In case it hasn’t made itself obvious through my blogging (and writing — or lack thereof — on Supraterranean.com), I’m going through something of a transition. I can’t express it fully at this time. At the very least, I write much less frequently than I have throughout the past two years. The reasons are plentiful. I don’t have any regular columns, freelancing, or other sorts of publishing relationships. At the moment, it’s all about Supraterranean…but that’s only one of those three “jobs,” and the other two don’t involve writing.

As David Gessner suggested in his New York Times Magazine essay (which I discussed here last fall), the reading life is the writing life. So I’m first trying to get back on my regular schedule of heavy reading, and hopefully the writing will flow on its own. Maybe part of my transition has to do with changes in why I write. I first started writing on a regular basis in January 2006 when I started a music blog on blogger.com. I wrote to pass the time and because it was fun. I was drunk on Kerouac and stuck in a big city that seemed to hate me as much as I hated it. I got through it by going to as many concerts as possible and using the written word to organize my listening habits.

The foremost point is that I wrote for the sake of writing. Any time I start doing otherwise, I catch myself and try to get back to that original motivation. That applies to inane journalistic assignments that require me to sacrifice my creative impulses for the sake of a maniacal editor, but it goes beyond that. I’m sure every writer hits a wall now and then. I don’t just mean “writer’s block” — there are also projects that refuse to be finished. Usually I don’t let it bother me. I think of it as planting seeds. If I sit down and write 1,000 words on pure impulse generated from vague ideas, sometimes I shelf it and come back to it later.

A notable example of this is my essay “A Healthy Contempt for Journalism,” which I published on Supraterranean.com in September 2008. I probably started writing that in January ’08, since the events discussed in the essay happened between Sept-Dec 2007. In other words, it took eight months to finish, but much of that time the project was totally inactive. In all truth, there was no way I could have written that whole essay in January ’08. I needed time to develop a broader perspective. I had to learn more about the journalism industry beyond my narrow experience with one internship and a year of grad school.

Finally a time came when the pieces seemed to start assembling themselves, and the rest of the essay was more fun to write. More importantly, I was happy with the final draft. That’s another reason to write: if both the process and the product are fulfilling to the author. If you hate the act of writing, or none of what you end up writing is pleasing or inspiring to you, then chances are you won’t be a writer for long.

Of course, there are many other reasons that people write. In the 20th Century, many people made careers out of writing. I suppose some people still do it, but with the fall of the newspaper industry (and the subsequent drop in freelancing opportunities) it’s becoming much more difficult. Really any kind of paper publishing is more difficult. And yet that’s how all literary classics were born, especially in the 1900s. No one had the means to self-publish. Some publishing company had to invest in an author for the author to be exposed to the public and gain an audience. There have always been multiple avenues, but that “needle in a haystack” method is what sticks out in my mind. I always think about Kerouac trying to sell On The Road to publishers for something like eight years, and then becoming the “King of the Beats” practically overnight.

And that’s another reason that some people may try to write, to achieve fame. It’s the whole rock ‘n’ roller mentality that swelled to monstrous proportions at the end of the 20th Century. It’s a seductive idea in writing, the hope that one’s efforts will eventually be affirmed on a grand scale, thus justifying all the tireless research, endless typing, awkward sleep schedules, and/or damaged personal relationships. Even if a writer tells himself that’s not why he’s writing, it’s another thing entirely to consistently write just for the sake of writing.

The great Hunter S. Thompson was even guilty in that regard. As he started to build his reputation in journalism, he once wrote to a friend that he was having trouble working on fiction. He said that inspiration was hard to come by without any promise or potential for payback. To me, that’s really sad, especially because The Rum Diary and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are two of my favorite “fiction” books, and I wish there had been more of the same from Thompson.

So writing for money is a bad idea. Is writing for fame just as bad? That question will now (and probably forever) return me to a conversation in Steppenwolf (discussed here previously), when Hermine says to Harry:

“No, Steppenwolf, not fame. Has that any value? And do you think that all true and real men have been famous and known to posterity? [...] The image of every true act, the strength of every true feeling, belongs to eternity just as much, even though no one knows of it or sees it or records it or hands it down to posterity. In eternity there is no posterity” (pp. 152-153).

Those who know me well can see me striking through my main literary inspirations, and the only one left is Henry Miller. But I cannot disqualify neither Miller’s intentions nor his finished works. I’ve only read three of them so far — most recently Black Spring — but if he made one thing clear to me in the first three books, it was that he wrote for the sake of writing. I think Nietzsche would have called it (or did call it) feeding off of one’s own flame. (Wait, I’m confused — he said to consume yourself in your own flames.)

Before I lose track of what I’m thinking about, I want to express a few things about Miller. I keep telling my girlfriend that he is the most underappreciated literary figure in American history. What’s most compelling about Miller at the current time is my complete inability to express what’s so special about him. Yes, I’ve talked about his unique way to protest. Yes, I’ve mentioned his “first draft as final draft” and transparent autobiographical novel style. But no matter what I say about him, I’m sure I’m still missing the core of his being. I feel that I still have so much more to learn about this genius. I also have more to uncover regarding his importance to this generation of Americans (or Earthlings). Next I’ll probably try to tackle his reputed masterpiece, the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy.

