In a room that is completely uninterpretable—coated in topaz and opal, with oscillating ceilings hung with electrical cords and plastic bouquets of extinct flowers—lounges an apparent woman. Her eyes droop slightly, she is covered in a black blanket, her painted face sticking out, a vape tube snaking out of her mouth, coiled along her ____ arm as she pulls a shimmering letter out from underneath the sheet. The sheet bristles with electricity and the apparent woman gazes transfixed as words appear in swirling crypto-cursive across the page. This is a reader, and we’ve written something just for her, scanning at ease somewhere in the future’s abyss. One text, unaddressed, sent to her, who does not exist, just to her, who rests beyond our time and above it like we know the future to be despite ourselves. She has an opinion of the work she’s reading, you can tell: the intensity of her face, the slight smirk but—it’s unclear to what effect, and the sheer difference of her surroundings makes us unsure of our ability to interpret even a more obvious emotion. But we can tell she reads the whole thing, sets down the shimmering page which dissolves into a chalice like mead, and burrows back under her black blanket, leaving energy, excitement, and mystery in her wake.
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There are countless blogs and websites describing what it takes for beginning writers to find a personal, ideal reader for their work. Many quote Stephen King, who writes for his wife, Tabitha. Most of them are marketing websites, which makes sense— after all, the first tenet of marketing is the injunction: know your customer. It has a rather mythic dimension to it, right? Because no matter how much data is involved, some sort of imagination comes into play: marketers casting their perfect purchasers onto the world. Even when we write to another “real” person, some amount of guesswork and supposition has to come into play if we aim to please, or displease, them. (Isn’t penetrating the market the dream?) Pleasure’s progenitor is guesswork. And idealizing anything is a difficult task. The conversation in fiction writing takes only slightly elevated turns from this basic condition of linguistic production of our time. No matter how specific the ideal reader, somewhere in the idealization tends to be, if a writer wants their work to be read widely and loved, a commitment to smuggling in “society” or norms or subcultural values into the shell of this ideal reader, because I suspect that when asked “who is your ideal reader” many people would truly respond “many.” But many of the same one person? We come to the classic problem of demographics, averages, generalizations: the bane of good prose. It seems that rather than a fantasy of the ideal reader as a repeatable thing, this figure forms a sort of nucleus of pure understanding, of really “getting it,” with degrees of fanaticism and hatred radiating out.
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I spoke with a writer whom I had just met. She was very energetic, confident. It was Halloween. She was dressed up as a nun and I was dressed up as a priest, even though we didn't know each other. I don’t know if it was because of the holy dynamic but when she told me that she had no interest in small presses and was going for the big ones for the big bucks in order to get as many readers as possible I thought that it was probably one of the most honest responses I’d ever gotten after the stale introduction of mutually assured destruction that is admitting to being a writer. I swallowed my drink whole and probably tried to relate (I’ve or booze has whited it out) but she wasn't interested in my writing or my ideas about what publishing could be. Why would she?
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“Now, cyberwriters have a world of proper online sites to submit to, yet they accept their work’s terminal fate — read one day, forgotten the next. But that hopeless immediacy is the thrill of cyberwriting — you can almost hear the writer’s heavy breathing accompanying their words, as if they were ramping up to their last fatal scream into the void.” - Gabriel Hart
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Everything except for controversy and spectacle—politics, sports—are more decentralized than we realize. And though we don’t read long things, we write more in a week than was written all of pre-computer history. This means that more often than not, only a few people read something you wrote, even if you spend hours and hours on it. Of course, there’s the chance of going viral, which for many is the dream, but the daily reality of the internet is a flood of posts and messages, to the point where we barely have time to qualify them. Still, we compose long messages to friends at any hour of the day like budding aspects of our conscience. One of my friends and I have a single facebook message thread going back at least a decade now. Technologically, and maybe psychically, the instant message is the pinnacle of writing.
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“We’ve Made TOO MUCH CONTENT” “The Internet Is Rotting” “Drowning in a Sea of Information” “When There’s Too Much Information About Writing To Actually Write” “Individuals and Information Overload in Organizations: Is More Necessarily Better?” “Every second around 6,000 tweets are tweeted on Twitter” “CAN YOU READ…TOO MUCH?”
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A man sits up against a wall, chattering to himself and biting fingers that have swollen from the cold and infection from one of the hundreds of needles he has strewn across the city. Little love letters of their own. He starts to feel the wall behind him with full palms and active fingertips. He stares around at the outside world. It’s so bright. There are people moving, moving towards him, almost hitting him, away. Then his fingers find a crack in the cement. Shocked, he feels it up through the brushes and realizes that there is space, space for him. Gently, eyes still stretched to the sunny oblivion of forms around him, he pulls his whole body over the gravel and trash into the hidden space. It’s concrete darkness sprinkled with light from the cracks. It’s wet and the moss has painted the walls and the man is afraid. But he beings to feel safe. There is no trash on the ground, no familiar ruins of rest, but it’s warm and soon a loud orange speaks to his eye. In bright sharpie there is a single message and he begins to read. He laughs and smiles and doesn't notice the bad grammar of his own personal, rotting Lascaux.
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The sheer amount of things we read (or don’t) has made us expert consumers and sharpened the average person’s tastes down to a slick whittle. But for those who write, the death of the author and the anonymity and ease of the internet have intersected like two colors in space, creating a sort of zombie phenomenon where the name functions as some sort of reference, but more often than not we don’t always know who we are reading when and when they are noticed, names and concepts are collected like dazzling jewels alongside likes and shares, which are the expression of a formless intention that actually matters and animates the corpse of the author.
