Spread the word…
(Original blog date: 07/12/09)
Let it be clear, I am not a publisher. I am a writer who publishes. Why? Because I am doing what the publishers out there should be doing, but aren’t. Not properly anyway.
Today’s writer is a slave to the money society. The money society as represented by the marketing cohorts of the ‘publishing industry’. But books can never be part of an INDUSTRY. No more than can children, family, love, sick or old people.
The money society is not a trading society. Trade has existed forever. No, the money society is one where everything is subsumed under the capitalist obsession with value-addition. A vulgar stupid despicable concept. A transactional stencil that we apply to everything these days: to women’s bodies (they must be of the model-type, the pornstar-type, or the young-girl-type to command a high price); to our own selves (we must have ‘marketable’ skills to matter); and that has even made love transactional. So that now you have two kinds of love: conditional (that comes with a money-back guarantee if you get fat, old or ugly) and unconditional (the old-fashioned kind, which I gather exists somewhere under the rainbow, where Sex and The city meet).
Let it be said: a civilization that runs its affairs according to such a low, conformist, anti-spiritual, inhuman concept can have no future but the shithouse. It will leave no trace. And indeed, while ancient civilizations have left behind monuments built to the gods, the West prepares to leave nothing behind but toxic waste. The only vestiges of Western capitalist culture will be its monumental hillocks of trash.
Anyway, once I had created Revenge Ink (in a fit of enthusiasm upon reading Blake, as I think I’ve mentioned before) I figured I might as well share my good (or bad) fortune with other writers. Now this is truly heroic. It is a generally acknowledged (and largely true) fact that writers are not the nicest brand of people. They aren’t the worst either. But insecurity, narcissism, vanity, passive aggression, envy, neuroses of the most unbearable kind plague writers. Worse than other people? Probably not. Then again maybe. I don’t know. But the point is, for one writer to deal with other writers is nothing short of miraculous. A rare and award-deserving show of solidarity. Especially since writers tend to be so self-obsessed, solidarity means as little to them as caviar to a camel.
But I don’t care. I’m not in this for the moral satisfaction, pleasure or the money. Revenge Ink is for me a side-dish, a service rendered to contemporary society, a big up-yours to the big guys who believe publishing is a favor done by their august selves to what they believe to be a mentally-challenged (and largely useless) species (writers). This is why they (the publishers) like a certain kind of mythologized writer best: the bourgeois hack who sucks their asses for a living but in public claims to write high, anti-populist literachure. Not me. I prefer writers who don’t give a crap. Who behave like self-serving dickwipes if they have to or as poised and mature professionals if it comes naturally to them (a rare type, but they do exist). Either way, they must be themselves because this proves they are individuals. I don’t like to make writers feel they are children. I don’t like writers who conform.
Why? Because I am a writer. And I don’t demand that I like myself. I don’t demand that I be like other people. I don’t demand that I be popular. I demand that I be myself. And so, while publishing is a side-dish for me, the main and most delicious course will always be my writing. My world. My words. Ironically, this is the only way, I believe, to guarantee that I will respect other writers. Because I will prefer to leave them alone, as I expect them to do with me. We can only ever respect each other as true individuals. As unique and surprising human beings. Never as predictable ants in a fixed hierarchy. We are not ants. We were never meant to be.
So go ahead. Spread the word.
Tags: Today's writer, Writing