I Do Not Act Locally

Most of my friends here do not know I edit a communist magazine. When I planned the tour in August I did not consider a tour stop in Lexington because I did not want to explain it to my friends. I feel like they will find out about the journal on their own or they won’t. I feel like someone I know finding out about the journal and talking to me about it – while they do not know I am the editor – would be magical and amazing and worth not telling people about it. I feel like the chances of that happening are very small.

I do not believe in the slogan “think globally, act locally” or the slogan “think locally, act globally”. Sometimes I believe in the slogan “think, don’t act”. Sometimes I believe in the slogan “don’t think, don’t act”. I am usually unsure about the question of consciousness until I remind myself that my life exists on a different level of organization than society and that my beliefs or lack of beliefs have no impact on society because they have no impact on how people make a living.

I think that we should (by we I mean only myself of course) decide that we are only doing this stuff for ourselves. That we are doing it in order to explore stuff. That we want to write it down in case it is useful or interesting or annoying to anyone else, and because we like writing our thoughts down. Mainly because we like writing our thoughts down. That we do not care one iota about what people think of us. And we refuse to be co-opted by any political tendency or capitalist grouping.

I care a few iotas about what people think of me. I want the people I share my journal with to like it. I want them to be ‘impressed’ by how nice it looks and how good the writing is, even if they disagree with the content. I fantasize about someone relatively ‘important’, like Moishe Postone, reading the journal and disagreeing with it. I fantasize about not working anymore when an old, wealthy art lover gives me money to publish things. I realize these fantasies are probably not going to happen.

I decided to print 1000 copies of Letters #4 because I felt like it was really good and 1000 people might like it. I worry only 100 people will buy it, and Little Black Cart will have 900 copies forever and be annoyed with me. For Letters #5 I want to print it as a hardcover flip-book and publish a collection of Hungarian fiction as the literary supplement. I imagine people finding this beautiful hardcover book and thinking “what is this thing, why haven’t I heard of this before?”

I made a Wikipedia page for the journal to make it easier to find. I get frustrated when I hear about a thing and cannot find it on Wikipedia or Amazon.com, and I don’t want someone who hears about Letters Journal to be disappointed. I don’t know how to put the journal on Amazon.com, but maybe it is better that it is not there. I think a lot of people I know buy things on Amazon.com but nobody ever talks about it or admits it because we all want to pretend we ‘refuse to be consumers’ even though we all moved on from activism at least a year ago and know that actually Amazon.com is the same as every other business, albeit with better prices for new hardcover books.

11 September

The end is a night fire.

It is another May night, because May never ends. Here is a street that should be dark. In a gust of light the cement of the street can be seen to be new and rough. Some of the homes do not yet have lawns. All the trees are young and thin and supported by networks of ropes and stakes. They flicker and whip in the wind of light.

The wind is a wind of hot sparks. The sparks rise and whirl and die in the shrouds of light they make. At the end of the street sighs a burning home. The home looks the same as every other home on the street. It is on fire.

The tour last month was a success because we showed up to every single tour date and had an audience. We talked to the audience and painted with the audience, and throughout the entire event we did not offer a single practical proposal.

Now I sit in front of my computer and think “this is 9/12, this is it, I can’t believe I’m putting this on the internet, what is going to happen now”.