Date:         Sat, 22 Feb 2003 22:50:41 -0500
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@PANIX.COM>
Subject: BOASTS AND SHAMES
To: WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA

BOASTS AND SHAMES


i am one of the best writers in the world. i am working on an entirely new
mode of writing. my writing is the most intense in the world. it is a com-
pletely new direction for political discourse. it will be years before i
am recognized.  long after i am dead my writing will be read. new audien-
ces will discover new ways of reading my work. my work is not recognized
as poetry, fiction, non-fiction, net-art, non-fiction, or codework. i am
not recognized as the last romantic or the first harbinger of the future
of all culture. i will be recognized as all of these. scholars will search
through net archives, print sources, remnants of film, video, recordings,
for the slightest trace of my work. my work will be attributed to others.
there will be academic journals devoted to my work, and reputations will
rise and fall based on competing hypotheses. my works will be searched for
clues of identity, madness, influence, primogeniture. and i am ashamed of
this. i am ashamed for my contemporaries who find me arrogant, crazy,
dismissive, depressive, hysteric, obscene, furious, a nuisance, a pest,
useless, demanding, hyperbolic, obsessive, full of myself, elitist, vile -
a bad writer, a writer with too much writing - a non-writer - a videomaker
with too much video, filmmaker with too much film - an obscene organist, a
manic fake... i am ashamed for myself, who can only plead guilty to these
charges, these horrendous accusations. i am ashamed for our country, which
refuses me the honors i deserve. my work is subject to misunderstanding;
it requires patience that no one has and no one wants to give. i am
ashamed that i will no longer be alive when, in the troubling and far-
distant future, my work is rediscovered, for its insights, genius, range,
and all-encompassing worlds of philosophy, psychology, literature, and
fields not yet discovered. and i am ashamed that i must admit to this
truth, still so early in my career.


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