Saturday 9/18/21
A letter to the Inner Circle, evening of 9/16:
Spoke to the woman at the Starbucks I gave the copy of the Sam book to the other day. She was super friendly. She's a twenty-three-year-old African American college student. We fell to talking and she had never heard of Sam Cooke. But she liked it I think and brought it to work with her and she showed it to this other barista maybe a couple years older, and she introduced herself and was very nice.
Bloomsbury sent me six copies, which came today. I pulled up the contract, and that was the stipulation. But they owe me some money.
I need to move about three books here very quickly. Longer, Cheer Pack, something else.
As you can see--or as I think you can see--this is a huge period for me. When I break through, I will be able to end lives and careers. I don't want to get into some back and forth with you, Norberg, because I know--and I've always known--how this has to be, how I have to do it. That's not the utopian "art vision" thing you always wanted it to be, with me the contented pauper, where the work just makes everything all better and takes care of all solutions on its own. Yes, it's ultimately the work that will change the world, and change my life, but this is also a war. And that war won't be over even if and when I break through and reach the world. Every last one of these people has to be held accountable. The system must come down. I believe 1. I can take it down and 2. That's going to be crucial to my work. Not as work, but as part of my quest. My quest is its own form of art. Making the runway clear for my work, now and forever. The work is the real power. It transcends all. But it won't have that opportunity without the good fight of the war.
If you look at the News tab on the site, you can see I am achieving more than ever, somehow, even with everything against me. More hate than ever. I ask myself--and maybe you ask yourself--what this will look like when I don't have everyone against me, or they can't stop or suppress me? I think what you'll see is me and my work everywhere you turn in society. My voice, my creations, all of the forms of them. I hated going into the bookstore last weekend. I avoid bookstores. I see awful books by awful writers and I know why they are where they are. I open two magazines and I see that that hellacious fraud John Freeman has been added as a contributing editor. You know, the psychopath thief/coward/forever lickspittle who told me he wouldn't publish me if I wrote the Bible, and that he has his friends to take care of. (The stand-alone blog post on him goes deep--wait until you see it.)
What I should see in every bookstore is total domination by me, in every section. Constantly. I should have the main work everywhere. Short fiction. Novels. Cultural criticism. Memoir. Essays. Sports books. Children's literature. YA. Comics. Music writing. Film writing. The main works everywhere. There should be stores that sell just my work. I really don't even care if anyone thinks this can't be done, because if they do, they're just ignorant. Of course I can do this. Someone said to me last night, "There has never been anything or anyone like you in history. There's no precedent. Not the Beatles, not Tom Brady, not Dylan, not anything. When you break through, you're going to see what that looks like, and you'll have everything you want."
I don't know. I have faith in that, because that is true about me. Part of the problem is time. It takes time to sit in quietude and be in the moment of my work. Forty-five minutes, just reading. It's less the availability of time, and how obtuse people are, how they are wired to max ignorance and laziness (which, ironically, adds up and makes them less happy and more depressed) and consumption of empty experiences that are not real experiences. What I offer, in everything I do, is a huge, unique life experience. People don't work that way now. They consume in bites. The flash of images. What they read is in the form of a Tweet. But this may also be why I am here. Then there is the time involved in even beginning to understand this alien--me--who lives amidst humans. Because I am not remotely like another human. I may as well be a different species. And I'm just getting started. People can't even understand that I'd write on John Coltrane and do fiction. Or even Coltrane and Sam Cooke. Let alone ballet and Beatles and beaches. People can't understand how I create like I do, as much as I do, at the level I do, the range I do. You have to open your mind. You have to put some time in.
That cause will be helped by hype. By awards. By people saying things, and the pile on effect. But right now, no one does anything on their own.
There are site problems. When you search in the search bar, you get all of the results, but when you click on a result, you're told the widget doesn't work or something. Try it--type in Thoreau or Beatles.
The links are in awful disarray. There are 1000 or so missing. Then there are links that just don't work, or that get taken down. Eventually I will need to hire a full-time archivist or an archival staff. But that's later--when I am a household name, when I have my houses. But later might also not be that far off. At some point, later is just going to be now. I think that's how it will happen, if it does.