In reality I haven’t accomplished what I set out to do with this blog post, and that was simply to list some quotes from Black Spring with minimal discussion. I had also planned on making some points about how Henry Miller would have loved to see the massive jump in creativity that is resulting from digital technologies and the Internet. That just goes to show that I haven’t written enough lately, or maybe it’s evidence that I’m slowly taking on particular traits of my writer heroes. One of Miller’s prominent characteristics was extreme attention deficit. If I remember correctly, Tropic of Capricorn starts and ends within a very small time frame, and everything in between is either a remembrance from the past or an exploration from his imagination.

However, I don’t take the blog format for granted. In this spontaneous, convenient writing environment, I often feel more productive than times that I write in Microsoft Word. But after 1,300 words of this, I think I will leave you with a passage which, since it was written in the stretch of 1934-1935 — before both World War II and some famous works from that era by George Orwell and Jean Paul Sartre — was a highly prophetic statement:

“I cannot forget that I am making history, a history on the side which, like a chancre, will eat away at the other meaningless history. I regard myself not as a book, a record, a document, but as a history of our time–a history of all time.

“If I was unhappy in America, if I craved more room, more adventure, more freedom of expression, it was because I needed these things. I am grateful to America for having made me realize my needs. I served my sentence there. At present I have no needs. I am a man without a past and without a future. I am–that is all. I am not concerned with your likes and dislikes; it doesn’t matter to me whether you are convinced that what I say is so or is not. It is all the same to me if you drop me here and now. I am not an atomizer from which you can squeeze a thin spray of hope. I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night settling in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots” (pp. 23-24).

Recently I realized  that it would be very difficult to write consistently on here about fiction and philosophy. Not only would it be exhausting, but I’m just not sure that I have those kind of resources. For this post, I turn to a sort of nonfiction reference book. I caught wind of Sin & Syntax by Constance Hale on a trip to the MSU Computer Store circa Spring 2007. A girl working at the counter set the book down to assist me, and I couldn’t help reading the cover when she went into the store room.

I found the book used on Amazon and started reading. For someone who hasn’t had an English class since 2001, this was a hefty undertaking. This feeling was increased since, on more than one occasion, I disagreed with her suggestions. For example, she seems to prefer third-person writing to first-person without question.

“In today’s culture of confession, many writers prefer the first-person point of view. Unabashed subjectivity may be fine for ever-popular memoirs on incest and inside-the-Beltway intrigue, but the third-person point of view remains the standard in news reporting and writing that aims to inform, because it keeps the focus off the writer and on the subject” (p. 36).

She’s correct about focus, but some of the greatest literature — especially in American history — has been told from the first-person view: The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, The Sun Also Rises, etc. Plus (as if I haven’t already made this clear), the authors that got me to write were all using first-person: Kerouac, Thompson, Miller. I would even go so far as to suggest that third-person writing is a way of hiding behind other characters, instead of facing the story head-on. Or maybe I just can’t understand the concept of omnipotence, or pretending to know what dozens of characters are thinking and feeling, let alone saying out loud.

Hale progresses through three parts: Words, Sentences, and Music. Each subsection (i.e. – Nouns) features both Cardinal Sins (what to avoid at all costs) and Carnal Pleasures (what to work hard at developing). One of her Cardinal Sins is the way that journalism copy editors remove interjections (short words or phrases intended for strong effect more than meaning), leaving the writing stale and sterilized.

How she omits Kerouac — one of the most poetic prose writers of all time, who infused jazz into his words in amazing ways — from the Music section is beyond me. But regardless of my opposition, the book is still worth reading.

After devouring Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (a book I have not yet read), Thompson was on fire with the concept of individuality. In a letter dated 10/24/57—when he was only 20 years old—he wrote the following:

“Although I don’t feel that it’s at all necessary to tell you how I feel about the principle of individuality, I know that I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life expressing it in one way or another, and I think that I’ll accomplish more by expressing it on the keys of a typewriter than by letting it express itself in sudden bursts of frustrated violence. [...]

“Certainly not independence in the everyday sense of the word, but pertaining to a freedom and mobility of thought that few people are able—or even have the courage—to achieve. [...]

“Keep in mind that the ability to create is an integral part of the makeup of man. If a lack is encountered, it lies not in the ability, but in the scope of perception of one’s own creative ability” (pp. 69-70).

Thomspon was at a stage where he started to work out a balance between ideals and reality, between thinking and action. He was starting to see that creativity is one path to fulfilling the human desire for personal achievement. To a certain lot it even seems like the best path, which was something on my mind when I coined the new slogan “Freedom Is Expression.” After all, the word “create” can be applied to many different things, and is more often connected with physical or architectural projects than intellectual or artistic ones. Think of all the skyscrapers and pyramids and monuments that humans have built throughout the centuries. These can be referred to as “sublimations,” or the outward expression of our subconscious drives (I will return to this concept in further posts).

