Category: non-fiction writing

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And So it Goes

Speaker 1
You.

Speaker 1
Hello, aloha and mahalo. It is Monday, September 11, day of remembrance for all of us.

Speaker 1
My name is Thomas Farley, F-A-R-L-E-Y-I have a friend who is is dying and he has been dying for many years, but it is certainly the end of the line.

Speaker 1
It will be the end of the line very soon for him, it seems, unless there’s some miraculous intervention from beyond science.

Speaker 1
I and he’s a good man. He doesn’t deserve to die, die poorly like this. I would not trade places with him. I envy him, though, in a way, with the enormous amount of resources that he’s been able to get to apply to his condition. He has a physical disease.

Speaker 1
He has a number of things wrong with them, but they are in the end, all physical.

Speaker 1
He’s had good insurance with Kaiser and I’m sure some of his own money. Similarly, I’ve had good insurance plans and money and I’m actually paid out of pocket for nearly all of my mental health treatment because compared with physical diseases, you cannot get seen by a doctor routinely enough to do any good in mental health. For a psychiatrist. Well, he has Kaiser. I think under Kaiser, probably you wouldn’t be able to see a doctor psychiatrist more than once every couple of months.

Speaker 1
Instead, you’re kicked down to therapists and technicians. So I’ve always paid out of pocket for regular psychiatric treatment.

Speaker 1
So that’s one big difference between mental health and physical health. Another is that routinely, for years now, most of the major insurance companies have provided a 24 hours nurse talk line so that you can talk to a nurse at any time of day except that. And I’ve talked to these nurses on these health lines before. They say they’ve never, ever had a psych nurse assigned to one of these 24 hours help lines. They could have a psych nurse, a telephone line in addition to the physical, the regular RNS.

Speaker 1
They could have that. These groups, Intermountain, Southwest, Kaiser, multibillion dollar corporations, they could pay for a 24 hours psych nurse telephone line so he wouldn’t wind up at the emergency room or some other place victim of suicide. But they don’t because mental health does not exist for these people. They talk about these institutions, talk about the rising rate of suicide, and isn’t that awful? But they won’t fund for it.

Speaker 1
They will not fund for it. They will instead give out some pity, some false pity and give some money to other groups, other agencies that are working on the problem, but they themselves don’t participate. And in the last few years, we’ve all seen how they want to really focus. They really want to throw everybody into two categories that of depression or anxiety. And if you’re not in that category, then good luck to you.

Speaker 1
I don’t want to dwell on my particular problem, although I’ll just say that it’s severe insomnia and nightmares and yeah, you hear about research, say, into PTSD and related, but it’s not really in my opinion. And I’ve been almost become a professional consultant on this subject since I so much want to get better. And I’ve tried everything. So I’ve become sort of an expert on what’s current, and I’ve done everything, including electroshock, or ECT as it’s politely called. Electroconvulsive therapy didn’t work for me, paid for all that out of pocket.

Speaker 1
Physical diseases, especially the physical diseases that happen to a lot of people, that Big Pharma has a market for. Those seem hopeful. As far as research getting spent, I know there’s some incurable, seemingly incurable problems like autism, and so there’s just major diseases, although autism goes to great deal of mental health fields, so it’s inherently not going to see the amount of research or funding to begin with. My friend has got all of these resources now available to him as far as end of life treatments and hospice, just like my parents had hospice and people willing to help stepping in. And there’s nothing for end of life, for mental health problems.

Speaker 1
My condition is not livable, and all I get in a response as far as end of life is that it can’t be that bad.

Speaker 1
And I sometimes say, yeah, you’re right, it’s not that bad. It’s a hell of a lot worse. You live with this, you live with this. But it’s a mental health problem that they can’t capture with a microscope or a thermometer going up or down, or blood pressure they can measure or blood they can sample. They just have to take the word of the patient, and our word doesn’t mean a damn thing.

Speaker 1
And I feel for people with mental health problems that are not as articulate or verbal as I am, that can’t express themselves or they express the hell they’re going through. They really have. That just I can’t imagine the misery funding needs to be addressed for my friend. There’s all sorts of patient advocates available for him. He’s actually had genetic engineering things done for him at Stanford Hospital.

Speaker 1
There’s been housing available for family and relatives nearby, just on and on and on. And I am glad that he’s had that care. It’s extended his life for many, many years. It’s just there is no equivalent in mental health for this. And it just devalue you.

