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ENDURANCEWRITER

AKA Damon Arvid. Under-the-radar writer, musician. Let's keep it that way. The cloud novels and other highlights are being collected at DamonArvid.com. To access all the music and Avocado Sun, click the big black box below.

Fabric - Summon These Days (Music)

Testcut - Hashtag Novel

3/27/2015

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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). 

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Test Cut ?

3/26/2015

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Listening, Renewal

3/26/2015

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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––





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TWO BULLETS LEFT ...

3/22/2015

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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.
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Prose created without a net––here is what I forged in today's workshop. A second potential beginning to Two Bullets Left. Again, far from the version that will make the book––and probably more original for that.
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Coherence (Updated)

3/21/2015

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For the Birds

Flute thrashes time, 
miseries expounded,
frustrations extended
Earth a fabric distended

A muddle of marks exposed, 
Unspoken vision of calamity asserted 
By the mere fact that no one can hear––

I make my way along the beach 
where nothing grows, 
I see cormorants carve air currents in
shriek of triage, I leave my splintered mark

Would you ever want what you heard
plastered across the wind
If there were not some declarative power
that turned realities upside down,
dangled roots in blue
And reclaimed space as
beyond borrowed-time continuum?

Bring in the donkeys, the brayers, the (re)mixers,
cut and paste soothsayers, who know not what they Google––
what we used to call fixtures. 

[This was March, 2015. Out of nowhere my old college roommate, who I may have turned to a path of music and infinite frustration, reappears in the digital realm]
​
Steve Perry: If your flute thrashes time, I recommend a metronome 

Me: I am completely against the metronome, when did anything except that timed to destruct the earth need a regulated beat not coordinated with planting, celebration, ceremony? 

Flute playing, cormorants flying, looking at a sky & branches upside down––gaining a new perspective on life each day, or just being heard. Hearing yourself over the din of competing voices and logic. Wilding blend.

Therefore, introduction of metronome is a great idea (Kashup has nothing on this logic, I believe.)
​
Steve: going hiking you were like "the forest is 3-D and the trail winds one way..." and then I tried to rush ahead and got more lost than ever have in my life....

Me (channeling Dante): 
​
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

In the middle part of my life
I found myself in a dark forest
where the direct way was lost.

Steve: Oh yes, now it all comes back to me. I remember the very class. Sitting in Purgatorio!?? Shit.
​
Damon: Professor Brose and the sweet new style. That line of Dante's always stuck with me though... I'm just starting to understand it.

Steve: That was a good text. I'm reading the Anthology of English Literature right now, got through Beowoulf. On to Chaucer, which is like trying to read in Spanish. 

Damon: Chaucer is awesome... Boccaccio's Decameron was preferred tho...

Steve: Who was the fem fatal in Dante?

Damon: The fem fatale was that dame Sam Spade almost fell for... Eve. man, I think I just finished writing a classic my friend (Arisugawa Park, now A Beautiful Case of the Blues. Eve, now Evena.)

Steve: yeah?
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Dante and Virgil leaving the dark wood - Gustave Doré
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March 20th, 2015

3/20/2015

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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.
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"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."
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"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.

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* A first edition of Thoreau's first book, with "some wear to spine extremities" now goes for an eminently reasonable $17,500. 
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Brand New Second Hand

3/12/2015

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[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. ​
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Antwerp. Required reading, preflight.
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At cousin Tom's - ballad of the half-made man.
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Of MFAs and Shitty Writing - A Response to Ryan Boudinot

3/3/2015

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Blood, sweat, and coffee.
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Deconstructive - between modal and fusion.
[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.
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Hard work, even in paradise.
In his recent article in The Stranger (February, 2015) Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One, Seattle City of Literature executive director Ryan Boudinot speaks about what makes some writers shine and others not so much. As a creative writer on the cusp [of obscurity] I have a few thoughts on his provocatively titled piece.


Boudinot begins by asserting “writers are born with talent.” I am not so sure––at some level, certainly, 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 fixed at birth too static a construct to encompass the sheer malleability of existence. 


Talent seems to me related to how much thought and effort is put into any endeavor. [This is different from “practice makes perfect” dictum––mindful no-practice can be the best training, moreover, it clears the palate.]


Maybe talent 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 never appear unless beckoned. [How does one beckon ego, which at best is barely controlled? Let stories appear in dreams and dreams appear on the page.]


Boudinot opines “if you didn't decide to take writing seriously by the time you were a teenager, you're probably not going to make it”*


This statement seems both true and obvious. The necessity of even mentioning an early love for literature as prerequisite for being a decent writer probably has to do with the phenomenon of Baby Boomers (with more time on their hands than talent) entering the creative writing/MFA sphere in droves. [This may stand as an early “OK Boomer” moment, ironic considering that Generation, Inc., now considers me fully in that greybeard category] 


Familiarity with the constructs of classic literature is a given among writers worth reading, with well-worn tropes constantly deconstructed. Miles Davis knew the bop canon inside and out before he created modal jazz. Having pioneered the latter form, he was in a nice position to deconstruct further and work toward fusion. [Then cocaine happened. Sad end of many good musicians in the 1970s.]


