I must say, at the risk of exposing some sort of reactionary longing for the past, I truly do regret being born too late to enjoy old-style Gentlemens’ Clubs and Smoking Rooms. The whole bourgeois idea is very attractive to me and I wonder where they all went nowadays. Whatever happened to the Liberal Club and the Reform Club, I wonder? Not that my politics are particularly fond of either one of those words.
I find the notion of the old early 20th Century Gentlemens’ Clubs appealing. The idea of sitting around in a warmly-colored room dressed in a fancy smoking jacket, surrounded by fancy leather furniture, a full bar, poker playing and other men discussing economics and politics while smoking cigars and sipping brandy gives me a wonderful Victorian vibe. Imagine if I managed to start up a Communist Club with leather-bound works of Lenin and Stalin on the cherry-stained oak shelves. Imagine what stories could be told in places such as that that couldn’t be told in your average pub, not to mention we would have a fireplace and compare facial hair.
I propose starting up a new Communist Gentlemens’ Club. It will serve food, brandy, cigars and have all-leather furniture with a healthily-colored portrait of Lenin above the fire. It will be called “Gentlemen of the Red Flag.”
What do you say, chaps? Break out the humidors and let’s get it started!
Out of money already—simply amazing. Well by Jove old boy, you’ve really done it this time now, hadn’t you? You didn’t see the rent check coming, no? The utilities almost as much as the rent, they were. The aircon was a pretty penny. Damn these Atlanta summers! Now you’re back to borrowing from Peter to pay Paul once again! Well, enjoy it while you can, old bean, since all students end up in debt.
I have continued to live quietly and frugally in Atlanta, working by night, sleeping by day. I am a helpless prisoner in my own study/bedroom during the hot summer, and exist as a wanderer during the spring, autumn and winter months. Of course, this simple formulation is not to garner sympathy. My position as a writer/recluse does not exclude occasional trips out of state or out of country, nor meeting with friends and foreign correspondents. Apart from frequent so-called “vacation” trips to places such as New Orleans, I customarily travel to Maryland during the Christmas holidays and visit members of the “old gang” on excursions through my beloved Atlanta.
During an era of economic depression in which literary employment is increasingly precarious, the most I have managed to obtain is a vague promise of a spot on a literary presentation forum to present a research paper, a few essay contests and perhaps a small shot at an assistantship. Please note that while all of these adventures are worthwhile and will raise my prestige, none of them pay a single cent. Right now my only dependable source of income is a rapidly diminishing savings reserve.
Despite my slight recognition as both a political and, to a far lesser and more writers-blocked extent, a fiction writer, I have recently become exceptionally critical of my work to the point of paralysis in the field of fiction, all the while writing political tracts more easily than ever. I have the problem of thinking of my fiction and science fiction as too uncompromisingly noncommercial for popular lists, and yet unworthy for preservation as a serious, hardcore literary endeavor. When judged by historians of the new nanotech age, if some shadow of a scholar bothers to write a dissertation on my efforts, they will find my financial situation due to writing is desperately poor, an abject failure even by depression standards. Though, how could it be otherwise for an overtly ambitious yet unpublished writer who spends his time protesting the capitalist system and all its machinations?
Still, what a man does for a living is not the final measure of him. What he is, his essence, is everything. I never ask what a man I have just met does for a living, because it does not interest me. Some are offended, since I do not ask, and when told forget quickly. But the essence of someone—that is wealth that shall persist far beyond death, and it shall be the only wealth I have for many years.
So, in between my adventures within both the glistening ivory tower of reactionary academia and the allergy-tainted and customer-plagued chaos of the working retail, and in between attempting desperately to be present at political events and demonstrations to raise revolutionary consciousness and trying to write political pamphlets and science fiction while somewhere in between the cracks occasionally having fun and/or a social life, I will take on the task of keeping this blog updated within reason. The drive for this is not so much vanity, though this factor certainly has its place, nor is it some Utopian illusion about the impact of yet another unreadable and mediocre webblog floating around in the supreme echo chamber that is the Internet. No.
Rather it comes from a desperate attempt to defibrillate my own lacking inspiration and shake up the endlessly backed-up colon that is my mind, in a flailing project to win my private war with writer’s block, haunting me since 2008. It may work, it may not. We shall see, won’t we?
