"Waiting for Gadot," final scene

Make sure you read in order!

Pardon the Interruption

Let’s talk, you and I. Let’s talk about theatre. The house isn't empty as I write this; a cold February rain isn't falling outside. It’s not night. Sometimes... we lose the power. But for now it’s on, and so let’s talk very honestly about theatre. Let’s talk very rationally about moving to the fourth wall…and perhaps over the edge.

Testing, testing

Hello. Here's a little piece of anger and good thinking (for myself...) I wrote for a GRE Practice Exam question asking whether it would be a good idea to create a national curriculum for the schools of a nation. I'm somewhat fond of it, but I'm telling you what it is because, well, because it's schoolwork, about as unrelated to this blog as anything I've posted here before. Enter after the jump at your own risk. Before I cut off on the homepage, I'll say this: we are experiencing regimen change (like the pun?); ideas for "etymology," and pieces for "autopsy" are still very much at hand, as well as others. The new type of "regular" posting may or may not begin soon. You will not see since you aren't here but were that not true you might. Diving board, you've climbed thus far with me, would you care to jump?

When at last you give in...

I think the ultimate test of understanding an idea is being able to recognize it elsewhere. Anyone can string useless words together as some sort of definition, anyone can write, but it is actually seeing this concept outside of its initial context that allows you to truly claim understanding. It's like waiting on a girl to grow her hair out just to see if you're only attracted to the current boyish cut. Because you'd never know. I would say that being unable to recognize ideas that connect across different contexts is one of the major faults in ideology. Let's have ourselves a little experiment, then, in locating the concept outside of its context.

The Splintering of the Left

Testing, testing

The Kind of Irony You Can't Write

One of the brilliant things about academia is how stupid it really is.

PLAINWATER

"Bohemian Rhapsody," "Happiness is a Warm Gun," "Band on the Run," and "Paranoid Android" are all songs that are known for their diversity--the way that they slip around on you--and are commonly thought of as more than one song somewhat cut and pasted together. But done so very well, of course. Which gets me to thinking--why do we like this idea? I mean, the concept of a mini-album contained in one song falls completely flat on its face so hard it doesn't even have a nose anymore. So why do we like the idea of a song containing the diversity of an album? I would postulated this is an interest in disparate connections: we enjoy being stunned by two ideas the fit together so well that we can't even see the seams where they logically attach. It's like CatDog: at what point is one the other? And yet they are completely different! And that's, as they say, poetry.

Layering

One of the perhaps subtle bits behind the genius that is Douglas Coupland's Miss Wyoming is a theme that we can track back to Rousseau. It's basically the Doomsday Device from Dr. Strangelove and it's an idea of which any archaeologist is familiar.

"Slippery," my father corrects, "just slippery. That was the nickname."

My spirituality is rooted in coincidences.

It's all a problem in mindset.

Just another rant about hierarchies.

The blue bus speaking in my mind.

About dreams, DeLillo, and the like. Sort of a mental note, which is why I'm not putting much introduction here. (Trying to change what I use this blog for, so this is one way to do that, I guess.)

The price of the stereo depends on the stereo type.

Still in the punning mood. Not sure what this one is about. This is the long haul at the moment, seeing if I can get a lot of posts in while it's still June. I'm doomed to fail, but I've got nothing better to do. My writing style at the moment is a lot of fun to work with. It's been a productive month: moving the fiction back to the end was quite helpful, because it allowed me to do a lot of writing in the length that I want (~1000 words) and then adapt that to fiction. Plus it was fan fiction so it was all kinda new. But I'm wasting time here. This is the introductory bit saying au revoir.

Uh, yeah...

This is just a filler post. You'll know that if you read it. But I put some ideas in it. And anyway, I think I mention it is so while writing it. As long as it captures something, however ugly and un-brilliantly it might do so, then it was worth it. It's a Monday when I'm actually writing this, although it's dated otherwise, and since it's mad, it gets that tag. I've gotta sleep. Night, folks. (6/21/10, 11:34PM)

You and me and "you" and "me," but not "you and me."

Bret's in here as a tangent. This is about Borges, him, but most of all me, and what I wrote in my journal going on like four years ago now. Bit of a small post before the jump here, so I'll just point the finger to Say Hi, who I've been soundtracking this blog entry and the past hour?-ish to by way of the stand-by youtube. Another one-man band, so it elicits the issue of pronoun, they?, he? I'll go with "they." They make better music than I make blog posts, but go ahead and read this one if you wish, it's one of the better ones, until the end where I have no idea what I'm doing.

