Is Generation X poised to become a bridge generation between the Boomers, while holding the memories of those in the Silent generation who were our grandparents, and the Millenials, Zoomers and beyond who are our children and grandchildren? Not many people are writing about Gen X minding the generation gap. Instead they are focused on the way they think AI is going to upend life as we know it. In reality, the continuing decline of the Boomers will be much more impactful. Writer Jeff Giesea is thinking about this topic though, and he wrote a rather thoughtful piece about what he calls the Boomer reckoning, and the way the generational shift is going to affect the United States and the world at large as they slowly let go the reigns of power.

            Giesea calls this the “Boomer Paradox: boomers are holding society back, but they also are holding it together. What happens when they finally fade from the stage? Will we renew our institutions and cultural fabric, or drift into decline and unrest? How will the fiscal math even work?”

            He went on to write a lot about the resentment many of us have for the Boomers. I feel that. At the same time, like Giesea, I had a number of Boomer mentors whose role I really appreciate. There were some less savory types as well. I am a late Gen Xer, born at the end of the seventies, just before the Millenial generation. A lot of my older friends, and siblings, were more squarely in the Generation I identify with, as is my spouse. Punk rock, skateboarding, industrial music and hip-hop were all part of the stew I was influenced by, and these subcultures were born out of the hearts and minds of Gen X. Yet there were Boomers who mentored me, and their hippie music was almost as important to me, though in a different way. I had a handful of Boomer teachers who guided me and coached me in creative writing, on the one hand, and older hippies who inaugurated me into that part of the countercultural world. There was always some older hippie hanging around after all. A next-door neighbor and good friend who would get me stoned and teach me about vegetarianism, gardening, astrology and beyond. There were other older hippies hanging around the edges of the as well. Someone always knew one. Who else were you going to buy the weed and acid off of without actually going to a Grateful Dead show yourself?

            Some of these drug addled deadheads in my circle I never should have had as mentors, but such is fate, and being in a phase of low self-esteem, I let certain individuals have more influence over me than I ever should have. But then that’s one of the issues those of us in Gen X have: sometimes the people who could have been mentoring us, were off doing something else, leading us to find our own way. Right into the hands of people with questionable sense of ethics. At least, speaking for myself. I wasn’t really a latchkey kid, but so many other Gen Xers I knew were, I am sure they can relate to this.

            There were some less seedy hippies in my life as well. A few of them had resisted the psychic reterritorialization that was spawned during the post-WWII boom. While some people were making babies, government agents were thinking about how to best go about brainwashing people, and steering the hippies off course. MK Ultra and Operation CHAOS were a big part of that, and to a large degree, they succeeded in their aim. Having a counterculture so tightly woven around the use of drugs made it all the more easier to manipulate peoples minds. Have a look at Tom O’Neill’s book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties if you have any doubts. Though his book leaves some threads untied, it points to enough factual evidence and indirect evidence to show just how much MK Ultra and Operation CHAOS were up to their eyeballs manipulating minds, hippie minds included.  

            After the Manson murders the image of the hippie had been marred. Then the academic think tanks began a project to rebrand the more radical edge of the counterculture. Black Panthers, Weathermen, Students for a Democratic Society and Yippies all became taboo. If you wanted to make it in the world, even talking about such things became verboten. Capitalism could no longer be critiqued by the hippie generation. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, and so a large swathe of them sold out and joined the ranks. This slow dissipation of the movement happened during the seventies, at the time when E.F. Schumacher’s idea of appropriate technology was having a moment, and the appropriate tech movement itself was doing its DIY best to address the precarious energy predicament then hitting the industrialized world in an opening salvo.  

​            Doing it yourself takes a lot of discipline and effort, and eventually many of the Boomers turned their backs on their youthful ideals, joined evangelical churches, and joined instead the Reagan Revolution. America was back, for a time. But the hypercapitalist neon dayglo of the prosperous 80s and 90s that followed would soon begin to fade, culminating in not a renewed economy, but depleted energy that lead to fracking and more offshore drilling. The 2008 financial crisis caused by the burst of the housing bubble led to the busting of hope for Gen X and early Millennials as their future was further sold out to prop up the financialized system and property of the older banker Boomers who just didn’t want to let go, leading us into another boom bust cycle and our current state of polycrisis.

So yeah, there is some resentment.  
 
