Check in... 7/6/22

Hey! How are you? Are you doing okay? 

It's been a rough few weeks, hasn't it? I know. There doesn't seem to be a break from the increasingly horrifying stream of current events. At some point, it just becomes an assault on the psyche to the degree we just go numb, which is it's own special horror. It's almost like there's a choice between continuing to try to be informed about the world as it exists and we exist in it or to shut it all out as a preservation of sanity and humanity. 

I can't say I have an answer. The older I get the more I feel answers aren't my thing, as in I'm not very good at divining them, aside from the fact that I've come to distrust the religiosity of individualism where the body politic is concerned. Questions seem to be where I do better. I have better questions than I do answers. They suggest some progression, but they always leave a way to reconsider. One question leads to more, and as long as I'm comfortable with there being little more than a pursuit of better questions, I'm less anchored to the answers that lead to the current questions. There's less weight in acknowledging a previous answer was wrong or that maybe the previous question wasn't the right question either. It makes it a little easier to go back and revisit it, to adjust, to change perspective. If I'm honest, I don't know what questions I'm really mulling over until I sit down with a pen and a notebook. If anything, we're watching the refusal or the inability of power to reconsider it's presumptions, and we're not getting very good results. 

Lately though, I've been a bit distracted by the concept of distraction. I've been embracing the idea of distraction a bit more, the necessity of it. Otherwise, it seems a bit perverse, kind of masochistic, to constantly stare into the screen as the firehose of continuing and increasingly horrific events and revelations continues. There is, to my constant disappointment, only so much a person can ever know, and it's a limitation which has to be accepted. Even in this though, it's often my distractions are still some kind of search. I picked up a copy of The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, and I've been beginning my days reading the essays it contains, instead of opening social media and immediately submersing myself in the horror of world. I'm finding it's an exceedingly good distraction, so far. It also serves to begin the day with less of a scattershot mindset. The act of focusing on well developed, well constructed lines of thought seems to lend itself to a more focused mind, instead of more or less staring into a firehose of horror, inanity and 20,000 different lines of thought, few of which are more than half formed, and the racing mind which follows. It's a distraction with substance, and also a bit of indulging those questions I'm actually mulling over, as opposed to having shoved into focus momentarily. 

I'm in the process of editing a novel. It's growing, and it's my primary focus. Behind that, there is a novella waiting to be edited. Chances are good it will expand as well. The plan, as of now, is to take the first novel and attempt to go the traditional publishing route with it. The novella behind it, I'm seriously considering releasing in chapters here on Patreon, and then as an ebook. They're both slightly odd things, not quite fully situated within any specific genre. The novel is a bit fantasy, a bit sci-fi, a bit satire, life of one man in extraordinary circumstances variety novel. The novella behind it is a bit horror, a bit police procedural, a bit commentary on both, and probably the more traditional of the two. I am finding the first drafts are much easier for me to write. I sit down and write, and they come out. There may be some hours of fiddling with notes about structure, character details etc, but for the most part, the general story just comes out, as long as I keep writing. The editing is much harder, but not less enjoyable. Editing in my case seems to be a matter of expanding, adding what's necessary for it to be an experience the reader is going to enjoy or at least find captivating or interesting enough to continue. The first and early drafts are a story. Editing is the process of making it a book, in my case at least.  

It may sound odd, but I've also found it's helpful to have distractions from that too. If the novel and novella are work, writing about film is a productive distraction, and that's been what I've been working on for the Patreon, other than the odd review or piece about current events that I have an overwhelming urge to write. If the novel is work, these other things are something more akin to play or at least, there's no sense of attachment to an outcome. They are things I do because I love writing, and because the discipline of thought necessary to make them pieces of writing I'm comfortable sharing with other people is a good thing. Hopefully, others get something from them, even if it's nothing more than some sense of identification with another living, breathing, thinking being in a world which seems more and more alienating every day. I'm less and less concerned with "producing content" and becoming more interested in producing thoughtful and good writing. The more I become comfortable with my own estimation that we live in a time and place that isn't suitable for or interested in human well being, the less and less interested I am in more conventional ideas about success, which in this context means less being posted here on the Patreon, but hopefully that what is put here is of higher quality. I'm not going to just crank things out because the current wisdom is to have to post X number of pieces weekly or daily in order to keep your audience coming back. If I'm going to have/find an audience, I'd really rather it be that we have some trust in each other. You all trust me to try as well as I can to produce good writing, from a thoughtful, considered, humanistic perspective and I trust you to receive that writing in good faith. 

I've got a few things I've been working on which will be coming here to the Patreon, and they are in progress, "I think I might get to these." One of them is a long piece, a deep dive and breakdown on the 2018 Suspiria remake by Luca Guadagnino. The film has been a bit of an obsession since I first saw it. It's cast a spell, as the "witches" it's concerned with do in the film. I've read quite a bit of the response to it and the criticism, and this piece is a bit of my own response to it, and a bit of contextualization, as it's pretty clear both the critical response and general audiences are missing a good deal of the important points and what it's ultimately trying to do. It's something that is different in a way we're not used to things being different, and presenting things from a perspective we're not used to thinking in. To my mind, it's an incredible piece of cinematic artistry, and this is my way of attempting to suggest it being recognized as such. It belongs in the canon of great works of cinematic sociology, as it deals with a combination of politics, religion and gender, while also portraying a somewhat more realistic variety of idealism, a better dream where those things meet. This is still going to take a little while, because it will be a deep dive, nearly scene by scene. I've compiled most of what I think I need to do it well, and have a rough outline. The writing and editing will still take a while.

I'm also in the process of developing what is going to be a series looking at a number of films from the perspective of ways in which traditional masculinity is harmful to men and leads to bad outcomes for all of us, meaning the men the films center on and everyone who shares the world with them. The idea is to examine the characters, their motivations and their decisions through the way traditional masculinity effects them. At the moment, I'm favoring the idea of specifically focusing on films which have a reputation for being sexist or misogynist. Part of the idea is to tie together the ways in which traditional masculinity and the sexism inherent in it also leads to a pretty terrible existence for men. This started out as an idea to focus on the career and films of Martin Scorcese, but I think I'm going to make it a running series, something I will come back to regularly. It's not going to be Scorcese films exclusively, but it will feature a number of his films, because they are so ripe for this particular reading. It's where the idea started, and let's face it, spending time watching a lot of Martin Scorcese films is far from the worst thing a film lover can do with their leisure time. I have this notion that we've so much accepted the idea that the male patriarchal perspective has been the default perspective to so much a degree, we've missed the opportunity to critique some important things about it. I've already written a kind of overview/introduction as an explainer for what perspective I am going to be using and why I think it's worth looking at these films and others through this lens. Taxi Driver is the first film I'm going to be writing about, and that is currently in process. I'm hoping I'll have that done by next week. I'm having trouble coming up with a title for the overall series. The point of giving the series a title, of course being a way to delineate these pieces from the more standard review.