but I'm tired of hitting Ctrl+C.

Clearly Tao is writing from his "feel", or maybe it's just one of those verbal ticks we all have.

Or is there a difference? Doesn't it seem as if the construction, 'I feel ____' is the foot of his sort of writing? Isn't the writing sort of an ongoing answer to the Twitter perennial, "What are you doing now?" which the introverted, melancholics of the world read as "What are you feeling now?"

Here's a piece from Muumuu House's website, "SELECTIONS FROM CHRIS KILLEN'S TWITTER ACCOUNT BY CHRIS KILLEN, EDITED BY TAO LIN". Reprinted here, absolutely without permission.

2:39 PM Mar 14th
lay in bed for a long time, 'twittering' in my head. tried to remember what i had 'twittered' last night. got up. put on dressing gown. etc.

2:50 AM Mar 14th
listened to man on radio in taxi with 'strong opinion'. panicked mildly that i would never have a 'strong opinion' about anything.

10:53 AM Mar 16th
possibly going to eat a banana in a moment.

11:00 AM Mar 16th
still haven't eaten the banana. what am i doing?

11:01 AM Mar 16th
i feel like i have 'twittered' myself into eating the banana.

1:41 PM Mar 16th
i feel like i am 'twittering the mother-fucking shit out of everything' today. i feel like i am in a fast, open-top sports car.

2:22 AM Mar 16th
my penis feels like a day old glass of water, with bubbles and a bit of tobacco in it.

2:22 AM Mar 16th
my penis feels like a CD i never listen to anymore.

2:23 AM Mar 16th
my penis feels like a curious old gentleman climbing a flight of stairs and then stopping halfway up to have a stroke.

1:47 PM Mar 17th
i am eating a blueberry muffin.

11:57 AM Mar 18th
it is 'blueberry muffin time' again.

4:13 PM Mar 18th
my leg feels strange.

4:15 PM Mar 18th
@jennashworth hi, babes.

2:19 PM Mar 20th
just watched a video on the internet explaining how to fold a t-shirt.

2:22 PM Mar 20th
just tried to look at the alley at the back of my parent's house in kenilworth on google street view. wasn't there.

Now, here's another piece from the site, "Relationship Poem" (OH GOD THE TITLE IT BURNS ME) by Brandon Scott Gorrell:

on the couch i kept asking what was wrong

you said that nothing was wrong

then you said it had nothing to do with me

then we turned on american idol

and only talked about american idol

later we went to bed

and gmail chatted the next day

using 'ok' and 'i don't know' at a frequency that seemed higher than usual

i was on the 5th floor of the downtown public library

sitting next to an obese teenager

who was listening to death metal on her ipod

i minimized our gmail chat and looked at the escalators

mentally projecting myself minimizing our gmail chat and looking at the escalators

then the music on the obese teenager's ipod switched to r&b

it was interesting

Pretty similar, huh? Interesting, indeed!

The good part, which is sort of bizarre, is that despite this petty stamping of the "I feel ___" phrase, whether literal or metaphoric--(you see, the thing about metaphors is you can't just write about something like a blueberry muffin and have it not be symbolic!) it is not writing that I definitely don't want to read. I like it a hell of a lot better that talking animals and teenage vampires/witches. But what are we reading?

We are reading, short prose, with little form except for what it avoids. We see:

-No long, complicated words (adjectives or otherwise)

-no metaphor or simile

-Little or no punctuation

-state description only

-very passive tense

-Nothing serious or attempting to be profound

-Only the first-person narrative

-An ironic self-reference to its own terseness by a grappling with larger, not exactly metaphorical, yet symbolic subject matter of the distinctly personally-narrative, i.e. (I feel "___", quotation marks included)

Is it all ironic? Is Tao Lin's interview style a continuation of his writing style? Is this terse-first-person meant to be involved deeply with what it "feels" in order to be more of a terse, first-person? Are the quotation marks, as the only form of often-used punctuation, meant to be a ironic use-mention form of the author's self-reflective but sparse use of words? Is every word, put in "quotation marks" or not, really a substitute for "I feel"? Is "feeling" the only real verb here? Are we meant to be looking inward, only to find there is nothing there?

wait a minute.... this all seems oddly familiar....

