What Am I Doing. I wake up and it’s immediately bouncing around my head. The question is such a preoccupation these days that it’s less a question than the constant awareness of being pressed against the plate glass of experience, the inside gawping at the outside with feelings of inadequacy. Well, I am trying to be a writer, chasing occupation from the starting blocks of preoccupation. I can do it, I say to myself. I’m not wrong.
In an effort to force prose out myself, I have had the intention to start a blog—substack, patreon, whatever—for years. And working on the last few posts has been a blast (I hope you have enjoyed reading them, too). I want to write a little about the purpose of the blog. I want it to have a laxative effect, the demands of an imagined audience forcing me to push some writing out the pipes, while also relaxing the creative muscle through a breezier approach to the pressures of performing. This is my tune for you, dear reader.
I like the pipes as an image of the creative apparatus. I type away at my creaking 2013 macbook, my Apollian instrument that I fear may die any day (the other week I accidentally vacuumed the H key off the board). But equally it points to the symmetries in digestion, conception, and sanitation—the co-mingling of productivity, waste, and shitting in trying to make stuff, surrounded by millions of people all doing stuff and getting stuffed with doing and do-do. A consummate Kantian, the ageing Coleridge lamented “the petty needs of the body that plug up the pipes of the playing fountain” at a time when his substantial opium use made it extremely challenging for him to defecate. I used to read this line as a general hatred of bodies. Now, I see how much he hated his broken passages, his shit stuck inside him. I guess that’s why the young tend not to be Kantians.
In an image of anal expulsion rather than retentiveness, I recently finished Gary Indiana’s incredible Three Month Fever, a heavily fictionalised account of the life of Andrew Cunanan, a spree-killer who shot Gianni Versace dead on the steps of his mansion, and then shot himself. In Indiana’s rendering, Cunanan was a cold, obsessive snob who wished to mix easily in high society and the glamour of the west coast gay scene. Written after extensive research on the life of Cunanan, including interviews with people who knew him and the various accounts of the trial (including police records), the novel recounts his excessive spending sprees and furtive capacity to appear to be from money. Naturally gifted and a pathological liar, Cunanan pretended to be from a wealthy Jewish family while his father was an alcoholic Filipino immigrant. He went to great efforts to lead a lavish lifestyle, including possible involvement in the armed robbery of pharmaceuticals, because he desired to move among the elite and wealthy with ease.
With disgust and intrigue, Indiana describes the wealth of 90s high American society, their intense dispersal of wealth, made solid in gauche objects as the “grandeur around the invisible Freudian fecal pile.” In spending sprees, the rich quite spectacularly shit their wealth around, and, in the fine line between envy and hatred, we all hold our noses and gawp at it.
Indiana’s novel charts a simple narrative progression, how does a narcissist escalate from spending spree to killing spree? It sounds rather simplistic but with Indiana the devil is in the detail, and the author humorously navigates the reciprocal relation between a society that devalues human life in the pursuit of goods and the psyche of a man with a severely damaged capacity to see the life of other humans as valuable.
Anyway, enough of that shit.
I often find myself enjoying or being troubled by a book, a film, an album, a song, an experience, or whatever facet of stomping through the world my mind temporarily becomes fixated on. And then have an idea of something to say about it. But I am habitually very bad at seizing hold of these ideas and putting them into words. So many great ideas haunt the graveyard of my imagination.
I still, to this day, think about the comparative essay I wanted to write, in 2012, about Yeezus and Spring Breakers. I even talk about this ghost of an idea, as if I was lamenting something that in some way happened, although it only ever existed as something that never happened. The moment has so long passed that I doubt it could ever be good or interesting. This blog is an exercise in the imperfect practice of not letting go of any idea, of grabbing it and pinning it to a board, framing it, and thrusting it in your faces, of saying, like the proud infant, or James Franco in Spring Breakers, look at my shit.
Since finishing my PhD in 2018, with over 70 job applications for permanent positions and counting, it’s been hard to ascertain whether a slow shift into seeing myself more as a ‘writer’ and less as an ‘academic’ was a choice I actively made or a response to the depressing circumstances of the job market.
The answer is probably both.
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, contradictorily to my impulses, taking possession of a happenstance decision is a better way to feel stable about it, as the big waves crash all around the lifeboat, than seeing oneself as a constant victim of worldly misfortune.
And as a para-academic, wandering in the desert of under-employment and zero hour anxiety, I’ve worked as a tutor, an editor, a copywriter, and many other jobs the last few years to pay the rent. Interestingly, it is in the commercial work I’ve done, butchering words, hacking at them on the slab of the market, that I’ve learned so much about how to write, and grown in confidence with it, too. It’s funny how we can sometimes learn so much from the places we least expected to.
So this blog is something like a primer for working through my own thoughts, a way to push steam and a bit of shit through the pipes, so that we can all gawp at it. Good shit.
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