After much back and forthing over the last 24 hours, I've decided that, instead of switching to bi-weekly, I'm pulling the plug on THE SHORTBOX MEMORY REVUE completely. While it was a fun little experiment, my reasoning boils down to the simple truth that I'd rather spend my creative time writing fiction and my usual little slices of whenever/whatevers here. As you were.
Which I guess makes TSBMR a for-really-real new show. Hadn’t planned on it going that far, but here I am and here it is. But hey, at least I get to use my favorite signoff again: you can (now) subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, or your preferred podcast delivery system. New episodes Wednesdays, give or take.
Pleasant Monday surprise: something I wrote appearing elsewhere (that elsewhere being Kevin Hodgson’s always-excellent Kevin's Meandering Mind blog) along with a super-cool graphic version of same and generous linkage to the newsletter! Super-cool graphic version:
And I loved Kevin’s rumination on it (a sentiment I wholeheartedly echo) about blogs now being an inward space:
Tyler’s piece had me thinking (yet again) of this blogging space, and how my view of it has changed over time. It used to be more of a space that I imagined as “outward” facing — sharing with other bloggers, and being connected into larger blogging networks — but now I see it more as a reflective space, something more “inward” where I am curating my writing and thinking. My audience may be smaller (I may be my only audience) but I still keep the door open for others (you, perhaps?) to peek in and see what I’m up to.
Also happy to find myself sharing space with James Shelley's excellent piece, What's the fun in writing on the internet anymore? Many thanks, my friend.
Updated Principles page with 09 :: this is it / this is me:
I'm not aspiring to anything other than continuous progression and improvement at my chosen art: this site, the newsletter, and the zine are, until they are otherwise, my chosen, wholly independent delivery systems for whatever I think, ponder, and create. The expressions and experiments and explorations shared in these spaces are neither aspirations nor stepping stones for anything bigger: I've spent more than half my adult life caring about things out of my control and, as I enter the back half of same, I've little interest in continuing down the same path. This space is – and these spaces are – for better or for worse, the truest expression of myself in this moment; whatever the next moment brings will be dealt with when it's time to deal with it. Until then, this is me, and I'm good with it.
After much searching through menus and settings (and an unwillingness on the part of the app on the iPad to scroll down far enough to hit the "deactivate" button requiring me to go to a computer), finally hit the deactivate button (six days early, but to hell with it: those who wanted to stay connected have already done so, the rest, bye): my Insta-presence is no more. Aside from that one video with the "get that shit out of my face" vegan frog (which I did watch about 35 times before hitting deactivate: that "motherfucker stop, STOP!" shriek kills me every time), I don't miss any of it.
(And when Threads launched, I realized I didn't really need or want another microblogging conversation platform: that's what this space and the Fediverse are for / Note: still want to use the FV for my comment system here; running out of time before the next annual bill comes due.)
Didn't go full delete on Insta because I'm enough of a shit that I don't want the other Tylers Weaver to have that account name. I've protected it long enough, even added the extra W to myself, across multiple platforms and decades, this being my third (holy shit).
Related/un–: I anticipate the day that some startup buys (or pulls a Muskian coup on SpaceKaren himself) the Twitter name and the rights and the bird and brings it back, sort of like Twinkies and PBR, banking on nostalgia as a (highly viable) business model. As someone rightly said, the brand was the only thing that didn't need fixing at Twitter.
Anyhow byebye massive communication/advertising conglomerate techbro companies. We had our laughs and our cries and our successes and our failures but it's time to move on. Internet dinosaur powers: activate.
Deactivating Insta on 06 August. Farewell Insta-posts, recorded here because what the hell why not.
Very excited to see my little daily Attendance Cards being used and remixed via my good friend Kevin Hodgson and others as part of the DS106 Daily Create, a “a space for regular practice of spontaneous creativity through challenges published every day.” Here's my original, from the end of April:
And the first remix:
Followed by this fantastic bit of trippy by Alan Levine:
Which was made even tripper by John Johnston, in GIF form:
Which itself was then given a soundtrack in video form by Kevin:
So very, very cool: you may consider me duly honored and thoroughly chuffed.
Behold, the new binding for PRESS (A) TO START: all future editions and issues – unless format dictates otherwise – will be bound in Japanese Stab Binding-style:
Or, rather, all future editions and issues - unless format dictates otherwise – will be bound in my iteration / improvisation of Japanese stab binding (meaning it involved three holes instead of four and a power drill in conjunction with the awl).
Either way, proud of this one, considering the last time I tried to thread a needle I was in a state of inebriation at 2AM and convinced I needed to sew a button back on my shirt. It took two hours to thread that needle. But that button held.
