pleased with my own self

Casting our eye over the last year, LI feels … good. This has been, of course, a terrible year in the set of terrible years that have made up this decade of complete and utter failure. Our failure to achieve the economic viability of even the lowliest bottomfeeder, which we used to justify, in a half assed way, as the price of art, is no longer justifiable by any criteria. We will long remember and long regret the various outrageous stupidities that have threaded themselves in our moment-to-moment, especially as it looks like we are headed towards streetcorner destitution as surely as the stunned ox slipping down the greased chute is headed for the butcher’s blade. But I would like to think that every life has its little Camelot moment, yes? And so I look back at LI’s past year and a half and like God looking at the green and blue globe he dreamed up on one of eternity’s slower nights, I can say: it is good.

I’ve been five and a half years at the blogging biz, and looking over my back pages, I obviously took some time to figure out what I was doing. For a writer of more traditional narratives, as well as one of more traditional discursive texts, blogging is difficult. It is a text type in the literature of spontaneity that gives us Jules Renand’s journals and Horace Walpole’s letters – not to speak of Malcolm Lowry’s – , which is a literature I have a fondness for. In any work that aspires to literature, one is looking for the real right thing, the moment in which urgency and the mediation of artifice form a more perfect union. And every romantic soul, from Shelley to the Beats, has longed for a way of casting off the mediation, of making good on the adage, first thought, best thought. Unfortunately for the romantics, mediation is indispensable. The path to the urgent moment is necessary, even if, from the subjective viewpoint, it is secondary and always irritating.

But so speaks the classicist mickey within. Of course, LI is living in a society in which boredom is considered the worst quality – to say that a book is boring is to say it has committed a capital offense. Myself, I think the liquidation of boredom in the aesthetic realm is intimately connected to the Gated Community ethos in the social realm, in which the unbought graces of life now come out of a high end catalogue, and are called “pre-owned”. If you don’t know how to be boring – its time, its place, its subtle effects on the unconscious, what it is for, what it tells you about time and solitude – you’ll make a fucking twist of everything. It will just be Man and his faithful tv-set tracking across the void. LI is not for man and his tv set tracking across the void. We are against that shit.

I’m not excursing here – boredom is of course just the thing about spontaneous literature. To have a boring bit of exposition in a novel is tolerable, given other qualities of the novel, and its ultimate interestingness. To have a boring bit of exposition in a letter, however, is much less tolerable. Still, the premise of a letter or a journal is intimacy, which forgives many things. The great letter writers – say, Byron – visibly have a lot of fun writing their three sheets. I’ve been reading the letters of Henry Adams, lately, and it is obvious that the young Adams was modeling himself on letter writers of the past – more than anybody else, Walpole. Obviously, there are parallels between Horace and Henry – both coming from great political families, both being acute observers, and both feeling, acutely, their lack of power as a sign of some failure of character. Adams, in any case, pushes the entertainment too much to the fore. When that happens – when a certain hard to define threshold is crossed – the letter ceases to be intimate, and thus violates its own contract.

Blogging begins by pissing on that contract. I’ve noticed that those who blog for friends start out strong, but quickly peter out. That’s because, well, here it is and don’t say I said it: Hegel is right about some things. The Spirit does obey a pattern – or at least, produces one – and it goes badly with people who try to cross da Spirit. Blogging derives from intimate literature, but is as cold as a motherfucker, in the end. And here’s the paradox: just because LI is so out of sorts with the Spirit of the Age, a pterodactyl among canaries, blogging has been good to us. The reason for that is that complaining – especially complaining from one’s whole existence, complaining that is rooted in a total failure to fit in, in a total complaint levied at the basic social system – is one of those transitional speech forms. It provides a passage from intimacy to anonymity. I have poured more anger and moaning into the ears of debt collectors on the other end of the phone – or, say, the bureaucrats who periodically threaten to turn off my power – than I would dare to do even with a lover. Of course, this is partly cause I’m half mad, but I’m not the half mad guy who talks to himself on the bus. Yet.

But complaining itself is only transitional. And it moves to two extremes – either monomania, or extreme dispersion. Complaining about one thing over and over, or complaining about everything.

Which gets me to why LI is pleased with the past year. It is no secret that, of course, I am a monomaniac. I have the same hardon against the Bush administration that Jeremiah had against the worshippers of Baal. But Jeremiah – or lets say one of the Isaiahs, who are my fave prophets – the Isaiahs were clever prophets. They saw the wickedness of one kingdom or king in terms of a whole vision of what the world is like. They saw early and plainly that the world is balanced between paradise or hell, and one gesture can send it either way. That gesture is the prophetic fiction – the only time anybody listens to the prophet in the Bible, in Jonah, the prophet is naturally pissed off. It is much more fun to predict fire and brimstone than to have people listen to you, change their ways, and avert the fire and brimstone. Dire is sexy – everybody mocks a reformer. But backing up to the point: in the last year and a half I think I’ve successfully found the bigger poetic themes, the motifs I want – madness, the supremacy of war, magic, the synthesis of Michelet’s witchcraft and Marxism – to organize my random bitchery.