| | I once woke up to a profound epiphany about the differences between how I enjoy British literature and American literature. Something about the coldly polished refinement of the British man's tragedy set against the alcoholic, self-wallowing raggedness of the American man's tragedy. (I use 'man' here quite purposefully -- going to an all-male school run by Jesuits doesn't do much for your understanding of literature outside the traditional canon of embarrassingly self-aware white male posturing.) I may have written some brief notes on the subject before taking off for some more flighty pursuit, like organizing photos on Facebook so that I could have a seamless visual hyperreality of my life. Or something.
The point I was attempting to make here is that 'something' is the sort of thing I no longer come up, instead ending up in bed with its distant but fondly remembered cousin, 'nothing'.
That sentence is a perfectly wonderful example of the sort of literary diarrhea that bubbles up from the recesses of my mind these days.
I still feel a compulsion to write, but no longer to write here. It's not really an escape from a past identity, as so many other Internet denizens conceive of their site relocations, but rather just the sad consequences of the expiration of an environment. When I began writing here, it was a primary outlet for silly rants, random thoughts, and musings of existential angst, while also granting me the pleasure of entertaining an easily amused audience. Now I have actual conversations with friends for that sort of thing, and any leftover friends have matured too much to tolerate such nonsense in written form.
More than anything, I interpret my reluctance to write here as a sort of fear -- a fear that I have accumulated an audience here that has come to expect a certain style, a certain tone, a certain purpose out of me that I can no longer fulfill, both because I have changed and because they have changed. (More the latter, really, but cut me some slack here, I count as having undergone at least minimal maturation too, okay?) And so I don't develop and write out what ideas I have, because they're so removed from what I've come to expect people enjoying, as well as from what I myself have come to expect as the bread and butter of my writing style.
Don't criticize me on proverbially 'selling out' or anything either. I see writing as a project that requires interacting with others, capturing their attention, manipulating their moods, pushing them into a new realization or a new perspective or at least a chuckle. Sure, writing can provide catharisis, but that kind of writing is the stuff you see in therapists' offices and goth-skinned Livejournals.
If I relocate the Internet presence of my mind's flushings, I will most likely post the new URL here, of course, which ironically implies that I will still be trapped with the same audience and thus the same problems as before. But there is a psychological association of audience with location that I can escape when I move to a new site. And to start anew is to effectually announce a new purpose to writing -- expectations are wiped away, leaving hesitant curiosity and greater eagerness to accept. It doesn't hurt that Xanga's layout and community seem to be made for the sort of tone I used to write with. The long list of subscriptions with retarded user names, the badly formatted 'look and feel', the half-heartedly implemented new post navigation system -- it all adds up to an amateur environment for amateur prose, and this is what I mean when I say that I need to find a new host.
My God, this entire thing reads like some sort of hackneyed mixture of subpar submissions to pretentious publications and teenybopper Internet-speak. When will we find a way to insert technical terminology into stories without sounding like asses? Think about some Faulknerian passage where a stream of consciousness describes the actions of a more contemporary protagonist -- and then, there, smack-dab in the middle of all this amazing prose, is the word "URL." It's like erotic literature that actually flows along quite nicely for a while, with some real displays of writing talent, until suddenly everything is spoiled by the random appearance of words like "cock" and "pussy". Perhaps the only way to escape the clunkiness of technology in literature is by obscuring it with metaphors, much like authors do with sex. Perhaps this is the entire enterprise of literature -- to metaphorize ourselves out of our mundane existences and shower meaning upon our lives with flourishes of wordcraft and dainty clause arrangements.
Now I'm going to say some sort of self-aware discounting mocking statement, like, "Boy, wasn't that a thrilling venture into deep waters?" Now I'm going to say some other self-aware not-very-funny statement like, "Oh wait, I just did." This is the sort of meta-literary trickery that entertains no one past the age of 17.
This is the part where I usually panic because I have no witty ending to pull out of my back pocket. Luckily for me, today, I don't need that, because all I'm saying is that I can't really write anything good here anymore and that I'm going to get a new place to write soon. Ending wittily would merely contradict all that effort I just put in to making absolute sure that you know how much I suck. So, you know, don't look too hard for that abrupt, inelegant ending, because
it's
right
HERE.
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| | Posted 7/7/2007 7:25 PM - 103 Views - 8 eProps - 5 comments
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