I kind of played against what was “good” or “successful” and ultimately
quit Twitter because I found myself repulsive, caring and craving so
much for witness and recognition, and warring against myself whether to
promote myself on Twitter or retweet praise or write about the process
of writing, which felt at times like a sort of promotion, a real-time
behind-the-scenes I’m Writing! Read my Next Book Entitled Suicide is
Amazing in 2016!—even though I like writing about process, and I like
reading about writer’s processes....Basically,
whenever I think I’m doing something that would be good for publicity, I
wind up bailing on it. Maybe I have issues with success. I find failure
more interesting. I also think in general the writers who use Twitter
to promote themselves or their projects, instead of writing about ideas
or writing about reading or posting weird jokes or having a conceptual
project, were the ones I found really boring, like being at a publishing
party, and it made me cynical about being on Twitter myself.
....I think noticing
who was following me or unfollowing me based on something I wrote
depressed me in small yet critical ways, or made me think of writing
something to appeal to more readers—which I found poisonous as a
writer—all that sort of currency, or thinking of being a writer as
publishing, or as being an author, or as having cultural capital,
instead of as reading and writing. Also feeling a fixed identity—a
box—and I felt like I was not able to change or refine ideas or be in
the process of becoming. That’s why I quit the online world, for now.
After the last book came out, I needed to calibrate things offline, and
go back to having a private life, to mourn or complain or read privately
for a while. Writer friends or online friends or people who like
reading me will still often write me and say they miss my online
presence—which is nice, but also a strange feeling, like you don’t exist
if you’re not on social media, or that your online presence is what
they read of you. There’s this pressure to be continually writing on the
Internet in order to stay a writer. But I kind of like the feeling of
being invisible, of not existing for a while. I think I’ve been
interested lately in a poetics of anonymity, a performance of
invisibility. Maybe that’s why I like twitter accounts that immolate
themselves and are performative/ephemeral. Like I think Kafka would have
been really brilliant at twitter, but he would have had 40 followers
and would have been disgusted with himself and quit it often.
via
descensus Averno facilis est