ON THE HIPSTER QUESTION

Is that what this is? Hipster writing? Short, un-artistic, form-as-gimmick, I-drink-beer-like-I-feel, living-in-williamsburg-is-so-damn-hard, Hipster bullshit? Has my attention been drawn, against my will, to the literature equivalent of an ass in skinny jeans?

Let's ask Tao about it:

EN: I read somewhere that you say you write for depressed hipsters. Why do you want to appeal to the hipster crowd?

TL: I try to think of a hipster I can’t think of a specific person. When I think of hipsters in general, they are just people who care about what’s happening now. What they look like… and also… most of that is so they can find more friends. I like all those things. I also feel like they’re like the only people who read books a lot, except for people trying to be writers.

EN: So do you have that audience in mind when you’re writing?

TL: Not when I’m writing… but… yeah, when I’m writing. Cause those are like… either those people or people who are interested in those people … those are the people I’m interested in, in terms of like, talking to and being friends with. In that sense, I target them. In the way I talk about it in interviews and stuff, I’m half joking … those are people who I think read books are, so I’m gonna target them.

Very suspicious.

Firstly, he "can't think of who that might be". Sure, I believe you live in Brooklyn and can't think of any hipster in particular. Even ride the L? Ever go to a bar? Ever go to NYU?

But then he figures out that would be a hard one to get around. Yes, it is the audience he has in mind when he is writing. He admits it.

However--I don't believe Tao Lin is a hipster himself. But what he says, for a "feeling" about who his hipster audience may be, is pretty apt: they are simply people in whom he is interested. People who read books, who might read his books, and who he would know on that basis. A bit scattered in terms of phrasing (edit much, "Bomblog"...?) but pretty honest.

There are many reasons to dislike hipsters. They gentrified your hood, they bought all the good records, they wear shitty clothes, they don't know how to make a good espresso, etc. This all falls under the general, catch-all hipster problem--they are a bunch of clowns who somehow are found everywhere you want to be. It's as if the Insane Clown Posse fan base stopped hanging out behind the drug store, and are now drinking in your bar, going to your favorite DJ night, and generally convinced half the nation's youth to do the same thing.

But this problem, which we are on to here, is separate from the unfortunate fact of hipster fashion. Tao Lin is not interested in hipsters because of the way they dress, but because of the way he feels. What is this link? What is causing his writing to take this dry, ironic, self-referential tone, without riding an 80s skateboard or buying all the good drugs? It is a gene carried by many hipsters, no doubt, but I believe we are looking at a totally different cultural chromosome's allele.

Let's give it a name: Emotional Singularism. That's a bit dry, so for the practitioners of this condition, we will give a nickname: Feelies.

In Emotional Singularism, we are re-visiting Cartesian dynamics, in a most-time appropriate way. In this era of graphs, datapoints, curves-as-linguistic-and-political-architecture, plotted points or the continuation of such points have a currency all their own. You want to be relevant? Show us a graph. You want to hold weight? Plot us a curve to stand your narrative upon. Run it through the points of You, Me, Iraq, Global Warming, George Bush, and make sure its all within the same plane of general consumer-liberalism. There, now you have momentum. It takes three points to plot a distinct curve, and if you read any persuasive essay, you will note at least three points, fixed in a cultural plane, with a nice, sloping approach drawn through the three of them.

But what is really important is the vantage point--the crossing of the axes. From this point, we measure everything. For Decartes it was the abstraction of the verb, "I think"; thinking denoted being. This is a cold, rationalist, metaphysics. It was the axiom of the geometry, and as easily forgettable.

These days, we don't care about the axioms. We just want to see the pretty curves. So we've withdrawn back into the crossing of the axes, without Kant's interest in the suppositions of the axioms, and the necessary philosophical internalization of the geometry of metaphysics into the unconscious (time, space, what is that like?). Rather than analyze the significance of the word, "I", for its own pre-conditions and metaphysical systems, Emotional Singularists are happy to take that singularity as fact. After all, they feel it. And there, they have found their new conscious substance for the pursuit of truth. Hence, their own personal emotions are the singular point on which they base and measure their world.

