Rimbaud Would Have Voted for Trump
May. 5th, 2017 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_camera
The piece __ submitted was awful. Which shocked me because, you know, ___ journalist! _________ contributor!
But I really must be the world’s best editor ‘cause damn! if I did not make those words sing.
And the piece we published in Sooper Sekrit Standpoint is very fine indeed.
This makes me think that I have been approaching my own writing in absolutely the wrong way.
I have this compulsion to get it all right on the very first draft, which leads to hours and hours of rearranging commas, searching through weird linguistic appropriations for common adjectives, and other time-wasting activities. When really, I should be blurting it all out in as short a period of time as possible and shoving it in my underwear drawer for three months.
Three months is about the right length of time to lose the muscle memory of writing it.
Then I should take it out of the drawer and edit the hell out of it.
‘Cause as surely as Bruce Springsteen was born to run, baby, I was born to edit!
###
Else?
It’s raining.
I have been in the same general washed-out mood for several weeks now. Unengaged, one might say.
This weekend I’m supposed to write a piece on the Five Trump Insurgency Blogs YOU Should Be Reading!
That Five…You Must… formula is guaranteed clickbait.
Trouble is I have only identified two Trump Insurgency Blogs you must read – and one of them is by an insufferable prick whom I honestly think no one should read.
The other is by a sinister genius who espouses the darkest, most inflammatory thoughts ever but does so in a rich, delicious style that makes me shiver so that every time I set my browser to his site, I feel as though I've just been presented with a plate of chocolate-covered, absinthe-filled cherries. He is Rimbaud – after the teenage rockstar poet years, when Rimbaud was a weary smuggler working the Abyssinian coast.
But now I have to come up with three other pro-Trump blogs!
Plus – as always – I must toil in the Scut Factory mines.
For I have CV axles to fix and trips over Memorial Day to take.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2017-05-05 04:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-05-07 08:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-05-07 03:42 pm (UTC)I do post fiction in my diary from time to time, and here's a link to the political piece I hammered out last night:
https://medium.com/rally-point-perspectives/three-trump-insurgency-blogs-you-should-know-about-a40a6c860a9f
no subject
Date: 2017-05-06 01:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-05-06 01:40 pm (UTC)Are you asking about my own writing? Or the online publication I'm editing? :-)
no subject
Date: 2017-05-06 01:41 pm (UTC)And we should probably go phone to set up the parameters of the "writing buddy" system. After finals. :-)
no subject
Date: 2017-05-07 02:27 am (UTC)Also, if you want, I have got some Trump links for you.
no subject
Date: 2017-05-07 03:57 am (UTC)Here's a link to the piece if you're interested:
https://medium.com/@patriziadilucchio/three-trump-insurgency-blogs-you-should-know-about-a40a6c860a9f
It's fuckin' Medium, right? So I don't feel compelled to clean it up any farther. :-)
Women and Darkies First
Date: 2017-05-07 08:08 pm (UTC)When does the Sooper Sekrit Standpoint start? You've been talking about this for months. I want to see deets from the Mcluhan Revolution!
Re: Women and Darkies First
Date: 2017-05-07 08:34 pm (UTC)Sooper Sekrit Standpoint has been up for a month now:
https://medium.com/search?q=rally%20point%20perspectives
The McLuhan piece we published is incredibly lame -- the entitled white male who wrote it wouldn't take any editorial direction from me, so all I could do is clean up his commas. :-)
Plus Boy Genius whose seminal work --
https://medium.com/rally-point-journal/situational-assessment-2017-trump-edition-d189d24fc046
was the inspiration for this group is an incredible diva. Not so much fun to work with.
Thing is, I have always wanted to helm my own answer to Breitbart! :-) And I have the writing and editing chops. But not the cash. And not the human platform.
I am thinking I might be able to make something out of this.
We're a Facebook group. Are you on FB? If you are, friend me -- and tell me that it's you 'cause I don't know yr real name -- and I'll add you to the group if you think it might be interesting for you.
Re: Women and Darkies First
Date: 2017-05-07 09:05 pm (UTC)Geez.
How much money do you think you'd need to run something like that?
I am not on ze faceplace. But, I might have to join again. I find it far more problematic than the anti-gay TOS here. Also, it encourages me to loathe my friends and hate the world. Thus, I have become a digital recluse.
