Writer's Diary
5/14/26
Reading is split into reading and situation monitoring. There’s deep reading, and there’s scanning, gathering, commenting. Books or scrolls.
I think the middle tier—long-form essays, magazines, newspapers—are very far on their way to becoming either irrelevant or subsumed by one of these two broader categories. (The middle tier, by the way, the 2,000-word essay, is also the easiest thing for AI to replicate.)
Write books or write schizo posts. And if you do write an essay, find a way to get it into a book. That way it might survive in time.1
Nietzsche writes, “Our pessimism, the world does not have the value we thought it had. Our faith is so increased, our desire for knowledge, that today we have to say this. Initial result, it seems, worth less. That is how it is experienced initially. It is only in this sense that we are pessimists, i.e. in our determination to admit this re-evaluation to ourselves without any reservation, and to stop telling ourselves tales, lies, the old way. This is precisely how we find the pathos that impels us to seek new values and to grow from the will to power.”
In the arts you can tell when someone is not interested in the threshold between okayness and greatness, when they would like to have a career versus when they would like to initiate some kind of profound inner and external change that initiates a harmonious relationship with life itself—and to root out existential weakness in themselves in order to become artists in the ontological sense of the word. Primal makers.
Sometimes I feel like I vacillate between the calmness of strength, non-reaction, and the calmness of exhaustion, the calmness of being ground down and turned into a nervous husk. It’s like I have two modes, two selves at least.
Tuesday night The Punisher reading felt like launch of Dimes Square season five (or episode 2 maybe if you went to the On the Rag reading, which I didn’t).