Writing Poetry

On a Youtube video for an early demo of  "Everything In Its Right Place," our presenter comments that they kinda lose it at the end but it's still awesome. I don't do so well here, but I'm just apologizing beforehand. "I can never lose it"? Maybe so, but maybe not. Welcome back to the blogging, rather than the slitting of a story up into bits. Continue on at your own peril.

Rain Out

Forgive the metaphor, but I do have a moderate excuse for my lateness—this post was originally meant, in my mind, for yesterday. Seeing Get Him to the Greek last night was an effective rain-out to the baseball game that was this entry. So now, here we are, in the middle of a day and night doubleheader. Or rather a night and night doubleheader, because I’ve slacked off a bit this Sunday. Or a night and day one, as I’m not sure if I’ll get through both of these topics before midnight.

That said, let’s get right into it. I think it’s somewhat beneficial to write these two posts back to back, because I’ve got somewhat linking ideas, sort of an expanding theory, if you will. I’ll let you in on a little secret, the original thought that I had for yesterday’s post got canned, because I envisioned it earlier in the week and then the day came and I couldn’t get myself to write it. That’s the problem with plans: you get ahead of yourself; you get to thinking that sure, you can do that when the time comes, even though you can’t see yourself doing this activity at this exact moment, and obviously that fact doesn’t change, just because time has moved on. But whatever, enough of my cry-baby antics, and onward to our double feature.

Now, not to poke fun, but my digression has given me a slight bit of a transition to a letter to the editor from the June issue of Poetry, which states the following:

“I notice that you are publishing, in cahoots with the authors, lengthy explications of their poems. I have a suggestion: why publish the poems at all? Just print the explications and your readers can imagine the poems for themselves. Thus you would greatly stimulate their poetic imaginations and spare them reading the actual work.”

This was in response to the April issue, which apparently included the cited “explications” which so bother our letter writer. I feel as though I am completely right in assuming that the letter was written to mock the idea of poets explaining themselves, so I’m going to apologize now for the possibility that that might not be the case—it would make it a very interesting letter indeed, were this not to be the case.

The facetiousness of poetry is due to the sort of mindset that lies behind the close-mouthed poet; this character has been mocked as far back as Socrates, who claimed that he met with the poets and found that they did not know why they wrote what they wrote and they knew no more than he did (in fact he thought he knew more than them, because he was aware of what he did not know). I’m not a Platonist, but I do see some truth to the words that he gives Socrates here, because there are certainly parts of the creative process that you aren’t sure about, that seem to force themselves upon you. I write from the voice in my head, basically typing down what I speak to myself, never putting enough thought behind each individual word or turn of phrase, so sure, there are certain bits that I can’t explain.

But to pretend that an explanation is not beneficial is to be stuck-up about an art. Poetry seemed to be having some fun in picking the letters to the editor that they would publish, making sure to grab a somewhat fair number of dissenters to their decision of combining new poems with self-commentary on those poems. I, at first, had little respect for the people who wrote in against the commentary because of a comment from Neil Gaiman regarding his short story collection, Fragile Things, which ended up including poems, along the lines that the poems weren’t going to make the book cost more, so you could simply have skipped over them if you wanted to. The problem with this, I will say, is that Poetry is a monthly magazine that (from the first two issues I’ve received anyway) ranges from sixty to ninety-ish pages, so I guess you are entitled to comment on what you want to see taking up that place.

However, this letter is trying to be funny, I think, and in doing so it really just bothers me in a way, when it suggests secretive authors who are somehow “in cahoots” with the magazine to create “lengthy” companion pieces to their verse. In a time where any Stephen King review from someone who didn’t like the book says that the man is money-hungry (although he often ends up giving away his profits from writing these days to various charities), and in a world so dependent on currency, I find this comment essentially insulting. You write because you want to write and writing about what you’ve written, well, this is a good thing as well, because it can allow you to figure yourself out a bit. It’s good to know what you’re talking about and when you are a writer, the best way to learn, at times, is by writing. Therefore I’d say that you can’t just say that since these poets were no doubt paid for their commentaries, they are somehow selling out or something along those lines. In fact, they might have been enthused to write down their thoughts more for what benefit it could do them than the money itself. But I’m speaking for other people and paying too much attention to a somewhat clever joke, so I’ll move on.

The other thought that came to my mind when I read this letter was that someone like Borges would support this idea entirely. He would create a concept of a poem that would be impossible and then he would write a commentary on it. Instead of not printing the poems, which is, if the writer of the letter was being serious, a stupid idea, it would be interesting to create the “explications” without ever creating the poems. The concept would parallel The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, a picture book that calls for its readers to write stories to go along with each of its images.