Which, I am not so sad about. But, my non-compete is getting ready to expire and I am feeling a need to make day money. So, I might be back. But, I haven't quite worked out how to do that, as a semi-professional, without letting everyone I know know that I am there.
I don't want to hear what anyone I know has to say on Facebook anymore.
Re: Women and Darkies First
Date: 2017-05-07 09:30 pm (UTC)Just let me know you are yew-w-w-w-w.
How much money do you think you'd need to run something like that?
I'd have to put together a business plan. :-)
Alpha Male -- my co-conspirator -- is worth a bundle, so if Seekrit Sooper Standpoint did catch on, he could bankroll it. This is kind of a perfect setup of a media platform of some sort because Boy Genius's essay is actually a very trenchant and perceptive analysis, and it serves as an attractor. An enterprise like this needs an attractor.
In a year, Sooper Sekrit Standpoint might build up enough links and SEO goodness so that it no longer needs an attractor.
Join FB! I'll hit you up for a piece! You said you wanted to write, right? If we work together on editing your piece, I guarantee you'll learn a lot about the writing process. :-)
Alpha Genius Rant
Date: 2017-05-08 07:45 pm (UTC)Of course you are seeing intractable "problems" but also a glint of "Hey we could monetize this." My guess is that they desperately want this (or any number of other similar projects) to get wings, just to leverage "boatloads" of Angle Donor Dollars. That really does seem like their personal business plan.
Girl. From here on out you need to be getting paid. They can afford to pay you. I'm fairly certain both of them at least have a prospectus. It'd be interesting to find out exactly what that is.
Second, your attractor is shit. I'm among the target audience for that squeeze and it's totally turned me off. In fact, everything I read here is an exercise in patience. I could easily debunk both these dudebros, but you'd have to pay me. Also, new people, aka people who know nothing about this stuff, are not going to be turned on by his antics either. Most people don't even understand what he's talking about. He's getting fist bumped in an echo chamber.
Third, there are loads of other people and groups mobilizing over this and other similar stuff. It would be nice to appeal to people less concerned with the idea of being among some intellectual vanguard. I've played this game before. And going for "intellectual elites call for insurgency", isn't going to cut it. The main problem, of which there are many, is everyone you appeal to secretly thinks they are the smartest and are either here to eat popcorn or are secretly angling to be in charge.
Vice became a multi-billion dollar company on the basis of The Bro Code. These people seem like they want to be the next Vice but don't understand how that really works.
Last, there are no women in charge. You are the only woman that you have mentioned regularly working on this. That's not going to work either. Yes. Let us answer the sausage fest of Breitbart with a different type of sausage party. See what I mean?
Re: Alpha Genius Rant
Date: 2017-05-08 10:51 pm (UTC)One of my sources of frustration with this gang, in fact, is how little they've done to leverage (let alone monetize) the enormous viral power that SA2017 exerts, which I've seen with my own eyes. It may not speak to you, but it sure speaks to a hell of a lot of other people. Even me: Equating the current surge of populism with the birth of a new kind of collective intelligence is pretty high order.
The FB group is definitely not an echo chamber. Super-smart people there on both sides of the red/blue color chart. But the smarter people are fading away as it devolves into a circle jerk -- because there's no action agenda. I'm thinking in another few weeks, I'll be bored with it, too.
Boy Genius and Alpha Male are both deeply involved with complexity theory -- which bores little concretistic thinker moi literally to tears. Boy Genius doesn't make his $$$ off the Neurohacker Collective -- he's involved with some Silicon Valley operation that's in deep start-up mode. Also, as an undergraduate, he attended Texas A&M! Which I find pretty amusing. Alpha Male, whom I've known for 30 some odd year (and whom I like) already made the big buck$. He tells me the group is an experiment -- intelligent people in a Petri dish.
Girl. From here on out you need to be getting paid.
Always a good thing! Not gonna happen with this.
But, hey! if the next Breitbart is on your agenda, let's tawk. For serious.
I must respectfully disagree.
Date: 2017-05-09 10:37 am (UTC)One of the first steps in pushing something like this is article writing. After they accumulate enough material, then they will push all that into a "best of" Zine. If that gets traction then suddenly it's a website. Meanwhile, the plan is to attempt to colonize appropriate social media platforms and generate interest and niche groups.etc etc.