Speaker 1
It devalues a person over and over and over again. You’re not worth it. And if you want something done, you got to pay for it yourself, because we can’t see it, so we don’t think it’s a problem. I’ll give you a simple example of how much I often have needed a patient advocate to deal with people just on the phone, for example. One of the things that really induces my nightmares is being a mean person and having to argue endlessly.

Speaker 1
And if anybody’s dealt with any customer support, any healthcare organization over the last many years, you’ll know that it is impossible sometimes to get across what you’re trying to say to a person that keeps falling back on a script will not transfer you to a supervisor about the websites and email addresses that they hand out that don’t work, telephone numbers they never call to make sure that they actually work. It just goes on and on. Well, that all forces me to get service, forces me to be a mean person with these people. And I don’t want to be a mean person. It’s toxic.

Speaker 1
It’s toxic to everybody, but especially in my condition. And I can’t tell them that that just engendering more and more nightmares. And it would be great if I had a patient advocate that would be able to speak for me and would be able to sit for hours and hours on a phone trying to get something arranged and it’s just not possible, not even with paying for it out of pocket. These people don’t exist. And it is very frustrating every step of the way you’re told that your condition doesn’t mean anything and it is indescribable as I try to make myself, as I try to make other people comfortable with me.

Speaker 1
You can’t mention, for example, that you have violent nightmares anymore. They’ll call the cops on you.

Speaker 1
People today are so scared by corporate media that they associate mental health with violence when in fact the mental health are far more likely to be victims of crimes than actually committing the crime. But corporate media doesn’t want to hear that. And it is the more and more I try to make other people comfortable around me, the less credibility I have, the more well spoken I am, the less people think there’s anything wrong. If I keep up appearances, then just what’s the problem? And I’ll try to say, well, how many times do you have to watch your mother or your best friend get chainsawed to death?

Speaker 1
Well, it’s not real. No, it actually feels real. And shock after shock and this has been going on since 1988 with me and it just breaks you down. I probably have less than 4 hours of sleep every night and tell you this is how these professionals, they just want a measurement. How many hours of sleep are you getting?

Speaker 1
And their limited thinking is insane. Well, four or 5 hours, it doesn’t matter. It’s the quality of sleep. It’s all broken up. I’m pacing around at 233 30 in the morning, waking up every other half hour.

Speaker 1
It’s the quality of sleep. But they can’t measure that. They have to rely on your word. And your word doesn’t count. Your word doesn’t mean a damn thing.

Speaker 1
Well, we’re sorry for you, but there’s no at this point I’ve tried literally everything, including, like I said, ECT. And that program when it first came out, using the Apple Watch, which is a dedicated Apple Watch and a dedicated iPhone that goes with it called nightwear. I’ve written a multi part review on YouTube about it that also failed.

Speaker 1
But in the end in the end, my friend has a ton of services he’s going to have measured, respectful, end of life experience, I guess you would call it. But no, I’m going to have to take care of things myself. And it’s tragic, but it’s consistent with the disregard that mental health gets in this country. I’m not sure it’s that much better anywhere else, and I don’t have any suggestions other than fund, but it’s all about money, and so I just don’t especially Intermountain. They’re an incredibly toxic group, incredibly damaging to mental health people.

Speaker 1
And you can read on my website, Thomasfarleyblot.com, what they did to me, how they treated me. I think a real fundamental problem in healthcare is how the line personnel, or the people responding to their Twitter and social accounts have no idea what duty of care means. We are patients first and then customers. This is not a typical industry where you have a customer. No, we’re patients first.

Speaker 1
When you extend the duty of care, if you have to explain what duty of care means to somebody picking up the phone, they need some real training or they need some days in the hospital tending to patients. Once you accept the duty of care, again, it’s just not my dad was a brilliant physician, brilliant doctor, and his colleagues were all well mannered, neat, professional, all of them caring. And they accepted the responsibility for a patient once they took them on. And once a system takes them on, like Inner Mountain or Kaiser or what have you, that duty of care is extended. That umbrella applies to everybody under their name.

Speaker 1
Well, that’s enough for now. I wish I could give you some hope, but there really isn’t any. Not at least for people with my condition. And I think that they would actually prefer a lot of us just to die off so they don’t have to deal with them. I think that’s what’s going on with a lot of the homeless, with mental health problems.