In an essay on “Digital Excess” theorist Scott Litts writes, through a discussion of B.R. Yeager’s Amygdalatropolis, about non-consumer energies (which he compares to the heterogeneous nonproductive forces that circulate in Bataille’s general economy) finding spaces in digital forums, where transgression and edginess and interaction rule as the primary forms of value. He believes the Internet is an aleatory immediacy machine where we are rewarded with pleasure at finding diamonds in the rough, and this phenomenon in smaller images boards becomes an even further subversive function to mainstream society.
“In a wholly anonymous forum, as soon as the post is submitted the author is stripped of ownership, it being attributed only to ( …) both everyone and no one. This transience, this lack of accumulation, insists on symbolic exchange as its only value metric— drawing only those interested in this purified form of socialization, the thrill of communication.”
Here, the point is not an affirmation of a reader so much as it is an appeal to a shared desire: signal fleeting glimpses at unmarketable forces. (Remarkably, in the last few years, the increasing re-learning of 20th century theory gives much of the writing a backwards-looking trajectory, no matter how contemporary the concern.)
Teeming with taboo these “highly dynamic sociocultural refuges” function as “utopian third place[s] divorced from the impositions of capitalist exchange” and a “Borgesian Aleph that fascinates and engrosses the user, as epitomized by Yeager’s /1404er/, whose mind is slowly consumed, warped and in the end effectively destroyed by an endless cycle of desensitization, transgression, and alienation from the reality that surrounds him.”
Though the extreme anonymity may remain, the errant nature of this discourse seems to be getting taken under the belt of the market with NFTs, etc. And Litts’ vision of these utopian spaces without authors, based on the shared desire that the dice roll might be for once transgressive enough, seems almost woefully out of date, as does most technology writing within the space of days. These forums gather desire, with writing written to elicit, and the desire is then dumped over the cliff of immateriality like a dump truck on cliff’s edge.
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Faced with the complete oblivion of anonymity, something that in a way recreates, ironically, pre-internet obscurity–the genius in the woods who is never discovered–two regimes of purpose seem to present themselves. Both involve smokescreens. One is the dead zombie author who writes only for the immediacy of exchange for “others” or for the digital space and then there is the more classic, published author who professes to write only for themselves or for someone close to them. This later view, which I don’t buy at all, shows the writing practice as one of pure pleasurable expression–or of a sort of neurotic feedback loop where the self listens to the self, depicted viscerally in David Foster Wallace’s short story about the depressed person. This later practice brings us back to the ideal reader, in this case being the writer themself (though it’s not always clear where Wallace fell on the question). This feedback loop is at the heart of the obsession with auto fiction. It’s remarkable that with so many influences streaming in all the time that writing for oneself is still such a noteworthy and respectable goal. Of course, our own ideas of ourselves are more often than not laced with pure imagination.
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In Denver, poet Mathias Svalina, whom I had occasion to see recite at the legendary Mercury Cafe, is known for his Dream Delivery Service. He writes individual dreams (or nightmares) for his subscribers. The local ones he delivers by bike, but the service as become extremely popular so some he delivers by mail. While it’s in effect similar to sending a regular letter, the fact that he uses the ostensibly commercial format of deliver, so present with Uber, Doordash etc, and projects in it a future dream space for the receiver makes it an interesting case when it comes to the question of who we write for and why.
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Back to the figure of the apparent woman–nonexistent, future, amused by our by then-dated dalliance–I propose we take these different strains that define the contemporary literary scene: a mass of content barely read, the explosions of anonymity and instant response of the forum, the apogee of the digital message, mix in a bit of the messianism of the occult communists, and then jettison completely the “writing for oneself” of the unconcerned avant-garde (to me the fact that writing pleases the writer or aligns with their taste is something that should go without saying) and affirm this idle reader in the future. What if a truly decadent late modern practice directed every single text towards some undefinable singular future reader? What if we anticipated the tastes of these fantastic people with whom we have no idea how to relate? Would we portray ourselves differently? I mean, it’s just an orientation; we know that more than just Tabitha reads Stephen’s work. This figure is a point of desire to bring us out of the mire of the present. It is science fiction infused into our desire for the reader, of the reader. Most similar to the letter, this future-heading takes into account the absurdity of content: how many books are being written? And how does that anxiety brings to writers to certain conclusions? How can we elevates our writing towards some mind-fuck of a horizon? We can make art that tends towards it, without any expectation of response, not just because we are just writing for ourselves, but because of the sheer decadence of literature in terms of scale and excess. Little monuments to the idea/reader, horrifying and electric in the distant future. Writing as micro-monuments hidden in stone like geodes for the future babies to find. Writing as individualized dreams, pulled from the digital mire, delivered to the drowned future, hi-jacked in the now, vibrating with the speed of unknown desire.
'Of course, our own ideas of ourselves are more often than not laced with pure imagination.' That's the interesting thing about writers' claims to write for themselves -- which selves?
I think I'm always doing something between writing for the past version of myself who would have wanted to read what I'm writing, and writing for some unknowable reader in the unknowable future. I don't like to imagine an 'ideal' reader because I don't want to close off my work to people I wouldn't imagine reading it -- it would be more gratifying to be read by someone unexpected than to be read by whoever I might envision at the moment of writing.
I always wonder what people in the past would think of current responses to their life and work. People are always saying so-and-so would be rolling in their grave, or would be proud, or whatever, but that seems so presumptuous. We don't know what the past would think of us any more than we know what the future will think of us (and I think the same thing about claims that anybody in the present will inevitably be proven to be on the wrong or the right side of history).
"the terror angel on the front porch of the sun."
-Gorgeous.