Any irony in the letter soon became overshadowed by this thought, in my mind, even before I got back to reading Life is Elsewhere, Milan Kundera’s second novel. This book is ironically, in a way, a sort of “explication” presented without the original poem. The protagonist, Jaromil, is a poet and at times Kundera treats us to parts of his poetry, but at other times he simply explains them or he commentates on single lines cut from long pieces of work. And it’s a great book, quite enthralling, if far from perfect. So, that writer of that letter, well, maybe he would’ve been on to something, if he’d been writing letters like this back in the late sixties, while Kundera was composing the novel.

It’s all so very interesting, the idea of fictive layers, a “non-fiction” piece written on a “work of art” that has the misfortune (or not) of simply not existing. I just think it’s a lot of fun to contemplate. I’ve got ideas for a bit of it in my own literary future, but let’s not dig into future projects that may never see the light of day at the moment, so I’ll sign off for now (or not, as I will be writing another entry in the next hour, but allow the poetic license, please).

See you soon…

Psst! Over here...

So here we are again at the end of another work week. And with an irregular sleep schedule like mine, Friday’s have the nice alliterative pairing with another word, “fatigue.” It shouldn’t surprise you, then, to find a bit of a random thought dumping of a post centered on sleep. The unpredictable injection into that formulaic piece is, of course, death. Or not “of course,” I’ve been thinking about this post for so long, that I’m afraid I might be jumping ahead of myself already.

My lack of musical knowledge is something I’m probably always going to have to live with and that’s something of which I’ve grown to deal, because I did make a decision at some point in my life (not that I can recall the specific instant), to not pursue music of any sort. I don’t feel like I could’ve been a master musician—or a musician at all—but that I could at least understand it. Maybe read it as well. That might have been a different life to live. But whatever, enough about this. I offer this as just another annoying autobiographical pause, because I mean to explain why I analyze songs and albums fundamentally through their lyrics. We all have different ways of thinking about our favorite tunes, I would say, but it’s not something we really come across too much, because we leave it to reviewers to set a certain way of talking about music.

And maybe that’s not true; it was a simple slight that just slipped into my head, so I electronically jotted it down. The thought contained in those words could perhaps be expanded to say that I think it would be great if we got more writing from the common public on music, poetry, books, etc. I want people out there raising questions and postulating answers to the utmost extent—aiming for the impossible goal of asking every question you ever could about everything, which is obviously something that could only be reached if we stopped creating more things that expanded everything—because that’s what the internet is for. So I’ve written in a story about how a writer-character wants to write an article about what “Hotel California” means to him, but doesn’t end up doing it, similar in a way to the recent Warren Ellis tweet: “Things I’ll never have time to write: 10,000 words on the relationship between Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’ & Bo Diddley’s ‘Who Do You Love.’” I think I would enjoy reading that, but of course I find myself not having enough time to read as much of Ellis’s various running columns, as I should, so I can’t complain.

The point is that I don’t want to have to go to a book club to talk about a book and maybe I don’t want to dig through forums which generally seem to amount to people saying “liked it,” “didn’t it,” “this scene was cool.” But I guess I’m getting both off-track and stuck up, so I’ll pull it in a little—this is not that big of a fish, I’m just no expert out here in the waters; what I’ve learned is that I enjoy casting a lot more than the rest of this gig, but once you’ve got a bite, well you have to do something about it.

By now you are perhaps wondering what this has to do with sleep and death, and, kind reader, I am getting there. Quite quickly at this point, because in this very sentence I will present the case of the 2004 Modest Mouse album Good News for People Who Love Bad News. The various threads of this work present an interesting portrayal of the “sleep/death” line that I’ve been considering lately, not the least as I drearily picked through files at my summer job, my productivity level unfortunately dropping as the week drove on and the drowsiness mounted. (The previous sentence is hopefully not entirely true; I like to think that I keep a fairly regular activity level at work. I followed it out, because it is actually one of the fears that pops up into my head when I have about an hour or so left in the day.)

My abnormally large amount of introductory thoughts (which is quite the feat, considering that I generally do drone on and on before getting to the small, pitiful point) is due in part to the lack of strong evidence for my ideas in this post, but also due to the fact that I’m simply working with a small thought here and one I wanted to dress up to make it larger. About a third of the way into the aforementioned Modest Mouse album, we are treated with a creepy little 13 second rattle of a song—coincidentally the same length as the opening to Radiohead’s “The Bends”—where it is I would assume Isaac Brock who says to us “I’m already digging, I hope you’re dead,” which repeats once.