Speaker 1
It’s just get these people off the books and we can go back to treating people for just anxiety and depression and everybody else is on their own.

Speaker 1
But if you know more about the subject, let me know. But there’s no dignity in this, not for people with mental health.

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non-fiction writing

Sportsman’s Park, Nye County Nevada

12 NE of Tonopah. Nevada stocks it with Rainbows. A beneficial white carp resides. Goldfish occasionally. Birds stop in, no other open water for miles. Little large animal scat. The wells nearby are the chief water supply for Tonopah. Simple bathrooms. BBQ stands. Numerous picnic tables. I’d say the open water is about 3/4 of the size of a football field. This may be an enlarged stock pond from when cattle were run back in the day.

One pond for bait fisherman, a smaller one for fly fisherman. Maintenance worker says he’s never seen a bait fisherman out here in 15 years. No charge of any kind. Camping probably prohibited.

North on NV State HWY 6 a few miles out of town, left turn onto 376 at the first major intersection. You can see a stand of trees in the far distance. Go! If you wind up passing a county airport then you have gone too far on HWY 6.

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Nightmare Review Part Two: Another Effort to Get Out the Word

This is a reposting in case someone can be helped by this system. It was certainly a total failure for me but perhaps someone else may get assisted.

NightWare™ review. A review of NightWare.™

Transcript delayed due to the death of a friend.

NightWare Review – Part One (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Three (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Four (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Five – Final (internal link)

My first suicide attempt (internal link)

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS

[00:00:06.890]
Hi, this is Thomas Farley. This is my second video on the Night Ware system. I hope hope you’re doing well or at least coping. I wish the best for you.

[00:00:32.670]
There’s so much information. I’m not sure how to present this. I’m just going to go in and pull out what I think are the most important points from my point of view. When I’m working, I am a professional writer and editor. Perhaps I take offense at this material more than I should.

[00:01:01.930]
I got the watch.

[00:01:09.350]
I have an Apple watch already, so I’m familiar with this, but at least several times I stopped the recording of the device and I thought I pressed the stop button, but it continued to run and record and eventually essentially timed out very puzzling. If the wrist strap isn’t tight enough, it will stop recording your heart rate. You’ll get a message saying there’s been no heart rate detected for ten minutes and it will stop and I don’t have the screenshots, but several times at least three or four didn’t work as they should.

[00:02:06.710]
And I wanted it to get right because there’s this initial calibration period that they talk about. I wanted to make sure the watch was working correctly and didn’t know if it was working correctly, and that’s a problem with the tech support not being available at night when us nightmare suffers are up at night, and of course, nothing on the weekend.

[00:02:27.350]
So rather than getting this resolved in real time, it has to wait. And anyway, so the watch seems to be working now correctly. It stops when it should stop, starts when it should stop or start.

[00:02:56.910]
When I was having those events, what I did was started a dream diary. So if something like that went wrong, I noted the time so that I thought we could go back to the charts and correct them. Similarly, when it was sounding off incorrectly, like once I pulled up on the sheets too hard and it marked this thing they call an acceleration when in fact just pulling up the sheets too hard. So I had this idea that I would make all these notes on these false positives.

[00:03:32.430]
Such an ugly phrase, but false positives.

[00:03:35.670]
And then somebody at night where we would go back correct the record so that the algorithm could learn. Because how else can the algorithm learn about an event like pulling up the sheets too hard if that only occurs every five, six days? Similarly, the literature says you can use the restroom, just take a short break, come back and it won’t affect the record. But each time I did a short break, it would sound off. So again noted that in my sleep Vlog because this is the first couple of days and I actually keep a sleep blog for your own records, but there’s nobody at night where that’s going to go back and reconcile this the algorithm is running on its own, which I found out later.

[00:04:35.190]
It’s a lot of stress before I found that out for, like, bathroom behavior. The Apple watch has a gyroscopic function, which you may be aware of, and so it can track movement, get out of the bed, move toward the bathroom and back. So it is probably recording that event as an activity, logging it and then over time, maybe dismissing it. But this initial calibration that I read about apparently finally got an email on this.

[00:05:20.210]
You’ll get no interventions. The initial calibration period lasts one to three nights. After the system collected 1000 samples.