I’m starting to feel very strongly that creative works are the purest form of creation that doesn’t inherently involve equal or greater destruction. Now if you’re an environmentalist like me, you’re probably thinking, “But what about all the paper used by writers?!” Well, now we have digital compositions, and they are increasingly taking over for traditional paper-based publishing with the help of the Internet. The really difficult part is, once you get the urge to attain individuality through creative expression, you have to constantly battle the feeling that your efforts are futile; that you will never fully express yourself or what it means to be a human being; that you will never really be an individual, and your actions certainly won’t help people after one or two generations have passed; that you will die alone just as you were born alone, and immortality will be lost.

Okay, so I’ve taken that strain WAY off the deep end, mostly to make a point. Of course I don’t always feel that way. I do think it’s important to learn the complexities of this type of philosophical thinking. And Thompson would soon learn that thinking is useless without extremes of action—but to set rules for action based on the thinking process makes less sense than acting and then figuring out what it meant.

Reading these letters makes me slightly angry that I didn’t start reading consistently until the age of 21—but better late than never, even if I am five years behind Thompson in starting to understand these concepts. You can definitely look forward to more quotes from HST on this blog, so hopefully I haven’t crossed your comfort threshold yet.

The day I launched Supraterranean.com, someone wrote a post on the Facebook group to share his opinion. He runs an index of Facebook groups that are devoted to creative writing. He informed me that he is an expert on the subject of literary publication, since he’s editor for the North American Review at University of Northern Iowa. He is — as far as I can tell — a pathetic boob. (Correction: I don’t know him well enough to be certain that he is either pathetic or a boob. I was simply angry.)

In the post, he called the site “narcissistic and solipsistic.” The former was a complaint that I created almost all the content in issue #1. The latter was…well, I haven’t figured that one out yet. In one piece, I did say something about the possibility of time not existing. Does that mean I think nothing exists outside myself? Apparently the man thought it was more effective to chuck big words at people than to take a moment to explain what he really meant.

Here’s how I responded:

“If you read the ‘about us’ page, you’ll see that part of the inspiration behind Supraterranean was ‘to evade the pretentious nature of existing literary journals.’ Your academic high-mindedness and literary tyranny are exactly what I was trying to progress beyond. You take a huge leap in calling the first issue ‘narcissistic.’ I’ve only received three submissions so far, since site development just began in May (you’re welcome to submit…that is, if you can stoop to my standards). Another inspiration was that I hadn’t found a suitable outlet for my work that already exists (including journalism, if that makes you feel better). I think it was Henry Miller who said he’d rather build his own ladder than waste his time climbing someone else’s. (Correction: It was Hunter S. Thompson who said this, in a letter from 1/26/58 printed in his first volume of correspondence, The Proud Highway. The exact quote: “I find that I’d rather build my own figurative ladder than start at the bottom rung of the existing one.”) Well, I just created a customizable ladder for everyone who hates yours. Now I see the real reason you keep the index of creative writing groups — you’re trying to preside over them. Thank you for your consideration, but you can go to hell.”

I will welcome two descriptors: stubborn and sarcastic.

It’s been very difficult for me to explain what I want this web site to be. I regret even calling it a literary journal and I may change the slogan. (Correction: Today, 7/2, I changed the slogan to “Freedom is Expression.” Please comment or email admin@supraterranean.com and tell me what you think.) There’s no single term or concept for what it can become. It’s more of an artistic and creative community on the web than an actual publication. However, since anything posted on the web is now considered “published,” it will be impossible to avoid that tag. Since the site was imagined as something that can not be easily categorized, it made me extremely angry to see someone from a traditional literary journal try to do so.

If you read one thing on the website, please make it the “About Us” page, especially the Mission Statement and Goals. I am not going to be choosing what is placed on the website. My role will be more moderator than editor. I will rant on this blog and post my own creations on the site, but eventually I hope that my content is the minority of what appears there. That’s where you come in. Email your submissions to submit@supraterranean.com today, and let’s get this revolution on its way.

I recently finished Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. I feel that it was the missing link in my literary inspirations, particularly as a precursor to Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson. On one hand, I can’t believe that I didn’t hear about Miller until 2008. On the other hand, I can understand why he would be misunderstood and looked over by many modern readers.

One section towards the end of the book seemed especially useful for Supraterranean.com.

“What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when the night presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns? What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fang-whorl and star cluster” (p. 250).

Most things that seem huge and scary to us are really, in the grand scope of the universe, minuscule and unimportant. We should lead humble lives, strive toward rediscovering our collective past, and work together to uncover our greater destiny.

Miller understood this, and that’s why he’s one of my new favorite authors. He was one of the most unique minds I’ve ever encountered. And exposing the contents and capabilities of unique minds is what we’re all about here at Supraterranean.com! What’s inside of yours?