I’m at peak anxiety because I’m overworked; and it’s embarrassing because the overwork was voluntary: so I did this to myself. What happened was that I got a notice from the corporation that owns this here blog site where I post these journal entries, and they said that at the end of the present month they’ll be “improving” their interface and forcing everyone to use it. So, to me, this meant that I should start backing-up and archiving all my entries, cuz no corporation ever gives a fig about improving any of their products, and every change is always for the worse...
CORPORATION: “Here’s our new, improved burger!”
CUSTOMER: “It looks just the same as your old burger, but now it has a camera lens sticking out from its meat.”
CORPORATION: “Exactly! That’s to help us monitor your eating experience, so that we can keep making it better with improvements like this!”
So for the last weeks I’ve been madly scrambling behind the scenes copying everything that I’ve posted here and moving it onto my personal storage drives. It’s such a tedious task that I almost feel I could die doing it. (“Doc listed Bryan’s cause of death as ‘backing up blog posts’.”) But it’s necessary, and if I don’t do this myself, who else is gonna do it? — By the way, all along, I have kept copies of everything I share here; but I end up revising my writings so obsessively that the online version is usually significantly different from whatever “safe copy” I kept; so it’s worthwhile to grab everything, just to be sure...
*
Boring, boring, boring. I apologize to myself for besmirching this page by even mentioning the above chore; but the fact is that it’s a huge part of my life, and I do care about maintaining a record of my existence here — also maybe my noting of this will help explain why the surrounding entries are so so-so.
So, anyway, while copying them, I couldn’t avoid glancing at many of my old entries; and I have an ambivalent reaction to my own works: It turns out that I’m an odd mix of self-lover & self-hater. When I’m writing an entry, and directly after I’ve finished something, I love it intensely: I feel that every last jot and tittle is precious. But then when enough time has passed and I look at the same entry with fresh eyes, I feel disgust with myself: “Who is this enthusiastic buffoon?” I ask. And, in shame, I have the urge to annihilate everything. — But I end up deciding to preserve it all, if only for the sake of being an example to others: Perhaps they’ll see me as “the wrong way to go.” Cuz of course I’d be happy if the future-folk judge me to be an exemplary writer and an interesting artist, but on the other hand I’d be equally happy if they rank me as the clumsiest cuckoo dilettante ever, because then maybe future writers & artists will look at my stuff out of curiosity to see how low matters can sink (the way that one might say to a friend “You’ve gotta see this movie — it’s so bad it’s almost good), and when the artists look at my works, they will laugh and say “O god! I could do better than that in my sleep!” and then they might create works of their own, just to prove how easy it is for them; so, in a way, I will have inspired them, with my vulgarity, to bring beauty into the world.
Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul.
—as Emerson always sez, in his “Divinity School Address”. And this is also what Emerson’s Uriel means when he speaks that couplet that I quote all the time:
In vain produced, all rays return;
Evil will bless, and ice will burn.
And, returning to the topic of blog-archiving: these circumstances have forced me to begin the arduous task of BINDING these diary entries together into book-form. There’s so many of them (about a thousand now) that they’ll need to be published in multiple volumes.
I got the first roundup in proof, and it runs from 10 June 2014 to 10 June 2015: exactly one year. And that’s 350 pages. And I’m gonna keep all the “obligatory imagery” along with the text, because altho at the start I always assumed I’d leave the images out when I printed the diary as a codex, I now realize that the pictures play too big a part to eliminate. Even if all they do is sit there blatantly having nothing to do with anything, I kinda like that. I welcome them for being so stupid and foolish.
Yet the very bad news is that in order to print the images, I need to select the option to use “Full color pages”, which is extremely expensive. The way that the on-demand publisher prices the books is that they have a base printing cost, which is what you pay to get your proof (your author’s copy prior to final publication — it’s so that you can look it over and fix any changes), and that’s already $25 dollars. And in order to put it into the market and offer it for sale, the printing company demands that you increase this number so that they can make their requisite profit (nothing, not even a mother’s milk to her infant, should be allowed to yield less than maximum returns); so although I would prefer to scatter my words freely forever, I’m forced to price the book at $50 dollars — anything lower than that, and the company’s interface won’t even let me press the “Publish” button: it remains greyed-out and un-pressable until you type the magic number.
So that’s sad, for what this all means is that the physical book shall be officially cost-prohibitive. There’s nothing I can do about that; this is the way that the LORD made the earth. (In heaven, things are different. In heaven, everything is fine. But earthlife sux.) But I still wanna have the option of owning a bound, paper copy of all my entries, so I’ll just order a single proof of each volume for myself: I can’t afford any more than that!
And then maybe I’ll let the volumes get clowned as e-books — I haven’t yet looked into the pricing of so-called digital options. All my other literary masterpieces are only available as raw physical objects: ink on paper. I specifically prohibited the publishing company from selling them as e-books, cuz I don’t believe in e-books.
