Catharsis

Today, I'm hoping to have the chance to finish up a few postings I started but never completed. This one's a mixture of vagaries and vagrancy attempting to explain how I do.

What we're experiencing right now is the synergy, the synthesis, the syndication, the syntax, the symphony, the single most important part of why I do this, and that is you reading this. I write to cleanse. I write many, many things--strange, peculiar, arcane, bizarre, goofy things. Some of it's hyper-intellectual, some hypo-analytical, and some hippopotamus. My need to write comes from a larger need to empty my stress, the overflow of ideas, the excess energy and anxiety of everyday and, and extraordinaryday life. And my tragedy is that I don't get a chance to do this enough--not because you all pine for my magnus opus that is this blog, but because I love writing and this is one of the ways I drive myself to keep it up.

So if you want to help me keep writing, when you read this or any other postings and find them interesting or dumb or insightful or barely coherent, let me know that you've been reading and what you think. It will help me grow, and it will add to the entertainment factor of what you'll be getting out of this.

I've always wanted to have a story that captures my philosophies and thoughts and is relevant to others. I think that's what many writers want, so in a way, until I have that story, this is my way of staying fit, of keeping in shape prosaically and intellectually. Between work and school, I write hundreds of pages in a year. With emails and IM and all these other written forms of communication, I spend most of those pages writing in a style that its audience demands--making me something of a chameleon with a typewriter. Here I can empty all of that out in steady prose, to help me remember how I write, to an unsure but present audience who are looking for something to read.

So this is my ritual of purification to prepare to write that short story, novella or novel, because you all put me in the right frame of mind. I'm trying to entertain and stimulate. And today, I'm asking you why you read. I tell you why I write here, and I'll be the first to tell you why I read:

To expand.

My ideas.
My perspective.
My vocabulary.
My sense of style.
My musical choices.
My sense of self.

but also

To participate (to vote, really) in the intellectual republic that exists.

I find reading to be one of the most powerful decisions a person can make in defining his/her generation. The books we choose to read, the blogs we choose to read, the newspapers we choose to read, only find relevance in their audience. A man named Pablo Picasso could have placed his artwork in a basement, where they perished in a fire 40 years after his death, and he would not have impacted art, politics or the development of Spanish and global culture. Alternatively, art critics, patrons, students, museum-goers could have let his works fade through their indifference towards them. Instead, they discussed, explored, sought out, tried to learn more about him and his work. They wanted more of him, and they elevated him to the seminal role in the 20th century artscape, politiscape, and general culture landscape that he owns.

And you would think that this powerful and important position that you and I, as readers, have, would inspire respect in artists. For some it has. For some it has guided their work to the point where it is defectively designed--certain to appeal to a certain audience, yet having no lasting power, no deeper purpose than pure entertainment. In the music industry, where a form of art, in the pop scene has been relegated to pure entertainment, you've seen a backlash to this particularly in some areas of hiphop. It's rather stunning to see that this backlash has created continued success for hiphop. Some artists have produced a carefully-cultivated, progressively-insulting disrespect for the listener. In an atmosphere of consumption, Jay-Z says "you're only a customer." Eminem was one of the first to abuse his listener directly and his sales spiked. People seemed to think that they were in on the joke and that he was talking about everyone else, so because they got it, it couldn't possibly be directed at them. So more people wanted to be in on it, more people had to buy the albums to prove that they were. Strange phenomenon. As a result, hiphop has gone from shameless self-promotion to viciously abusive of the listener. I'm over-generalizing here and glossing over some of my favorite parts of hiphop, not to mention that I'm pointing at a specific cross-section of artists and not the entire genre, by any means--but it's present enough to merit consideration here.

So it's important to also recognize in our role as listener, reader, viewer, audience, that we can be consumers, but we can also be active members in shaping the art and culture of our generation. Especially in the internet age where voices and exposure have increased exponentially.

Or we can leave it to a bunch of critics, editors, publishers, record labels and curators in their ivory (or green) towers.

I write to cleanse and participate and practice for when I have something really important to say. Why do you read?