Directory of Lost Causes

Hello Angel.

Interestingly, I don't use 'wtf' a lot, but I am wandering about in a daze. Actually, I think bewilderment is good, or at least, not bad, as long as you don't mistake your own bewilderment for superiority (IE, "I don't get this, therefore it is stupid", which paradoxically means, "I don't get this, therefore I'm clever"). I sensed that was the way both of these posters were using the phrase.

To be honest, I feel like many of my blog posts are a bit petty. I'm not sure why that should be. I don't think the same thing holds true of my 'real' writing.

It must be something to do with the medium. You say different things to different people, I think, and maybe different things in different media.

Hello Angel.

It actually occurred to me after I'd written my last response to you, that my position was completely untenable. I was trying to create a distinction between my own bewilderment and that of the people I was criticising, to imply that there is some qualitative difference in our behaviours, and, in other words, that I am better. And clearly, I'm not. They are 'expressing themselves', as I am 'expressing myself', by criticising others. So, we're basically the same. The only difference would seem to be quantitative - a difference of degree - in that I think I'm a bit better at expressing myself. But if that's all it comes down to, it seems a bit unfair for me to pick on them.

Having said that, I do think there was something valid in what I was saying. I suppose my basic point was that this kind of thing depresses me. But obviously it also fascinates me enough for me to comment on it. It is, in some sense, part of me. In other words, it takes one to know one - I must recognise my own idiocy in the kinds of comments I'm talking about.

So really, this whole blog entry is about self-disgust. I really think that must be true. Not just by deduction, but because, well, I do pretty much hate my blog. (By the way, I'm suffering from insomnia at the moment, which is why I'm writing at such length now.)

I'm coming to feel that opinions are pretty useless things. I just don't see the point of them any more. And all I seem to do on my blog is express my opinions, as if they were of any significance at all, which, of course, they aren't. I've always preferred fiction to opinions (stories to philosophy); opinions, or philosophy, are just fiction without the entertainment value. I suppose people can't help having opinions, and it's not like I want to start a crusade to stop people having and expressing opinions, maybe it's a necessary dialectic - I don't know. I just can't help feeling the inadequacy, and I suppose therefore the pettiness, of opinions. I recall the remarks of Robert Smith on political pop songs. He said that he always found political pop songs very embarrassing, because they seemed to assume that there was something that the listener did not know that the singer must urgently tell them about. I suppose I feel like all expressions of opinion are basically like that, as if you want to educate people, which, when you think about it, is a pretty arrogant thing to want to do. Even I find myself patronising.

So, yes, well, I hate my blog. I'd really like to change it somehow. In fact, I have very mixed feelings about writing anything on my blog at all. I think the kind of stuff I really want to use my blog for at the moment is simply to let people know about my real writing (which is fiction and therefore low on opinion content), but I feel obliged to post other things now and then just to remind people that I still exist, or... I don't even know why I do it. I saw a friend the other day, and she told me she used to like reading my blog, but hadn't done so recently, because I stopped posting for a while. I suppose that's the kind of thing that prods me to post more entries, but to be honest, in blog terms, I've been feeling very uninspired recently. On the other hand, with my fiction, I've been quite the opposite, although, of course, no one will be able to read the fiction I'm currently writing for a number of years, because that's how long it takes (if you're lucky) for a publisher to pick up anything. I think my unpublished material probably outweighs my published material, because publishing is such a tediously slow and uncertain business, and writers almost never receive any significant support from publishers, readers and the world generally while they are actually alive. It's really frustrating, because I do think that I am, on the whole, improving as a writer, and that the stuff I am writing now is way ahead of anything of mine that has so far been published. By the time anything is published, I've already left it far behind.

Who would ever want to be a writer if they had a choice? Unfortunately, I seem to have none.

Well, thankfully, I can feel tiredness descending on me. I hope it will be sufficient to get me to sleep.

Thanks for commenting.

I wanted to call one of my collections, 'You Put the Dirty Pictures in My Head!', but I actually was not allowed to.

