Sloppy thots ex'd away from a blogkomment

Dear diary,

I named this one "Sloppy thots arointed away from a blogkomment" because that's exactly what they are. Yesterday I was volleying words across the reply section of FIREMAN with my mellow my fellow the distinguished author M.P. Powers, and I noticed that one of my responses was too sparking with extra thots, so I had to cut them, and this act of relinquishment made me sad, because I hate to waste awit ("a" as in "amoral"; "wit" as is), plus everything I say is oh-so-precious (I am my own grandchild, by which I mean I dote on me), so I cupped these superfluous rejects in my hands and plopped them down right here for all to enjoy. Till the end of time. And also there were other fragments from my latest posting on the same cutting-room floor, so they're mixed in too. And the reason I describe them as sloppy is that most of them are unfinished (often I performed a partial-sentence abortion) and none of them really follow like NEAT thoughts should: one after the next, in single-file, over the cliff.

Plus I changed aroint to ex so as to save space. Shakespeare's Macbeth (1.3.6): «Aroynt thee, witch! the rump-fed ronyon cries.» Also Edgar's mad charm from King Lear (3.4.120):

Swithold footed thrice the wold;
He met the nightmare and her nine foal,
Bid her alight and her troth plight,
And aroint thee, witch, aroint thee.

Unused B-roll

...it’s as simple as choosing what appeals to you, what provokes you to write best; because, in the end, any medium that can hold text will be able to transfer thoughts, to transfer imaginations from mind to mind; and if your blogging appeals to an editor or publisher someday, now or however many years into the future, who’s to stop them from compiling a sturdy BOOK from your online writings.

If you type some lines of Dante into a phone screen, does the poetry suffer corruption? I say no: because language is inherently symbolic, it gestures to something outside of itself—unlike much of visual art in this respect, text is not itself the important thing: what it signifies is of importance; it’s a way for one mind to suggest imaginations for minds beyond. I’d rather get Shakespeare by heart by reading text online than to own the hardbound works of some bestselling hack.

And what strikes us contemporaries as slapdash or undignified about all these computer-borne opportunities, newfangled to us, may be taken by some upcoming age as “the classical format.” Or as I put it in my hell-bible Save the Lord:

Today’s perversions are tomorrow’s old time religion.

What's my verdict; is the task worth it? It depends on your perspective. If you are like I was five years ago, that is, if you abhor politics and hate history, and the only reason you read is for the difficult pleasure of {AESTHETICS???}

The linguist Noam Chomsky, whom I recently discovered (again, I am a very late bloomer), is an indispen—

What do them virgins all trimming their wicks mean?

I think that any blank will end up as a book, if the writing is tiptop

...the U.S. since the World Wars has held the position of Lucky Winner; one of the perks of being which, as the proverb goes, is the privilege of authoring history...

NOTE. I deleted a brief digression from the paragraph just above that last quotation. Following the sentence "So far the theme seems to be how Movie Land was seduced into helping propagandize the regretfully peaceable public of the U.S.A. into the First World War," I had written...

One last thought on blogging:

I keep reminding myself, for the sake of my personal confidence and feelings of self-worth and human dignity, that this format with the unfortunate name “blogging” is essentially journal-keeping or essay-writing; and my favorite artists created what are my favorite compositions in those forms—I think of Montaigne’s essays; Francis Bacon’s essays; Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays and his even superior journals; Kafka’s diaries; the personal letters of John Keats. Would it bother anyone, beyond the ugliness of the term itself, if those last were labeled “e-mails” and all the foregoing “blogs”? And how Samuel Johnson spent his genius and wisdom writing his Rambler; Adventurer; Idler—couldn’t these compositions all be blogs nowadays? (I realize that I’m not adding anything NEW to what you and I have established in our exchange above – I’m merely reinforcing our point.)

And I imagine a naysayer objecting that blogs are demotic, low, base, vulgar. Is that so? Fine, now let’s consider who embraced the same so-called inferior formats of their own generation: Wasn’t playacting considered a low form in the time of Shakespeare? Didn’t Dante entrust his most sublime vision to the vernacular—as did Chaucer with lowly English! Note how it’s not that we are able to find a few decent names among the bad, or a couple good among the middling, whose “vulgarity” we echo – no: it’s the BEST OF THE BEST who, almost as a rule, choose to dabble in the demotic. Our man Goethe: look at Faust Part Two – isn’t he almost reveling in a certain type of mythological “bad taste”! (only those who lack ears to hear thus disparage his heaps of farce-splendor; the happy few have always thrilled to it)...

What will survive the test of time is what will be able to appeal to the people of the future. Their lives will be different in ways we cannot guess: they’ll have their own fads; but we can be sure that they’ll have the very same buzzes and stabs of emotion, the same tangles of relationships, family, friends. So what centers on the human heart will survive – it won’t matter if an artwork first appeared online, in a blog, an email, whatever: it will only matter if it’s strong and relatable, and essentially human, and divine, and if it exposes what is familiar in the strange, and what is strange in the familiar...