It is here that we are treated with the classic Poe scenario—the uncertain death which could potentially lead to premature burial (both the name of a Poe story as well as an important plot element to many, including “The Fall of the House of Usher”). This recurs with force and in a much more sinister way in the late track “Satin in a Coffin” which includes the refrain “Are you dead or are you sleepin’?” Apologies, dear readers, who thought I might be making an original point, but I’ve stolen this one directly from the lyrics book. Here, our premature burial situation becomes even more evident—taken in this light, and somewhat out of the context of both the song and the album, I will admit—the response of “God, I sure hope you are dead,” becomes somewhat understandable. We don’t want to be digging graves for living people now, do we? (An aside to this being that I once wanted to write a story about just and send it to a horror magazine to get the first rejection slip, but I never did. I’m so often a failure as a writer.)

This interesting connection between both songs broke into something more for me, when I listened to “Bukowski,” probably my favorite on the album, on a further time through the soundscape. In it, our singer/speaker, if you will, is reflecting on the boredom of listening to someone “talk, talk, talk in circles” (not quite the exact quote; and another thing, he wouldn’t like me much, would he?), and asks “when you get to the point, make sure I’m still awake, okay?”

And I thought, wow, sitting there being bored to death by this speaker, you could fall asleep and be seen as if you were dead (which is ironic, considering the hyperbole). We need to make sure that this person is still awake, because on this album, sleep ends up being death.

See that final conclusion? It didn’t pack much punch, now did it? But then again, it was an odd thing, having already conceived of these connections (but not completely of this blog post), to be watching the Larry King interview with Lady Gaga the other night (which I know I’ve already mentioned this week), and to see the question posed to her, “Why are you so fascinated with death at 24?” She answered that it haunts her dreams (though probably not with that exact cliché), and I thought that there was a connection there. Sleep being something we can explain scientifically, but death being something that many people would say transcends science and even dreams in a way. All these things were somehow worthy of noting to myself and in what better way than in a location that I can access from an internet connection anywhere.

It’s just too bad that I’ve bogged down that simple thought to be remembered in this long post. And consider the oddity that was me finding in Girlfriend in a Coma, a Douglas Coupland book that I read last semester, while leafing through it today, before writing this post, a chapter entitled “If it Sleeps It’s Alive.” If this were a story, I might have broken out in chills at that moment, like Bret Easton Ellis when he rereads his own books (and experiences revelations! How funny)in Lunar Park, but it wasn’t so I simply thought it was a cool coincidence.

And I’m just about quits now, but before I go let me get down an idea that came to me while writing this: What if something like Wikipedia ended up linking you, in the future, to various pages of people reflecting how they were affected and how they saw a certain piece of art or an event, and this continued in a sort of file system, so that you could easily search inside a work of art, interpreting not only specific lines in Ulysses or The Catcher in the Rye, but as a public, everything of which we are fans.

Losing it...

“I can never lose it,” sputters the inhuman voice that makes up with that one line all of the lyrics to Brand New’s untitled track on The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me, “I can never lose it.” And with that thought we are off on another train of thought. Remember my way of taking things out of context and creating a background of my own?

So what can we never lose? I made the connection here between the odd sort of optimism that one gets with the Flobots’ Fight with Tools, specifically a line in the song “We Are Winning” (see the half-full glass?) that states “resistance is victory/defeat is not an option,” the kind of lines that bring to mind one hand clapping. But Fight with Tools is a great album, the sort that I leave in my car stereo for weeks on end, even though the same compact disc player keeps spitting it back out almost every time I drive somewhere, telling me to check the CD. So what can we never lose? In this case, success, apparently. But what is success?

The Flobots’ sort of “we are the insurgency” talk is the kind that I totally support and praise, because we aren’t living in anything that you can even squint at and pretend you are looking at a utopia. I’ve begun to say in my mind that I’m not proud to be an American, because I didn’t do anything to be an American, I was born into it. And what I mean to say is that I’m happy to be in the position I’m in, but you don’t come by pride from doing nothing. And on top of that, I fully applaud the themes of America, but not the way that it has upheld those themes and values throughout time (and I’m not referring to every American value here…).

The problem with all of this rambling is that it amounts to nothing. I don’t mean to mock the band’s intentions (actually a whole lot of bands’ intentions, a whole lot of artists’ intentions), but what do we actually amount to in this line of work? It’s like whatever the percentage of bloggers who consider themselves “journalists,” which I can only grow immune to by exaggerating my awfulness. Vonnegut would agree with this sort of questioning. He lived through the answer: the quote, as I find it on Wikipedia, is:

“During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”

That’s a block-quote, above, in this Word file where I’m composing this piece, but I’m doubting that’ll transition to the blog, which is why I’m noting it here. I know that it should be indented a half-inch or something like that. I mean, I’ve been to college, even if I’m not through with it yet.

