Tyler Weaver's Blog, page 25

Notes on Giving Myself Permission to Do My Work

Now that my part-time full time endeavor of cabin in the woods caretaking has come to an end and the winter hibernation is just over the horizon, I'm neck-deep in rebuilding my writing practice, in training myself to work in the afternoons (in addition to my daily 0500-1000 blocks), and giving myself permission to treat it not as a hobby but as my job (I thought having actually been published would defuse this mental fuckery; hahaha joke's on you, writer-boy).

Two things I've found:

One, that the only way to actually get better at it and to get over my preconceived defeatist notions of my capacity or lack thereof to function in a focused, brain-centric manner is to actually do it.

Two, that while, in the process of doing the afternoon block of The Work, I more often than not feel as though I'm slamming my head against a wall – wouldn't it be nice to have a small pillow or egg container for a nanosecond or three? – the morning blocks are usually smoother because of the aforementioned two hours of head-slamming. Learning to treat the afternoons as further unclogging of the mental pipes for better flow in my more conscious hours; I am nothing if not a morning person.

OK, three:

By spreading my writing day across an actual day – as opposed to attempting to jam it into the confines of a morning so that I might spend my afternoons pretending to be someone I’m not – I'm more capable of defusing the self-loathing that would creep at around 1500, give or take. Shock of shocks, actually doing The Work when I want to do it and not tailoring my purpose and my need to the whims of others ameliorates the mindtricks and middle fingers that conspire to piss all over the day when my umbrella's in the shop.

There might be a better conclusion to this post but I haven’t found it so I’ll leave it at that. There also might be a better accompanying picture but I can’t find one and it’s a dog toy so there. The day’s run awaits.

Beware, for a Brain-Dumping Grab Bag Shall Ensue

Making an attempt to not consult my backburner list of potential ramblings for this space until I exhaust options - if there are any - for rambling improvisation from at the anointed hour of their self-required creation.

Thoughts jangled loose from the last 24 hours of brain wanderings:

Considering: taking my Twitter account private for no other reason than I haven't done it in the 11-plus years I've rented out my useless parentheticals to the public timeline. Preventing me from doing so: a bevy of reasons, all of whose seemingly sound logic is decimated in the face of two simple questions: What's the point? and Do you really care about that? ...

Ideal: a private / public toggle for Twitter posts. Would love to have the links to these postings be public, with all of the other useless shit I post being private, accessible only to those who choose to subscribe / invite me into their timeline – a better self-policing of signal to noise – or something like that. I don’t know.

Also:

Almost done with Kurt Andersen's FANTASYLAND and, though the subtitle rings false – we've been haywire since our founding; it's in our nature, the constant struggle between reason and irrationality – and a general aversion to survey-course scope, I'm finding it illuminating. One major thing, however, is preventing me from including it on my unwritten though gestating List of Books to Understand the Madness (potentially joining Tim Alberta's AMERICAN CARNAGE, PW Singer and Emmerson T. Brooking's LIKEWAR, Naomi Klein's THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, John Carreyrou's BAD BLOOD, and Jane Mayer's DARK MONEY): the lack of a bibliography / notes section (yes, there are copious footnotes but they are - at best - incomplete). Call me rational, but I want to actually read the primary sources from which Andersen derives his incisive commentary... a qualified inclusion on the list, perhaps.

Of Serialized Opportunities Missed

Fond memories of receiving my AMAZING SPIDER-MAN subscription each month in the post – rolled up and battered, yes, but I owned it and it came to me and it was wonderful.

Fast forward 25-30 years:

In newsletter 0071's "Favorite Thing of the Week," I wrote about the first issue of Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch's THE BATMAN'S GRAVE, a remarkable reminder of the endless narrative potential of "Detective" part of "The Dark Knight Detective," a potential seemingly lost in the muck of current continuity-heavy series, of which I have no clue of – or interest in – what's going on.

But that continuity-based pissing and moaning is beside the point; my point here is that I would love to read each issue of THE BATMAN'S GRAVE as it came out (as I would CRIMINAL) – I live in the middle of nowhere and there are no comics retailers within 30 miles of me –  but, for some reason or another, series-based subscriptions don't (seem to) exist in the digital comics landscape – a glaring omission.

(If I'm wrong, please point me to the place where I can send my money now.)

It's an omission – and lost opportunity – that gets to the heart of my issue with digital comics (and with buying digital movies or digital albums or things like that): to charge the same price for digital access as one does for physical ownership is asinine; a pricing system stuck in a mid-naughties loop of diminished returns and publishing malpractice.

Solutions?... Individual series subscriptions a la individual digital magazine subscriptions or "Season Pass" options on Amazon Prime? Or perhaps the solution lies in the DC Universe streaming app? (Or Marvel or Comixology or Whatever) – a premium tier for current series / season passes like ad-free Hulu?

Just thinking out loud here. I'll probably end up buying the HC collection of THE BATMAN'S GRAVE – and maybe that's the idea – but I'd prefer to not have to wait: by not making an option for subscriptions readily available, publishers are neglecting key components of comics storytelling – serialization and anticipation – and the fond memories they inculcate.