[00:05:32.210]
I thought with such a wide variety of activity possible at night that it would take a long time to dial in. And tech support is saying it actually happens in one to three nights. So problem is, you’re new to the watch. You’re turning it on and off. You may have really ragged sleep like I do.

[00:05:58.190]
And because of that, I was turning the watch off repeatedly when I would get up for a couple of hours, because I have my insomnia.

[00:06:10.010]
Actually, that’s probably not a good idea. Probably keep it on at all times, because what happens is there’s this 30 minutes window when you hit the pillow and between that? Well, actually, when you go to sleep, when it first registers that you’re sleeping, it will provide none of these interventions. None of these tap on the wrist for 30 minutes. You’re on your own for that 30 minutes.

[00:06:35.210]
And some of my worst nightmares hit me as soon as I put my head on the pillow. And there’s nothing to be done about that. Tech support repeatedly claims that an improvement in that area would require FDA approval. I don’t see why that would be such a problem. Perhaps it is what we have is adaptive technology within limitations undisclosed so that it doesn’t adapt, for example, to that 30 minutes window.

[00:07:15.110]
It’s not going to lower it, and it also won’t adapt to if you have anything outside the criteria or the settings of what they deem a nightmare, that is your stress level, measuring your heart rate, your movement in bed, some other factors that I’m still not aware of. If that criteria isn’t reached, then it’s not going to be considered a nightmare. You will not get an alert, you will not get one of their so called interventions. And again, without reconciling your chart with your sleep log, it’s going to be saying, maybe happily, that we provided five interventions when, in fact, they could have been false readings, false alerts.

[00:08:14.210]
But again, the bottom line, nobody is going to reconcile your sleep record with your actual chart.

[00:08:26.910]
What else? Yeah, I thought I was going to flip through some of this, but actually trying to think if there’s anything important, a lot of us have nightmares. That may not be the classic you’re killing somebody or somebody’s killing you, but you just might be having to watch. I don’t know, a loved one being tortured or suffering, and it may go beyond going. I had a nightmare the other night where I had lost my cat in a retail store.

[00:09:07.490]
Fremont is an indoor cat and had a huge store running all over the place. Can’t contain them, can’t collect them. And this goes on and on and you would say, well, so what? It’s a cat. You’re running out of a cat.

[00:09:21.110]
But the anxiety and the stress which just goes on and on is just one of these what I would call stress dreams. And people dismiss them because they don’t have the same level of anxiety that I do. Or maybe they’ve never had a cat on the loose and they can’t find it. It’s lost. You can’t get it back.

[00:09:45.170]
That’s incredibly stressful. It doesn’t have to be chopping up people for me to constitute an extremely difficult to deal with situation. And a lot of this is a background to my sleep. And I’m really bothered by the fact that that stuff. They just keep going.

[00:10:06.290]
Now, at this point, this guy just would probably like to put down praise in which has never worked for me before. One of the few dreams that are actually prescribed for nightmares. I’m sure most of you have used it and know that it really doesn’t work for most people because otherwise VA hospitals would be cleared of PTSD victims in a hurry. But the other thing introducing other medicines. I don’t know how you’re going to tell what’s working or what’s not.

[00:10:42.050]
Maybe three of them can clear up the lower level stuff and the night where system can clean up the more violent stuff. It’s just an experiment right now. I’m going to end the video with those random thoughts, and I hope something helps you. My email is Thomasfarley at Fastmail. Com.

[00:11:02.030]
Thomasfarley at Fastmail. Com. And you’re free to email me and we can commiserate with this. And I’m really hoping for the best for this product. I really hope tonight that you don’t have any nightmares.

[00:11:16.130]
I really hope tonight is a good night for you. And let’s hope that for everybody. So thank you.

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These Are the People I Deal With

I don’t expect anyone to read this except for search. And I don’t expect anyone to sympathize with my complaints, either, because this is the way the world is arranged. I’ve was raised to be a nice person but there are too many mean people to overcome. This is not something I can win. And, given my constant nightmares since 1988, not something I can cope with.

 

[00:00:03.650]
This weekend at a community picnic, I was introduced to an old cowboy who asked me what I did for work. I told him that I work part time online, at which point the conversation quickly drifted south because of him. He told me that the greatest computer was between our two ears, the human brain. And I said, I agree with that.