I sometimes find Japanese book titles a bit more creative than Western ones. But I can't think of a good example right now. Perhaps you know what I mean. Sometimes it seems like their titles aren't even written in normal Japanese, but in some made up version of Japanese.

I'd definitely like to write a pop song with a title like, "Young girl auto-sodomised by her own chastity".

I'm trying to think of some of my favourite titles, but I suppose they tend to be a bit sedate in some ways. Okamezasa (Dwarf Bamboo), Towazugatari (A Tale No one Asked For), Kakademonoki (A Record I Would Have Done Better Not To Write), Tennin Gosui (The Decay of the Angel, or, The Five Signs of the Decay of the Angel). That kind of thing. Bowie has written some good song/album titles: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, for instance. I also like the title, The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty).

Hello Sarah.

Thank you. That's very kind of you.

I think my blog, and the Internet in general, in its interactive aspect, was an addiction to me for a while. That's not so much the case now, although I suppose I can't really claim to be totally cured. I was going to say that, I don't really post here to know that I exist, but to let other people know, out of a sense of duty, but I'm not sure I can really carry off such an explanation with a straight face. I suppose there's more than a hint of confirming my own existence to myself. But it's only relatively recently that I feel like I hate my blog. I think I've always felt ambivalent about it, but now I've got to the point where I'm fairly tired of it, too, and not really sure what to do with it next.

I think my blog is very

http://www.youtube.com/v/RVe5yM0LBDo

and sometimes I wish it was more

http://www.youtube.com/v/VcsBGR9uHmc

I just noticed some of the Youtube comments under the Joanna Newsom clip. I was completely right. People are idiots. Apparently there's no getting away from it.

"I think that idiots like that need to be slowly tortured, maybe have someone pluck each hair out of their epidermis with a rusty pair of tweezers"

Well, you've beaten me to it. That was going to be my next blog post.

Joanna Newsom is someone who I have discovered recently, since someone very kindly gave me her two albums The Milk-Eyed Mender and Ys, for my birthday. (I have a strong suspicion that html has been disabled in the comments sections for some reason, so there will probably be visible coding for italics just there). Unfortunately, Joanna is already spoken for, I have discovered. She is attached to someone whose music I have been listening to for some years, namely Bill Callahan, otherwise known as Smog. I have a feeling that this song, Rock Bottom Riser, is about how Joanna saved him from being a miserable git for the rest of his life (but maybe I'm wrong):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J-WpgOzW9A

I like Smog, but... Joanna is clearly far more talented than Bill. She really needs to find someone with a talent and depth to match her own. I don't know, maybe some neglected writer of srange but incredibly deep, genre-confounding stories about the blurry line between the real and the unreal. Just a suggestion.

Lengthy comments are the best kind.

"Have you tried selling e-books instead, or alongside your physical entities (books)?"

This is something I've been considering for a while.

"Mind you, I guess a publisher probably wouldn't get all too hot and excited about your gifts to humanity (I don't mean poo poos) as it were (whether purchased concentually or forced upon the reader by their relatives) if it found out that it's already been wafted around the internet several thousand times and illegally copied between users, like a highly contagious sexually transmitted disease in the gay baths of San Francisco's 'Uber Dandy District'!"

This might not be the obstacle it seems. Someone calling himself Cory Doctorow has a lot to say on the subject. I can't find the particular bits where he's talking about the advantages of e-books. But he does. I do think that people don't go out of their way to find books the way they do with music. They want books handed to them on a plate, or preferably shoved down their throats, before they'll bother to read. So, that counts against e-books, which have little or no middle-man promotion going on for them. However, I'm willing to believe what many people are saying, that this Internet 2.0 publishing kick is the future, and that a load of stuffy media types haven't cottoned on to this and are still snobbily trying to cling to their monopoly. So, the main thing that has so far prevented me from releasing an e-book is that I can't be arsed. I'm not some super hyperactive, self-promoting entrepeneur like Doctorow. My energy levels are low. It's as much as I can do to write the stuff and somehow crawl from one day to the next in abject misery, without having to actually to the job of the publisher and the promoter, too.

