It Ain't War Out There

When I look out my window, there's no war in the streets. No one's running around waving rifles or machetes. There's no bloody rubble or burned-out cars. There's no explosions or smoke in the sky. I can go outside any time I want.

How lucky are we who live peacefully.

But what should we do, enjoy the spoils and get comfy?

The thing about war is that we know that it's coming. If we can learn one thing from history it's that war is inevitable. Peace is a mere pause between battles. Peace is the in-breath. War is the out.

We are no different. That's what we should assume.

So what should we do?

Prepare. And I don't mean dig a shipping container into your yard and fill it full of beans and semi-automatics, you freaks.

Arm yourself with ideas. They're the real armor, the real defense against war.

Lack of good ideas precipitates and exacerbates war. Let's make the next war as painless as possible.

You in?

Love,

Ben

Fuck Lit Fic

Lit fic, or literary fiction, is the reason no one likes reading anymore. Apart from a few nerds who dig ruffles and skirts and glances across the parlor, no one reads books anymore cause they all suck.

We can trace the origins all the way back to Modernism. Or further back, all the way to the first Sumerian dude or dudette who put chisel to stone and tapped out his or her thoughts five thousand years ago.

Writers got super into depicting the 'true' experience of being a human, what it is like to be alive. And they got really good at it. An Englishwoman called Virginia Woolf and and Irishman called James Joyce got really good at depicting existence, but it nearly killed them. Virginia Woolf ended up filling her pockets with stones and walking into a river. But they wrote some dope ass books where they're trying to show what it's like to be in your head, going through your regular day.

That was in the 1920s. A couple decades later, an American guy called Ernest Hemingway was killing it with his seemingly simple writing about hunting, fishing, bullfighting, war, drinking, fighting and fucking.

His writing looks simple. He doesn't use many descriptive words and uses lots of short sentences. His dialogue is killer, and his way of describing things made it seem like you were watching a movie in your head. He had a crazy skill of choosing the exact right word to make a clear picture in your imagination.

These were the main ideas to come out of writing in the 20^th century, and they were awesome. They were such good ideas that people haven't felt like they needed to find any new ones since. Describing what it's like to exist in the real world is a pretty worthwhile goal, ain't it?

No.

It's been done. You see, those names I dropped, Woolf, Joyce, Hemingway, are not only the creators of the biggest styles in the last hundred years, but they also did it the best.

Every writer since is writing in the shadow of these giants. Everyone's imitating them, and some come close while others miss by a mile, but they're all following in someone else's footsteps.

Fuck that.

Fuck Literary Fiction.

Let's find something new.

Love,

Ben