            Living in this kleptocratic gerentocracy has made many of us who are in Generation X weary and wary of the Boomers. Some Millenials have perhaps been even more wary. The postwar Boomer era is ending. But they are still clutching onto more than a slice of the pie until their hands go dead and cold. Yet Giesea says resentment towards Boomers is stupid.  The thing about resentment though, is that it isn’t usually a choice made in your head. It’s an emotion. Every human deserves dignity, including Boomers, but a lot of the resentment comes from the decreased standard of living younger generations have had to endure while our elders continue to hold onto property -hence things like the new round of the “housing crisis” which is really just a greed crisis.

For my own case, I’ve worked at the library my entire adult life. I started as a book shelver, and stayed in the job for typical Gen X reasons, even when it was difficult over my first decade here to get any kind of promotion. I stayed because I was working for a good cause, the free sharing of information and knowledge, and I didn’t have to work for some corporation with questionable values. It was also a perfect slacker job for a bookish person. I had access to books and a ton of music, two of my favorite forms of intellectual stimulation. I worked with many other Gen Xers who were artists, musicians, poets, potters, writers. The atmosphere made up for the lack of funds. I didn’t generally take my work home with me either, and still don’t. It’s a fantastic kind of job to have while pursuing things like doing radio shows as I did on WAIF, and putting effort into developing my skills as a writer, and working on getting published.

Over time I did get some promotions, and my ability to earn and make it in the world has gone up, but it hasn’t kept pace with the cost of living and now stagflation. My ability to help our own Millennial children is curbed. When I see them paying more money for rent than we ever paid for a mortgage, yeah, there is some resentment for the Boomers raking in the money off of these properties, and yeah some Gen Xers are doing that too. But a lot of that real estate is held in Boomer hands and accounts. How can are kids build a future when they struggle just to make rent. Having a slacker job and doing creative things on the side is less viable, because they are hustling to make it. When they are off work, they are stressed and the way out is into the digital world.

The huge wealth gap doesn’t help matters at all. Most of us are seeing the quality of life deteriorate year after year, and have to make choices over whether to take our dog to the vet or put our car in the shop. Meanwhile Boomers are going on cruises, going on big vacations, and those in the higher ranks are buying yachts, estates, shrinking what the rest of us have access to it, so yeah there might be some resentment there. It’s also why I will always despise such a genre of music as yacht rock

That being the case, Gen X can still be a bridge generation, as Giesea suggests. I just think that what that bridge looks like is going to be a lot different than he does. This is because of a fundamental difference in world view. Giesea says, “The postwar boomer era is ending just as AI and automation accelerate. Over the next two decades, these forces will reshape the world more profoundly than most of us are prepared for.” I disagree with him that AI and automation will have as big of an impact as he suggests, for the simple reason that the environmental resources needed to power AI are not adequate enough to sustain it. That doesn’t mean our would-be tech lords won’t try to pilfer as many of those resources as they can before they can’t. 

Yet a recent article in Fortune has shown that most corporations aren’t making anything on the money they have invested into the questionable tech. No doubt another economic bubble is forming around these LLMs and when it pops the tools people are putting so much unvetted faith in will disappear.

Until that happens though, we are going to see more and more people going off the rails of the crazy train, as Ted Gioia has pointed out in his recent assessment of AI and its disastrous impacts on mental health and the ability to even know what is real.           

 It should come as no surprise that Giesea and I disagree on the trajectory of the future. As founder of the Boyd Institute he comes from a place steeped in the industrial worlds preferred mythology, faith and belief in technological progress. Many of their project’s center around drones, automation and autonomy, space exploration and technology for statecraft. Their name comes from John Boyd, developer of the OODA loop, and while that seems like it could be a useful tool for strategy, it need not be employed towards technological advancement. The OODA loop could also be deployed for degrowth, frugality, and downshifting towards lower-tech tools that will be useful as the Boomers die out, and with them, their world of endless technological progress.

            This is where the bridge of Gen X will become important. We remember how things were done before the internet became as prevalent as it is now. Those of us lucky enough to have grandparents who grew up on farms, and put effort into their home economy, will be familiar with the way they pinched pennies and got things done on the cheap, produced some of the things they needed for their own household. We may also remember the way families stayed in touch by writing letters to each other. This was something I did when I met people around the country as a teen skateboarding in new cities on family vacations. I’d make a friend for a week and we’d become pen pals. That will be a useful skill to revive as the use of the internet becomes more and more questionable. As Josh Datko pointed out in a recent substack note, it is also a lot more secure from being surveilled. We also know how to make a mean mixtape.