Following that digression, let’s get back to the point; Father Kurt here plays the exact opposite artistic field to the above noted optimism. And this is what you expect from perhaps the most well-known and (I would say) one of the most talented Pessimists, with a capital “P,” because that’s what he was more than an artist, really. I mean to say that I don’t know if he viewed himself as an artist. I mean to say that I don’t know what I mean to say.

[It’s probably apparent, by this time, that I return to the same set of characters frequently, which it’s maybe a good idea to apologize for. You’re probably going to have to get used to Vonnegut’s name. Bret Easton Ellis’s in a few days, if I follow the schedule I have set for myself. King, Kundera (maybe, because I’m reading Life is Elsewhere), Borges (because I’m reading Aleph and Other Stories and am still stunned by Ficciones), maybe some more names. I’m not displaying my knowledge of a select few. This is simply a way of mine, limited by “knowledge” of a select few.]

So Kurt, right, let’s get back to him. In A Man without a Country—which I think I’ve already recently alluded to (shame, shame)—he talks about how you shouldn’t pursue a career in the arts. You should create art for your own good. And reading this, I was thrown off a bit, like you will be by Vonnegut: is he joking? (A question that he makes light of where else but in AMwaC) Maybe I’m right, then, in saying something about Vonnegut’s view of himself as an “artist.” Should I say “artiste” or would I be making light of someone?

And how many stations do we plan to have on this train of thought? How many stops do I still have left? You may wish to take note of the fact that the conductor is not in full control of this vehicle, it is moving, as humbly as can be said, on its own. I’m running with as little physical exertion as I can here or rather, a King-ism, I’m unearthing an artifact.

But that boring little pause, this train has taken a twist on the tracks; I do have a point here, so I’ll muscle it back. I’ve presented two sides to a coin when it comes to the artist’s presence in the world and how it affects our future (as well as what our future will be like, regardless of art). The position of the American poet in politics is set away for further discussion, a sequel of sorts to be presented when the present writer is more awake and more willing to create a response to an article by David Biespiel in the May issue of Poetry. Right now I’m working with a coin, as I’ve said, I’m simply flipping and watching it twist in the air.

Upton Sinclair is parodied relentlessly in Chris Bachelder’s U.S.! as a writer who maybe Stephen King would say couldn’t “write worth a darn,” but he’s also presented as this social activist who has the gumption to fight for his cause over any number of lifetimes (you’re going to have to read the book to understand that one). And one of the questions you ask yourself as an artist is what you are trying to do, what you want to be able to create, and leave behind. Not saying that anything I’m making will outlive me in any real sense (although with the internet some of my writing will physically be around after I’m gone, I’m sure), I’m stating the sort of questions that delve into that big stopper of the interview: Where do you get your ideas? Not where, in this case, but Why? and Why do you choose specific ideas to follow through on?

So what do you call whatever it is that I’ve been talking about here? The subject, well, when it comes to the subject, I hope “I can never lose it.” I hope that’s true. This auteur sometimes fears the opposite. You find yourself and then you have to find how you are going to express that person. I think I’m stuck between those steps at the moment.

Reflections on "Found"

A noteworthy feature of many a Milan Kundera novel is the presence of the author himself sitting back and telling us this story. The novel proper of The Unbearable Lightness of Being begins with the line [this quote is from the Michael Henry Heim translation that I read] “I have been thinking about Tomas for many years,” and I remember thinking a few things when I read this. Further on in the novel, I would think that I’d much rather that the name Tomáš had been left with at least the accent, if not the other thing on the ess that I can’t name. That’s a particular-to-me, I know, and it applies mainly to the accent, just an example of my eccentricities. But immediately I considered the character of Tomas, how Milan presents him here as almost an old friend, but not quite so, simply someone that Milan has considered for some time now as he has brought out this story.

Vonnegut did this in Breakfast of Champions, but Kundera is known for it, which is what makes The Joke a special book. Here we see the writer paying his dues—his first novel is a multi-narrator deal, where Milan is completely absent. This was quite the interesting read, as I coupled it with Laughable Loves, Kundera’s short story collection which made its way here first as a part of Philip Roth’s Writers from the Other Europe. That’s the edition I have, a slipcase compilation of four books from the series that I picked up cheaply for the Kundera book. What we find in Laughable Loves is a sort of transition period. The collection (at least in the order in which it’s placed in the book I have) begins with some standard narrative voice and a few first person stories. What is very interesting is that the speaker of the fiction begins to appear toward the end of the book in the Dr. Havel stories and very much in the closing story, “Edward and God,” as I think the proper name was spelled in my edition (Wikipedia has it written “Eduard and God”). For a writer who has tried a similar style and watched it fail (in an early draft of a story called “On Relations” which I’m currently looking for opinions on, if you’d be interested in reading it, let me know, now with the bump done), this was great fun.