[00:00:39.770]
He then went on with a whole series of statements and questions that were aggressively going after. I think I think when I start talking about computers and what I do online, it’s so far out of reach of most people that they think that I’m trying to be smarter than them, or somehow they feel inferior. I think that’s a great deal of it. They have an inferiority complex to anybody that’s working with computers. They act as if I’m trying to prove that I’m smarter than them, when in fact, I usually don’t start the conversation at all because I’m so far out of reach with what I’m doing, with what most other people do that it’s not even worth bothering to talk about.

[00:01:31.860]
Like all of the work that I’m doing with AI and Chat right now. And it’s very discouraging because I had a friend say to me recently that it was possibly economic, because not everybody can afford a computer or the resources that I have, and that’s not really the case at all. I should probably stop at this point and refresh everyone’s memory that early on, before the Internet went commercial, back in about 94, 95, with the advent of Mosaic. Mosaic was the first graphical based Internet browser that you could see images with that became relatable to people. Images provided a boost to advertising, but librarians had been on computerizing, their catalog, card catalogs, for years before.

[00:02:42.790]
And so when personal computers came out, they started populating libraries with them. Especially, really around 84, when IBM came out with its own personal computer for the masses. There was this Charlie Chaplin advertising campaign that was hugely successful. But years before, Apple had been trying really, really hard to place computers in the school to get these lucrative contracts, and they did a good job. They started about 1980 with the Apple II.

[00:03:18.270]
So by the end of the 80s, computers were basically in every library and school. And so everyone’s had an opportunity since then to use computers in one way or another. Night school classes, adult education classes since really the late 80s, early ninety s. And I’ve actually been on computers since 1978. Over 40 years.

[00:03:46.230]
Everybody’s had a chance. But an idiot like this that I was talking to, he doesn’t want to go to the library. I’m sure he hasn’t been to the library in decades. He probably can’t remember when he checked out a library book last. I have many computers.

[00:04:02.350]
I think I have two desktops, two laptops, two tablets. I also have a library card from Pahrump. A library card from Goldfield and a library card from Tonopah. And I am in those libraries, actively. I’m checking out books.

[00:04:22.130]
All of those libraries have a computer. I think it’s just laziness on most people’s part and not having an interest. It’s easier to put down somebody for what they do than to ask about it or just say simply nothing at all. These are the people that drive me crazy. There’s so much amazing stuff going on and I don’t mind if they’re not interested, but it’s the librarians that I’m infuriated with.

[00:04:53.090]
They’re the gatekeepers in education and they don’t want to know about Chat or AI. So it’s not really economic. It is a deliberate decision on many people’s part not to engage, not to learn, to let the things go by. And people that are actually interested, that are burning to create, that are trying new things, that are experimenting with new things, those are people that are something to be put down on because I think it might remind them of how little they want to know, how content they are with their own little world. And that’s fine as long as you don’t go out and bully people or put people down.

[00:05:38.570]
This is the way I can make some money. I can make this money part time. I’m doing a good service and yet I have people people commenting who don’t even know the basics of writing and business writing.

[00:05:55.970]
Self-sustaining freelance writers are maybe four or 5% of the population. That’s it. Everybody else is doing a second 3rd, 4th job to enable their hobby or their passion the and as far as nonfiction writing goes, nobody understands that. As far as business SEO, there’s nobody that I know, haven’t known for a couple of decades that has any idea of what I’m doing. But if they ask, if I try to explain, it’s just an immediate putting down of what I do.

[00:06:40.750]
It’s just this prejudice against the unknown, which is really the root cause. If you don’t know something, if somebody knows something you don’t, you don’t want to hear it. Instead of asking questions about it or letting it go, they want to put it down because they’re bullies. That’s all they can do. They’re trolls.

[00:06:59.990]
And maybe it reminds them of the fact that they’re dead to the world, that they have no interest in inquiry.

[00:07:10.170]
Anyway, I just wanted to put down what I have to deal with almost every day in my effort to be creative. I really have to keep it hidden. Can’t discuss it because it’s like we’re going back to the Dark Ages. One idiot, in fact, who’s in charge of something historical, he was talking about computer literacy, computer literacy in such a way that I asked him this:

[00:07:43.400]
You’re not holding out computer illiteracy as a point of pride, are you? And this guy’s a former engineer and he thought about it and said, that’s a good question, actually. I am. This is a living, breathing, talking luddite. He doesn’t want to learn.