“If you aren't a serious reader, don't expect anyone to read what you write.” Amen to that, with reservations. I think a lengthy period of serious reading is best followed by a lifetime of reading purely for fun. [Make it seem so fun that no one will pay you.]


These days I have a nearly perfectly random approach to reading and take months to finish most books. I digest a little each day, mulling as I go. If “taking literature seriously” is a no brainer, akin to holding your breath as you jump off the deep end, not taking literature seriously is equally as important. Catching myself off-guard is the only way I know of growing. [Addendum: I will flip through nearly any book but to get me past the first few pages takes considerable authorial skill.]


Example: I just read Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon for the first time. It really blew me away––pitch perfect descriptions of San Francisco, perhaps the first truly unreliable narrator (Sam Spade) and the debut of the femme fatale. I’m now winding my way through Louis de Berniere’s The War For Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts. Pure Marquezian fable, written at a time when magical realism was all the rage. I find myself intrigued by the idea of how a story could be effectively crafted from a dog’s perspective, so will probably read Jack London’s Call of the Wild next. I am really looking forward to perusing William H. Prescott’s The History of the Conquest of Mexico, a 19th century text about Cortez and Montezuma that details tragedies and social occurrences in the places I may or may not visit along the Yucatan peninsula. The common thread linking these books is that they came to me by chance, at hostels in San Francisco, Miami Beach, and Playa del Carmen. 


[Never did get to London or what turned out to be a really dry history book. But I did discover Tulum and fabric flute along the way.]


Boudinot’s greatest scorn is reserved for those MFA students who complain about not having enough time to read. He suggests that they should “do us both a favor and drop out.” I am so far out of the MFA loop that I have nothing to say about this. I do know that I was not accepted into the UC Santa Cruz creative writing program during my tender college years and wear this as a badge of pride. Even then, I realized that the best route toward really having something worthwhile to say involved experiencing life first hand. And it worked––I think I am in, by the skin of my teeth, at age 40. Young for a first-time novelist, even. If I had spent a lifetime coaching writers I considered inferior, I would probably have much the same view as Boudinot––a sheen of bitterness, an instinct to bite the hand that feeds you. [Bitter butter, better butter, buttery toffee tip top––what this slop?]


Boudinot goes on to assert “No one cares about your problems if you're a shitty writer.” This is a truism if I have ever heard one. A shitty writer by definition produces unloved writing. Other than its snarky tone, the thing I object to most in this is the implication that putting personal issues on the page and being a "shitty writer" are intrinsically linked. Admittedly, many pick up the pen as a form of therapy, but Boudinot crosses the line in saying “just because you were abused as a child does not make your inability to stick with the same verb tense for more than two sentences any more bearable. In fact, having to slog through 500 pages of your error-riddled student memoir makes me wish you had suffered more.” [I really can’t believe this line. Why am I even writing about a wanker like Boudinot?]


Yet there is an element of truth to Boudinot's contorted and offensive attempt at humor. Self-effacement and restraint get you far. In Arisugawa Park [now A Beautiful Case of the Blues], I have woven composite fabric from hundreds, probably thousands, of people I have known. I’ve got 99 problems and my own are not among them––on the page at least. 


Turning to the emergent Kindle/e-book/self-publishing sphere, Boudinot asserts “You don't need my help to get published.” He talks with apparent glee about the New York publishing industry sliding into cultural irrelevance. Yet, as one online commenter astutely points out, Boudinot has apparently achieved low Amazon sales of his own (highly reviewed) volumes. Having done my homework, I will say that I do think that the literary agent is not outmoded and agree with the late PD James, who said in a 2013 BBC interview: “It is much easier now to produce a manuscript with all the modern technology. It is probably a greater advantage now, more than ever before, to have an agent between you and the publisher.” [Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you the agentless, penniless, wonder of the literary world. High on his mountaintop….] 


I return to wholehearted agreement with Boudinot in his final assertion that “It's important to woodshed.” His point is so well constructed that I take the liberty of quoting the entire last paragraph:


"We've been trained to turn to our phones to inform our followers of our somewhat witty observations. I think the instant validation of our apps is an enemy to producing the kind of writing that takes years to complete. That's why I advise anyone serious about writing books to spend at least a few years keeping it secret. If you're able to continue writing while embracing the assumption that no one will ever read your work, it will reward you in ways you never imagined.”
This relates to my concept of writing as an unglamorous, hidden, long-slog activity, which I have gone so far as to enshrine as a motivating principal of the EnduranceWriter blog. Now, back to the hard work of creating words and sentences composed of exactly 26 letters. [I think that was a veiled reference to the presumptive heavyweight Twitter novel of the world, Testcut.]


Viva la tortuga.
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Pure glamour.
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. 
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Hammett - as easy as it looks...
1 Comment

    Damon Arvid

    Author of Arisugawa Park. Fabric. Life.

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