This post has been revised as of 11.19, with a bonus poem. 

#testcut is not Banksy, not quite. It is the notion that a novel will be hashtagged to the reading public in real time, as it is created.* The equivalent of the David Hockney piece that he recorded stroke by stroke on his iPad until it was complete. (This was one of my favorite pieces in de Young's A Bigger Exhibition). The idea that we can watch the act of creation and revision, again and again, in its entirety.** 


#testcut  is immediacy in writing beyond anything possible until recently. If Dickens released his work in installments and Andy Weir (the Martian) in blogposts - Keroac on an onionskin loop -  this is something even more haiku flowing… Each 10 tweets a unit, like movie cuts, but taken from throughout a novel that I have not yet mapped. Subconscious meanderings that eventually thicken, cohere. Or not - high-wire writing, without a net. 


The book actually began two weeks ago in a muddle of Tweets that did not know they had a theme. Here, for clarity, the gestation phase.
​

First there were skirmishes, then there were wars. Then an uneasy peace pervaded the place. Only the place had ceased to exist.


To a place where time, if not exactly still, is very nearly silent.


When procrastination is not an option, empty your mind & begin without aim. Themes will sort themselves out.


One to admire, one to cast aside. One for the road. 
#endurancepose


Faced with a decision, circumspect. Timed release, I'll be out of the room by the time––


Amiable, egalitarian, her hair glinted in a certain light. Foggy.


Truth twisted with a hint of rye. I took the news straight.

Circumstances dictate that I write this on this on toilet paper, in lemon ink. You will know why when I escape. 
#hethought


You will never know the ways I tried to find a place that we two could share. Hopeless. 
#shethought

Crisp, her eyes shone in the light. How do we stay afloat?


Mar 16


When the world catches up, it is time to move on.




* If my literary forensics research is correct, Twitter novels have been in existence since 2011, taking form 140 words at a time. Micro novels are particularly popular in Japan, presumably written on crowded commute trains where there is just room to maneuver a cell phone (a phenomenon I know well). 

This poem has been revised as of 11/.19.

I  peeked under tightly pulled sheets,
to see what items lay there for my acceptance, removal. 
The contents were the same, no matter how many 
layers I peeled. 

Then I opened my eyes and everything changed. 

The single viewpoint is not certain––
the multitude are waiting to be uncovered.
Push against the idea that an algorithm
will decide who goes forward.

Sense of smell came later and was intoxicating.

Four walls, inert, unless you push 
with unceasing labor 
and work your way out 

Touch, the most far reaching of the senses––intimations of death.

I heard the laboring in my mother’s womb,
I sensed the grandness of what lay beyond,
I wept and wept when I heard that song 
and still it did not hear me. 

Life and forgotten breath. 
With listening comes––

Las Vegas Strip 3:45 am

The Strip never quite sleeps––even at that moment when movement wanes and those tipsy sorts not enclosed in all-night wombs have departed in cabs, the neon lights and video towers flicker out ultra-luxe lifestyles at a bargain. The bridges that crisscross an otherwise pedestrian-hostile desert are empty except for the odd vagrant too out of his head to make it to the shelter of darker rock and scrub––the vacant expanses that hint at hard times only minutes from the glitter. The plexiglass on the overpasses, designed to halt the fall of brawlers and losers on the felt flickers a hundred fuck-me colors––stimulating aural intimations that one has come to a place where money spent is just a color form, unfocused.

Stumbled on an interesting blog Brain Pickings by Maria Popova and an article about Henry David Thoreau's early publishing struggles. Exhibit A––Thoreau's journal entry referencing his self-published volume A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers*,  written as an elegy for his brother John.

"For a year or two past, my publisher, falsely so called, has been writing from time to time to ask what disposition should be made of the copies of “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” still on hand, and at last suggesting that he had use for the room they occupied in his cellar. So I had them all sent to me here, and they have arrived to-day by express, filling the man’s wagon, — 706 copies out of an edition of 1000 which I bought of Munroe four years ago and have been ever since paying for, and have not quite paid for yet."

"They are something more substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. Of the remaining two hundred and ninety and odd, seventy-five were given away, the rest sold. I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself."

This makes my experience having 100 copies of Earth Fabric printed (and failing to make a single sale) seem very lightweight, almost comical. Some things never change. Naturally, sales were never the aim –– but would be nice if so-called bookstores in the SF Bay Area took a close look at non-traditionally published works. Oh I know, bookstores are dinosaurs, just struggling to survive. Maybe this is why.


[12/19: Looking back on this in context, a full year before Trump's election, I consider it prescient. In recent years the topic has been covered ad nauseam, but at the time it was kind of like piecing together a definition of an illness that didn’t quite have a name. Remarkably, the piece was written when I still had an agent and must still have had some hope, if not reasonable expectation (intuition, the ultimate joy kill) of getting into the literary world through the front door. 

Now of course, I don’t  care––music, writing, art––we live in a world in which “what’s the diff” is the prime mover and those who go the viral route sell, but are also are dead on contact. It doesn’t matter if fabric makes a cent now or after I am gone, if it is meant to have an impact it will, I can only help it along.]
​
January 12th, 2015
Raleigh, North Carolina

Cycling through Raleigh, I found myself falling into familiar rhythms. It was winter, the leaves were off the trees and the effect was more Stephen King than Maybury. A feeling of eerie emptiness pervaded the gentle urban folds. History stills hangs heavy on Raleigh, the mists of the Civil War have not quite departed, despite an influx of entrepreneurial hipsters and Research Triangle technologists.
​
Amid this almost eery stillness, I began to look back at the past year, certainly one of the oddest chapters of my life. I had spent five months in Las Vegas––way too long, any way I looked at it. Enough time in the SF Bay Area to realize I would never be able to afford it. A stranger everywhere I went, divorced from the predominant currents of American life. 

