Manifestos are dangerous

First: thanks to everyone who still comes here and reads and comments. I’m really grateful for all of you even if I haven’t been able to show it consistently in the last eighteen months.

The actual topic: I’ve been thinking for months, really, about if and what I want to be blogging. This post is probably most owing to a comment SueBC made here and my thoughts about a response. Why don’t I blog that way anymore? This is a very abbreviated form of what I’ve been thinking about. (Hopefully it’s also as neutral as I can make it, insofar as the point isn’t to anger anyone.) The danger is first that I articulate all this stuff and somehow still can’t find the time and energy to blog, and then second, that I don’t live up to what I’m saying here. But nonetheless, this piece seems to belong here now.

1. I am drastically out of synch with most of the fandom as I perceive it (at least the Armitage-oriented pieces of it – I don’t experience issues with the stuff that occurs apart from that).

1a. There are some discussions I am no longer willing to participate in, in the form in which they repeat themselves year after year. I have said all I have to say about certain topics, in some cases long ago. It seems pedantic either to repeat myself or to link to things I wrote years earlier, particularly if I’m not interested in continuing or developing the discussion.

1b. There are things I’d like to discuss but don’t (for reasons like not having time to articulate a point, fear of being misunderstood or creating anger, thinking I am the only one who cares anyway).

2. The more active conversations occur on Twitter, but apart from private conversations, I have grown to view Twitter as largely a vile soup of marketing, kitsch and aggravation. (Two months spent largely away from it have revealed to me just how paralyzed as a writer multiple exposures daily were making me feel.)

2a. Richard Armitage is not doing himself any favors with his social media. While I seem to have survived the realization of my worst fears about him, Twitter has given rise to a new one: the possibility that Armitage is frighteningly conventional. I think this is not so much a product of Armitage himself as it is of the medium, which itself seems to push participants in the direction of increasingly conventional, unnuanced expression, perhaps because so little can be said (see point 2).

3. The process of following Armitage news is increasingly one of consuming and responding marketing, as there is practically no actual news.

4. At the same time, there’s so little quality work on the horizon that the surfeit of marketing means all discussion more or less amounts to the production of even more marketing (“buzz”), something for which I’ve expressed my distaste many times. The level of discourse spirals to the bottom (see point 2). As someone said to me recently, as a fandom, we used to have a lot of creativity and periodic disagreement. My own take in response: in the face of fear of (or fatigue due to) disagreement, we have primarily “safe” creativity and almost no discussion around it. This is as much my fault as anyone else’s.

5. And as fodder for a more creative discourse goes, I’m weary of consuming bad art and explaining why it’s bad. (At least when I grade, someone pays me for it, and there’s the hope that someone might be listening.) This difficulty is particularly acute for me in terms of Armitage’s audiobooks. (Add to that the fact that Amazon is clearly an unethical, abusive employer and my feeling that giving money to Audible is putting my wages in the hands of thieves only increases.) Of (I believe) seventeen audiobooks in the last two years, in my opinion, only two (or perhaps three) projects were worth doing artistically, and one (maybe two) of these I can’t access in any format that’s really convenient for me. I can’t bring myself to spend any more time on my reactions to the Joy Ellis novels (poor quality) or Armitage’s reading of them (big misstep, imo). The badness of much of Berlin Station did have a certain humor quotient, but it became ever smaller as time went on and the show became more frustrating. There are also the increasingly hard-to-see movies that may be worthwhile but just aren’t available without significant effort and/or to most fans (Urban & the Shed Crew; The Lodge; My Zoe; Arden’s Wake; the Korean project). And I hate feeling like Armitage’s projects aren’t worth my time, money or attention.

5a. The project most likely to be artistically significant this year is yet again something with restricted access, determined by fans’ abilities to make the trip to London.

6. There isn’t going to be another actor for me after Richard Armitage (or at least it doesn’t look like it now). KellyDS wrote an excellent description of how celebrity fangirling works for her that I find exemplary, and I think will make a lot of people nod, but that even as I read it, made me think, this is not the path I am on.

6a. In fact, I think I’ve already had / am having my post-Armitage crush, generated by the movie, Rocketman. But it’s not a crush on Elton John, just as the Armitage infatuation was only tangentially about Armitage.

7. The continued observation of the news / marketing stream (“Richard Armitage tangentially related”) has become odious to me. In addition to my lengthily articulated views about the destructiveness of focusing on marketing, this development may be occurring because Armitage is no longer an “organizing hunger” for me (referencing a paragraph below from an excellent recent novel, Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts):

Despite (8),

9. I continue to appreciate and be provoked and stimulated by Armitage’s work, when the project is worth my time. The artistic crush is still alive, despite the flood of mediocre projects of the last years.

10. I continue to be interested in Armitage the person and the way that he makes his creativity work. The personal crush is still alive, despite the haze that social media have blown over it.

11. I still have an active fantasy life as relates to both the actor and the characters and as my reaction to SueBC’s recent post reminded me, I don’t see them as substitutes for each other. They are intertwined in my mind.

12. I am still immersed in various pieces of Armitage-related fan fiction.

13. In the current season of my life I have practically no time at all for creativity outside the classroom, but all the non-educational creative impulses I have had recently were owing to some aspect of my Armitage infatuation.

14. The initial purpose of the blog, when I thought I was writing for myself, to clarify my reactions, and for a very few other people, was self-exploration. That rationale persisted for a long time, but I practically never write posts like that any more. I know why I don’t write them. I wouldn’t say the reasons don’t matter — because they have almost silenced me — but it’s not worth enumerating them here. I need to change. if I am to continue blogging I need to go back to that level of curiosity, honesty, and openness, cultivating it in myself and to the extent that there continue to be readers here, in the audience as well.

Be it therefore resolved:

In future, I will try:

–to blog only “news” (or marketing) that interests me for some reason and to stop absorbing the various ill humors exuded by social media;

–to return to the theme of my Armitage crush as the opportunity for fantasy as a source of creativity, and critical analysis as a source of self-exploration and self-understanding;

–not to waste my time (or feelings of obligation) on responding to projects that don’t give me anything;

–to post only about things I feel strongly about, and to write about them only honestly.

[If you read all this: thanks for reading.]

~ by Servetus on November 8, 2019.