New Year's Resolution

During my recent trip back to New York, a couple people actually expressed annoyance that I don't write so much anymore. It's quite a problematic arrangement: first, this has been an embarrassing endeavor from the beginning, started when I was working as a copywriter at a shit advertising agency in Manhattan, where the quantity of work was vastly inferior to the quantity of workday. And, lets all be very frank with ourselves, it had a little to do with forming alternative communicative arrangements, since the metaphorical river had been dammed. Either way, it's such a fucking nerdjob arrangement, I'm embarassed of the poor quality of writing on here, and I can't seem to call it quits.

But people want to know more about Arkansas, I will attempt to do a better job at conveying Arkansas to them. As I've mentioned before, Arkansas is difficult to explain, and even more difficult to explain is myself in the context of Arkansas, and the two are rather inseparable. Particularly when we consider what I now feel fairly sure of, based on my last trip back, that living in Providence and New York made a crazy person out of me, as most of my readers (and dearest friends) have a fairly nuanced awareness of. See, the realization that I thought had been made by going to Chile in high school was that cultural geography matters very little and own's own attitude towards things matters very greatly but what has confused me a little about Arkansas is that it appears that where one is, and not just where one's mind is, does actually make a large difference.

Arkansas has proven to me two very important things: 1)The whole depression thing was not necessarily ontological, but potentially conditional. This makes me bitter and I feel like I got cheated, although in the end one only has oneself to blame. 2) In the Ivy league success stories are narrowly defined. Leslie Thornton told me, before graduation, that if I moved to New York I would wake up one morning and be thirty and, she said dismissively, "working on my screenplay." I think that she meant "working on my screenplay" as euphemism for "being a loser." So. She was my favorite professor. Some of you probably knew that already, that New York City is not necessarily the best place to get artistic things done, but I've always been a bit slow to the punch. I continue to be a little pissed at anyone who might make the whole smaller pond bigger fish analogy. It's not like that. That's what's hardest to explain to people, that it's not like you move somewhere smaller and the world's standards are lower. Absolutely not. Unfortunately, living in New York does not make one smarter, a better writer, musician or anything else. It's pretty fucking stupid to think that might be the case. Realization (2) might seem an oxymoron to realization (1) but really mediocrity is rampant in metropolises both large and small. And this is the Marshall Frady quote I kept spouting to people last week, if you were curious:

I've never been too sure that it is benign for a writer to spend any great length of time in the company of New York's estate of appraisers from afar and traffickers in reactions and responses. Because maybe you start after awhile writing from those secondary vibrations, instead of from the primary pulses and shocks you can't afford to lose. Perhaps writers ought to be scattered out over the land...that way you're writing out of what you're living in, there can be that energy and immediacy and very flash of life in your work. All the while, covertly, you're actually a kind of undercover agent, stranded out in the cold and sending dispatches from those far brawlings of life to Dickens, Twain, Gogol, Balzac, Cervantes, telling them what's going on now -- Let me tell you what these people did. Let me tell you what this character is like and what he did and what happened to him...

Why don't any of you whiners ever post comments?