You're like over there going "That's not happening." Meanwhile you're their editor.
>It may not speak to you,
It's really the fact that he's wrong. More than anything, it's that he's hilariously fucking wrong. Ex. "Groups have a non-linear consciousness". Okay. Name one non-linear real life event. I don't mean a fucking thought experiment. I mean a real life concrete happening.
- while we wait for more on said magical moment, let's move along to other items of interest.
>"Equating the current surge of populism with the birth of a new kind of collective intelligence is pretty high order."
"The absolute ruler may be a Nero, but he is sometimes Titus or Marcus Aurelius; the people is often Nero, and never Marcus Aurelius." -Antoine de Rivarol
Well. I hate to tell you this but that is a load of utter horseshit. Look, collective intelligences, as such, have been with us the whole time. We are only now at the cusp of understanding them enough to acknowledge they factually exist. One suspects that it is a little premature to suggest that here we have something brand spanking new.
I'm of the opinion that "The Singularity" is, more or less, just bowdlerized Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. But, regardless of that fact, Marshall Mcluhan, tells us explicitly that all of this is just "old humanity" existing in a cacophony heightened reality.
Intellectuals have only been thinking about this shit since before I was born. Its roots go back to all my 18th-20th century ole timey occult interests. See "Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France" for more than you ever wanted to hear about that. Rimbaud and the Dandies make an appearance. So Yay.
>But the smarter people are fading away as it devolves into a circle jerk -- because there's no action agenda.
That would be end stage popcorn eating. My guess, and it's just a guess, that anyone who has tried to do anything there has been met with whining and pleas of needing consensus. Ultimately, this is just a bunch of smart people getting together to jerk themselves off. I PROMISE YOU, that despite your protestations, it's also an echo chamber. (I have got more on that if you want it)
>Boy Genius and Alpha Male are both deeply involved with complexity theory -
I have heard of the Santa Fe Institute before too. Good God.
Look, I don't hate them. I have just done this dance before. And, I don't happen to agree with this particular group's current Understanding of Media.
If you think Aplha Male will bankroll this thing, I'm more than interested. But, he's going to need to drop at least 50k into operations, if he hopes to do anything here. And, that doesn't even touch actually paying people for their work.
Still, I am an LJ recluse, so it's not like I'm a social intelligence expert. Consider the source and all.
Anyway, thank you very much for giving me a window into all of this. And, thank you for the invite. It's appreciated. I have enjoyed this exchange so far. And, I hope you have too.
Re: I must respectfully disagree.
Date: 2017-05-09 11:52 am (UTC)And Happy Day-Before-Your-Birthday.
Mayday
Date: 2017-05-09 05:14 pm (UTC)But, see this is yet another reason why I hate Facebook. In the olden days, this "rant" wouldn't be considered "talking". It would be a continuation of dialog. You'd be over there going "It's on now motherfucker!" and be making counter points.
But, due to Facebook, this now looks like angry crazy lady ideologue blathering. These days, "reasonable" and "nuanced" discussion is reduced to two paragraphs or less. IT has become the tiresome art of making hair splitting statements about things in which we already generally agree on.
Little wonder that this entire paragraph exists at all
"I continue in this weird prickly mood. Communicating with human beings other than B and Max feels like walking a runway that’s been placed over a minefield. Human interactions are just fraught with complications. Remaining on the defensive is exhausting."
That right there is why I don't Facebook. It's the tyranny of everyone else's group feels. In the olden days everyone had wiggle room to have unpopular opinions or occasionally behave like an outright asshole. Now there are ever reverberating "consequences."
Which is to say: Because I was critical of your group, you now suspect I must hate it. And, I don't hate it. It's probably, to varying degrees, got a lot of stuff that I'm all for. Certainly, it has my specific interest in mind. Otherwise, I wouldn't waste time going off about any of it.
PS
Way up there, when I said "It's pretty good". I was talking about your Trump article; Not the Zblog. The Zblog is pretty meh as stuff like that goes. Have you tried Taki's Mag? Generally speaking, I think it's far superior.
no subject
Date: 2017-05-06 03:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-05-06 01:38 pm (UTC)Yes, I did take you off the list -- I figured you'd forgotten all about LJ. :-)
And yes, I'm writing in a bunch of places these days. :-)