Cape Cod has been on my mind lately. So I recently revisited the Cape by way of Thoreau, in the NewPages blog.
This is one of several short book essays I’ve written this summer — I’ve read about 18 books since the last week of May.
My mind has also been on the future replacement of this site, which I’ve been thinking of for years, and see that it’s probably about time to do.
I don’t believe in politics. I never really did — I’m of no party whatsoever and I have no interest and I abjure myself entirely of all of it. It’s all a tired LOL and not for me. I just don’t care. Almost nothing could be more boring. Sure, I’ve been tricked and conned and fooled and pulled like anyone else, like almost everyone. The only answer is to simply ignore it. Just like ‘social media,’ which is one of the biggest boring jokes and cons of this wreckéd age. All real friendship, life and living happens off-platform, and people who want to live need to remember that.
There are no answers — only questions. The more I know the more questions that I have and the more that I keep asking. There’s nothing else to do. I am interested in the long and near, the gone and far away, the moments in our reach that melt away. This is what I’m interested in and this is what my work is all about. Writing, stories, novels, songs, images and objects made — that’s what matters.
I don’t like WordPress, either, and I know this site and homemade theme has long outlived its simple usefulness — it’s time to return to plain HTML and the good handcoded text of yore, and I’m about to. In my own time — I’m still offline, working and doing, and I enjoy the distance and the silence.
I saw Twitter from nearly the beginning — and cynically ignored it.* In the beginning, I may have had good reasons. At the time, I was completely offline, amassing millions of words in manuscript.
Eventually I got on @michaelstutz, but retained my ambivalence.
Something has recently changed all that — a sure, subtle change in the air, that you can feel, that means this is a time for being and creating online and sharing ideas. And the way Twitter’s evolved in recent years, especially with longer character counts and the addition of threads, it brings new & exciting possibilities for writing. Original Twitter, or “Old Twitter,” is almost entirely a long boring stream of ‘status updates.’ Not anymore. There’s no doubt that the whole thing’s suddenly compelling.
And now it took me no time at all to get blocked by my favorite story-threading Internet kook — who crossed the line of deceny by doxxing innocents as part of one of his rants.
* Well, not entirely true. I’ve run a stable of characters, as an experiment in online fiction, since the beginning.
Obsessed about a new kind of writing, something more interesting, and immediate, than what’s happening in social media or anywhere else, certainly books—and it was seen in the thrim and shimmer of the lightrays and lush at a disco loft party last night. There for a second, a mirrored moment alone, when my ancient idea of “instant writing” was haunting me hard, some of it came out quickly in great natural clarity—it was strong, vernal, and maybe the only way out that was reasonably possible.
Because look: I’ve created a mountain range of backed-up work in journals and files and piles of pocket notebooks all to transcribe, and there’s simply no way to gather it en masse together and organize it without stopping, and time, and meanwhile more—the ideas keep gushing forth in their fast-flowing froth and I know that the most likely way of finishing these big legends and books is maybe to write them all out in realtime just as they happen, and instantly with fast strokes & brushthought life is transmuted to word.
Control the medium and you control what’s possible on it. Language is the medium of thought. So the way to curtail thought is to take away the tools that make it possible — ban words and phrases, change their meanings, outlaw certain expressions … and suddenly whole ideas are forbidden, if not impossible.
Today the so-called “literary” press is among the worst of the politically-correct controllers. That’s why contemporary literature is so weak and useless — it has no cultural cachet, the novel and poetry have almost no presence or power in public life. “Literary” is a synonym for weak-minded, academic PC junk that isn’t worth your time.
I won’t support them, and in return they won’t support me, either — Circuits of the Wind isn’t simplistic enough for them, they hate a lot of words and ideas in the book, and they sure don’t like white males — dead or alive.
So I was honored to be a part of Loren Feldman’s documentary film Silenced: Our War on Free Speech, produced by Mike Cernovich. It’s exactly about that. And a lot of us aren’t shutting up about it anymore.
