Dear diary,
Books are stupid. I want to say “This entry that I am writing will be neither literate nor illiterate, neither pre-literate nor post-literate, but ANTI-literate: a blog post against reading,” – that’s what I want to say, but I actually like reading (at least the results of decoding word-symbols, if not the act itself), so I can’t advise you to entirely abstain from all literature, because I never lie.
I hate when someone tells one, “I found a book on the table,” and then they say, “so I leafed through it.” I just hate that last phrase. I wanna retort “Leaf thru THIS,” and then hold up my middle finger.
I also hate brief books. All books should be lengthy, multi-volume tomes. (Tho I should add that all my favorite texts are mercifully short. I’m not trying to contradict myself here—I just keep realizing, while noting down all these complaints, that my mindset, at least at this instant, is more emotional than accurate.) And I hate when people borrow books from the library. Books should be purchased not borrowed, otherwise you don’t own them.
In fact, libraries should be abolished because their nature is insufficiently capitalistic. (When’s the last time you met a billionaire librarian? Think about it. I myself have only met three billionaire librarians in my life; & I have two kids with the second one, whom I married—tho we’re separated now.) It’s hard to make a fortune by lending out texts for free.
In a notebook fragment, Walt Whitman writes “Books are not men.” So if you know anyone who prefers books to true human interaction, you might wanna wink at your fatherland’s Secret Police and suggest that they start a file on this individual. Note down all the details of their daily life. Develop their character.
Whitman also says, early on in “Song of Myself”:
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books…
Check the file that our government compiled on me, and you’ll see that I have not done a very good job of adhering to the dictates of my favorite poem. I’ve done little else with my adult life than feed on the spectres in books. Especially the choicest parts of Leaves of Grass, which is the volume that contains Whitman’s “Song of Myself”. So when I say that I treat this text as holy scripture, I mean it sincerely; and my statement will hold up in court – for just find a person who believes in the Reformed Church of Protestant Christianity and ask…
Hold on; this breakthrough realization deserves its own paragraph:
Just locate a soul who believes in the Reformed Protestant Church, and ask him what his holy scripture is called, and he’ll answer “the Bible”. Then ask this same believer to name his favorite part of the Bible, and he’ll answer “the gospels that tell about Jesus Christ,” meaning the books attributed to St. Mark and similar pseudonyms. Now when we read any portion from whichever gospel the believer claims is his favorite scripture, we notice that he, the believer, reacts the same way to the contents of HIS preferred text as I myself react to MY preferred text: I find it as difficult to live up to the sentiments of “Song of Myself” as the believer finds it to live up to Jesus the Christ: we all fall short of our ideals. But one fact I want to stress is that I also love the gospels and much of the Bible – I don’t limit my literary purview to Whitman alone; whereas it’s been my experience that “believers” do indeed limit their love—at least the self-styled Christians in MY family refuse to read Whitman. Whereas I, even I, follow the teachings of Jesus to a tee (“to a tee” is an idiom meaning “wholly and completely”). “Song of Myself” challenges me more than the Bible, because it is a Divine Word more recently spoken – it’s easy to accept the challenges of divinity from ages ago, as they’re given in the biblical scriptures; however, perfection-potential keeps beckoning us onward and outward, and it’s incumbent upon each individual to answer the sacred call. Many “believers” ignore this.
Is the above paragraph too preachy? I agree. I’ll delete it. I gotta stop doing that. I gotta stop losing my head. I’m just under so much stress from dealing with handyman contractors, since we’re trying to move from our current dump to a different dump, and thus we must polish this dump to sell this dump – so I won’t be myself until this fiasco is over. We still have so much stuff that we need to do. Here I’ll make a list:
We still need to remove wallpaper; replace countertops; replace both sinks; replace the entire bathroom and re-caulk the tub; dispose of a veritable cubic kilometer of clutter; install baseboards downstairs; unclog the water softener; spray-paint the cover of the exhaust fan and the interior casing for the doorbell; eliminate one wall’s-worth of deadly mold before adding a new wooden frame plus a coat of liquid sealant plus a vapor barrier plus moisture-proof sheetrock; mend three cracks in the ceiling; install four “boob lights”; scrub down all the doors; ring out the old carpet & ring in the new; then, lastly, drizzle white paint over all the new carpet, by mistake.
Also, FYI (“For Your Information”) I edited my handle on the blue bird network (I got tired of having those numbers at the end of my name – it used to be “@BryanRay444”; now it’s “@NotBryanRay”) – this causes an alteration to the URL (“Uniform Resource Locator”: an address identifying where shit can be found on the Internet), so you’ll need to update all your bookmarks.