The reason I give you this perhaps boring exposition is to set an image: Milan Kundera as an artist who first gives us an accepted type of writing—that of the multiple narrators, a form that could perhaps be linked to the epistolary novel which is around five hundred years old, I’d say—so that he can transition into the writer of the metafiction for which he has become known. Although you can go back through history and declare books such as One Thousand and One Nights or Don Quixote as metafiction, this is really a genre that formed in the mid-late twentieth century. In The Joke, Kundera is putting in his dues, before he transitions into his more unique style. This image links with Borges, who wrote for a very long time before he transitioned into fiction. His essay-like style in many of his stories harkens back to all the non-fiction he had already written. In much the same way, we find Kundera’s themes simply moving from his characters’ mouths (in The Joke), to his own, albeit often placed in the story by way of a characteristic of a character.

This mumbo jumbo is especially interesting to me at the moment because I’m writing a story currently that I plan to entitle “Found,” so being able to find these writers finding themselves (or at least read about such) is almost doing my homework. As Ron Silliman notes on his blog about Redburn, “Melville teaching himself to write is the much more fascinating tale here,” and I’m not trying to say that The Joke is a torture of a book that is only academically notable (I thought it was a solid novel). I’m just quoting an idea that I found somewhat similar to my own.

So you teach yourself how to write by writing, which makes sense, and it isn’t so much that you write horrible stuff at the beginning, but just less skilled works. I mean, this captures almost perfectly the way I feel when I look back at the novel I wrote in November of 2008. It’s not worse than what I write now. And that’s not to say it is good, but like Father Kurt did in Palm Sunday, it’s not bad when I “compare myself with myself.” And I don’t know what to do with it, in actuality, should I mend it or simply rewrite? Another problem being that the plot doesn’t mesh perfectly with the universe I’m creating with my writings. Plot-holes have a way of working themselves out through revelation, but should I even be wasting time thinking about this book that I wrote? During the times that I don’t reread sections from it, I’m completely okay with letting it go (Letting Go is a Philip Roth novel, by the way, a bit of full circle going on here), but then I do take a look at it, and really I tied up three or four different storylines in that book, all of which I want to write official final drafts for at some point. So it’s difficult going.

This is one reason that I sit here and I make note of various changes in the writings of acclaimed authors. Little twitches that I’ve noticed in my observations of their works. And often not even that I’ve noticed but rather that someone else has noticed and I’ve simply passed on. (One of the reasons that I infrequently blog is because I feel that I’m simply link-dumping or passing on information that you can get elsewhere and often better said elsewhere.) By bringing up these models of mine, these inspirations and influences, I can avoid considering my own writing situations.

Think about it this way: I’ve already said that you learn through writing. This here is me writing about, well, not about that much. But I’m writing and that’s the point. I’ve been stuck in “Found” for the last few days, but I think I have an idea now, and I held on it and I wrote this as a bit of a warm-up. The problem is that I’m going to go to sleep tonight instead of writing (an Aaron McMullan song lyric “don’t stay up all night writing now”) and this is not going to function as the stretching exercise before the game. But that said, it’ll at least give me more practice at typing without looking at the keys.

You know, one of the problems with “finding yourself” is simply cultural hegemony, the chains of not only the dominating cultures of the world, but even the various cultures and groups of which you consider yourself to belong. Kundera wrote a book that would be accepted as such because, well, I’d say because he wanted to write. This done, he broke rules. And sometimes you never break the rules and you never really find anything other than what is very much a larger-than-life image: that of a combination of views that aren’t exactly your own, but those of the various people (including yourself) that make up any number of clubs.

While watching Iron Man 2 last Sunday, I had a little fun with the story of the work, simply bending the various themes to my will. Expressing in my head, by way of the various plot pieces, the things that I believe in. And it felt, heh, it felt damn good. Like I knew who I was and no one could tell me otherwise. (Another full circle idea: Kundera claims to write without a message and to write leaving a lot up to the reader’s imagination. I would expect, then, that he would support what I was doing, imagining various messages that Iron Man 2 could be somehow construed as to trying to get across to its audience, messages that I agreed with very much, that were in fact, my own ideas tacked onto this film, like some less mean-spirited Justin Hammer.)

So to put this meandering, uncertain tract to bed, I’ll simply say that what I think we need to do is continue to create a globalization that expands options, that does not restrict, allowing people to decide who they are and not feel that because they define themselves in a certain way (i.e. politically, sexually, religiously, ethnically…etc.). We need self-definition and we need a limit on the limits of every defined term. Lady Gaga was on Larry King tonight talking about expanding boundaries. They do need to be pushed and the people that can do so, whether or not they need to first pay their dues as Kundera did, well, I thought these people were worthy enough of a blog post.