It was pointed out to me that it was very hard to read the text at the bottom of the home page, where you have the different sections listed. If you go and take a look, you'll see that I fixed that, I think. I changed the colors from orange. Kept it with blues, in keeping with the nautical theme, and there's some red like sand, I guess, too. I think it looks pretty good. I'm not skilled with this kind of thing, so I was kind of proud that I did that on my own, which saved a little money.
Next week there will be an excerpt of the Sam book in the The Daily Beast.
I have these sociopaths. These stalkers. I am becoming more and more successful. That makes them loathe me more. Especially because I've had more taken away from me. I've been discriminated against more. But there I am. I see the obsession some truly crazy people have. I worry about getting assassinated at some point. I see IP addresses, I am made aware of behavior from third parties. It's chilling. Truly, truly disturbing. Some people have made hating and envying me the most important thing in their lives. How sick do you have to be for that to be the case?
But this is how I win. This is how I will win. You might even be looking at the penultimate stage before I do win. I don't know.
I signed off today on edits on an Edith Wharton piece for the TLS. I still have not heard from The New Yorker regarding the five stories. You might be surprised that I haven't followed-up. I'm just trying to show them that I can play this game. Meanwhile, I'm letting the achievements pile up. Also, in the interim, I have fashioned a list of the next group of works to send them, if nothing works out from this group (or even if something does). I'll run that by you now, Norberg: "Dot," "Upon Becoming a Ghost." Those are the first two that occurred to me immediately ("Dot" back in July, "Upon" as I was doing it). There are others, obviously. There are the ones that I didn't use this time. As it is, I have written 315 new works of short fiction going back to June 2018. And more than 1200 blog posts. And obviously the books, the essays, the op-eds, and the pieces and so on. It's not human. But it's happened, and I've done it. I keep doing it. Then there is the radio. I don't know if you've been listening, but the half hour segments are even better in some ways--more time is just better--and it's the best radio anyone has ever done. I know radio. I know there's nothing to touch what I'm putting out there. Then you'll have a film book in December if I work really hard the next couple of days and perform at a high level, and a book of fiction in January.
Dan, anything you can do at Dzanc would be appreciated--I have to keep the line moving. I have to get more books on schedules and in line to go out the door. I have to be able to say they're coming out on the front page of my site. This is a war of quality, but it's also a war of amazing quality meets unprecedented quantity (and range).
I'm certain two presses are withholding royalties and effectively stealing from me.
Tomorrow marks the start of another year for me. It some ways I am stronger than ever, and I don't feel like I belong to any age group, or any group. I feel like I am just my own thing in every way. I don't put my info about my birthday online anywhere, because then I see how much everyone hates me, fears me. Even "friends" and family. Because hardly anyone says anything, which is a theme of my life. People behave towards me as they behave towards no one else. It's greatness. Greatness drives people away. I know it and have said it, Thoreau knew it and said it long before I did. That is perhaps the biggest piece of the pie, more than publishing. Solving that problem, and having people flock to greatness. But I still believe in myself and my outcome.
A comparatively light note on which to end: I listened to the first Downtown appearance I did today when I was trying to separate the massive list of links into files for each subject. It's a project. I had never heard the segment. It's funny: sounds like the segments sound now. I was saying the word "basically" too much back then--which no one would notice--and I made a point of cutting that out. But it was total command, and even that very first segment sounded so different from all of the others on that show. Different energy, different everything. That's not me slamming anything. You can't even compare it, though. Also goes to show you what happens when you put me with someone who is a decent human, and we will just get along. In some ways, it's sad, because people who are secure in themselves take to me and take to me hard, instantly. But very few people are secure in themselves. Or anywhere near secure enough to do whatever with me.
One more thing: learned last night that I wrote on the Beatles for Rolling Stone at least sixteen times. Isn't that crazy?
I wrote that 1500 word piece for the 33 1/3 blog, and what I'll do by 9/23 is write four more, and they will put them up, one a day, for a week.
