What I Wrote for the Picasaweb Blurb: Metamorphosis from 2005 to 2009 ::: The Four Year Lag Time Email to Uni California UC Press. As I am preparing to send off the "new organism" of "The Mountain's Last Flower" into the world, I was building up my internet social networking habits... and part of my personal goal was to clear up on email account www . questionreality . org @ gmail . com. And there I found an email from an editor of the University of California Press. My default instinct was to write an email stating (1) pardon the four year delay in responding to this email, but (2) I'm thankful for your patience, and yet I'm sorry if I was unprofessional and potentially inappropriate in behavior the first time I approached you as a naive undergraduate.... It was a powerful feeling to writing such an email, and then I started to think what was the "rational underbelly" behind the instincts.... What did I learn these past 4-5 years? What did I not know back then that I know now?!! (2005: worm-grub idiot to 2009: attempting-to-fly-butterfly)
The last 2-3 days (or longer... geez) I had become a Facebook Addict, Facebook Junky, Facebook Binge-er, Facebook Purger, Facebook Whatever... as I have been attempting to create a fresh account and delete an old account, affiliated with negative memories... and failures.... In addition, I made a deal with myself to crack into one of my "deadly" email accounts, wwdotquestionrealitydotorg atgmaildotcom, hunt through it, excavate all emails, and close the account.... In the process, I found an ancient email from an editor from the UC Press and instinctfully sent him a polite note generally stating... "Pardon for the four-year delay... but when I submitted my 1000-page Question Reality manuscript to you, I was an idiot. Sorry if I behaved unprofessionally and inappropriately, but also thanks for your patience and putting up with me."
It was an amazing feeling... of redemption of sorts?... to be able to open that ancient email in my life and address it. And yet an instinctful email response was followed by a surge of thoughts overwhelming my mind, when I cam to realize what an "unknowledgeable idiot" I was back in 2005, and how much I have come to learn and know since then about the media world....
To celebrate the passing of a little over four years and all the knowledge I have compoundingly acquired during this time, I decided to make a "generic list" (not a "life story," as to which it can easily become...) of all the things that I didn't know back in Fall of 2005, and all the things I know now... such that I can look back at my old worm-grubby self and even have enough confidence to label my 2005 self as an "idiot." It's funny how it all happened though. I never planned myself to be where I am at now. I'm just at a very fortunate state where right now it's "safe to reflect." Four long years of CONTINGENCY, contingent events, contingent learning processes to achieve a state of being "safe to reflect." As Dr. Nancy Kawalek told me one time... "You will only perceive, unless you are ready to perceive." And again, my father has always been an encouraging voice and describes Question Reality as a "necessary intellectual barf" to order to synthesize and compromise two polar-opposite, strangely, somewhat "mutually exclusive" worlds of "academic-"scientific"-book knowledge" and the "experiential knowledge acquired" of surviving anorexia (As they say, the university is the "frontier of knowledge," it seems like scholars in the university are the "last ones to find out.").
(1). No one in their right mind publishes books of 1000 pages, unless you are a Stephen Jay Gould at the end of your life... and you are the Biblical Figure of your respectable discipline, including Harry Potter pseudo-disciplines.... Basically, I went backwards... as my mentor Hugh Marsh told me... Hugh stated that most people write a series of newspaper articles, and then these articles conglomerate into books.... It's how most journalists earn their "book" merits....
