In the beginning, you are immediately, a failure. I do not care how good you are. Publishing is the last bastion of clean pure malevolence in a marketplace of sadism. I have known more than a few editors. I had been one of them once. We did not share the same lament. I have never met another editor cringing in the darkness of the species who did not express to me exactly how they tolerated writers and how the writers made life hell itself. In other words, editors deplore writers. I would say they hate writers so I won’t say it. They hate writers because they, too, were writers. Once. Who failed.
I did. It comes for you in the night, and the Little People get into the blackshiny lace carriage. Up we go.
What’s it gonna do when it comes for you even when you think it won’t, and you embrace an audience you cannot know. Vegas does this like it’s a big blinking rest area. They will eat you alive. It is not an observation. We are all ancient Greece and no one knows or cares about why we are here, and most of us would rather not know. So we can get on with it, don’t jump too far ahead because the cave looks fucking ominous. You cannot observe without changing the thing itself. A minority opinion. Credit cards got invented.
Show me what is not a minority opinion.
The experience is an abstraction. You become the splots on the canvass. Has everyone seen my tits.
It’s flippant. It offends you. My eyes to the sky. The death threats have settled down a bit. If you wander too far from the status quo, they will find you, shun you, punish you, castrate you, jump up and down, accuse you of murder and masturbation, and claw into your mind in Esquire that portends to see into my brain. I apologized. What is the point. They said I didn’t mean it. How exactly do they peck around my cerebral cortex, oh, they don’t, but it can be explained by a moral failure, and humiliate you in the village square of pop culture melting temperatures leaking Rivers of No Return. What happens is a numbness, I feel compelled to wear my I am Not Autistic Mask I have failed so many times, it’s just fucking ridiculous. I sound angrier than I am in person. Again. Immediately. But what kind of literary demon are you.
I used to snarl back. The New York Times is over me. I am tempted to keep responding but only use one word, and it would be (because it has to in the physics of it) absolutely inappropriate (like art) to go all the way back in the time machine to Year of the Wet Rat. Not unlike the World’s Fair rotates. But it’s all the same World’s Fairs. Why. Because the observer affects what is being observed as measurements to be poured over as to define reality because you can’t be the World’s Fair twice. You can, but only three people will come.
As one who is separated from mainstream publishing by all of the above. I just care about other things. It’s sophomoric. But there’s spinning and there is spin. When all of it becomes the spin, there is little hope of survival let alone the opportunity to spin another plate. Plates drop. Plate smash around. But now, the plates have been replaced by heads. Find a place. Join a club. And Spin It.
This on Twitter. Great Writers Never Play Keepers of the Gates of Beautiful. Head on. You bend that knee into a crawl, you will not get up again. I have put entire multiple magazines together, and the blur of it is an emptiness of stereotypes because that is what sells. How to spin it remains the focus of the story. The only question is where is the arch. The academics will lob this one at you. They want to lob not listen. My argument is that publishing is medieval.
Boom.
The internet kicked my white ass into the street.
And Amazon became publishing. History is repeated because that is how it becomes history. There are treasures up there but mostly not. Why. Because homo sapiens may congregate in the cave, but that does not mean they have explored the back of the cave, and they have no idea, really, how far it goes. Even with fire, it’s a black hole. They went from books to books. But we do not really know if the center will hold. Mass generated campaigns other websites have repeated times ten. Publishers want the thoroughbred. Triple Crown. Let’s go play cards, I count them. The horses and the finish line like get a clue, you become the glue.
The cave was a learning experience in an evolution of speed. With fire, some became quite hot. It repelled animals. We forget that animals ate us. That is imprinted on a genetic scale. The limbic system is ready to jump in. Always on alert for animals in the back of the cave who have never seen such light before. No one could make this stuff up. But it was sand and sticks that made the first art disappear by cavepeople who had phones.
Waves ate everything. Waves still do.
God, please help me. Help you how, you idiot, help me endure the idiots. The ones who have no history of understanding in any other fundamental way, that the the writing was on the wall.
Was it an art exhibition where you had to have a guide to get there. Yes. No autistics asking questions was allowed. The Greeks knew what to do with you. History speaks in bones, and languages are bones, too. We drool and say funny things. Yes. We needed girl guides. I am leaning toward the reality it was a woman who embarked on Calligraphy in Caves. Whose walls represented abstract symbols, by which time abstract symbols were what we had. Like all we really do is exchange one cave for another. The writing on the wall is the message is, indeed, the media. Pop culture or does the pop pop. Everything pops in the popping of the multiverse where editors answer email.
There are books because we understand that if the limbic system kicks in, we’re talking so far back in time, lizards roamed the planet longer than we have, and were apt to multiply. We looked like a wet rat. They didn’t even know we were there because mainly we existed under the ground. Most of us die in the great fire of whatever. Plates spinning and moving. Give it a rest. But no.
It’s a pop culture landscape of Second Selves. It will not support you. It has a Big Problem. Who gets to create the myths and take care of the children.
It was a woman who had painted the walls of caves in France. It was a record of this is how we live. Even in science fiction, much of whicj is actually literary fiction, but it gets homogenized to fill a slot at the warehouse and I am not kidding. I never kid.
You wanna see some good pictures. Come with me.
But it doesn’t see itself (and either do I) as being irrelevant as a cartoon. When they tell you they want authenticity, they put it on you to define authenticity. Where’s my mouse mask. It always smiles and I’m Mary Tyler Moore with a beret. Liberalism is a defense that pretends to see a future your writers attempt to articulate with a lot a caveats. Like the discord is giving us a developmental headache.
The discord not unhistorical. The message is your comment moderator. What I see is AI, everywhere you turn.
You can create the infantile, but complexity approximates. That is why complexity is in itself, complex. Cells divide. They take off like dirt bikes. Because there are layers of communication, it’s okay to come out of the holes, now, and go eat trees and bugs.
To tell the story of it.
You are naked, sweating, running, fall over on the gravel, getting back up and running again, you arrive message in hand within the temple of the Spartan Court.
They got it.
I wonder if it really happened. Against Great Odds and Gods, We Endure. But we have not changed our hearts in our endurance of them. Endurance is the bell curve, it’s all homo sapiens have anyway. We endure but not everyone is satisfied with just survival because our brains prevent a problem with the skull size, and we have ways around it it, and new problems, too.
The hidden walls of the cave were hidden even then. No electric lights, if you can imagine it. It took some courage to do your thing with art knowing full well no one in human history will see it and tell the story of beauty being consumed, eaten by the carnivorous. -- tim barrus