Notes

4:50

Reading requires empathy. Black marks on a page, looked at and processed into the mind's eager functions, produce images and sense. Reading, the most important thing to have happened in history and humanity, has saved humanity from oblivion. When a mind wishes to say something, the complex activities involved aren't unlike sneezing or being alarmed by a loud sound. The mind chases down the seconds to get the thought down in words or image and after, relief and sustained applause. To construct a world out of many pieces of writing, and to find the empathy to read a piece through to the end, is something, if we lost it, that would change the chemistry of humanity in the worst way. Listening would change, as would love. Empathy would change.

By rejecting a piece of writing, or a collection of pieces, the reader intends to say, "I have not found a reason to apply myself to the empathy this text made me feel." The nature of rejection is to throw a text against the wall with disdain. This response, an active jolt of feeling against a text, is all the more reason to publish it. All rejection, less rejections involving a letter or conversation about the text's weaknesses, effaces humanity's most valuable and cherished empathy. Bitter rejection, angered rejection, should fuel the desire seek out who would read and enjoy what you have found absolutely horrible. To understand a rejection not inclusive of response, comment, and dignified critique, one must build a wall protecting themselves from rejection and embrace or absorb the response as nothing. No=nothing, not: No=poor, or fail. For years the publishing industry and its second and third tiers have used simple notes for manuscript rejection. Their responses, figured by returns in the higher tier, and figured on whatever in the second and third tiers, for written word implies a lack of empathy. Rejection, and the numbers it has affected, has changed the idea of and approach to writing. The writer is asked to swallow rejection as a part of the process of publication.

4:55
When the first book, story, poem, or article goes out to be read and rejected or accepted, the writer can give themselves room from acceptance and rejection; allowing rejection to reflect the editor's needs for an issue, or publishing house, and not their dissatisfaction with your text, or regret for being part of the same species as you; and giving acceptance space to provide the artist with continued self criticism rather than the 'I AM GOD' feeling one wants to have for a moment. The writer is allowed, then, some creative room to move on to the next piece without feeling waterlogged from tears of joy or misery. A safe distance from publishing keeps...and I don't know here where to continue.

5:10
After a first failure, we're not expected by industry to produce anything more. We're actually expected to slough off and be replaced by some younger, newer, brighter, and more attractive plastic to market. After a success, we're asked to produce something to reach more minds, more readers, listeners, viewers. We're to popularize our texts, songs, canvases, and relinquish any part of ourselves intent on keeping artistic integrity. Personally, I don't understand what artistic integrity is. To completely violate it in order to produce seems fit and fine to me. The more violating needed and done, the better the work? Violate away. But, saving what you have of a soul, if you turn away from producers, editors, and agents, and disregard all, ignore the great explosion of your first success, and complete a second work, with only that work's quality in mind, you will produce. That's it. You will produce.

To produce after success and failure. Then of course you must push the damn product around like you pushed the first, and third if it's the second that's behind you.

All I've been thinking of lately, because of rejection, is that education needs to pick up the slack of the publishing community and produce readers. If it produces writers, that's fine, but they must be inherently readers and voracious ones, to tighten the rope.

7:20
Reading is a more creative endeavor than any other medium. We are required a certain value and type of empathy. Telling anyone who doesn't read why it is important is hard for a reason. It is an extremely complex benefit to the mind and health. Well, they'll say, I get that by watching television. I say, sure, you get some things, but television is too perfect a medium to require any worthwhile interaction. It's actually so well done, and so highly processed for the mind that we're near sleeping when we view it. The energy required is less than REM sleep. So, what are we to tell non-readers? Reading words is important because the reading of texts is actually tiring and difficult, and because the writing of words is imperfect as a medium we take part in their sense, their meaning, their composition, and in a way we're providing the text with the benefit of a highly complex machine as its participant. I'm not saying, as Saussure or Derrida, that printed word and story are our readerly creations, but we partake and witness a building of text and language and we're required some hoisting and pushing here and there to get all the way there. A writer can make a decision about their text where the reader should not. The writer decides what is included and what isn't included. What we're to take from this rule is that the reader reads what the writer includes and not what the writer excludes. This is not the case, or shouldn't be. A reader should take into their bossom the possible text. I'm not the first to say this. I'm no the author of such simple ideas. But, I'm putting them here, out of my way, to interest myself in them later when I'm at the task of looking back.