.diminished discords (ix)

never beating the mormon allegations

to be a professional writer now you have to be a small business owner. i don’t want to do that. first, i’m not really cut out for business. and whenever i tried to make a job out of things i liked to do i ended up hating the thing (and the effect can last a very long time, depending on how much investment in jobness was involved; it took me fifteen years to get over a handful of literature classes in university).

and on the other hand, though i have had quite a few very different jobs, and none of them particularly exciting or interesting (meaning, i wouldn’t do them if i wasn’t paid to do them), i was always able to muster some enthusiasm and interest in doing whatever it was i had to do. and if not that, take advantage of my surroundings. and that keeps my mind free to pursue my creative projects in parallel. so i don’t want to make writing my job.

now, if i suddenly became rich through one of my books, that would be a different story. another category altogether. and i have no idea how i would react. i like to believe i would still want to write, because the thing is fun to me anyway. but i don’t know, wealth might prove to be as demotivating as academism was. but anyway it’s very unlikely that i’ll become rich through my books. i don’t think the content allows for that.

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but i do think more people would enjoy my books than currently know about them.

it was pointed out to me that in some ways appearing on podcasts to talk about your books gets more people interested in them than reviews do. so i’ve been trying to get on podcasts.

the first issue was finding one, not only that would have me, but that i wanted to be a guest in. i am not really a podcast person, for one. i usually listen to music, and when not that, silence. but i found one recently, Book Club From Hell, through a Brad Kelly interview about his new book. i liked House of Sleep and wanted to hear about the new one. it was a very interesting episode, the host and the guest were in total sync, riffing effortlessly off each other with the novel as a stepping stone. it was quite enjoyable and it got me a little excited about the format. i’ve listened to a few more after that, and decided it wouldn’t be a bad place to talk about my stuff (whether i’ll be a good guest, we’ll see). so i contacted them.

of course, what i want to talk about is my fiction, in particular the Alice book, and what i’m writing now, and how the two are part of the same universe. the host was very kind in his reply and ended up buying the Alice book. but then something funny happened. he said that he was reading, and enjoying, the mormon piece. it seems that, even when i approach people about fiction, i will always be the esoteric mormon guy. as i’ve said, mormon ideas are what ended the curse of university and allowed me to make my way back to fiction. so it’s ironic.

Miles Davis said that people kept pestering him about playing his classic fifties and sixties tunes and ignoring what he was doing in the present. and like the people pestering him, i very much prefer Birth of the Cool or Kind of Blue or Nefertiti or even In a Silent Way to whatever he was doing in the late seventies and eighties.

is that what’s happening here, that my best work is actually the mormon piece, along with those early essays or whatever they were, and that riffing on them, playing the hits again, is what i should be doing.

i don’t think so in either case, but it’s still funny. i’m never beating the mormon allegations.

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it was also pointed out to me that, for someone who comes across my stuff for the first time, having the ebooks as freely available to download creates the perception that they have no value (and perhaps that they did not take effort and dedication to make). as Susana said to me, people will download them, but then read the ones they actually paid for. so i’m no longer giving them away for free (not by default at least).

whether i like it or not, value comes from scarcity, and even if the scarcity is artificial, like in ebooks, the perception of value is still affected by it, at least to a certain extent.

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.cool
using the limitations of form in unexpected ways

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maybe quartal harmony sounds really ethereal and weird and beautiful because it has Mary in it, in contrast to conventional harmony based on the trinity, i mean thirds.

there’s also some kind of relation between the evolution of consciousness and modes of limited transposition, in which expansion in one plane means narrowing in another. the first limited transposition mode is the whole tone scale, and its aimless quality, which i’ve mentioned before, is perhaps akin to humanity’s first natural response to increased perception.

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early spring
morning mist
lingering

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i am not a spreadsheetist. a deaf Beethoven is worth more than a million tone deaf non-Beethovens. but most discussions are about quantity. whether the question is the dumb machines and their supposed intelligence, or human impact on the earth, or the fertility question.

the social fertility question is the climate change of the right. all they can see is quantity. the proof is that the implications of there being a spiritual world, where souls presumably come from, are never even mentioned, much less considered.

but what matters is quality. a small piece of varied native forest is worth more than hectares of a single cash crop. and the same is true of people, and of all beings. perhaps they have never read their bibles, or don’t take them seriously. Noah and his family built a boat, everyone else drowned. and we’re here.

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the world is getting worse, but i'm getting better. eventually i'll die, but until then, what else is there to do. we're always becoming something. might as well try that it be something better. what we lose on one side we may gain in another. in this life, or the next.

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i'm too stupid to learn the proper way to do things. i can only do them my way.

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God did not invent the notes, but he did play a really sweet chord progression. now we jam.

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.diminished dicords. discourses on polytonal metaphysics (i guess)

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neither secular nor perennial, millennial

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i decided to change the format of the magazine, and that i would rework the back catalog so that there was consistency going forward. it’s not as easy as i thought it would be. so i decided i might as well rework everything, covers included. the old ones just don't work well for the new size. maybe it’s just that my standards have gone up.

it made me think of babies, and how their proportions look fine and cute, but if you scale it up to adult size they don’t work, and vice versa.

only number one left to go. also revamping the site, and then finally releasing hypnagothic number five. also from now on they will be print only. no ebook.

new covers

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i spend a lot of time on miniscule design choices because it's hard work to make something look effortless. writing dialogue is like this too.

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i have no need for machine generated images. there are so many old paintings and drawings and photos in the public domain, and endless resources to work them. remixing them into the culture is an act of defiance against the sterility of the age.

on the surface it might seem like the same thing, since the dumb machines can only copy and combine what already exists. but it’s a ‘good artists copy, great artists steal’ kind of thing. and the dumb machines might be competent copyists, but they can’t steal; they don’t have a soul.

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work in progress. the wife says it's very 80s tracksuit. but i think it's very 'don't know what i'm doing'.