I was acutely aware that in any era but my own, 2014 would have been enough. This experiment in coming halfway-out-of-the-writerly-shell to meet the imperatives of self promotion 2.0 has been shredded by the great leveler, Buzzfeed Nation. Leave your brain at the door. Content must fit one, fit all. Bouyah. A belief that talent would prevail over societal apathy left me with a distinct lack of money, a feeling of pinch.

The issue, as I see it, is that very few seem to be actively seeking out well-constructed writing. Has the quick-fire cry and response of the Internet age upset the brain chemistry of entire swathes of our population? Campus torchbearers of envelope-pushing discourse metamorphosed into hipster pablum? Those who once explored the intellectual outer limits, now wrapped in a vortex of device. Reaction to others' devices is not community, it is void.

In some ways my irascible father is right. We have succumbed. There is a definite lack of quality in music, writing, art. All the best original impulses fractured, the old rewards for honest effort vastly diminished. What is encouraged by those inclined to "break shit" seems close to Hallmark drivel (see your average Medium feed). 

Perhaps this is because coding is binary, engineered systems coherent in a way that a life set down accurately on paper can never be. A beautiful mess on the page is no easy feat. And those who decide what is administered to readers through feeds, platforms, search engine bumps have decided not to pay real writers.* What we have now reads like Dilbert: square and oppressively correct. Hyper-inflated headlines, underperforming logic. Clicks, likes. All in the service of idiotic zeitgeist. 

There was a time when those who defined the conversation did not bow to the whiplash velocities of twitter-framed opinion. When trolls lived strictly under bridges. Such meta-level influencers (once known as  lions) are not easy to come by these days. The ability to dodge bullets and slow time, while doing the old aerial 360º, is exceedingly rare. Yet it is absolutely necessary in an environment where reputation has become a form of high-frequency trading. There are bullets to dodge from all directions. 

Gaining readers and viewers is a huge double-edged sword. You get your head chopped off unless you are quick on your feet and have a thick shell to retreat into. Viva la Energizer tortuga.

Despite all this agony, I was not completely dissatisfied with the trajectory 2014 took. Sometimes clusters of events occur that convince you there is a reason for it all. The highly improbable one-two punch of a Guinness Record endurance poker tournament and securing a literary agent put me on some kind of map. New acquaintances fought their initial urge to take the piss when I spoke passionately of being a novelist. My aging father railed less often about a career at the post office being the proper setting for my minuscule intellectual capacities. External validation provided the lubricant that acres of self-belief never had. 

I was free to roam, by the skin of my teeth.  Endurance artist––so qualified by a willingness to live a mendicant existence (ala Henry Miller, carefree and careworn in Depression-era Paris. Entranced with the cavernous excesses of his throbbing mind). Everything connected through––what? To use a dated phrase, the collective consciousness. Not quite that. Fabric––a next gen platform that values creatives and, oh yeah, saves the earth.

And what of my muse? It has not departed. Every evening I hear the train whistle through the heart of a small, no longer time-removed Southern city. It is time to take that train south to Miami Beach. And from there––whatever means will vault me out of the static States. ​

[1/20 - As readers of Endurancewriter may have noticed, I am going through the blog backwards and revising all the old pieces before posting any new stuff. I may never get to the new stuff. In the annals of awkward endings that would take the cake, except it doesn’t matter. It never did matter. One sentence is important as the other, in any given moment of time. Particularly meaningful, as time may soon cease to exist for humans.


Global warming matters. 8.6 million pieces of micro plastic in every cubit foot of ocean water matters. The loss of hedges as a place for ecosystems to thrive in the European margin matters. The way opportunists have fracked the American West matters. The far worse situation in every other continent matters. There, I said it. Important, in this moment in time.


This piece is one I have had particular reluctance to edit because it seems to convey a confidence that what I am doing as a writer is right and should be rewarded. Maybe in my heart I believe my stuff is unique and worthy, but the marketplace has not backed that up. What is a marketplace? I think I can say that in this society, it involves rewards going to the wrong people most of the time. Most are aware, if not woke, enough not to dismiss this as mere Sad Sackism. Evolutionary wrong foot, race to the bottom. 


I have scaled my own personal mountain, created some stuff I am proud of and feel may last. The feeling of personal accomplishment is pretty solid. I have even thought out a strategy of ensuring that any money generated goes toward a system that trumps those have expedited global warming, sown hate (and yeah, incidentally, rejected my stuff). The –– of the world, noteworthy not only for their stupidity but their minions. Denial is a hell of a drug. 


Another reason why re-editing is challenging: toning down all the ego-driven statements and burnishing the decent prose to a satisfying glow is a major chore. Yet there is some good kindling here, can’t just throw it away.…] ​ Note - visit revision of this article with new art.

Boudinot begins by asserting “writers are born with talent.” I am not so sure about this––certainly, at some level, the brain chemistry must be there to grasp sounds and murmured intimations from mother and other influencers. However, I am a firm believer that talent isn’t innate––personal evolution as we grow is too complex, talent too static a construct. 

Talent seems to me related to how much thought and effort one puts into any endeavor. Moreover, it has to do with whether the palette of vocabulary and experience at hand is sufficient to convincingly capture flitting thoughts. There is an element of play to good writing, of catching oneself off guard––once a certain competency has been reached, the reins should be lax and ego should not appear unless beckoned.