(2). Society does not judge you based on (a) your hard work (b) your intellectual merit (c) your impeccable track record of straight-A-goodie-two-shoes in school (d) but based on your intimate contacts, inherited or acquired (e) your popularity, your "platform," your already-built-in audience through marketing, self[deprecating] promotion, exposure (f) economic affordability (g) degree of coupling with other forms of media campaigning. So the quality of most books in Borders and Barnes and Noble is close to shxt. It's not about quality literature, it's about the popularity media bombardment (mostly). (Believe me, I remember one day I had that epiphany, and I walked into Borders in complete disgust... my entire perception of Borders and Barnes and Noble completely shifted....). I came to realize how many people's beautiful voices, how many geniuses' thoughts must have been buried in history simply because the one's who survived and became famous... were not necessarily the best, but won the popularity contest. (I have a dream of writing a newspaper column discussing the "Unburying the Undiscovered," in which I was to go into deep history of the region and find all the people who had the potential to impact society with their influential thoughts and stories, but ended up being drowned by the winners of the popularity contest, ended up being buried in history. Like the whole Herman Melville Syndrome, giving a second chance for select individuals to be rediscovered... unfortunately... long after they're gone....
(3). Society DOES NOT READ. A long time ago, there used to be books. People used to have time and energy invested in reading books because there was not much else for distraction. People used to read words and imagine worlds and generate emotions within them. Readers used to be ACTIVE dreamers. But then lots of technologies had arisen such that words could now be coupled with images and music, visions and emotions, such that there was not much incentive anymore to be active dreamers, but more so PASSIVE MENTAL CONSUMERS. And we learned fairly quickly that the human mind prefers IMAGES and AUDIO over sitting down and reading static, symbolic code on page after page after page. And to make it worse, the modern environment of "media bombardment" has placed people in a state of MINIMAL ATTENTION SPAN, MAXIMUM ADHD, so the capability for an audience member to retain a linear train of thought in consuming a piece of media is becoming closer and closer to zilch.... And so... welcome TWITTER to make life even worse.... So now, specialize-then-diversify strategy comes in full blast (the Ian Shive Conservation Photogapher strategy). In order for people to become interested in your central product, in this case a novella, you have to LURE THEM INTO reading your product through SOUNDBITES and IMAGEBITES.... You gotta HOOK THEM and then RETAIN their attention span.... Hence, the TRIANGLE EFFECT in writing, the most pertinent and sensationalized items presented first, and then tapered off to the juicy, but less "sexy" material hidden in the boonies of whatever product. Hence also leading to the FOUR ELEMENTS of ESSENTIAL STORYTELLING (1) What is this about? (2) Why should I care? (3) Why should I believe you? are three questions that need to be answered in the first 15 seconds of meeting any important person in the world who may be able to more widely distribute your product.... and (4) What kind of tricks will you infilitrate in your craft of storytelling that will maintain my interest?! (Also consider the PRISM EFFECT; the ability to speak with multiple different parties/stakeholders, e.g. how to approach literary agents and editors as opposed to how to approach journalists / magazine writers or students or more specialized academics) (The concept of telling stories in MENTALLY DIGESTIBLE CHUNKS, for example, in a short, adventurous story like "The Mountain's Last Flower") (The concept of STORYTELLING IN LIGHT OF MULTI-MEDIA TECHNIQUES, writing stories such that it is EASILY ADAPTABLE to other forms of stories, e.g. art exhibit, music, stage play, film, interactive website... whatever....)
And on that note... given these fundamental philosophical transformations... I engaged in a series of educational and artistic pursuits in order to convert my mind from the "academic treadmill" to the "economically viable treadmill" which I do not support. I do not support mass production. Period. Mass production and growth in quantity is by default non-sustaining. Period. I don't need numbers to show this (except for mass producing proton-electron arrays on a computer screen doesn't really seem to do the world much harm...).
Visceral things I didn't know about: male Homo sapiens (beyond my father, who I have discovered to be the exception to all the rules), their positive, sensitive inner universe as well as their extremely negative, bridge-burning undersides, I also didn't understand much about death (as I had most profoundly experienced through my grandfather Ray and grandmother Marion)
Elements of Substance / Philosophies I didn't know about: geology (paleontology, paleoecology, sedimentology, my pet pea subjects), the nuances of creative writing a la Barry Spacks :-) (understanding storytelling structures such as poetry, song lyrics, flash fiction, short story, novella, novel, etcetera), Matrix of the Mind: Mapping Language on Landscapes (the feedback between language, images, and emotions), I didn't know that my writing could be classified as "literary fiction [faction] for social change" (finally, a discrete and bounded discipline for the publishing types!), I didn't have people with authority and legitimacy around me (like my new Ph.D. committee, sitting in Mike Davis' class)....
