really earnest

I started this little thing, what I’d rather call a ‘literary output’ than a ‘blog’, with the intention to subvert. Not that I’m some kind of activist. I’m not particularly the type to act clever, much less the type to be clever, but I do, as I suspect most writers do, see myself as both agent of and subject to change. Writing is fundamentally about change and it is fundamentally about time. There exists no story, by which I mean any kind of fiction/nonfiction/poetic narrative, in vacuum just as there exists no permanence outside of vacuum. We must accept the subjective world as one without a permanent mode of stasis. Nature favors chaos over equilibrium. Artists, including writers, undo knots in the tangled thread of truth just as they create new ones. ‘Reality’, a paradoxical word that questions itself (Should we consider the prospect of ‘reality’ real or surreal?), is enhanced by its infinitely supplemental and differential structure. Its truths have no center. Arbitrariness rules and subjectivity follows. What comes out of all this postmodern theorizing is an abstract form of art aiming to surprise. In this way, “subversive” and “art” work well together.

If we agree that postmodernism died on 9/11, what follows? We live an age described in variables, weave through arbitrary generations of unknowns (X, Y, Z) trying to define our existence as a coordinate in time and space. We contradict the idea that such a permanent point may not exist. Two towers collapsing, driving a casualty counter up in ‘real time’, convinced us of this, drove the final nail into the postmodern coffin. Surprise is no longer subversion, but terrorism; subversion comes only as a brand of deceit. We have come to favor seriousness and sincerity. We have become earnest. It is an Age of Irony, then, which we construct (just ask a hipster), and under this circumstance my original purpose with this literary output turns silly at best and offensive at worst. I don’t actually believe in purpose in any case, so screw it.

But my friend Molly is clever in a way that I am not. We were both wanting to do something with our mutual interest—at-times-obsession—with literature and art that validated our vocational, academic, and personal dedication to the notion that whatever ‘truth’ is can be at least approximated in the arts. I came up with one of my typically catastrophic, over-enthusiastic ambitions and suggested the start of a creative collective. Molly provided an innocuously subversive title and, with it, a philosophy. We are really earnest.