[00:08:02.380]
He wants to put down people for learning. We’re going to go back 300 years into the Dark Ages when people were prosecuted and killed for trying to learn things, for trying to advance science. We’re going to try to discredit them. Or Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in which anybody with higher learning or higher ambition was killed. That’s what we’re going to get.

[00:08:29.090]
We’re going to go back to the Dark Ages and then we’re going to take 300 years to come back again. At the end of the Dark Ages, they had to reinvent all the math that the Greeks had done, what, 1500 or  2000 years before, because people were criticized and killed for trying to learn new things. And now we have people writing about chat and AI who don’t actually use it, haven’t experimented with it, but don’t want to learn. They just want to put it down. So it’s frustrating, but that’s the world we live in.

 

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Pleased to Meet You. Nice to Know Me. What’s The Message? Can You Show me?

Rare selfies. The A&W in Tonopah, Nevada.

Gone, gone. The root beer gone.

Not happy about that.

But things are looking up, right?

Maybe not.

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Going Beyond Optical Code Recognition for Writers

Tremendous amounts of primary research material in newspapers, books and magazines continues to fall apart in libraries and warehouses around the world. Much of it won’t physically survive much longer. And much is still unrecognizable to the best OCR software. What to do? Read it!

I use HappyScribe: https://www.happyscribe.com/ – (external link) to transcribe what I have read to my iPhone or Mac. Both can generate an .mp3 file which is all HappyScribe needs. From there, you upload your file to HappyScribe and it produces a nearly flawless transcription of your reading. (Yes, automated transcription services have now become that good.(

Let’s say I had a badly aged edition of the San Francisco Chronicle in a reserve reading room at a library. Most of us can still read what the best OCR software cannot. Read that article into your phone and then onto HappyScribe or a similar service. Far, far, far easier than typing, especially for long pieces.

You’ll still need to correct and polish the resulting text but at least you will have the article, much of what I see today is simply not possible for any present or future OCR software to read, most often gray smudges too indistinct for anything but the human brain to bring out.

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The New Vette Races at Monaco

My Etsy Store is here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/ThomasFarleyDesigns (external link)

This design builds off a classic Monaco race poster from 1965.

 

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WWG1WGA – Where We Go One We Go All

Corporate media may label QAnon as a conspiracy driven movement but certain facts are irrefutable.

The military-industrial complex existed before we were born and is now an integral part of the American economy.

The alliance between Big Pharma and the government cemented during COVID will grow stronger.

Intelligence community spying through social media companies was established by Snowden and these ties will only get stronger.

The tacit agreement among corporate media companies to thwart Trump’s reelection began on his first day in office and continued for four years, with bogus stories like Russian involvement being endlessly pursued to nowhere and many vital stories censored.

That alliance between Big Media companies continued even with the President out of office. His blacklisting from Twitter, for example, was maintained at the same time the Taliban’s account remained open, eventually used to communicate orders among their fighters for the fall of Kabul.

None of this is in dispute or controversy. The real question is why corporate media is working so hard among themselves and with the Biden administration to silence these people. But we all know why, aside from their obvious hate of Donald Trump.

Independent groups challenging authority, dishonesty, and manipulation will always be feared by those in power who hate the United States. The US government crushed people’s lives and the American economy during Covid simply as a way to assert more power over people, to introduce them to a new level of control.

And most of those directives were contradictory nonsense not backed up by science or consistency, and declared by idiots like Fauci. Yeah, conspiracies. Conspiracies rooted in finding out the truth and pushing back the government’s desire to stomp our individual liberties into the ground. That sound too dramatic? Not dramatic enough.

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Are Writers Made or Born? by Jack Kerouac (transcribed for the first time!)

I transcribed this article from two image files at the Writer’s Digest website. I have introduced line breaks of my own to make the text more readable online.

This is a six minute read. Kerouac reserves the word “genius” (and his attendant praise) to those who originate a writing style, those “born” to write. As he puts it, anyone can write but not everybody can invent a new way of writing.

This is a well planned piece by Kerouac. Notice how he echoes or repeats the use of ‘five thousand’: “five thousand writing class students, “five thousand university trained writers,” and “five thousand ‘trained’ writers plus Joyce.” These echoes are all made at distinct, different points in his work.