The older Gen X crowd also helped build up the indie underground that was all based on analog networking. Many of those Gen Xers took direct inspiration from the hippies, from the underground newspapers, and certainly from the rock music itself. Many Boomers played a hand in developing their own underground networks in terms of the Rainbow Gathering, and the unique culture surrounding the Grateful Dead and the jam bands that followed, pulling in many a Gen Xer into their wake. Now that scene has meshed in some ways with that of traditional music, Americana and bluegrass.

The analog tools we have that helped build the underground worlds of skateboarding, punk rock, and hip-hop, and more niche scenes like noise, goth and industrial, are all useful to rebuild connection as digital culture continues to disintegrate.

All of these groups and their interests famously got mashed up into the ire spawning image of the millennial hipster who drew from all of them while being loyal to none of them. This itself can be a strength. Many a Gen Xer derided the hipster phenomenon as much as they resented the Boomer. Yet we can still be a bridge. If we let go some of our cynicism and the emotional armor of the perpetual skeptic, we can become mentors and mentees in turn. Every generation has a lot to give the ones who came before and after. Each have blind spots, each have skills and memories worth preserving and sharing.  

.:. .:. .:.

The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

​“Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company.” -Lord Byron

Dear Readers,

             I hope the missive finds you well.
           
In the past the exchange of letters was a serious form of entertainment. Back when the news cycle[1] was a matter of days, weeks, and months, not hours and minutes, most days were slow news days and I imagine there was an excitement about getting a letter in the mail. It might have been enough to buoy a person for days and weeks, even more so when the letter was from a loved one who had moved far away, or from a colleague in a particular field of research and inquiry who did not live close by. The exchange of gossip or ideas was a pleasure in itself.

When a mother heard about a son’s adventures trying to make a living or a name for himself in a distant city, it brought relief to her worries, an update to his latest activities, and an idea of what life was like in San Francisco, as opposed to St. Louis, or a farm in Iowa. A father hearing from a daughter who’d moved on with her new family to make a go of it in South Dakota got to keep up with the growth of his progeny in times when travel was rare, difficult, or otherwise expensive.  Childhood friends could stay in touch and new friends from far away, met by circumstance, would become pen pals and keep each other posted on what was going on in their lives if each was amenable and of the right temperament.

Did I mention gossip? I thought I did, but maybe it’s just a rumor. The salacious spreading of rumor, suggestion, and innuendo has long been a habitual pastime among humans. The kind of letter filled with juicy tidbits about the goings-on of cousins, neighbors, coworkers, in-laws, ex-laws and outlaws was the proper place to write about what might have otherwise been improper to say out loud in the polite society of our not-so-distant past. When these letters got shared with others, they became like tabloid rags for socialites and the hangers-on at court or those who aspired to aristocratic social positions.

People never stopped entirely writing letters to each other, but due to their analog nature, they seem to have reached something of a nadir point for most folks in our society. Even the traditional Christmas letter that people used to send, updating one family on everything going on with another family over the past year, has been replaced by shallow cards, or by pics of the family with their pets. I like getting pictures and cards from my cousins and friends at the end of the year, but often times there is hardly anything in it more than a note.
Is the high school love note endangered? The people in high school now are part of a generation that has grown up with cell phones. Teen texting has replaced the teen love note, furtively folded in sweaty palms then exchanged between classes or given to a potential paramour at the bus stop.

​Would those words from Nick Cave’s great romantic ballad “Love Letter” ever be phrased for an email or a text?   

Email has been a great substitute for the letter, but it’s not the same. As a teenager in the nineties I had a lot of pen pals and people I wrote to, but it tapered off as email took over in the oughts. I’ve corresponded with a lot of wonderful people over email too, but there is something different about the medium. Avid emailers haven’t really collected their email correspondence with others in the same way people used to collect letters and print them into books. As much as I’d like to read the collected emails of Rudy Rucker, say with his friend, fellow science-fiction writer, and sometime collaborator Bruce Sterling, I’m not sure such a thing will ever happen.  Maybe I just haven’t waited long enough for it to appear or perhaps there is already something like this out there that I just don’t know about. Maybe emailers don’t want to share their collected emails. Maybe they all got deleted. Maybe no one else cares.