A second issue is coming, and I do want to hew to a schedule of two releases per year. Working on learning a new binding technique as I'm far from satisfied with the current one. There will be much stabbing and bleeding from tips of fingers, I’m sure - but I definitely want to go this route. Contents to be bled and stabbed upon TBD…
As I've moved this space to being more of a Tumbl-y microblog (it took a long time, but I'm fully sold on title-devoid posting here) and away from its original iteration as a repository of text-based daily word-hurling, I've become – I wouldn't go so far as to say troubled by it – acutely aware of a noticeable lack of text. And, while you might be celebrating, I'm not – the site header does, after all, declare me a Writer, more or less.
Maybe it's all part of that shift into a new creative epoch (evolution is mandatory) I've mentioned off and on throughout, or maybe it's something else; either way, a desire to post more writing here has been omnipresent – it's been the figuring out how to do it in a way that makes it workable and enticing for me (i.e. not contributing to feelings of rush or pointless haste and not making me sacrifice the Main Projects to kowtow to some wholly self-inflicted deadline) and enjoyable for you that's been somewhat more elusive.
The plan – subject, as ever, to change: a new release of something every Wednesday, be it an essay – this will be the only time I write about writing these things, I promise –, a bit of flash fiction, or a who knows what. I'll work on these Wednesday and Saturday mornings (though I'm writing and posting this one solely on Wednesday morning, hence the more rambly nature), releasing early to newsletter subscribers on Sunday (this will commence the first of the year, so obviously not this week or next, but with 2023's first dispatch, on Sunday, 01 January) and to the wider digital ether on Wednesday as I start work on the next release. The other four mornings will be spent on whatever the Main Project is of the week or month or lifetime; tiny thoughtlets, some titled, some not, will be released as they pop into my brain, composed and released in 15 minutes or less.
Posted it several times, but since this is something of an intent-post, I’ll do it again: Montaigne, on “Grotesques”:
Having considered the proceedings of a painter that serves me, I had a mind to imitate his way. He chooses the fairest place and middle of any wall, or panel, wherein to draw a picture, which he finishes with his utmost care and art, and the vacuity about it he fills with grotesques, which are odd fantastic figures without any grace but what they derive from their variety, and the extravagance of their shapes. And in truth, what are these things I scribble, other than grotesques and monstrous bodies, made of various parts, without any certain figure, or any other than accidental order, coherence, or proportion?
Sketchy though they are, the (four minute and thirty-three second) Attendance Card exercises (patterned after Lynda Barry's in MAKING COMICS) have served their purpose and will absolutely, 100% continue – and serve as a model for what I'm doing here: I love doing them (in spite of this morning's evidence that I have no clue how to draw hands) and they, along with the spate of releases since 2020, have freed me from a perfectionistic claptrap that plagued me for the last ten years. The pieces I release on Wednesdays will be similarly sketchy and incomplete, a sort of weekly attendance card, weekly challenges to myself: whatever comes out of four-to-six hours of work is what comes out – most won't work; a few, perhaps, will. Maybe some weeks I'll build on the previous week's (or weeks') releases, transform them, play with variations – who knows: the point is that I don't know until I write them...
Hey, idea: why don't I call all of these Sunday/Wednesday grotesques/releases The Informalities? Hey, that works. Sweet. I've missed that title – arguably the best I've come up with.
Also: last week's Woodshed triage should be considered the first of these Informalities and is now so tagged.
The things that will stay and/or leave, at least as I see them in the moment of this writing:
Staying: whenever/whatever statuses and pictures and etc etc / whatever weird shit strikes my fancy here, along with occasional 15-minute-or less thoughtlets; Attendance Cards; PRESS (A) TO START (though it might move to an annual release from a semiannual one, TBD as I continue to play with possibilities with the second release - some of the weekly releases might find their final form there - hey, I like that); the newsletter.
Leaving: THE SOCIALIZED RECLUSE (I loved doing the show, I loved getting to talk with cool people, but I really need a break; it might return sometime in the spring, but in a different iteration); certain other projects that have languished and faded; efforts at being someone I'm not.
Arriving: The Informalities, V2.
Bringing this maunder to an end by mentioning that I've been in a "I need to do something more with my life" as I've done this writing thing for half my life now and, well, here I am. Countless ideas ran through my head of what I could do – run a non-profit again, open a bar, etc etc – but, after much headdesking and handwringing, I've reached the conclusion that I'm going to double or triple down on writing because, at this point, fuck it.
Best reason, I think, to do anything.