I’m now best friends with 3 in the morning, if by best friends I mean bound by sickly smelling glue or tied by old moldy ropes to an unshapely dullard, a pallid streetlamp lit atmosphere and starless sky and a saturnine abandoned campground, a kind of poorly scheduled and sparsely attended funeral where even the recently departed has failed to arrive, a 3 in the morning who soundlessly breathes on my neck, blows damp air into my earholes and forces me with a nauseating gentleness to wake up for a disjointed series of monologues reprising the misgivings and gripes and lukewarm erotic fantasies of days past, the mounting difficulties and obscurities and frustrations of a new job in that ancient industry, an expired occupation for me at least, where excitement for an opening date, the grand unveiling of a quirkily curated and sumptuously stocked cafe, the groundswell of anticipation for a new venture feels to me more like the prospect of cleaning a field of dilapidated outhouses through which a ragtag conscripted peasant army has recently marched, which, now that I think of it, I’d rather do than talk to one more person about syrups or hold one more interview.
Though I continue to admire the enterprise of pushing the English sentence as far as it can go, I feel the length needs more variation sometimes. In previous installments you had a short-long-short-long rhythm and it worked really well. Here the long-long-long can be something of a chore, a slog. Though this matches well with your sisyphean theme, it imposes a high demand on the reader who might start reading another sentence and think "uh-oh, here goes another uphill climb". The short-long variation made the punchier bits like resting on a landing before the next flight of stairs.
Other than that I have an bone to pick with your narrator - not you personally, understand - who complains that the human heart "irresistibly imagines its leaders as oppressors and its blessings as burdens". But the overall drive of his musings is that the leaders *are* oppressors, and there are no blessings, only burdens.
Insofar as the coffeeshop boss is a leader, he has become an oppressor, because that system is the system we have in place, not co-operatives or workplace democracy in which the feeling is very very different. In those places - a simple co-op or a syndicated workplace - the human heart really is quite different, not boiling with resentment but brimming with empathy. But the coffeeshop enterprise is a hierarchy by its nature of owners vs workers, ergo the coffeeshop boss *is* a petty tyrant. That's not a reflection on the character of the boss, it's just how it is, structurally.
What I'm saying to Mr Narrator, not to you the writer, is that generalized misanthrophy, or Cioran-style misanthropy directed at yourself, is fine and even empowering in that paradoxical way that despair can become strength, but when punching downward at the unfortunate schmucks who have to work alongside or under you just comes off as mean. Not ennobling, just the rant of a tyrannized tyrant tyrannizing those even lower in the non-endowed sector of humanity where he himself dwells.
Hope you understand that the foregoing is all meant in the way of encouragement, not in any way a negative criticism. I love your work and its grimy pessimism, just that I feel the devastating force of the prose is best directed at self and world in general.
I welcome intelligent criticism such as yours. It's generally far more interesting and useful to me than endless effusive praise (but if that's how you or anyone else feels about a particular work, that's all well and good too) so there's no need to worry about me taking offense, I'm not thin skinned in that regard.
On the matter of sentence length: I'm playing around here, pushing things a bit, mostly as a test for myself, to see if I can stretch things out and enjoy writing this way, and also to blow off a little steam in a setting with extremely low stakes (i.e. free material on the internet) and even here I've shown some mercy by keeping the total length of the piece quite short, under 1000 words even, shorter than many of the preambles and preemptive clarifications or explications that introduce some of the posts I see on this platform. I wouldn't write a 300 page book solely in this style and charge 20 bucks for it, at least not at this point, though who knows down the line. I do love Faulkner, especially Absalom, Absalom, and Proust, and Kraszhnahorkai, and others who similarly draw out their sentences and explore every twist and fold of their thoughts and all the meandering mountain paths without much in the way of rest stops or base camps. Writers with very different outlooks and particularities to their style but all of whom make high demands on reader concentration. But I don't read that kind of writing all the time, nor do I intend always to write that way.
Plus, I'm playing around, almost in a self-sabatoging manner, with material that *is* purposefully less catchy and quotable, less amenable to quick and easy sharing of zingers or punch outs, almost as an experiment, with fairly predictable results (it's less popular). What I've tried to do is give these confessional or auto fictional first person pieces a different style and feel from the played out staccato banalities of countless diary entries littering the internet.
And I suppose I respectfully agree and disagree with your thoughts on economic structure, well, I agree that there are glaring structural problems with the modern economy worth addressing, but I'd still insist that co-ops and brotherhoods and egalitarian arrangements, even if they did fix some of the issues, would still be extremely vulnerable to petty resentments, squalid intrigues, schisms, generalized dysfunction and rancid ambitions, and that on a mass-scale, in churning and dense urban environments, empathy is hard to come by regardless of how you officially set up the hierarchy, and that we are very limited in how much we can care for countless others in unstable settings. What I see, maybe I'm wrong, I'm willing to consider the possibility, is that in conditions with this much complexity and population fluidity, where social networks, extended family networks and continuous work connected to consistent surroundings and recognizable social patterns have largely withered away, empathy isn't all that empathetic, and more often appears as yet another weapon for beating people over the head.
Such a comprehensive and well thought out response. I can only respect your decision to experiment by pushing the stylistic boundaries to the utmost. It will inevitably be less popular with general readers to make the experience so much more demanding, so much more like the day-to-day slog you embody in your prose. I have to say I'm going completely the other way right now, experimenting with a style that is absolutely frivolous and as weightless as possible. "Unbearable lightness" and all that. Must also confess I never heard of Kraszhnahorkai before, must search that name out.