Notice, too, the depth of Kerouac’s study and reading of the Great Books. You might think a Beat writer would have laughed off the classics when developing a new way of writing but Kerouac didn’t. This man _studied_. Only the Great Books provide a wellspring deep enough to inspire new thoughts. Although Tom Clancy is an excellent writer, no one will ever pen a Great American Novel by reading how Jack Ryan breaks into a locked file cabinet.

[Thomas Farley, thomasfarleyblog.com (link to this post) September 18, 2022]

The text of this article and post is available here in .pdf format (internal link)

ARE WRITERS MADE OR BORN?

BY Jack Kerouac

Writer’s Digest, January 1962.

Paragraph 1

Writers are made, for anybody who isn’t illiterate can write. But geniuses of the writing art like Melville, Whitman or Thoreau are born. Let’s examine the word “genius.”

It doesn’t mean screwiness or eccentricity or excessive talent. It is derived from the word gignere, (to beget.) And a genius is simply a person who originates something never known before. Nobody but Melville could have written Moby Dick. Not even Whitman or Shakespeare.

Nobody but Whitman could have conceived, originated and written Leaves of Grass. Whitman was born to write a Leaves of Grass and Melville was born to write a Moby Dick. “It ain’t what you do,” Sy Oliver and James Young said. “It’s the way atcha do it.”

Five thousand writing class students who study “required reading” can put their hand to the legend of Faustus but only one, Marlowe, was born to do it the way he did.

Paragraph 2

I always get a laugh to hear Broadway wise guys talk about “talent and genius.” Some perfect virtuoso also who can interpret Brahams on the violin is called a “genius,” but the genius, the originating force, really belongs to Brahams; the violin virtuoso is simply a talented interpreter – in other words, a “Talent.”

Or you’ll hear people say that so and so is a major writer because of his “large talent.” There can be no major writer without original genius. Artists of genius like Jackson Pollock, have painted things that have never been seen before.

Anybody who’s seen his immense Samapattis of color has no right to criticize his “crazy method” of splashing and throwing and dancing around.

Take the case of James Joyce. People said he wasted his talent on the stream of consciousness style when in fact, he was simply born to originate it. How would you like to spend your old age reading books about contemporary life written in the pre-Joycean style of, say, Ruskin or William Dean Howells, or Taine?

Some geniuses come with heavy feet and march solemnly forward like Dreiser. Yet no one ever wrote about that America of his as well as he. Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it’s that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through – originality.

Paragraph 3

Joyce was insulted all his life by practically all of Ireland and the world for being a genius. Some Celtic Twilight idiots even conceded he had some talent. What else could they say, since they were all going to start imitating him? But five thousand university trained writers could put their hand to a day in June in Dublin in 1904 or one night’s dreams, and never do with it what Joyce did with it: he was simply born to do it.

On the other hand, if the five thousand “trained writers” plus Joyce, all put their hands to a READER’S DIGEST-type article about “Vacation Hints” or “Homemaker’s Tips” even then I think Joyce would stand out because of his inborn originality of language insight.

Bear well in mind what Sinclair Lewis told Thomas Wolfe: “If Thomas Hardy had been given a contract to write stories for the SATURDAY EVENING POST, do you think he would have written like Zane Gray or like Thomas Hardy? I can tell you the answer to that one.

He would have written like Thomas Hardy. He couldn’t have written like anyone else but Thomas Hardy. He would have kept on writing like Thomas Hardy. Whether he wrote for the SATURDAY EVENING POST or CAPTAIN BILLY’S WHIZBANG.”

Paragraph 4

When the question is therefore asked, “Are writers made or born?” one should first ask, “Do you mean writers with talent or writers with originality?

Because anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing. Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing, and her imitators are just talents. Hemingway later invented his own form also.

The criterion for judging talent or genius is ephemeral, [ed. note – added the comma] speaking rationally in this world of graphs, but one gets the feeling definitely, when a writer of geniuses amazes him by strokes of force never seen before and yet hauntingly familiar (Wilson’s famous “shock of recognition”).

I got that feeling from Swan’s Way as well as from Sons and Lovers. I do not get it from Colette, but I do get it from Dickinson. I get it from Celine, but I do not get it from Camus. I get it from Hemingway, but not from Raymond Chandler, except when he’s dead serious. I get it from the (sic) Balzac or Cousin Bette, but not from Pierre Loti. And so on.