If you’ve gotten to here, I’d like to think that you agree.

My uniformed opinion...

This title could turn into a series in a similar way to this post. Apologies, but my laptop battery is about to die, I am publishing this without looking into what I want to reitalicize from the Word document I am going to paste. "*" means that at least in the original document I plan to write in a footnote at some time.

Now for the feature presentation:

I think it’s somewhat the job of history to put down people who made wrong estimations about the future and people who got things right. And since everyone is human and thusly imperfect, all people in the latter category also occupy the former. Since I’m no historian, I see the need to point out that nothing that I say is to be taken as the absolute truth, and that all predictions I make will undoubtedly end up in the former category, but I see no fault in sharing my own thoughts on these matters.

Okay, done with the disclosure. Wrap it up with I am not a political theorist or economist and haven’t read enough of Karl Marx to say what I am saying about him with any authority. So, now then, let’s move on to the point. The way I see Karl Marx is as an almost historian, himself, someone who for the most part only made predictions. The Communist Manifesto was obviously meant to turn people towards overthrowing the bourgeoisie, but otherwise, you can see Marx as simply someone interpreting the world he’s in and wondering where it would go.

Marx saw economics as a story, in a way, something that had plot movements, and could be read like a book, rather than the opposing view of something so cyclical and repetitive that it could not be read chronologically. Simplifying things, like he did in the manifesto, although he was more in depth elsewhere, history is like this: We step from feudalism into capitalism, which, although allowing for a better life for more people than feudalism does, also puts the still vast majority into worse lives than they had, then this group, the proletariat, rise up through revolution and form a classless society. It is not difficult to look at Marx as a somewhat careless observer of these events, and although this is blatantly not the case, I do believe it is a point that is not raised oft enough.

Personally, the oddest thing in learning more about specific great political thinkers of the past is finding that I do not agree one way or the other. I do not see Locke as more correct than Rousseau or Marx as righter than Burke. It seems helpful, in our views of these people of the past, to look at them as abstract characters, uncolored by their biases or their environment, and I really do not think that this thought process can be held to the extreme, so I don’t see any real problem with it. I mean, we spend so much time considering why people of the past thought exactly what they thought, that it seems we may often miss the actual point.

And I guess that all of this up to here has been even more disclosure, but what have you. This is Karl Marx: a bearded German man who will be clumped with the Russians of the next generation, people who will corrupt his views and make his name Mudd*; he’s a staunch atheist, an anti-Semite, and a commie. So now that that’s all out there, we can forget it. It is my belief that we cannot truly see Marx as a person separate from his bias, so in attempting to do so, we can only grow to see his politics more clearly, rather than to celebrate the man as separate from whom he was.

Let us then return to the beginning of this discussion, when I classified that there are two types of people catalogued by historians, these groups can be seen as concentric circles, as one is all but completely located in the other. For a bit of a refresher, since my wordiness has put some serious distance between that first point and this one, I will say that the bigger circle is made up of everyone who has ever made a wrongful prediction of the future, while the smaller circle is everyone who has made a correct one. Now I wish to provide an example of qualification for both of these circles for Marx, one of which I will elaborate on.

It does not seem to be “too early” to call Marx’s views of the coming proletariat revolution as inaccurate, since here Karl sided too much with Hobbes or even Rousseau in a world of scarcity. What I mean to say is that Marx, at least for a small degree of the population, understated actual humanity and its inner humaneness. This is shown in his view of the capitalist as the fat cat with a cigar who sees all others as dollar signs*. All three of these thinkers seem to believe that people (or capitalists in Marx’s view) are driven solely by self-interest, or at least that any feelings of empathy or compassion are easily outweighed by self-interest. Marx’s labor theory of value, besides simplified to the extent of being inaccurate, seems to neglect the sheer fact of capitalism, itself, in that the worker can sell his potential product to the highest bidder, since there is more than just one person who owns the means of production. Here, it is very truthful, in my opinion, to say that Marx made a simple mistake in prediction, and if we wish to reenter thoughts of his biases, then we can say that Karl has failed, like Upton Sinclair*, in creating the socialist world that he wished for.

Up until this point in the discussion, I believe that I have kept within the views of the average American, a person who has been alive for a fair amount of the past century, and through the propaganda that is a result of half a hundred years of conflict, have developed a nasty little thought process towards socialism, namely that it is evil. I am here to say that that thought process is neither here nor there. Concerning it, I am, unfortunately, not completely without a side, as I am towards the political thinkers I have learned about, but my disagreement with that sort of simplification is not relevant or important in any way. Therefore I did not use this mindset of pink as it might be claimed, in order to reach the conclusion that I have reached regarding what Marx has correctly predicted.