I was also thinking of Cèline in your pieces, the misanthrophy and the lyricism combined so reminiscent of that Journey to the Edge of the Night.
As for the possibilities of empathy and fellowship amoung equals we'll have to agree to disagree and shake hands on it. But I wish I could show you how people work in some of the collaborative enterprises I know. You might think differently.
Still chums as before then, we'll be chatting more anon.
Left you a message last week, here in Substack...
Though I continue to admire the enterprise of pushing the English sentence as far as it can go, I feel the length needs more variation sometimes. In previous installments you had a short-long-short-long rhythm and it worked really well. Here the long-long-long can be something of a chore, a slog. Though this matches well with your sisyphean theme, it imposes a high demand on the reader who might start reading another sentence and think "uh-oh, here goes another uphill climb". The short-long variation made the punchier bits like resting on a landing before the next flight of stairs.
Other than that I have an bone to pick with your narrator - not you personally, understand - who complains that the human heart "irresistibly imagines its leaders as oppressors and its blessings as burdens". But the overall drive of his musings is that the leaders *are* oppressors, and there are no blessings, only burdens.
Insofar as the coffeeshop boss is a leader, he has become an oppressor, because that system is the system we have in place, not co-operatives or workplace democracy in which the feeling is very very different. In those places - a simple co-op or a syndicated workplace - the human heart really is quite different, not boiling with resentment but brimming with empathy. But the coffeeshop enterprise is a hierarchy by its nature of owners vs workers, ergo the coffeeshop boss *is* a petty tyrant. That's not a reflection on the character of the boss, it's just how it is, structurally.
What I'm saying to Mr Narrator, not to you the writer, is that generalized misanthrophy, or Cioran-style misanthropy directed at yourself, is fine and even empowering in that paradoxical way that despair can become strength, but when punching downward at the unfortunate schmucks who have to work alongside or under you just comes off as mean. Not ennobling, just the rant of a tyrannized tyrant tyrannizing those even lower in the non-endowed sector of humanity where he himself dwells.
Hope you understand that the foregoing is all meant in the way of encouragement, not in any way a negative criticism. I love your work and its grimy pessimism, just that I feel the devastating force of the prose is best directed at self and world in general.
I welcome intelligent criticism such as yours. It's generally far more interesting and useful to me than endless effusive praise (but if that's how you or anyone else feels about a particular work, that's all well and good too) so there's no need to worry about me taking offense, I'm not thin skinned in that regard.
On the matter of sentence length: I'm playing around here, pushing things a bit, mostly as a test for myself, to see if I can stretch things out and enjoy writing this way, and also to blow off a little steam in a setting with extremely low stakes (i.e. free material on the internet) and even here I've shown some mercy by keeping the total length of the piece quite short, under 1000 words even, shorter than many of the preambles and preemptive clarifications or explications that introduce some of the posts I see on this platform. I wouldn't write a 300 page book solely in this style and charge 20 bucks for it, at least not at this point, though who knows down the line. I do love Faulkner, especially Absalom, Absalom, and Proust, and Kraszhnahorkai, and others who similarly draw out their sentences and explore every twist and fold of their thoughts and all the meandering mountain paths without much in the way of rest stops or base camps. Writers with very different outlooks and particularities to their style but all of whom make high demands on reader concentration. But I don't read that kind of writing all the time, nor do I intend always to write that way.
Plus, I'm playing around, almost in a self-sabatoging manner, with material that *is* purposefully less catchy and quotable, less amenable to quick and easy sharing of zingers or punch outs, almost as an experiment, with fairly predictable results (it's less popular). What I've tried to do is give these confessional or auto fictional first person pieces a different style and feel from the played out staccato banalities of countless diary entries littering the internet.
And I suppose I respectfully agree and disagree with your thoughts on economic structure, well, I agree that there are glaring structural problems with the modern economy worth addressing, but I'd still insist that co-ops and brotherhoods and egalitarian arrangements, even if they did fix some of the issues, would still be extremely vulnerable to petty resentments, squalid intrigues, schisms, generalized dysfunction and rancid ambitions, and that on a mass-scale, in churning and dense urban environments, empathy is hard to come by regardless of how you officially set up the hierarchy, and that we are very limited in how much we can care for countless others in unstable settings. What I see, maybe I'm wrong, I'm willing to consider the possibility, is that in conditions with this much complexity and population fluidity, where social networks, extended family networks and continuous work connected to consistent surroundings and recognizable social patterns have largely withered away, empathy isn't all that empathetic, and more often appears as yet another weapon for beating people over the head.
Such a comprehensive and well thought out response. I can only respect your decision to experiment by pushing the stylistic boundaries to the utmost. It will inevitably be less popular with general readers to make the experience so much more demanding, so much more like the day-to-day slog you embody in your prose. I have to say I'm going completely the other way right now, experimenting with a style that is absolutely frivolous and as weightless as possible. "Unbearable lightness" and all that. Must also confess I never heard of Kraszhnahorkai before, must search that name out.
I was also thinking of Cèline in your pieces, the misanthrophy and the lyricism combined so reminiscent of that Journey to the Edge of the Night.
As for the possibilities of empathy and fellowship amoung equals we'll have to agree to disagree and shake hands on it. But I wish I could show you how people work in some of the collaborative enterprises I know. You might think differently.
Still chums as before then, we'll be chatting more anon.