rambling is the new morality: a format change
On Rambling
Logorrhea is the great social disease of loneliness, boredom, and experience. I'll come back to that last category. First, though, I only call rambling a disease because I'm afflicted by other people's logorrhea, and also because it seems to group itself and create types of anyone it infects. "Infects"—such inflammatory language! I can't help it. I work at a public desk in a public library and our great and beautiful work is often listening to the exact details of a patron's ongoing feud with his sister, his landlord, his mechanic, his life, the universe, his time as a cowboy, his pre-teen years in a gang, and politics, politics, politics. Politics crammed into a small, petty, understandable (petty is personal) list of specific grudges and attendant disbelief at certain trends. The dialogic turned monologic from years of life wearing away one's ears and leaving only the mouth. The monologic as a reaffirmation of self, the internal constantly seeking and giving its own proof of life through external neurosis. I talk, therefore, I am.
Ramblers are the best evidence for medium as constituent of content, and for the paradoxical and obvious conclusion that content matters. Ramblers are rich, poor, educated, simple, conservative, progressive, scientific, literary, and probably a few are even mathematical. Certainly the engineer-ramblers. Beware your neighbor's shirt pocket and its telling number of pens and perfectly-fit notepads. Ramblers bleed together in the sense that my conversation with them is the same, their urge to share warping whatever is being shared until the only content of the conversation is a power struggle between my desire to be rude and awful and slightly less human and their desire to keep me listening. When I do listen, though, I hear how meaningful are the specifics of everyone's life from the inside. The rambling dilutes and reveals this insight in equal measure.
Personally, I find that I'm less filtered as I age. Experience is a wave that beats against the mind. I'm worn less specific, my many roles colluding to round my stubborn, craggy individuation. But the more I am worn and annexed by the duties and survival so basic they're nearly everyone's duties and survival, the difference between myself and the world is thinned. I'm speaking very personally here. I'm not claiming all hurts are the same hurt or all survival the same survival. I'm saying that I can feel myself typed by life, but typed in ways that open me to others even as vanity and self-concern bubble over into unnecessary self-expression.
I wish I had a bigger point to make, but that's not the rambler's goal. To finish is the rambler's enemy. No one wants to die.
Ramblers, as you can tell, are insufferable. This newsletter will now be my rambling. I'll still include links I'm thinking about now and then, probably, and maybe post what I'm reading or enjoying or anything else I want. It's my newsletter and I'm unreliable. But I think short, various-toned, not-essays are the new order of the day. May God grant you the mercy to unsubscribe.
Reading: Like Life, by Lorrie Moore; In Defense of Sanity, by G.K. Chesterton; The World to Come, by Dara Horn; Collected Tales, by Nikolai Gogol; The Biplane Houses, Les Murray (but also anything else I can get online right now. RIP to one of the greatest.)
I'm not usually juggling this many books, but with short stories and essays and poetry it's easier to bounce around.
Podcast: The Big Read (!!)
Bill and I just posted our latest Big Read podcast about N.K. Jemisin's The Obelisk Gate. We open with an opinion on Francis Spufford's unauthorized and unreleased Narnia book.
Miscellaneous: This ending to Les Murray's poem about his father dying is an all-timer (and crass; sorry, Mom!). It will 100% be an epigraph for a book of mine, should I be so lucky:
Snobs mind us off religion
nowadays, if they can.
Fuck thém. I wish you God.
I wish him God, as well.