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| I'm writing this far too late, but you were right, Caltrops. Thanks. by Welcome to Omsk 12/10/2015, 10:57am PST | ||||
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It took years, but I finally found something worth getting worked up about.
Most things, I let slide. Being surrounded by people who produced only the mediocre got me looking for the extraordinary. I dumped everything that wasn't great by the roadside as well as anything that didn't connect to finding more great stuff: throw out the bland and the plain lousy and you'll be left with good work. Go follow the game tracks looking for deer. Read what you can, and when that fails to put you in the orbit of some quality effort ask anyone. Ask even the postman, couldn't be worse than the fruitless effort of reading what the zombies working the library counters and the lit departments told you to. Go through pulp novel piles in old book shops and every piece of zinester trash like a pig through shit. Refuse yourself nothing, be above looking in no place, turn over every rock. Keep at the scent. That's great right up until your bloodhound gang tactics lead you into a sewer and you're just nose-blind. Holy crap, I found a person of such capacity in missing the point that he crowns himself a genius for it. You hear about this, but until you experience someone leaving a slime-trail of extremely marketable excretions on you, you don't feel like you need to shower. You just look funny at the next guy taking steel wool to his skin after being touched by this poison. I just...I just cannot understand how someone could take the informational payload of a work from the existentialist tradition and feel okay telling people the emotive state of reading it was important to remember but to hell with the plot. Sure, the plot is secondary to using the medium to show a reader that they're not alone if they stumble into the torturous process of questioning the value of their life. That kind of mess in your head needs to not be yours alone so you don't give up looking for a way out of that maze and kill yourself or settle for a bad existence; for that to be avoided you need the collective knowledge of the group to turn to, to give you the option of seizing it and burning through the black fog or rejecting it like a coward, out of complacency. But the way Kafka writes, or Camus, or Nietzsche or Dostoyevsky or Kierkegaard - none are primarily concerned with emotive states. Emotive states are the end result to them, the bottom of the totem pole while you're reading, occasionally a useful tool to establish commonality and frames of reference. They're concerned with shifting perceptions through observations and adjustments in value, through changes you can make if you follow their example when your life seems like pointless bullshit and nothing else you find helps. These people point the way when you have a problem with the root causes of the human condition. Maybe if I wound up in an existentialist mess by way of being born a typical whitebread WASP who was told culture was important but not why and never saw the reason for himself, Kolsterman's ability to enshrine the moods brought on by these works of self-assessment at the expense of their other offerings would have looked insightful, and his ability to whitewash them would be useful or good to my eye, but only if I was an ungrateful cretin who didn't remember the utility of the existentialist tradition. It helps in permanently overcoming the kind of self-consuming doubt Chucky's readers need him to ease the symptoms of by telling them their cocoa puffs are alright to eat at forty, that there's nothing wrong with being a manchild. It's too bad that the doubt doesn't motivate self-improvement in them, but how can it if you're constipated by such dense idiocy? What a mental suppository, like a heroin brick made of stupid words, literary opium smoke. Next he'll tell me that it's the feel of math class I should take away, not the application of calculus to writing a stock market algorithm that makes me rich. Jesus. But here's this huckster selling books on how to feel in spite of all his feeling going nowhere, because in his life he's had no experience that suggested there was anything to write about where the ideas mattered. No external thought is striking so just learn to console yourself about being nothing. Literature is dime-a-dozen mood music to him. He's found nothing better than the kind of false wisdom a chinese immigrant would be ashamed to put it on a fortune cookie. At least if I eat McNuggets there's protien and carbs in 'em, but nobody in his right mind says it's about the tremendous fucking flavor profile - meanwhile this guy wants to cultivate the hollow people that subsist on fast food primarily, give them a way to defend their beady-eyed inability to access useful things. The small town mentality of being raised in the provinces with nothing better to do than smoke meth and talk about how great it is has found a way to spread itself out of the hunterlands towards the innovative places, where we have always had drugs but also something besides them. It's no wonder Kolsterman only fits into the landscape when he's standing in a cornfield. 
The shame of having a face like that really does necessitate a beard. Urban animals take note: this is what a monster looks like. Go to the home&garden and buy pitchforks, this is the kind of new york sewer alligator you have to run out of town. He'll only eat your children if you let him stay. I don't say that lightly. If I had a kid I'd program him clockwork orange style to look at Kolsterman and see a judas goat, to run at the sound of his prose or the sight of his fucking face. Look at those glassy eyes, that blank slate where any expression he musters only serves to replace a more meaningful one, holding ground when he's in the presence of greatness because he doesn't know how to look affected by anything meaningful. My kid is my ticket out of terrifying state-run nursing homes, he can drink underage but he better be developing his mind god-dammit. And not to be like this guy's: an ersatz mind, branding acceptability into an ersatz life. Thank God for this bad example. Sorry I doubted you guys when you said that vicious criticism was so useful - I mean, a lot of your targets of choice seem middling because I'd never permit myself near enough to them to get that aching need to scrub myself free, but even if they're not who I'd pick they're good for target practice, for cutting your teeth on. I guess I have some access to that point of view now and you all gave it to me. Could've done it faster and better, though. Assholes. |
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