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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ring_%282002_film%29 |
Believe it or not (and since this is me, you should totally believe me, but if not, there's tons of actual documentation to back up my claims), book publishing attracts a lot of groupies. Educated (for the most part), highly technical groupies, but add-ons nonetheless. They're the type of people hooked on reading, which is usually a bad thing for other types of addiction, but in this case it creates someone who is uniquely over-educated and typically smarter than you, the average person. As James Baldwin once famously said, he didn't mind being born poor, black, and gay because he was a very gifted New Yorker who could work the odds against him. He felt blessed, and he felt that if public school neglected him, he would read every book in the local public library, which would make him very well-educated, and he was right:
“It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”― James Baldwin
Readers form a synergy between the living and the past that cannot be broken, a rare type of erudition that eludes other types of education out there in the real world. It's been one of the biggest blessings of my life, but not the most compulsive one, because I'm not a compulsive addict. A friendly clerk here at my local library and I like to chat when I check out DVD's, most oftentimes movies, because I don't have cable t.v., nor do I go to the cinema very much. She sees me here and now, which led her to ask me, one of the most educated and well-read people on the planet, if "I ever read" yesterday (too funny), because she doesn't see me do it right underneath her nose. Obviously, right now I am busy writing to you all, which cuts into my other endeavors.
I went on to explain to her that there are people who only know me as a rock star book cover designer, because that was my trade for years. There are other people who wonder why I don't illustrate, photograph, and/or show my fine art in galleries anymore, because I am obviously busy being a publisher who utlizies all of those skills daily to publish for all of you, but compulsive people with learning disorders don't easily understand that. They simply don't get how I could, say, be at one time in my past, one of the best female Mixed Martial Artists in the world (and the only one in my age group), who gradually stopped training because of injury, a lack of time, and available funds, but that's exactly what happened with me. My parents are still baffled that I wasn't a professional ballerina, because I could have done that for living, too.
No, gifted people suffer from the same life conditions as you do, just with way less time: there's not a lot of it for extremely talented people with genius level IQ's, which means you don't know how many different facets I have, which is also why I don't run out of things to write about, speak to you about, or make art about...ever. There's just a lot more of you than me. I am just one, as you are many. Book publishing is the same as the general public, which was the market I designed for: "Adult Trade" (although I designed for other markets, too), items of general interest for the general public, which means I know just about everything. It's weird, but it's a function of my trade. I've read every type of book there is several times over, as well those in my head that I haven't made, yet, which means you are my forever audience.
We do have specialists within our workflow as a production queue with some very dull technical aspects, so badly repetitive to a mind like mine that I transcend lower level jobs in a year or less, which is also typical for me: to catapult past people who have been laboring for years under just one of two types of conditions in the workplace. It's excruciating for me to be around them as I must be for them, although I cross through their viciously defended territories often enough to make it very uncomfortable for someone who is basically a human typewriter in this modern age. It's not a good fit, but I already knew that, it's just that I don't have the time to school each and every one of you individually, that's what I write it down here: for reference's sake.
Same thing as my attention-getting design work at some commercial business: I'm there to do that specific trade (which encompasses more skill sets than you'll ever have), but obviously I don't have time to show you all of my G-d-given gifts, which makes me seem almost like divinity to the people who worship at the altar of book-making: I am their "Great One", The Maestro who always gets it right, even if you don't get it at the time. They publish my supposed "rejections" for years afterwards, too, which makes me seem like some magical golden goose who keeps producing even after my physical presence has long gone from their doorways. It's unnerving, and that's my life: to outlast all of you, as a final legacy that's my gift to the world.
It's created some absolutely havoc-wreaking dynamics on what can be a compulsive response to life, if you have disordered people manning the lead positions at the top who hate change like they can't see the germs on their clothes. In the industry, we have staffers who do one small chunk of the book process over and over again, without ever gaining any type of perspective or overview about the entire life-cycle of a book from concept to bound book, which often makes me the only one sitting at your round table meeting who knows what the fuck is going on, above and beyond your wonky V.P. widget of a human being, which is why the best of us "graduate" from a set industry to strike out on our own, which is why you are also now reading me, instead of the other way around. Oh, I've checked out a few books here, but it's really only if you can out-write or out-think me, which is highly improbable.
Occasionally we get "art fags" so disordered that they run screaming from our industry like we just set them on fire, which we have; a horrible state of affairs if your mind is already more jumbled than you can sort out. Making books is somewhat like making a really good movie: there's "money people" who produce, accountants who keep track of the books, managers who tend to the budget, and then there's the content-makers and content-generators at the top of the pyramid that include me, the editor, and our publisher, with or without some rich white "ladies who lunch" on the board joining us in meetings against our will because they're bored, thus forcing their boring presence upon skillful people like us, because we're truly exciting to be around.
We have a whole crew of onlookers we carry financially on the backs of our labors: secretaries, guys working the mail-room, that cool dude from IT...you get my point. They see a tiny portion of our labor, because that's what we have time for. You: fix my computer, NOW. You: how much time do we have in the schedule? None? Ah, that's what I thought, and yeah, no money either. That's how it goes at the top; it just gets harder and harder to perform under ever-changing heights of extremes that you can't handle, which leads to freak-outs that are so weird, I have to tell you about them. We attract kooks like magnets, ones who seek to impress others with their "creative"-ish jobs that drive them horribly mad because they can't do it.
BinBin was one such creature. Because she can't hack a real artistic life, she designs the same thing day after day after day, and when she finally complains about the monotony, someone like me tosses her a cover off the back-list with a tiny print run of no real consequence for her to design, which she fails at abysmally, thus sending her right back to the bottom of the workflow where she belongs. Oh, she hates us as much as she hates herself, and that's the weirdest part: BinBin telegraphed her Chinese hatred of the "White Man's" English language art-form by deliberately rubbing Vaseline all over face every evening before passing out in a drunk stupor, because she used her pus-filled acne to torture us with at face-to-face meetings, in the final irony of it. She isn't a real artist. No, her real artistry is using her body as a performance piece to hurt the people around her, because her father is an alcoholic who's a better artist than her as a professional musician, and she can't fucking handle that.
So, instead of working towards getting better, she decided to freak us all out by grossing us out, and that is her real genre: that of a gross-out artist, like the kid in your class who makes "boogie art" from his picked nose, or graffiti on the desk with his leftover chewing gum. It's offensive, but so what? There was nothing else to her besides the acne that she can or cannot clean up according to her not-so-very-hidden agenda tied to her worsening emotional state from her own incompetence and arrogance. Instead, she chose to spend her days playing weird head games with her hard-working co-workers, people who deeply love the printed word and the romantic poetry of the English language. She thanked us for allowing her to apprentice in our great trade by passing around horrible nude photos of herself through the company's in-house email network (stupid, too, like those ten "certificate" programs she has listed on her resume, with not one real art or design school degree), mugging her gross face at all of our productive meetings as a spite for her lack.
Don't forget history, people. Hitler was a failed artist before he became the anti-Christ, not the other way around. Be warned during this time of transition about the real horrors that exist in the world, while ignoring the fake distractions around you that mean nothing. The next great evil might just be the person sitting next to you who processes the same dull paperwork every day, in this rich character study about the banality of evil that's from me to you during this wicked Halloween season. Beware the techno-geek who seeks to harm you through your screen, because I hear what she has is catching....boo at you!