Yeah, so here I am, waking up each day filled with stress about all this home-pimping business. (I hate the word “pimp”; that’s why I used it just now. My dictionary says that its origin is unknown. …The word’s origin, that is; not the book’s. The dictionary knows that its father was Aristotle, who invented the boredom of labeling, and its mother was Adam, who named all the animals – Genesis 2:19 “whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof” – thus Adam was the world’s first poet… or rather the second, now that I think about it: the first was GOD, who spoke everything into existence, beginning Genesis 1:3 with a paraphrase of Thelonious Monk: “It’s always night, therefore let there be light.”) And the worst thing about being so preoccupied with physical labor is that I’m barred from doing any REAL work—the mission I was born to accomplish; my divine calling in life—that is, without all this hustle-bustle demanding my time and dulling my mind, I could be following the passion of my heart: I could be writing about giant robots warring against each other. Or alternately raping one another (it’s not taboo to take rape as a topic, as long as your subjects are machines and your tone is not jokey) – I haven’t yet decided which focus would be more interesting to read about. Or if you have a better idea, email it to me along with your bid for the mold remediation. Now here’s a passage from Paul Mariani’s biography of Wallace Stevens (chapter 14, “The Son Restores the Father”):
Would the reader “get it,” though? To look at the reviews of his work, Stevens explained, one would think not. But wasn’t the real value of the reviews that they brought with them a degree of acceptance? People read poetry nervously, afraid that something would “go wrong with the sentence after next.” Still, wouldn’t it be nice to hear that someone had actually received pleasure in reading his poems? Possibly, he sighed, “one never has more than a very few readers who pick up the feelings that one puts into one’s poems.” Reviewers usually underestimated the poet until the time came when he was accepted, and then they tended to overestimate him. But then people did not have the time to “put someone under the microscope.”
This interests me because, while writing creatively, I myself yearn for acceptance and would rather avoid being underestimated. But there are differences between Stevens’ day and mine. In the 1940s, which is the time that the above passage deals with, a man could compose poems by running a pencil over some pieces of paper, and then typing up the result via typewriter and sending it to a publisher; the publisher would then publish these poems in a book, and people would buy the book after reading a favorable review by an educated reviewer, whose composition appeared in a popular newspaper. Contrariwise, in 2018, the worst year ever—the rock-bottom low point of history—instead of writing poems with a pencil, we thumb our virtual keyboard to phone-in blog posts: no publisher is needed, we distribute our murmurs ourselves – just press the red button labeled “PUBLISH” – so no book needs to be printed or bound physically; but the downside of this is that no reader ever sees your work, let alone a reviewer. And any reviewer writing today, if he himself must seek out the matter to review, limits himself strictly to negative reactions – he simply browses around the Internet until something strikes him as bad (that is: unfamiliar), and then he pans it. Or in the case that the reviewer’s review must pass as favorable, the work to be considered is always pre-selected by higher-ups in corporate offices. So, again, we’ve come full circle to the dichotomy of gods-versus-men; and any man who acts as god gets crucified.
But it can’t always remain this way. That’s the boon of endless flux. For example, the rap music from the late 80s and early 90s seemed good to you, so you wept when you realized that its hour was slipping away; now the present generation’s popular music is dominated by a rap style that you hate; however, remember: this too will pass.
But when you enjoyed the ancient rap style, it was unpopular: in those days, watered-down rock music dominated the pop scene. Yet now, when rap gets its chance at being popular, it’s only the low rotten stupid lazy form of it that the masses prefer. So it seems that, despite the fact that everything keeps changing—tastes, fashions, fads—the one thing that remains constant is that the top slot, the throne of popular art, remains rumped by drivel. It is anti-sublime, exclusively unsophisticated…
*
Wow, I just installed a replacement light fixture in our bedroom. The thing has two sockets for bulbs. I took the old fixture down, and hooked up the new, and screwed in two lightbulbs from a box labeled (in my own uppercase handwriting) “USED BULBS—BEWARE: ONE IS BAD”… & then I turned on the switch, but there was no light. My first thought was to take the thing apart and begin to troubleshoot what I must’ve done wrong with the wiring; yet, before going to all that trouble, I decided to try another bulb from the aforesaid box. When I flipped the switch this time, the alt-bulb lit! So I grabbed another from the same box and replaced the remaining dud, and flipped the switch again, and both bulbs lit!! (What are the odds that I’d install a light fixture that takes two bulbs, and both bulbs that I use at first are burnt out?) (Actually, at my apartment, the odds are pretty good that this type of thing would happen. For I’m lazy at properly labeling household supplies.)
And just now my sweetheart sent me an instant text message, and I looked at it on my phone and prepared to answer back, but a dark oozing stain on my thumb caught my eye… I assumed this was blood, and that I had unknowingly cut myself; therefore, sobbing, I ran to the bathroom sink to wash off the gore… but then I noticed that the color was black not red – so it turns out that I simply got ink all over my fingers. From this, I conclude that, at some point today, I must’ve been using my fine point gliding gel pen.
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