NOTE: THIS PIECE NEEDS TO BE EDITED AND FIGURED OUT. THERE MAY BE SOMETHING HERE BUT IT’S A MESS RIGHT NOW, A VERY MESSY DRAFT OF SOMETHING–CT SAT OCT 28 2017
Nothing is simple for me. Things that are simple for other people are not simple for me. Things that are hard for other people are easy for me but things that are simple for other people are hard for me. Take for instance the sending of a tweet. Take for instance the promotion of a book, of my book or someone else’s book. Take for instance the public display of enthusiasm, of proclaiming oneself a fan or an adherent. These things—proclaiming myself a fan or an adherent—these things are hard for me. Sitting in the garden this morning, trying to meditate, trying to tame or at least call a truce with the riotous thoughts running thick and unbidden in the swarming air of what I choose to call my mind, trying to get some distance, some serenity, and by and large Holy Shit! succeeding, I think, really, really now, how do I defend this thing that I espouse, how do I justify it, what argument do I have for this? Whether it be my work or the work of someone else, I am intensely uncomfortable in the role of advocate. I know so little of whatever alien consciousness exists beyond the boundaries of my own eyeballs, I know so little of the minds that govern the tastes or the tastes that govern the minds of others, what, other than my own predilections, do I have to go on when I choose to fire off a tweet or load the Buffer gun?
I get tangled up and I get stuck and I do nothing. As a writer I am simply in love with words. When they tumble and ring I am a delirious boy doing the redheaded Watusi on a creekbed in Alabama. But when not then I have nothing
When I’m 64
I will be 64 this year. Things have changed since I was a hippie chanting another joint to carry me to the Bahamas. The literary world, the marketplace, our synthetic agora of ones and zeroes, it has all changed, changed utterly. The wonderment!
During this time of rapid change
wanting to engage passionately on the Net and shout to the heavens the wonder of this and that, but clumsy and ill-equipped to use the available tools, I have lived with guilt, powerless to do my dance, to chant my chant, to ring my bell and tout my heroes. I try to use the available tools but
Frankly, I hate the available tools
I hate the tone of the Internet, the idiocy, the egotism, the frictionless assumption of privilege, the postironic irony, the clickbait tits and listicles, the hollow hairless heads.
Much of what I hate is just the idiocy of youth, to which youth is entitled, as we were entitled to our own idiocy, a beautiful idiocy I once vowed never to desert but which, well, what can I say? When I’m 64? It all seems now a nightmare of fascism and hucksters.
I have this burden of guilt
toward my friends and professional colleagues because I want to “support their books.” I have also lived with a burden of guilt about my own recent book, Finishing School, co-written with my friend Danelle Morton. There is a lot of promotion one is supposed to do before and after publishing a book.
I hate promotion. I hate it.
I hate pretending to engage in “interesting dialog” with others.
I hate the pretense.
That is why I have been a hippie and a punk and an outcast, because I shared with other outcast-by-choice groups this gut-level disgust and hatred of self-promotion and falsity.
Falsity? the promotion gurus say. It doesn’t have to be false.
That’s what they say, anyway, these bald-headed Palo Alto nitwits with their TED talks. You only have to connect with your own truth, your own true … blah blah blah. I say it’s all blah blah blah because this is my truth:
My own voice, my true voice …
it is not this … it is not that … it is not the voice of the man in the black turtleneck with the megaphone, the cool breeze backslapping maker of promises.
In a nutshell,
even after 20 years on the Net I am still uncomfortable with the forms and styles it requires. Weird. because
in 1995 when the Netscape browser came out
I was all over it. I published a blog in 1995 on my lunch hour at Chevron. I owned the domain “writerman.com.” I let it lapse and someone took it away from me. But I was on it! The possibilities of cheap access to a worldwide medium! Oh my god! It was revolutionary! It was so exciting!
But that is long gone, like the prune orchards of Santa Clara. I do not think even the Internet Wayback machine can find it. It was short-lived. And then I worked for
the pioneering online magazine Salon.com.
But it was started by print journalists and most of those early people have gone back to print journalism because I think those of us in this generation are wired differently and have been educated differently. The short forms don’t work for us. We ramble on. We tell the long tale.
As I am doing now. As I did when writing the Since You Asked column for Salon. Which was probably a big reason salon found that my services were no longer needed—because I could not adapt, or refused to adapt, to the short form, the short, smart, prickly, in-your-face form:
the punch form.
So I promised my friends to publicize their written works and I am going to try to do that but I cannot do it by pretending. I can only do it by stating my sincere interest and affection for these works and these people.
And, even so, given that, I’ve still got to say this: I hate this shit! I mean I hate the mechanics of using Buffer. I hate the name Buffer. I hate all these little baby names for companies; I like the name General Motors because it is honest and it conjures a world that is honest in its terribleness and its hugeness. Google, Facebook, Apple, they are huge and powerful and fearsome but they pretend to be nice and friendly and that bothers me.
Anyway, I am a ranter. When I find my energy to communicate it is increasingly these days in the form of a rant. Because for one thing I feel silenced. I feel silenced by living in Italy and not speaking Italian worth a damn. I feel silenced by my stumbling speech as I go into the new cafe across from the high school and order a cornetto and attempt to tell them how pleased I am at their new location; I do not even attempt to tell them how sad I was when they moved, when I thought they had gone out of business or quit. Then it turns out they have only moved, less than 100 meters from their old location, to this new and much better location. I long to be able to chat with them and I cannot, not yet, and not for the foreseeable future as I am not such a good student of languages. I am not disciplined like my wife Norma, who gobbles up languages. So I need to study. Studio, studio, studio. Piano, piano.