Practical / Artistic / Social Networking Tools I didn't know about: I didn't know how to use Photoshop, I didn't own a Nikon D80 SLR until April 2006 (got my first photography gigs via cousin Mike Dillin!), I didn't know how to blog, I didn't know how to facebook, I didn't know how to design-organize-self-publish a book, like through LULU or CREATESPACE, I had no confidence in singing, I didn't know how to record-mix-master music, I didn't know how to record and edit video (thanks to UCSB's Blue Horizons program), I didn't know about the art of public presentation (thanks Toastmasters!), I didn't know much about experimental stage play (STAGE via Dr. Nancy Kawalek), I didn't know much about acting/modeling (which I learned via Barbizon/IMTA), nor was I ever exposed to wasteful mass production film operations (via Mike Dillin, Central Casting), I didn't know about the operations of a music studio (volunteering at California Sound Studios)
After all things said, I can find "some level of truce" with my first traumatic wave, simply by recognizing my own state of idiocracy, but not necessarily with the way how certain people treated me and responded to me (let's call it "collective abuse," shall we?). For example, to experience the sensation of "censorship," in which a literary agent and editor stated flat out "your writing is beautiful, but not now!" is one of the most traumatizing experiences I ever had in my entire life. Around that time, I recorded myself going through a panic attack in the car. At a visceral level, I could not stand the notion of being "mentally trapped" by the conventions/standards of a national society, and at a conscious level, I understood that my visceral/primal brain was going through a panic attack, and that I should record it. It's buried somewhere in my computer; when the time is right, I will revisit this attack (as a summary statement for most of my panic attacks). Traumatizing times provide the best material for storytelling....
The second most memorable response was a very contentious phone call with the editor from the UC Press. It was funny... I was exploring the website of the University of California Press and was noticing how they had this "non-discrimination statement," stating that the UC Press does not discriminate based on race, ethnic background, class, job position, AGE, or any other factor that could possibly construct the notion of discrimination. And yet, the phone call with the editor showed CLEAR DISCRIMINATION BASED ON AGE ("ageism" as opposed to "racism" or "speciesism" in District 9). He told me flat out (paraphrased, I have exact wording in another computer), "How could any 24-year old have something to say about the world?" which was extremely derogatory to me at the time. I left the phone call feeling like I was "no good" and didn't have anything valid to say because I was "too young." Following this phone call, I went through another panic attack alone, and I ended up writing a poem "It is important to take a moment and consider..." which I will place in the next blog, because I don't want to place too much information here....
Despite these discriminating statements made over the phone, I am going to have to let them slide, let them drip off my shoulder as if I were a random victim of being hit by bird dung. First of all, I have to let them slide because back then, I didn't know a lot, and I was a young idiot (yet with a lot to say) in several respects. And secondly, the editor did review the manuscript and made sincere, polite, helpful comments. Emotional and contentious phone calls should not be the basis for rational decision-making....
So, this "generic list" of all the things I didn't know back in 2005, but I do know now in 2009, is becoming a little bit of a "life story," so I'll catch myself and cut myself off here....
2 comments:
I also didn't know Sarah Simpson (Geology Editor of Scientific America extraordinaire), I didn't know what NASW was (National Association of Science Writers), nor SEJ (Society of Environmental Journalists), nor ILCP (International League of Conservation Photographers) National Geographic types, nor my great friend Shannon Switzer... nor did I ever attend AAAS before.... I was trying to figure out who my audience was... Boy, that's a painful process....
Hurricane Katrina didn't happen either... and in a certain way... I feel that I am an intellctual opportunist of real-world disaster.... I probably always will be... r species, new species rapidly evolving after disasters....
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