            Yet when I wander the stacks hunting for old books (one of the perks of working at a library), I have found volume upon volume of correspondence between various writers, artists, musicians, politicians, scientists, socialites and regular people.  When I did a subject heading search for the term “correspondence,” I found 5,724 titles for books that contain people’s printed letters to each other. To me, this says something about where we have come from as an industrial society and one of the many things we have lost: the art and pleasure of writing letters to each other.

            This would be a good thing to regain. Among myriad other benefits, in deindustrial times it may be possible for a person to make a living, or at least a bit of side money or trade, by writing letters.  In Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet of novels, a man works the trade of letter writer for hire on the streets of Barcelona. He had the calling of a poet, but poetry has never paid the bills too well (though it can happen). With his poetic imagination, he helps those who are illiterate to compose beautiful language to captivate the heart of the beloved. Prisoners who have been talented at letter writing have often gotten protection from illiterate prisoners by writing letters for them to their old ladies on the outside, at least in fiction. Considering that literacy rates are liable to go down in the dark ages to come, the ability to craft a lovely letter can be considered a potentially formidable skill.

Alyson Hagy wrote a whole deindustrial book on this topic. Her novel Scribe is set in Appalachia after a second Civil War and contagious fevers have decimated the population of the United States. Barter and trade have replaced the once mighty dollar. The main character has become known for her skills in making paper, ink, and further, writing letters. These she trades for tobacco, firewood, and the scant other things she may need. Yet, there is a danger in her ability as well. Sometimes a letter can set off unforeseen events. There is a responsibility that comes with being a scribe.

Letter writing need not be a simple two-way exchange between people. It can also form the backbone of an analog network with multiple nodes.

 There is a lot of potential for round-robin mail to come into use to keep communities and families connected. During the Great Depression, many people, even if they had phone service, didn’t like to make long distance phone calls to stay in touch, except in case of emergency. Long distance used to be pretty expensive, and if you came from a big family, as more people did in the past, chances were you’d have a lot siblings to stay in touch with on both sides of a marriage. The postal service helped fill the void. Round-robin mail was a way for families to stay in touch and it often worked by a process of addition and subtraction. Every so often a package would arrive to a family filled with letters and pictures. You’d take your old letter out of the package, write a new one, add some pictures if you had them, and send it on to the next person in the mail circle. That person would take their old letter out, and fill up a new one with the latest news, and then send it along to the next in line.

It seems to me the round-robin style sharing of letters and other ephemera could be employed just as easily by a group of close-knit friends, members of fraternities, sororities, clubs, and societies who wanted to stay in touch. This round-robin style of sharing mail is an excellent example of an old-school, analog communications network. Something similar, though operated differently, and not explicitly for family, could also be used for groups who share an affinity around writing about a certain topic, say alchemy, amateur radio, retro pulp fiction, deindustrial living skills, or green wizardry. Another way to do it would be to set up an Amateur Press Association (APA) on the topic.

Many APA’s are still going even though it is now a niche hobby. The structure of an APA should be able to weather some of the convulsions to come. At its most simple an APA is a group of people who share mail with each other in bundles. Each member writes and then photocopies, mimeographs or duplicates in some way their contribution to a mail package that is sent to a Central Mailer (not to be confused with the central scrutinizer) to collate and send back out to all of the different members of the group. Say someone sets up a Green Wizards APA and it has fifty members. Then each person who contributes to that month’s bundle needs to run off fifty copies of their how-to guide for making beeswax candles and send it in to the Central Mailer, who then collates all the individual contributions into the bundle and sends a package back to each member. Some APA’s put every person’s contribution together into a zine, but the principle is the same. Often in an APA there are yearly dues or a membership fee that goes towards covering the cost of sending out the bundles by the Central Mailer.

I have been a member of two APAs, one large and one small. The large one is the American Amateur Press Association, AAPA, established in 1936, and was a split off from the National Amateur Press Association, formed in 1876, also still in existence. The AAPA had over 120 members when I last paid my dues. The smaller APA, Freedom APA, was by invitation only. It took its name from the fact that there was no theme and members were free to contribute anything they wanted to the bundles, which went out about three times a year.

The idea of whether or not an APA is open to the public, or closed to a smaller group brings up a key point. Depending on what the goals of the organizers are, it could go either way. Many APAs have been focused around genre literature, specifically science fiction and fantasy. A number of professional writers have participated in APAs, H.P. Lovecraft being one of the most famous. I think they have a lot of potential for connecting people who would otherwise be online chatting in forums about herbalism or classical music appreciation. If started small and by invitation only, they could grow, and then when the organizers have the operation figured out and running smoothly, they can start advertising their presence and invite others in to share in the joy of exchanging the written word.