At last, then, I have reached the thought process that first initiated the idea of this blog post back three or so days ago, now. No matter how you view Karl Marx, and no matter what he thought, no matter what incorrect predictions he made, he was accurate concerning the future of intellectual property in the arts. This does not mean that Marx was even interested in the arts or intellectual property, but rather that one of his predictions, when specialized, becomes incredibly accurate.

Marx saw the capitalist system as formulated in such a way that it would eventually eat itself, create monopolies, and formulate a two-class system of proletariat and bourgeoisie, that would blah, blah, blah, lead to communism. He saw this as happening because capitalists would reinvest capital into making their productions so efficient, that they would decrease cost to the extent that they would also have to decrease profit to next to nothing, since value would decrease so much.

This hasn’t happened anywhere that I can see outside of the music industry. It is very interesting to imagine Marx’s time of formulating these ideas, when there were only the beginnings of telephonic communication to show for the technological innovations that would eventually lead to the internet. It is through the internet that the music industry has effectively cut its production costs to zero. Other than the actual cost of making music, the time taken to create it, and suchlike cash devouring things, music distribution is now free.

Now, let’s match this up with Marx: efficiency in production leads to low costs and then to low profits. This fits almost perfectly with the current issue of musicians, who can create an entire album and sell as little as potentially one copy, while the distribution by way of the internet and illegal downloading drops the profits to the same dismal level. Now, I don’t mean to be mistaken as Metallica, attacking every seven year old girl and her great-grandmother for stealing my creations, while I can always sit back on my millions of dollars.

But I do see this as a potential issue for the music industry, musicians, and writers (and I guess their industry as well). It is a good point to make that although the music industry has been grossly affected; this potential cancer has not injected itself completely into the art of the word itself. It will soon enough, however, as the time of the e-reader must come upon us sometime. By way of either kindle, e-reader, nook, or some other variant, I do see a time when a majority of books are only bought and owned digitally. And it is at this point that people begin to show how little they actually care for the product.

I do not mean to slight consumers or myself (since I’ve been known to dabble along the edges of illegal music downloading), but rather to show a potential view of both the present and the future, in much the same way as our virtual bias-less Karl Marx did. The fact of the situation is that people will not pay the same amount of money for a CD or a book as they would pay for the songs or the stories/novels freed from their tangibility. It is, for this reason, that I would point to the professional artist as an occupation that cannot house any person whose views are completely and whole-heartedly capitalist. The future artist will need to depend on his or her fans, and bands will be able to make money through both touring and sales of albums/music, but the latter will be effective donations, so they must elicit in their fan-base support on the level that people would wish to basically sponsor their art.

Otherwise a musician or another type of artist can easily distribute his or her music for virtually no cost, but cannot gather the means of production of more, namely through gathering of capital, in this case, basically money to live and produce art by. And that’s where Karl Marx has definitely been accurate as a predictor.

Final thoughts: potential solutions are always nice. I see this as a major problem for people who wish to live one day on their art alone, as long as that art’s worth is derived from mainly non-tangible parts of it. But it will only increase the fan-creator situation. Imagine a world in which a young Stephen King truly did have to court potential Constant Readers, to gather money from them, allowing him to give up his teaching job or time with the mangler. I see this world as an interesting one and the only thing I can truly see as solving issues of this nature is what I’ve already mentioned. A band/musician/writer/creator who views a work as a means of asking for donations from a crowd, must thusly reevaluate every part of said creation. Things will be made better for a time, and if this does elicit a response from the consumer, they will stay as such: always getting better, cooler, more awesome; the goal is to make you want more, enough so that you would support such creation. I think this would create a more balanced relationship between artist and fan, for better or for worse*. And in this way, we might see more moves along the lines of leftrightleftrightleft or No Ceilings, creations which are cited as being solely for the benefit of fans.

This would lead to a society similar to Plato’s Republic, where the leadership is supported by the lower classes, and does not make money itself*. Where, in this country, it is true that the president does not grow his own food and live on subsistence, and that he gains a salary for his job, this is true for a large degree of Americans, and is due in part to imperialism, which I might get to talking on at another time. I wish to point out that in Plato’s potential world, the ruling class was thusly indebted to the lower class, and the same would be for the artist and the fan-base.

And, if you have followed me all the way through this loopy brain-dumping, then I thank you. I have little else to say on the topic, so, as always, sorry for boring you.