Tyler Weaver's Blog, page 65

The Viewmaster Presidency

Campaign rhetoric delivered in a calm and “presidential” demeanor does little beyond forcibly clicking the button on the Viewmaster of a terrifying presidency. Yet his brief display of sanity will be the discussion for the remainder of the day, at least until he gives into the normal (so-called) angels of his nature and lets loose a torrent of vindictiveness after mentally seizing upon some slight that goes against his expectation of universal adulation.

But Democrats have to do better. They cannot rely on “Oh that’s bad.” I’m sure the former Kentucky governor is a fine person, but as a rebuttal to Trump’s first Congressional address, he offered a paltry remonstrance, devoid of the fire and passion that has fueled the resistance to Trump’s bastardization of the office in marches and protests the world over. Now is not the time to play it safe. Now is the time to listen to the fire, to show that its voices are being heard by a party with a pulse.

(TW)

Prepared

“Prepared” is now “over-prepared; “correct” is now “sanctimonious.”

A devolution to high school, where those who get an A on the test AND answer the bonus questions, who do well, are jeered and looked down upon by those who couldn’t muster the initiative to climb out of their delusional self-satisfaction and foundational mediocrity and put eyes to book, mind to task.

39 days until the election.

Stuck in my head: David Bowie, I’M AFRAID OF AMERICANS.

(TW)

The Blank Bird-Slate

Twitter’s slow, continued downfall spiral is rooted in its insistent (post-IPO-directed) need to evolve in a manner displeasing to entrenched users, forgetting its best state, a blank slate, when users made it into their own individualized service, an integral component of their own system of digital expression.

Where do we go when Twitter fades, when the magic is at last squelched from the little bird, when weak connections among digital strangers become boring, tired; when our mental capacity for a ceaseless deluge of incoming information and our ability to parse and understand this information is rendered inert, the service lost to bloviating mobs of agree/disagree; when its evolution pushes the entrenched into unknown gardens?

Twitter, probably.

Stuck in my head: Metric, DREAMS SO REAL.

(TW)

The Ring Returns

Wedding ring is back on my finger after being resized so as to avoid flying into the neverwhere and becoming nevermore. I missed it terribly during its two-week surgery: couldn’t shake the feeling that I had gone backwards in life, reverted to some primordial-ooze state, slithering about in an indecipherable and flavorless alphabet soup.

Its weight, its heft,  both physical and symbolic, is welcome.

Stuck in my head: Emmylou Harris and Dave Matthews, MY ANTONIA.

(TW)

Debate Night

The first debate is upon us, an event that will, as every major turning point, every major gaffe, every major unspeakable spoken has before it, inalienably alter the presidential race; the game-changer, the pivot, the divot.

The hills are alive with the clunking sound of “What Clinton Needs to Do,” and “What Trump Needs to Do” think pieces and prognostications; with moderators hemming and hawing on their role; with the perpetual lowering of expectations; with scorecards and drinking games and gatherings; with television-rating orgasms, possible viewership in the Super Bowl range, ohmygod.

Glossing over the inalienable truth: the collective forgetfulness of the American people in favor of the shiny new. By Friday, we will have moved on, the zingers and the “Who Won” articles will have become stale, and then it will begin anew, another cycle will dawn, and we will remember with only passing familiarity the run-up to the big event, that little voice that says, I’ve been here before.

Current read: Plato, THE REPUBLIC (3/4 done).

Stuck in my head: The Beach Boys, GOD ONLY KNOWS.

(TW)

One of Those Days

The pewter pig, my grandmother’s signatory initials etched into its belly, stares at me: You’re going to put words here, aren’t you?

Perhaps.

Sit back in the chair, keep typing and eventually the words will present themselves.

Eventually.

Is it going to be one of those days?

When the words become jumbled and jangled, when they function as little more than an outpouring of a weary brain, when they appear in any order, my ability to connect their dots flitting and sparking and growing dark as I sit back in the chair, typing, telling myself that eventually the words will present themselves.

Oh, it might be one of those days.

(TW)

My Own Little Garden

The greyhound is snoring in the comfortable chair. The Morkie likewise on her mat.

And here I am.