Mail Art operates in a similar way to the APAs, and developed out of the Fluxus art movement and the work of Ray Johnson and his New York School of Correspondance in the 1960s. From there its tentacles dipped into the  industrial and punk music scenes and other fringeworthy subcultures. The practice is centered around sending small pieces of art through the post. These are often collages, block prints and rubber-stamp pieces, but also other mediums. The practice still has a small but loyal cult following around the world.

Works were created and sent out to lists of people. There were many Mail Art APAs where collected collages were collated by the Central Mailer and sent to everyone on the network. Yet there were looser Mail Art networks. Each Mail Artist would develop their own address book of contacts and send pieces out to who they chose. (Even if you don’t ever get into Mail Art, keeping an address book is useful to do. I don’t really happen to know how many people in the Millennial cohort or the Z generation who have and keep address books, but if a digital gizmo dies, it’s nice to have a hard-copy backup of people’s addresses and phone numbers.)

​Zines and underground newspapers offer another way for people to get to know each other across space when the absence of heavily subsidized oil transportation and internet connections start (continue) to go on the fritz. A PO Box or return address is often included in most zines, even if it is really just a mail drop. Many zines have included classifieds of a kind. These are often people looking to make contacts for their small touring band, trade with other zinesters, or other people looking for pen pals with shared interests. 

Another reason to think about corresponding over paper instead of over email is to minimize your digital footprint. Sure, the NSA already knows everything they want to know about you, if they want to know about you. But paper letters are harder to hack. Perhaps more importantly for your mental health, it is harder for advertisers to use your paper mail to spit customized ads back at you, unless the people who want to read your letters are also skilled in the tradecraft of spies. If that’s the case, you probably have bigger problems anyway.

Even so, there are times in life when secrecy in communication is required. For instance, you may have gone out and started your own shortwave pirate radio station. Or perhaps you’ve started a clandestine political organization. In the case of shortwave pirate radio, operators often really like receiving signal reports and other feedback from listeners. They need a way to communicate that avoids giving out their location, while still giving listeners a way to get in touch. Enter the mail drop.

In order to run a mail drop you need to find someone who is absolutely trustworthy and is willing to operate a PO Box. A PO Box is used so that a home address never needs to be given out, adding another layer of privacy and protection for the mail drop operator. The PO Box is revealed to the public, in the pages of a zine or over the air on a pirate radio show, for instance, or more strictly on a need-to-know basis. Those who want to get in touch write to the PO Box. The operator collects the mail from the box and forwards it to the person it really goes to, often to another PO Box, which again adds another level of privacy and protection.

It is useful to know that operating a mail drop, on behalf of a pirate station or for any other reason, is completely legal. There is nothing illegal about sending mail by a circuitous route to others.

If you do find yourself in a situation where you are sending out secret missives, then learn  to write lightly. Spies and snoops have been known to read the pages of a notebook below the one the ink was splashed on. If you are really under surveillance from Big Brother, Little Brother, and their friends, then you should always consider that everything you write will be read. Not to induce undue paranoia.

No less a spy than Allen Dulles noted, “When the post is used it will be advisable to act through post boxes; that is to say, people who will receive mail for you and pass it on. This ought to be their only function. They should not be part of the show. They will have to be chosen for personal friendship which they have with you or with one of your agents. The explanation you give them will depend on circumstances; the letters you give them must be apparently innocent ...  A phrase, signature or embodied code will give the message. The letter ought to be concocted in such fashion as to fit in with the recipient’s social background. The writer therefore ought to be given details of the post boxes assigned to them. An insipid letter is in itself precious. If however, a signature or phrase is sufficient to convey the message, then a card with greetings will do.”
 
Learning some tradecraft will of course be useful to political dissidents, but this kind of thing might also be useful for those in minority religions if things turn ugly with the rise of the second religiosity (e.g. lynchings, mobs, burnings at the stake). General chaos, people getting canceled, and other dastardly shenanigans may be other reasons for communicating in secret.​

​If your interest in writing letters isn’t so clandestine, there are other aspects of it worthy of consideration with regards to a pleasant deindustrialized life. Consider penmanship. Mine is atrocious. Yet, it can be very fun to write in cursive, and a great joy for others to read. Practicing penmanship can be enhanced when bringing back the other kit of OG writers. I’m thinking here of the fountain pen. There is something ritualistic about writing with one. Loading the ink and cleaning the nib can prime the pump of words. Sitting down to write becomes very tactile. Typing, likewise, can be very physical and rhythmic. Letters banged out on typewriters are also fun for writer and reader.