There is some stuff available by me in e-book form, though, in collections:

http://www.lulu.com/content/162906

http://www.lulu.com/content/172690

By the way, I noticed a comment on Momus' blog recently, that chimed in with one of the many reasons I've been thinking of discontinuing my blog. The comment was as follows:

"When I was a teenager, you and your music meant a lot to me, Momus. There was this sense of of mystique and glamour and I used to get terribly excited when you had a new album out. Fifteen years later, I see you've become just another nerd with a blog, probably more invested in momus_lolz than making music. Moral of the tale: you should never meet your heroes or read their blogs."

I realise I lay myself open to accusations of arrogance by saying that this concerned me, since I'm sure I'll never be anybody's hero, and so I shouldn't really be concerned about doing things that would prevent me from being anybody's hero. However, I am concerned that my keeping a blog might somehow do an injury to my oeuvre of fiction and other writings, which I take as seriously as I take anything else in life, or more so.

I suppose I've more or less decided, though, that, even if I wanted to calculate my 'image' to that degree, by maintaining some kind of enigmatic silence, basically, I'm already fucked by now. As Sarah says, I'm an open book.

Besides, I don't think I even have to keep quiet to be enigmatic. It just comes naturally to me.

That's strange. I've just noticed that the comments to which I was responding (about e-books) are missing. Presumably the commenter decided to delete them.

I prefer real books, too. But I do read a fair bit of stuff I've printed up from the Internet, largely because I have to print it if it's of any length, because I can't read for very long off a screen.

Serpent's Tail are on my list of publishers to try, although they don't know it yet. I think I've approached all the others. There will be something coming out from Tartarus in which I am included, but nothing that's all me. Actually, I don't think I've tried Arkham House.

My novella (Shrike) is scheduled to come out from PS Publishing next year. If that does well, I suppose they'll entertain the idea of publishing more of my stuff.

Publishing just seems to be a very slow and difficult business. I do actually feel like I'm caught between two different kinds of snobbery, unfortunately - the inverse snobbery of genre, and the straightforward snobbery of mainstream literature. Unfortunately, what interests and excites me, doesn't seem to have the same effect on large numbers of other people. Then again, I at least think that there are more people out there who would read my stuff if they knew it existed.

"At the moment I'm reading Morbid Tales and Rule Dementia for a second time and I'm doubly impressed by them."

Thank you. I'm glad they stand up to a second reading. There's plenty of stuff in the pipeline (although the pipeline does seem to be blocked at the moment), which I think is better than those two collections. Then again, it's hard for me to judge that sort of thing.

"Incidentally, is there a specific reason why there's a stretched picture of Clark Ashton Smith on the front cover of Morbid Tales?"

Someone else said it looked like Klarkash-Ton, too, but I've never seen a picture of him. I think it's a depiction of the title character in 'Cousin X'; actually, I think it looks like me, or how I'd look with a slightly less Henry VIII face.

"Pshaw, Henry VIII? You're much better looking than that. You look remarkably like Quentin ought to look."

Someone once told me that I was the most 'Quentin' person she had ever met. Unfortunately, that doesn't preclude me being spectacularly ugly. But thank you.

"I noticed the similarity to a photo of the 19 year old Clark Ashton Smith in a bibliography of his work which I've got called Emperor of Dreams."

I've just looked at the picture. You're quite right. The similarity is too striking to be coincidental. I can only assume that Klarkash-Ton was the artist's model for Cousin X.

The only book in which I've so far had any particular say in the design has been "Rule Dementia!" I basically specified Bettie Page in the role of Britannia.

I like the Morbid Tales cover, though.

Looks like the pre-order info for Shrike (or some of it) has just gone up on the PS website:

http://pspublishing.co.uk/cat/shr.asp