Monday, April 5, 2010

Rex's Voicemail

Redirected from the filled-to-capacity voice mailbox of Rick Vigorous to the formerly-empty voice mailbox of Lenore Beadsman via the filled-to-capacity Switchboard catch-all voice mailbox:
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Rex: Ricks, it’s Reck. I was just reading—by the way, where are you? Hold on a sec [muffled pencil-tip-softly-scraping-paper sounds]. And so yeah I was just reading Kierkegaard and it occurred to me that pseudonymity—hold on a sec [muffled pencil-tip-softly-scraping-paper sounds]—that pseudonymity is going to be the next revolution in the publishing world. I recognize, by the way, that “revolution” and “world” form a fairly imprecise metaphor but and that’s why I prefer writing over speaking, you know, because you can revise it all … and avoid … cytoplasm-like fillers like “you know” and “like” and—although if someone were to transcribe everything into a posthumous, Norton anthology of… [muffled pencil-tip-softly-scraping-paper sounds].

But yeah, so pseudonymity: if, as we once semi-drunkenly discussed, the plague of modern writing is authorial self-consciousness (or at least I think it was you who I—whom I ... you with whom I discussed it)—um, so if the plague of modern writing is the writer’s awareness of himself as the writer, the writer need only divorce himself from his self in order to completely avoid the potentiality of … of, um, being self-conscious. Right. And the pseudonym is the key to the—the cure for the ... the pseudonym is the solution to the problem insofar as it allows the writer to, um—ok, I’m just going to write all this down and send it to you in a memo. One day society will advance to the point where speaking becomes obsolete and all communication is mediated through written words [muffled pencil-tip-softly-scraping-paper sounds].

Also, something came up suddenly—a manuscript review for that client who lives in Miami Beach—so I have to skip town for a week or so. And my cellphone is broken so just have Lenore forward my calls to the catch-all voicebox thing.

Ok, yeah, that’s all. Fin.