Then consider stationery: elegant paper that has weight and texture. Something the words can gleam off of. The crafty deindustrial letter writer will probably be scheming of ways to make their own ink and paper like the character in Hagy’s book Scribe.  This would be in keeping with something ancient scribes knew how to do as part of their trade. Making ink and paper could turn into a side gig depending on how much you can make, how much other people need it, and what they would be willing to barter or buy it for. It’s certainly a worthy quill to put in one’s cap as far as skills go.
 
What will become of the world’s postal services is a good question. The United States’ postal service has been in rough shape, by various accounts, for a number of years. Whatever its exact future, it seems some kind of postal service can and will be organized in the future. It is certainly within the realm of the low-tech,and various forms of mail service have been around for hundreds of years, with ancient precedents going back to the couriers of the pharaohs of Egypt.

I guess that’s it for now. Here’s to many opportunities for putting your pen to scratching and setting those typewriter keys to clacking.

Sincerely,

Justin Patrick Moore

P.S. A slighty different version of this article appeared in an issue of the deindustrial fiction quarterly, New Maps.

RE/SOURCES:
There are numerous histories of postal services for various eras and regions of the world. I won’t list them all here, but something along those lines would be useful reading in the event the postal service needed reorganization, or for writers looking to write a postal-based deindustrial fiction story. There are also a lot of different books about how to make paper and ink, the art of fountain pens, and paeans to stationary. If this is an area of interest for you, I’m sure you’ll hunt down the ones that suit you best. Similarly, if the related pastime of stamp collecting is in your future, there are lots of titles about “the world’s most popular hobby” to get you started. For these re/sources I’ve focused on a few websites and books for APA’s, mail art, and two novels about post office workers.
 
American Amateur Press Association (AAPA). <https://www.aapainfo.org/>. Besides sharing monthly bundles of reading material, there are a lot of people involved in the AAPA who are into letterpress printing. It is a great resource for anyone who wants to get started going down that road.

Bukowski, Charles. Post Office. New York, NY.: Ecco Books, 2002, 1971. “It began as a mistake. It was Christmas season and I learned from the drunk up the hill who did the trick every Christmas, that they would hire damn near anybody, so I went and the next thing I knew I had this leather sack on my back and I was hiking around in my leisure.” Aren’t those lines one of the great openings in American letters? Your mileage may vary on that, and for this novel about a gambling alcoholic who becomes a mail clerk and his sordid misadventures along the way. Even with all the antics, it does give some color to the job of mail delivery.

Gallagher, Winifred. How the Post Office Created America: A History.  New York, N.Y.: Penguin Press, 2016.
Garfield-Perry Stamp Club. “Stamp Collecting 101: Philately: The Art of Stamp Collecting.” <http://garfieldperry.org/wp/learn-philately/class-overview/> This page includes a short twelve-lesson primer on the basics of the stamp-collecting hobby.

Hinchcliff, Jennie and Wheeler, Carolee Gilligan. Good Mail Day: A Primer For Making Eye-Popping Postal Art. Beverly, Massachusetts.: Quarry Books, 2009.

Pratchett, Terry. Going Postal. New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins, 2004. Pratchett isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and I’ve only read a couple of his Discworld novels, of which this is one, but I thought I’d put it on this list as a fantasy humor alternative for those who might be put off by Bukowski’s shenanigans. This is a tail about “getting the moribund Postal Service up and running again…with literally mountains of decades-old undelivered mail clogging every nook and cranny of the broken-down post office building; and with only a few creaky old postmen and one rather unstable, pin-obsessed youth available to deliver it.”

National Amateur Press Association (NAPA) <https://amateurpress.org/> This is the oldest amateur press association in the world.

Srodes, James. “Allen Dulles’s 73 Rules of Spycraft.” Intelligencer: U.S. Journal of Intelligence Studies, Fall 2009, pp. 49–55. Available for download: <https://grugq.github.io/resources/Dulles%20on%20Tradecraft.pdf>
Welch, Chuck, editor. Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology. Calgary, Alta.: University of Calgary Press, 1995. Now out of print, but worth looking at, if you can find a copy, perhaps at a library. My institution has a copy, but it is very expensive now on the used market.

