Arrogance

I will say again for the umpteenth time that people are stupid. If you are stupid I say that you are not worthy of picking up a book by William Faulkner or anybody that does not write things the way that stupid people can understand them. Of course, having reread that sentence, I know how it sounds, the world is full of people that like to feel they are smart or important by dropping the names of authors they have read. I think they are stupid too. I don't do this to impress those of you who don't have an imagination, you are simply not worth impressing. You are not worth my attention, except to say that your ideas do not matter. I am not smart except in relation to you. I am a fucking ape except in relation to you. Arrogance is laughable and loathsome, except when it is a statement of truth.

Go back to stories with even sides that tell you all that you want to know on the page. Go back to things you can recognize and people you can understand only because you are like them. Read your stories with heroes, but leave the intangibles to me and my kind. Your brain is not expandable, my brain is not expandable, I don't know everything, but do not dismiss what I don't know as being not worth knowing. I do not dismiss James Joyce's Ulysses because I cannot be bothered to finish reading it.

If you have ever attended a writing workshop then you are not a writer. If you are not a genius then you are not a writer. All writers write what they want and are geniuses in their own heads and say fuck you to anyone who tells them that they are not. I am a god in my universe. I am a god on my pages. I am a master of my words. In the pieces that I write I invented the English language, I invented it's punctuation and all its dialects. Ideas you get at writer's conferences and the like are not yours, they are the offscouring of the minds of tedious, pretentious people.

Style your words, fools, imitate, worship, mock what you don't know, you melting pot of rednecks and dullwitted hicks with computers, then go back to your day jobs. Write for your own, to be recognized in your writing/reading groups, never see your own soul and never see what words can really do. Know, above all things, that all the writers you will never understand are better men and women than you can ever be. Selah.

Willam Faulkner

On William Faulkner, During World War I, after being turned down by the U.S. Army as too short, he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force instead, hoping to learn to fly planes, an abiding fascination. He returned to Mississippi pumped up with an English accent, some invented war stories (he had neither seen military action nor boarded a plane), and an affected limp. Har!

Read These:

Read These:Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow
Welcome to Hard Times by E.L. Doctorow
Chicago Loop by Paul Theroux
Black Sunday by Thomas Harris
Bluebeard By Kurt Vonnegut
Time's Arrow by Martin Amis
A House for Mister Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes

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Bitter, Naive Post, or no?

There is no hope out there. There are no really genuine people, niceness is just a facade, it's social lubrication, that's all. Everybody plays their games, the object of which is to use you, to manipulate, to turn your own loneliness against you. Humanity is just a collection of separate tracks to death. Everybody in their own little world, their own little places of suffering, not willing to reach out to anybody else, or pershaps not knowing how. Maybe there is no way to reach out. Maybe that is how you are and the only way to survive, or at least to survive and remain sane, is to use, to suck other people dry and leave them when you get all that you want. Maybe whoring is the true state of man.

Ali G, Jeff Foxworthy

Humor is a dividing line. In my mind there is a certain kind of person who likes Jeff Foxworthy, who thinks that his jokes are the very soul of wit. This is your AOL user, your stereotypical red-stater, your Average Joe, and the defter the sarcasm, the less interesting it is to him. There is also the person who gets Ali G, who appreciates the subtler nuance of mockery (no, it doesn't feel subtle if you don't get it). Not everyone can get irony, it is for those with sensitve hearing only, the inability to grasp it is like color blindness in a dog. See the dividing line in this flame war.