Returning, for the first time here, to these quick daily pieces, to force myself into writing online again, to regain a degree of comfort with sharing thoughts, of clearing out my brain before the day’s thousand-word commitment to my next book begins. To write about something else; to act as a counterweight to the daily battle with perfectionism, uncertainty, insecurity, and the occasional glimmer of hope that is the act of writing; as I told my wife, if I knew the mental toll this game of wordplay would take on me, I’d still do it all over again. And again and again.

I’ve written far too many of these introductory posts. Will do everything I can to stick with it——the challenge, the discipline; to carve out my own little garden in the weed-field of the internet, to cultivate it, to tend it.

Current read: Plato’s THE REPUBLIC.

(TW)

Endless Narrative

(Note: this piece originally appeared on my (TW) Tumblr as part of my Informalities series, on 10 June 2016). 

Susan Sontag once remarked that,

“By presenting us with a limitless number of nonstopped stories, the narratives that the media relate — the consumption of which has so dramatically cut into the time the educated public once devoted to reading — offer a lesson in amorality and detachment that is antithetical to the one embodied by the enterprise of the novel.“

Key line for the purposes of this Informality is “limitless number of nonstopped stories”: Twitter, especially, is the epitome of the limitless number of nonstopped stories: not just the scandalous, the intriguing, the world-altering, but the mundane, the trivial, the quotidian. In it, we are the media; this is the beauty and the detriment of the platform, a platform with which I’ve experimented time and again with leaving, with crafting a 140-character end to my story, but one to which I always return, for better or worse.

True mastery of the platform rests in the continual development–read: unending, like limitless narratives, continuously evolving–of an ability to process those endless stories, both yours and the stories of those you follow, into useful narratives that augment your life rather than detract from it, and to hone an ability to end stories that no longer have meaning, stories still followed out of the habits of politics and reciprocity, and, in so doing, build a better experience of meaning and utility.

(TW)

Zero K

(Note: this piece originally appeared on my (TW) Tumblr as part of my Informalities series, on 09 June 2016). 

The simplicity of its core struggle, of the ages-old, archetypal conflict between fathers and sons wrought over generational variances in perceptions of love and of purpose, makes DeLillo’s latest, ZERO K, tower above all of his works since UNDERWORLD.

That simplicity leads you, sans coddling, into a labyrinth, its foundation erected at a futurist crossroads of technological ethics and immortality, where a father and a son confront their terrors of abandonment, of love lost through love preserved, and stare over the precipice of their lives without, one staring headlong into the hope of unknown future that may never be, the other into the unknown future that only he can make.

(TW)

The News

(Note: this piece originally appeared on my (TW) Tumblr as part of my Informalities series, on 08 June 2016). 

Refresh, scroll; refresh, scroll: such is the morning. Happy Wednesday.

As the endless 2016 campaign(pain) wears on, I return again and again to Alain De Botton’s THE NEWS: A USER’S MANUAL, and this passage in particular: “It is when we are incubating particularly awkward but potentially vital ideas that we tend to feel most desperate to avoid looking inside. And that is when the news grabs us.”

And, oh, do I let it grab me.

It bothers me that I allow a hateful, spiteful, thin-skinned, misogynistic, manipulative, con-man-huckster xenophobe reality television relic of the Patrick Bateman eighties invade my thoughts; that I have this addict’s need to mainline information in black-mirror syringes, filling spaces of silence, perpetuating the distrust of my own capacity for coherent thought, with the bleary-eyed, brain-off, consumption of off-the-cuff think pieces birthed from a relentless clusterfuck of data-spinning and mining and churning and re-clicking and refreshing, bobbing up and down with arm floaties in a tepid cesspool of depleting ad dollars and the shallow promise of perpetual connectivity, Alfredo sauce of clickbait verbiage, opinion, and best guesses hurled against a wall covered in so much sauce that none of the new ingredients stick; that I fall for the mindless, endless prognostication and finger pointing and the noxious fumes emanating from the cloud of what passes for thought at the expense of my own.

While I don’t want to abstain from news consumption completely, I am challenging myself to consume that news in a more mindful way, not as a space-filler between bouts of word-slinging–or, worse yet, as a means to avoid exploring those deep recesses of what passes for my brain when they are most needed.

What, exactly, constitutes that more mindful way is the subject of continuing inquiry; 2016 marches on.

(TW)