.:. .:. .:.

The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. 

☕️☕️☕️ 
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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

The words bohemian and discipline aren’t two that most people normally think of as going together. One might think that self-restraint and good habits such as regular exercise and keeping a clean house get tossed out the window when embarking on the path of the bohemian. Yet it takes quite a bit of dedication to live an unconventional lifestyle. For those who have devoted themselves to literature, music and art, and to the making of it, discipline is a must for showing up on days when the muse seems distant and far away. The rigors of being downwardly mobile, of toiling away in obscurity, of working dead end or menial day and night jobs while focusing on the great work during so-called leisure hours requires devotion and willpower. And while the development of these internal powers may be free, they do not come without effort.

Discipline is necessary if one wishes to escape the laziness of the mass minded. Regular practice is required if indifference to the approval or disapproval of others is sought. To be insulated from the arrows of the philistines and illiterati care must be taken.

Resisting the simulacra of experience in favor of real experience takes guts. Doing things which no one gives permission to do means living a life that will often be outside the comfort zone.

The Do It Yourself ethic that is central to Universalist Bohemianism and Down Home Punk runs on a fuel of willpower for making things, whether it’s a cupcake side hustle, a regionally touring band, or a print or skateboard shop in your basement. Nothing gets done until you do it. No robots, no managers.

In the age of Big Spectacle perhaps the biggest use of discipline comes in the form of cutting oneself off from the deluge of streaming entertainment in favor of the drip feed of slow culture. Savoring unmediated experiences instead of bingeing on things both pointless and forgettable. The discipline to turn away from distractions and focus on things that are important to you as an individual cannot be underestimated. The only way to be sequestered outside of massive influence and the constant pull of attention is to erect an unassailable garrison around the mind and life.   

If you work as an artist discipline is a trait the muses find appealing. If they see you showing up to do your work, and you finish your work, you, as a vessel, will be refilled.

Discipline was the keyword at the collective house where Sun Ra lived with his arkestra of musicians. What to some may sound like improvised chaos, is actually the work of painstaking precision. The hours and hours of daily practice spent making music, then talking music, thinking music, back to making music, brief pause to eat, sleep irrelevant (Ra was insomniac) back to the discipline. It come from the planet Saturn after all, this honing of the blade of life at the grindstone of work.
 
Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth (TOPY), self described as anarchist in their organization, also had a focus on discipline. This was necessary for their other purpose of inciting individuals to get a life, live out their true desires, the ones that came from deep inside, the ones that weren’t inserted by television, church or state. Discipline and will become a foundation for living on your own terms outside ov control. As Genesis Breyer P. Orridge noted, “Thee Temple strives to end personal laziness and engender discipline.”

The word discipline is also related to the word disciple. A disciple is a person who learns from another. The disciple of bohemianism isn’t out to coerce others into acting, following and believing everything they do and say, but is someone who can act as a model and inspiration. By becoming a peer leader, they show to other humans what can be done and accomplished, given time and discipline. Those thus inspired may carry on certain aspects of a teachers work, but in true Aquarian spirit, make use of it for their own personal goals and ends, all the while further developing and braiding the cord of initiation further into the future.

As it is written in Thee Psychick Bible, “We are not seeking followers, we are seeking collaborators.” I take that as meaning those who can share and exchange vision and relate to one another on the level of imagination. This is why the artists, punk rockers, decadents, writers, poets, painters and visionaries of the past have always been an inspiration. How did they achieve what they did? Even if they are dead we can still collaborate with them in terems of learning from the echoes of their minds they left in their finished works.

A SENSE OF DISCIPLINE

There is also the matter of the word discipline as a distinct area of study. In this case there are many Bohemian Disciplines. Three main aspects of bohemian life come to mind: the discipline of reading, the discipline of listening, and the discipline of seeing. First we can think of these in their relationship to literature, music and art, major areas of engagement for the bohemian. Then we can think of the use of our senses as disciplines. The same way a body craves exercise, so to do the use of our senses in less automatic ways.

During the process of deindustrialization unfolding around us, we as humans will also have to be less automatic, run less on autopilot, and bring more intentionality into our actions.
Disciplines around the five senses can also be explored within the sphere of universalist bohemianism by developing an appreciation for good food (while elegance and refinement are all well and good, one need not be a snob about it -all the finest cuisines developed out of peasant recipes, and todays foodies would do well to remember that).

