Year One

The Thistle is a year old today. Honestly, it feels like a second birthday. I thought it would be a good opportunity to write about the newsletter itself, and what a blog means to me.

Blogs are wide-ranging essays. Unedited, unfiltered, blogging is one of the freest forms of writing. Some of the writers I admire most, like Ursula Le Guin and José Saramago, had blogs of their own. (Saramago opened his Otros Cuadernos when he was eighty years old). Cory Doctorow — who’s blogged almost every day for two decades now — notes that while in other forms of publishing an editor corrects, chooses, and assembles texts for a reader, in blogs readers function as editors. The writer offers a range of posts, and the reader curates what they would like to read.

It’s safe to say Cory Doctorow is addicted to blogging, but addicted in Richard Seymour’s sense of the word in his book The Twittering Machine. Seymour writes that the word addiction comes from the Latin addicere, in the mid XVI century used to denote the state of being devoted or dedicated to something. Addiction, of course, has its darker meaning (and blogs certainly play a major role in digital addictions), but in this other sense, it means how someone offers their lives to something they fervently believe in. In this case, it’s the idea of the internet as a democratic and plural space, and its role as our information commons.

Part of the goal of Doctorow’s Pluralistic is sublation and synthesis. His posts are seeds for his books, fiction and non-fiction alike. I find that for me, it’s the opposite. The posts are detritus that falls and collects from pursuing larger writings.

I’ve never shared the sentiment of a democratic internet. The internet from its origins as ARPANET was born as a surveillance network, not a means of science (like Werner Herzog purports in his documentary Reveries of the Connected World) or democratic expression. If blogs played a major role in, say, the Arab Spring (see Antony Loewenstein’s book The Blogging Revolution) then it’s because of the tenacity and adaptability of writers even within a surveillance network. In turn, the network responded with the Big Tech we see today.

Personally, I don’t think I participate in anything with my posts. I write because of the topics themselves, which are very valuable to me. Writing is curiosity, and The Thistle allows me to be curious about anything I like. Blogs are the perfect evolution of the essay. Essay comes from the French assay, which means trial. To try over and over, to essay ourselves through words: exploring, sculpting, growing. Essays are journeys of articulation, stones paving a road.

I set out to write in a style deliberately as different from corporate media as possible. The New York War Crimes is a stain on a literature, preaching a simple, concise form of writing — that wretched Hemingway style that tries to emulate the Bible! — to provide an illusion of truth and, worse, civility.

I wanted an ornate style that weaves fictional storytelling with the material world because I believe our age is truly endowed with mythological proportions. Our time is unique in the monumental scope of its transmutation. We are in a moment in history never seen before. For as long as humans have been around, there has been a frozen Arctic. The Atlantic current is not just slowing – it’s vanishing.

As such I really want to convey how terrifying but also how astonishing, how cosmic being alive right now really is. I think that a truly wretched aspect of capitalism is how it makes one feel like nothing, like our lives are boring, mundane, useless work days. In reality, we are creatures tasked with the entire collective memory of our species, and we may choose whether to be arsonists for the planet, or have a crack at making the glorious opposite.

The past year has been epochal. Palestine continues to endure the unspeakable, the unashamed brutality of imperialism and colonialism. The Monroe Doctrine is renewed. Giants like David Lynch and Mario Vargas Llosa have passed. Renewable energies flourish, as do new fossil fuel projects. Cinema as we knew it is gone. Human rights movements continue to find new forms of solidarity even amid the rise of far-right nationalism. Extraordinary literature is being written everywhere, and bursts from the constraints of the dominant system like flowers from concrete.

All of this to say, thank you to all readers, whether you are email subscribers, RSS feeds, or happen to come upon the little thistle on your journey. I don’t track anyone, so I can’t know how many people read my blog, but each and every one is more precious than gold to me. Thank you for opening your inbox to these virtual letters. Thank you for putting up with my digressions, my disregard for commas in favor of em dashes, and my terrible overuse of italics. From the bottom of my heart: Thank you.

PS: as I dive into longer projects, I may be posting more sporadically. A short story decided to become a novel not too long ago. I also hope I will have new fiction to share with you very soon.