Paragraph 5

The main thing to remember is that talent imitates genius, because there’s nothing else to imitate. Since talent can’t originate it has to imitate or interpret. The poetry on page 22 of the New York Times, with all its “silent wings of urgency in a dark and seldom wood” and other lapidary trillings, is but a poor imitation of previous poets of genius like Yeats, Dickinson, Apollinaire, Donne, Suckling . . . .

Genius gives birth. Talent delivers. What Rambrandt, Brandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. No frog can jump in a pond like Basho’s frog. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they’re seeing now, what we’ll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.

Paragraph 6

So in the case of a born writer, genius involves the original formation of a new style. Though the language of Kyd is Elizabethan as far as period goes, the language of Shakespeare can truly be called only Shakespearean. Oftentimes an originator of a new language forms (sic?) is called “pretentious” by jealous talents. But it ain’t whatcha write. It’s the way atcha write it.

–30–

Writer’s Digest’s image files.

External Link (s)

Interesting discussion of this essay: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/10/17/are-writers-born-or-made-jack-kerouac/

Notes:

Wilson’s “famous shock of recognition”? More fully, Melville, “Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round”.

Samapattis: The Britanica offers this on Buddhist meditation, “[F]our further spiritual exercises, the samapattis (‘attainments’): (1) consciousness of infinity of space, (2) consciousness of the infinity of cognition, (3) concern with the unreality of things (nihility), and (4) consciousness of unreality as the object of thought.”

Celtic Twilight idiots: Followers of the material Keats and his like penned regarding Irish folklore.

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I Take Questions From the Press

Art Gallery Here (internal link)

Version one is subtle, the lost art of deadpan humor.

Enhanced  version for those unused to dry wit.

Rough and Unedited Transcript

Hi, my name is Thomas Farley and I am here today to answer a few questions from the press regarding my artwork.

These questions have been vetted by my cat, John Charles Fremont.

The press is remaining outside in a secure room.

I cannot let them in to the house.

I can’t afford to restock the liquor cabinet once again, what kind of art style are you involved in?

I’ve heard it called photo montage.

I call it poster art. Digital collage. Bugs Bunny would probably call it digital collage. As far as an art style, I don’t know. I know an art style.

That’s the only one I know, and he owes me money.

What am I selling?

I’m selling a design service. So for $200 you can get a custom made poster currently produced at 24 X 36.

inches or a similarly large size.

I’ll design the poster, provide you two prints for $200, and give you the digital file that’ll be available@dropbox.com. Revision would be $50 and another two prints. Postage is on you unless it’s local delivery to perm postage anywhere from 13 and a half to $20. These days I can use your Instagram photos, Facebook photos. They don’t have to be too great because they’re just being posterized. Essentially, you can see the work of my Gallery.

If your artwork.

Could talk, what would it say?

Buy me. Yes, that’s definite.

By Tom Service.

What do I need to know when.

Looking at your work for the first time?

Don’t panic.

I think that’s good advice.

Generally, if you’re well grounded in some.

Sort of faith, I think that helps.

Cheer up.

Life is temporary.

That would probably, I think, gets you through your first viewing.

Where is my cat food?

Okay, obviously, John Charles got into the questions himself.

So we’ll go to the next one.

Yes.

You got into that question, didn’t you?

All right, the next one would be.

Where’s my cat food?

All right.

And the next one is Where’s my cat food? So I’m going to have to freelance it here.

Essentially, as you can see from the.

Artwork, it’s a bunch of found images. I’ll call them clip art people supplying their own photographs.

But if you have somebody that has.

An Instagram account that’s public, I can take those photos directly. You don’t have to send it to me.

I can make up an origin story.

I’m really good on this building.

What else? What does the future hold for your artwork?

Hand lettering. I will have to contract that out, though.

It’s going to greatly improve, I think.

The look of especially small lettering when.

It’S cursed, and that will be improved. I’ll have to raise my prices at.

That point because I will have to.

Contract out to there’s a Las Vegas.

Artist that I know.

What would you say about your artwork?

Probably the same thing that my works would say.

Buy my service.

And I think that’s a good thing.

To end on breakfast.

(Cat meows loudly)

I’ll take that as a Yes.