And we should remember that the future will have no experience of a world-without-internet: Everything for them will have been baptized in electricity (or whatever unknown fresh cyborg or semi-plasma worm spirit dominates that age’s culture and makes them feel inferior!) ...And any of our literary efforts that DO survive will get translated into unthinkable formats and media. If the language morphs enough, there’ll be bad translations...

My purpose was to try to lift our morale, but now I gotta stop – for I’m starting to scare myself.

[End of thought.]

I relocated all these stillborn bulbs of light to this present post so as to take advantage of its marginal corporate tax rates.

Weren’t plays considered a low form in the time of Shakespeare – a bit how movies or TV are ranked as sub-book today? (See any Wes Anderson film for clear examples of this book-worship sycophancy.) Wasn’t the now-respected novel form once frowned on as a childish waste? (To be clear, I idolize Anderson's work as well as strong novels: I'm only trying to emphasize how shifty are the age's prejudices.) I always think of the attitudes revealed in Middlemarch, how Fred’s sister looks down on him for wasting his time reading those "silly books"; while Middlemarch itself is just such a thing (of course only ironically; to me, George Eliot's tome is a sacred text). Or am I mis-remembering? The point is that art should remain very very very very serious (now I'm cribbing Lancaster Dodd on the topic of marriage aforetime, from the 2012 genius film The Master). And things attain the state of seriousness when they get old and dusty. Obscurity helps: once nobody understands a work, then we assume it MUST be important. And this is an added bonus for the culture's priests, for then they get to translate, to interpret... to invent in their own timid way. Nehemiah chapter 8:

And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people; (for he was above all the people;) and when he opened it, all the people stood up...
     And he read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.

I believe that the imagination is the crown of all creation: it’s the very thing to spend oneself upon – if I were a lion, I’d give all my life to killing lambs; and if I were a cheetah I’d delight in speed; and if I were an elephant I’d take pride in my physical strength; but as I find I’ve been born as a human, I will pursue the imagination: that’s the one place that I believe we’ve got the advantage; one might say that the work of the mind is the human form's calling. And I believe that written language is the best way to preserve and propel such visionary creations, thus any medium that can bear the written word will be worth bedizening. Any mickey-mouse object that can transfer a text message can transfer SUBLIMEST THOTS from mind 2 mind.

For me, it’s simple: The question of book vs. blog, or letters in paper envelopes vs. email, etc. – it’s all the same...

Atomic weapons can turn all creatures back to the chaos of zero, but written language is a mind-control device: instead of pressing a red button and making everything halt, you can actually influence the lives of wild beings in their world, and move them about like metal filings on a table with an undercover magnet, if you're a half-decent magician.

Thankfully, language does not convey thought with exactitude. (Why are only the scientists weeping now?) Even math is metaphoric.

I prefer paper that is bound into lasting books; but the good news is that whether one composes for a periodical (like many of our greatest novelists have done) or entrusts one’s seemingly frivolous inventions to stamped envelopes for dear friends’ little children (I’m thinking of Edward Lear) or patiently types private thoughts into the screen of a weblog, the important fact is that one’s enterprise can be relocated easily to paper and then bound into books that endure. So no energy is lost.

If you write down words on a napkin while dining at the saloon, and then later you transfer these words to your mobile phone and send yourself an e-mail, which eventually you revise into a blog post...

Would you rather etch your imaginations in stone, which lasts long but is hard to duplicate; or invest them in ink on vellum, which is a fine parchment made from the skin of a calf? You can always ask the cows to bear more young for you to inscribe your scriptures upon... Or should we just save a bazillion redundant copies of our writings on the Internet? Is it wise to care for the preservation of one's art, or is that only the instinct to tyrannize over the upcoming generations? I mean, we're thankful to have Shakespeare's works, but we're also oppressed by their majestic overflow, which seems to declare: the mission is accomplished, O fresh poets; there's nothing more for you to do.

But there's always more to do, because there's only a terminus to games, whose rules are manmade. Life is mercifully less purposeful. And Shakespeare didn't compile his plays to publish them: that was done by others. (I'm not saying that he would've been against this; he's obviously aware of the potential for verses' longevity; but...)

I once heard a novelist argue heatedly that Shakespeare did not use pen-&-paper to compose: he used only the mind. Mnemonic devices such as meter, rhyme, inevitable phrasing...

(Where is euphuism's place in today's post-literate glyph-world?)

To review: Chisel in stone; paint on canvas; compose poems in the brain, speak poems with the voice, preserve poems on papyrus...

Now John Keats just came to my mind – his request to be buried under a stone with the epitaph “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

So don’t die. That’s the tricky part.

And let Douglas Sirk be the only soul to leave anything Written on the Wind (1956).

Sorry for more frivolity; but at least the film reference is legal, as it complies with your pre-1990 cinema scope. [Blogger's note: That's an inside joke; earlier in our exchange, mine interlocutor had professed that the last time he watched a film was in the nineties.]

Seriously tho... yeah, you understood right about my abandonment of bookmaking; and if my view of blogging as a potential book of its own appears self-contradictory in light of this resolve, I repeat again with Whitman:

Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

When will capitalism figure out that the way to get children to brush their teeth is simply to add more sugar to the toothpaste.