Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1309240905130.28428@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Lousy
Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 09:07:39 -0400 (EDT)
Lousy My recent work has been lousy, repetitive, mediocre. I go over the same grounds again and again as I attempt to hold onto my sanity in a world of ultra-violence. Any response I might have to this world is lost in the symbolic, nothing is left, nothing left behind. I see our move to Providence as exile from the edginess of Brooklyn, for me the last locus of alternative negation. I see myself going over the same musical grounds, playing alone or with Azure, without the dark energy of the dominant saxophone. And I see my own good ideas already on the block and lost. I'm lousy with a mind corrosive with self-pity, drive, obsession, and an easy way out. I watch the body close down: carpal- tunnel, stretched muscles, tinnitus, insomnia, sweat, difficult breathing, clumsiness, stress, confusion: what's left forms the few notes of the shakuhachi. I take note of everything; I'm drowning in my own mediocrity. My end-blow flute-playing is lousy, my theory drags out thinkers from before the wars, my virtual world work imitates itself and I'm lazy in terms of new programming, my writing's pretty much ignored for good reason, and I still write from the outmoded positionings of the murmur and the scream. I'm exhausted with theory, I haven't read nearly enough, I take shortcuts, my lousy thinking infects everything, turning to paranoia at the slightest provocation. There - you see - "slightest provocation" - a lousy trite phrase, because my thinking short-circuits itself, comes up with nothing new but a fabricated lousy honest that's close to unhinged. I wish for something new, some catalyst - students perhaps or a Festschrift (I dare dream!) - to bring me out of this study in gray, but I've wished for such all my life, and this kind of wish is never granted, or granted at best in retrospect - and certainly not for the kind of lousy work I do. I type and think through the autonomous nervous system, as if my circuits were jolted by some sort of external machinery from the gods, content be damned. I write but it writes itself and in this case, this writing, this thinking, these virtual worlds, these video, these images, this music, is lousy, lousy, lousy, lousy, lousy. An epitaph - stupidly, in spite of himself, he kept trying. The rest of us knew enough to ignore the results. He was his own worst result. He was lousy. He was lousy because he took the easy way out, as if there were laurels to collect, choices made for him. He went with whatever fell the fastest. He kept waiting for his life and work to turn around, for something to turn them around, for him. He thought practice, not insight, makes perfect. His thought was lousy too.