Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.44.0211231315480.283-100000@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>,
"WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines" <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: beating myself up
Date: Sat, 23 Nov 2002 13:16:04 -0500 (EST)
beating myself up it's only my boorishness that carries me along. no one likes my work. my friends support me. my work's terrible, awkward, out of line, too porno- graphic, too tiresome. it fosters false debates. it does nothing for anyone who doesn't know me. i'm not invited to readings or group screen- ings and when i have a screening the film/video community doesn't show and in town i don't do readings. i've given and given to the community; i've broken my back for it; i've curated myself in atlanta and new york and i've edited people's work in anthologies and showed their work in media venues and brought them to schools and i'm still out here penurious and grotty and besides myself with heinous anger and an inability to focus or crash except by hurting myself and refusing to carry on the video or film or other medium that no one wants to see anyway. i have a reputation for aggression and spamming and getting in everybody's way and dissing the purity of free exchange and besmirching it and were it not for this my work would die moribund on the bottom of the ocean where better it lie. i lose friends over my depression and the ilk of my work proceeding in fits and starts and self-hatred which is my own little cultivated realm which is what i have to offer. i am constantly jealous of success of everyone and wish for my own success and it does not come. my friends go to openings for themselves and screenings at big international festivals and i walk around with tiny minidvs strapped to my back saying 'please won't you look at this' 'please won't you buy this' 'take my heinous tiny wares and do with them what you might.' i have offered my filmwork to anyone who might reuse the stock as slug or cutup for other students while it sits moribund in public storage where anyone can look at it and no one does i think because i get no records from the place that would even hint at a screening. i am not boorish there because i have given up there on the film because i know where i am not wanted and the only thing to do is give up on that heinous business and continue in heinous pecuniary loss and anxiety because that is all i am given in life because i do not get grants because i am not within any community. in fact the last real grant i received was over a quarter of a century ago and if i could only return then i would not be so boorish perhaps but i would be because it is in my nature to be unlikable and whining continually although other people say i have full victory over my failings i do not. nuclear death clout appeared prepared reaped rapped pare rape pe ar ===