These days, it's enough to feel. You can debate metaphysics, or get lost along its lines of logic, but with feeling, you can never go wrong. Truth itself is called into question, but we have not yet called feeling into question. Instead, feeling is growing like a vectored weed, directing behavior, politics, economics, and even, so it seems, literature.

You know who these feelies are. We called them Emo for awhile, when boys holding acoustic guitars somehow picked up on a bizarre congruency with the feelings of a great number of record buying teenage girls. But the Feelies are still out there. They are the hipsters feeling self-conscious because they don't know if their fashion and friends are enough. They are the man/woman crying and yelling at a man/woman because s/he gets confused by his/her sexuality's mixed messages. They are the people who don't really know about politics, but have still decided they really don't like politics. They are the people who do one thing, but wish something else. They are the people who just don't feel comfortable with any number of things, and therefore try to avoid those things. They are the people who do not speak, but instead go home and cry.

Emotions are our friends, but they are not replacements for thoughts and words. It works like this, I believe, in actuality: there is some crazy business going on in our unconscious, which we never really understand. This craziness manifests itself in feelings, projected upward from that dark, unphysical undercurrent. These feelings then must be wrangled, absorbed, translated, and mechanized with words. Only in words do we have the ability to deal with the undercurrent of emotions. They don't always work, and if they don't, we throw out the words and start again.

Somewhere along the way, it got uncool to think too much. Maybe between the viscerality of the 60s and 70s, leading into the unholy terrors of thoughts flowing through the 80s and 90s, we felt we would simply be better off not knowing. Or maybe to be hip in knowing just got too difficult, so the eggheads like Foucault and Derrida could worry about that, but the common man was just going to do a bunch of coke and start talking about the fire in his loins at the speed of light. This substitute for actual thought, this rambling realist (or alternatively, speciously new age) hype-speak took the place of the actual definitions of words, the difficult terms of metaphysics, and the technique of linguistic construction. Feelings, those ever-flowing semi-conscious perception, could be packaged and sold as language without a second thought. Ever see one of those adbuster-esque packages, proudly titled, "plastic junk!" a little gag gift plastic nugget-thing wrapped in plastic? The joke is, people actually buy those; a gag in which the gag is that there is no gag. People actually like repetitive, sacarine emo music. They even go to see it played live, just like it is on their CD at home.

Feelings are not words in themselves. It is not enough to say, "I feel weird; I feel nauseous." Because you have a feeling you are not fully able to describe, it is not enough to simply call it "weird", and then describe the discomfort you have with your inability to vocalize it as nausea. Sure, I believe your stomach hurts. But who give a shit? If you drink enough, or do enough chaw, your stomach will also hurt. If you lick the pavement for long enough, you will get nauseous. If you are simply nauseous, I couldn't give a fuck, because you might as well be a fish floating upside down. Oh, something went wrong, and the fish is dead. Was it poisoned? Overfed? Underfed? Drowned from not enough oxygen? There is no way to tell, so I throw it in the toilet and go get another one. I probably even give it the same name.

Hipsters are just as infected by the Feelies as everyone else, but not because they wear clown shoes. It's something to do with our times--a certain wrinkle of modernism that's only metaphysical advance over the past fifty years was to start thinking there was no need to pay attention to the subtle vicissitudes of language anymore. A current in our culture that decided to outsource deep-thinking to the philosophers and focus on stomachs. A specific element of our society that believes it can learn more about themselves from daytime TV chock full of commercials specifically manipulating their emotions than by actually conversing with any person. Watch the commercials playing during an episode of Doctor Phil or Opraha. What is the show? What is the commercial? Which is manipulating your feelings? Which is telling you real information?

So, yeah, you go online. Somebody listens to music. Your girlfriend probably hates you. Man, that's some weird shit. How interesting. How about maybe you stop feeling, just for one second. Instead, why don't you try and write an original thought? Just one. To see if you still can.

Here is a new poem, written by you. In one line, you describe exactly what it is that you did that caused the last fight with your significant other. If you actually do it, trust me, it will be beautiful. (Write it in the comments or email it, and I'll post it.)

Well, Tao Lin--your work with Muumuu House is interesting stuff, I'll give you that. But I wonder if it is interesting because of the reasons you thought it was. Or did you and your writers even bother to stop and think about that?

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.