Project: KaijuBrain, continued

Dawn of the third week of experimenting with / implementing / rebirthing my use of (a personalized variant of) the GTD system. Overall impression: while it's nice to have my brain freed up and I do feel less stressed about everything, the flood of ideas is somewhat overwhelming. Hopefully this torrent will recede soon – perhaps it's just the dam being opened up, the static and the flotsam being expunged – as I'm generally distrustful of idea floods when there's so much actual work to be done.

Question: have I reached peak system now that I have an unassembled box of Legos from my birthday in a project file? Yes, probably – but at least it's off the dining room table.

One thing standing out: as I recognize the limits of my own capacity for mental storage and build this external brain at my desk – KaijuDesk, hence, KaijuBrain – I've become convinced that asking someone else to remind me to do something, to act as my external brain, is a form of cruelty. To all whom I've attempted to recruit (my wife, mostly) in this "remind me to x" fool's errand, my profound apologies.

Right, forgot this: it's also a handy system to implement delay tactics, to keep myself on track when the new shit starts popping up – handy, especially with the aforementioned onslaught of shiny new idea torrents to nowhere. (Version of Disney's three-room editing process?)

Also: still loving SquareSpace though one frustration clouds: for postings from the web, post URLS follow the title but from the app – which I hoped would make parenthetical postings easier – they instead generate a byzantine collection of letters and numbers. Fixed by manually entering title, but automatic would be lovely. Tried logging out and back in, no luck. Uninstall-reinstall next?

(Listening): AND THEIR REFINEMENT OF THE DECLINE, by Stars of the Lid.

(I was having a snack)

An Unwieldy Enumeration of My Favorite Books

Whenever The Works starts to falter, I invariably turn to making lists of whatever springs to mind. This morning was one of those mornings; the list, of my favorite books. Here be the fruits of my mental stock-taking:

STONER, by John Williams

UNDERWORLD and LIBRA, by Don DeLillo

LA CONFIDENTIAL and AMERICAN TABLOID, by James Ellroy

THE LIVING, by Annie Dillard

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, by Ray Bradbury

FRANKENSTEIN, by Mary Shelley

RAGTIME, by E.L. Doctorow

MYSTIC RIVER, by Dennis Lehane

JANE EYRE, by Charlotte Brontë

THE HOUSE OF MIRTH, by Edith Wharton

MIDDLEMARCH, by George Eliot

THE BLIND ASSASSIN, by Margaret Atwood

SUTTREE, by Cormac McCarthy

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS, by Marlon James

RED HARVEST and THE MALTESE FALCON, by Dashiell Hammett

THE LONG GOODBYE, by Raymond Chandler

CASINO ROYALE, by Ian Fleming

SLEEPLESS NIGHTS, by Elizabeth Hardwick

OXHERDING TALE, by Charles Johnson

TENDER IS THE NIGHT, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

DAWN, by Octavia Butler

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, by John Le Carré

BLACK FRIDAY, by David Goodis

THE CAVE, by José Saramago

SATANTANGO, by László Krasznahorkai

THE GRAPES OF WRATH, by John Steinbeck

MIDDLESEX, by Jeffrey Eugenides

THE ASSASSINS, by Joyce Carol Oates

THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, by Ursula K. Le Guin

DRACULA, by Bram Stoker

THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, by Robert Louis Stevenson

(There are two dogs in this picture)

There are two dogs in this picture.

Notes on Impeachment Scrapbooking

In light of our current, worse-than-Watergate political crisis, I've been contemplating the why of Watergate's unique hold on my fascination.

Current thinking: Watergate is, at its core, about an active investigation on the part of our fourth estate into the underbelly of power: the corrupting power of power (requiring only the inherent corruptness of the character of the office-holder as fuel for the flame), the paranoia, the entitlement, and the urge, at at all costs, to cling to that power.  It is a saga about attaining a prize that no one in their right mind would want and doing everything to hold on to it.

(What I wouldn't give for a Robert A. Caro series on Nixon.)

Synthesis, maybe: that fascination is a logical precursor to my fascination of (and horror at) our current situation – Watergate 2.0 / Worse Than Watergate / ApprenticeGate: this is Watergate, amplified: in the place of Nixon's arguable adult-in-the-roomness (an admittedly low bar because clearly, Nixon was anything but, especially as the scandal engulfed him and everyone around him) and lack of access to Twitter at its center, we have instead a septuagenarian social media addict narcissist wannabe authoritarian poor-me autocrat throwing a temper tantrum on the grocery store floor and spewing hate and bullshit every time he steps up to the microphone or to the smartphone.

These, as someone once said, are the days; of horror, of fascination, perhaps – but they certainly are days. Each day like living in dog years.

Think I've mentioned before that I've got a Pinboard tag full of impeachment news clippings and no clue what to do with it. Probably just my hermetic quasi-historian's crisis scrapbook but who knows it could be more.

(Listening): THE HUMAN HEART, by April Larson.

(EarBliss): PHANTOM RHYTHM, by Gong Gong Gong III

Drumless post-punk marriage of Ennio Morricone and Otis Taylor sung in Cantonese. Hooked.