All the other publishing options are available to thee; but this one option thou must not utilize, for on the day that thy company offereth my bookwork in screenform, it shall surely die. (Genesis 2:16-17)
I like “audio books” much more than the e-book format (tho I haven’t yet gotten around to recording myself reading my books aloud for audio versions either — still, I do like that idea). But these diary entries are different from my Self-Amusements, because they (the diaries) were all originally composed to be studied on a glowing screen; so maybe e-books are the answer this time around.
No matter what, I’ll keep the entries available on this website so that anyone who wants to can always view the entire contents here on the Internet for free. So unless the Blog Corporation “accidentally” suicides them, they’ll abide online.
*
See how important I think I am? (But who actually cares what I do with my silly entries! This is the type of stuff that makes me feel such shame and self-loathing when I look back at it, years later.)
In the good old days, one could simply toss one’s manuscripts into the fire. For everyone lived in cottages back then, or log cabins, and they all lacked central heating and modern air-conditioning systems; so they had to use their fireplace to cook & to keep themselves warm. And this was convenient, cuz if you really hated something that you wrote in your diary, you could just burn the whole book: throw the baby out with the bathwater, and damn the goats with the sheep.
However, sometimes, when you attempted to lob your diary into the flames, it would land in the kettle that’s simmering there with its lid off: and the book would find itself submerged in the soup. (Or in the stew, if that’s what you’re cooking.) Then you’d have a second chance to rethink your abortive act; and you could reach into the kettle and pull the book out from the hot water & save it; albeit the words might have blurred a little when they were swimming in the liquid. And, on the plus side, you might realize that this mistake serves as your meal’s secret ingredient; because the soup or stew tastes suspiciously better than usual, as its bouquet now contains a hint of “old book”.
Also, aforetime, bookmakers manufactured paper from the skin of animals; so it would be totally appropriate to add a book or two to any recipe. Tho, of course, not if you’re preparing a feast for more refined vegetarians. In that case, you want to make sure that you only serve plant-based literature. But it shouldn’t be hard to find pages whose paper is wood-pulp.
& think about all those poets who write their curses down in blood. Is that kosher? — I don’t think so.
Maybe it would be best if we navigated our ship back to the days before the printed word was discovered. Cuz some people think that there was no literature back then, but they are dead wrong: there was actually a thriving literary industry, only it did not consist in computer screens, audio files, and scrolls of papyrus — for all the compositions of that epoch were simply stored in the human mind: they were memorized. So in order to make sure that you knew the proper order of all the words, the authors would need to make the arrangement easy to recall; thus they would install their ideas into lines that had a fixed number of syllables, and they chose words whose syllables would form a noticeable pattern, due to the way that they are naturally stressed when pronounced; also it is really helpful to rhyme the end of these lines, or even to add internal assonance. Any mnemonic device helps — every mental aid is welcome.
And that’s, I think, why there’s so many anonymous poems from ancient days, whereas not many people publish books in the modern market while leaving blank the “author’s name”. If you’re living in any of those eons prior to the invention of writing, you could easily edit any airy manuscript by simply reciting a different line than the one that was intended by the author; and if your amendment strikes your audience as superior (or if this is their first exposure to the work), they’ll all pick it up & remember YOUR revision instead of the original author’s lousy first attempt.
And some folks say that the advent of the written word slew the art of memory. That sounds accurate to me, but I also don’t care much. It’s like claiming that the advent of Auto Spell-checker killed the fun pastime of Spelling Bees. (A “spelling bee” is a tournament in which contestants are asked to arrange the characters of a broad selection of words in what the current society deems their proper order.) I always hated spelling bees anyway... I hate fun pastimes in general.
That’s also why people say “Smart-phones make you dull.” It’s cuz when you rely on your phone to do everything for you, you lose your wits. But I don’t think this is a bad thing: for what you’re really doing is saying “If an electronic device can tackle this task, then why waste my own miraculous mind upon it?” — And you’re right: By allowing your phone to take over all the tasks in the smartness department, you’re not growing dull: you’re finding where you fit in, so as to participate in The Great Dance of All Things without your moves being superfluous or redundant. For you don’t want two separate dancers both making the same stomping move at the same position in the grand routine: someone’s liable to lose a limb! Or you might step on somebody’s gilded slipper, and that would hurt. So it’s good to let your computing device do the grunt-work, so that you can focus your energies on the high-minded, creative, artistic pursuits: the type of stuff that computers can’t do. Like fornication, and poetic truth-ruining.
P.S.
Ah, man! I think the movie business is kaput. With this pandemic-virus lurking everywhere, there’s no way to film new movies with one’s troupe. That’s why I think we should bring back the Ancient Athenian Dramatists. Dig them up from their graves and ask them how they made their plays. And they’ll explain that they had all their actors wear stark, recognizable masks. One would don the vizard of Dionysus, and another would put on the hollow head of Apollo. And other people who are not divine immortals had their own disguises too, like Oedipus and Electra. My point is that you could make these god-masks and mortal-masks equipped with the right type of filters, so that the actors could kiss onstage without transferring the plague. And they could safely kill their parents.
[AUTHOR’S NOTE: That closing line is humorous, not bloodthirsty; it stems from my mentioning of the characters Oedipus and Electra: becuz the former killed his father while the latter killed her mother.]
No comments:
Post a Comment