(pursuant to the continuing efforts to elucidate the notions of destructive writing and antihumor, here are more evasive descriptions, along with some select milestones in how i, oomph cavilrest, came to hold my cavils here, and also rest, at Hellmark Press excerpted from recent note to a mentor. we join it already in progress):
... I am shamed to admit that [career] does indeed occupy a lot of my attention.
Attention that would be better spent on family, friends, music, literature, food, coffee and tobacco! And often is so spent: One of the great benefits of being in a (semi)professional milieu where one may feel one has no status or significance, is that thoroughly embracing that statuslessness can give one a great deal of freedom, provided one can nurture enough ego through to enable one to exercise same.
Recently, in a fit of silly dejection over my professional trajectory, I started to blog. . .
. . . after a youth as the son of an early-adopter fascinated with computers, and through those heady days when networking became the Internet and all that it promised -- I am somewhat of a grudging, late-adopting Luddite insofar as social networking media and communications technology are concerned. I have endeavored to maintain no Internet footprint. In 2007 I got my first cell phone (pay-as-you-go); I just began my first contract with a mobile service one billing-cycle ago; I used dial-up to access the Internet until December 2010; also I joined Linked-In.
As a writer, over the course of almost 20 years, I have written a lot of stuff, a lot of fragmentary stuff (perhaps intended as part, or a sketch, of something larger), and a lot of different versions of the same stuff, without ever developing the will-to-publish sufficiently to impose some order and finitude on the collection. I even wrote a poem about it: [citation omitted: see another revisionary testament]
But, well, honest assessment concludes that no executor or -trix would have such interest and patience, and that those bundles of letters no longer exist.
So, a moment of mortality-colored realism with respect to the ol' oeuvre led me to imagine some server at some blog service somewhere -- and the internet archive -- as the place to commit all the revisions to one copy that would be, more or less, under my control, while sure to survive any catastrophic hardware or software failures here at home.
Also, as a writer-cum-snarky-absurdist-gadfly, I have been working on distressing found language in various ways, and then seeking numinous implication of meaning or beauty amidst the distressed text, which in aggregate I flippantly call "destructive (unsaid: as opposed to creative) writing" so that I don't sound naive. Sometimes someone asks me what destructive writing is, and I am hesitant to make conclusory statements about it, but don't mind sharing examples with the very patient interested party. One thing almost all destructive writing has in common is that it is hard to read.
(unlikely that any executor or -trix as imagined above would have any idea what to make of the various destructive writing projects in various stages of distress and numinousness there in the bequested drives).
Also there is a similar(ly absurdist) notion of "antihumor" that I am loath to explain, but I know it when I see it. I don't mind sharing illustrative examples, but have a hard time putting my hand to one. Old vaudeville tropes like "take my wife" and "boy are my arms tired" recontextualized and merged into shaggy-dog stories. ("Antihumor? I hardly knew her!")
Separately, another alter-anima had made some music using some audio sources that were public domain and some that were not, and craved an easy way to share it, and other collections of sounds.
And separately-separately, I have been, for some years, through the cafepress.com DIY-shop service, making t-shirts and cards, mostly for myself, under the name Hellmark Press, which, in turn, has been affiliated with the People's Peaceable Assembly Line, who, as you'll recall, dutifully "reported suspicious activities" in regular letters to dear norm.
So, when, in March, a visiting friend, glancing at a doodled cartoon on a scrap of paper, said she'd buy the t-shirt that featured that cartoon, it all fell together. Except for the technical aspects, which I soon learned in the usual fashion. And, since then -- don't tell anyone -- I've been Oomph Cavilrest, who runs Hellmark Press (your best source for the hot educational hip-hop beats of DJ Pebkac!)
. . . Disclaimers aside, that's pretty much where I am. To some degree it gives me comfort to be done with a lot of the individual writings, and the blog format offers some interesting organizing options. As a great deal of the ethos of destructive writing lies in a sort of hostility or antipathy to the traditional bourgeois reader, and, as narcissistic (and bourgeois) as blogging is essentially, I haven't given much thought to pleasant navigation for the reader, but the labels are a pretty good way. . . .