Food always involves scent, but perfumes, cologne, aromatic soaps and incense are all ways to indulge the scent of smell. 

Touch may be indulged in with your loved ones from a simple caress, to massage and lovemaking.
The idea in all of these things is to approach them with more reflection and thought -an act that requires discipline.

Developing these senses is one way towards developing an artful life.

On another level we can think of writing, painting, drawing, and music making as disciplines that all add to the quality of life when creating beauty and wonder as gifts to share with others.

Secession is available in everyday life when we secede from every day thinking. But to stay the course requires work. Supreme aloofness to the viewpoints of everyone else cannot be achieved in a day. 

There is an aspect of bohemianism that has long taught of better living through chemistry. Rimbaud was just one in a long line who recommended the derangement of the senses as a path leading to the palace of wisdom.

It’s hard to maintain balance on the road of excess.

The Decadent Movement of the 1890s has a part to play in this matter. They saw correctly that the decline (décadence) of the Roman Empire came from the erosion of its culture, which came on the heels of the moral rot that had set in and taken hold. So it is now with the decline of western civilization which the Decadent Movement foresaw with the advent of industrial society. Charles Baudelaire adopted the term decadence in counterpoise to what he saw as the banality of progress, which he rejected.

Charles Baudelaire used the word proudly to represent a rejection of what they considered banal "progress."
Baudelaire’s work represented “a preference for what is beautiful and what is exotic, an ease with surrendering to fantasy, and a maturity of skill with manipulating language.” Yet Baudelaire also had a reputation for “dissoloute” habits, frequent visits to prostitutes and brothels, a taste for hashish, laudanum and drunkenness.

This aspect may be considered, from an astrological point of view, as one of the influences of Neptune and the way it promotes both drug culture and fantasy literature.

​Yet the Decadent movement, for all its excess, saw the shape of things to come. They were early trumpeters of what can now be seen as the perversity of Western society in a state that has moved from rigor mortis to terminal decay. Distancing oneself from the man in the crowd, creating an isolation around your mind, is necessary in order to not succumb to the various forces at work in the undertow and unweaving of culture.
Joséphin Péladan thought that art and living as an aesthetic ascetic was a suitable replacement for the pleasures of decadent society. Painting, music and literature all offered a way out from what we can now call the spectacle of mass entertainment. The movement from decadent decadence to aesthetic asceticism offers a mode of discipline for the aspiring bohemian monastic.

​The primary goal of the Universalist Bohemian life is to live life as a work of art. This brings the aesthetic vision to the fore in every aspect of what a person does. This vision was epitomized by the Decadent writer, artists, and mage Josephin Péladan.  He called it kaloprosopia. Everything about a person could be subject to kaloprosopia, and it could be worked on for the entirety of a persons life, so they consciously apply themselves to living up to their full potential. It was also a way of bringing the aesthetic out of just the studio, concert hall, gallery, reading room and salons and into the world. The person who practices kaloprosopia takes exquisite care over the refinement of their personality, over their choice of clothes -but not just as a dandy or person with a personal sense of fashion, but also their very presence as a person. Kaloprosopia can get down to the minutiae of an individuals  actions: the way they move their hands when conversing, certain types of gestures, the way they walk, word choice and way of speaking. All of it is an avenue for embodiment of a singular, individualist and individualized aesthetic vision.

“The law of kaloprosopia is to manifest the exteriorization of the character one claims for oneself.” Péladan wrote in the L’art idéaliste et mystique.

The notion of developing presence pertains to the inner esoteric arts though it is not limited to them. We have all known certain people who possess and transmit a certain and particular quality that seems to be effortless on their part -an aspect of their very nature. In my mind part of this comes from the way they may be connected to things outside and beyond them, to the inner planes and their openness to experience people, places and things.

Developing this presence is a goal of the Universalist Bohemian and was likewise an aim for Péladan. Another way to look at it is by using the term self-creation.

This idea may seem narcissistic. The idea of self-creation may conjure ideas of so-called influencers. It may all seem like mere ornamentation. However, for Péladan, who had seen his country transformed by industrialism, who had seen capitalism weaken the wills of his countrymen with an increasing commercialization of all aspects of life, it was a form of resistance to an externally imposed aesthetic viewpoint and allowed the true inner aesthetic of a person to emerge.

The word kaloprosopia itself is derived from the Greek καλός (beautiful) and πρόσωπον (person). As the digital age is in the process of disintegrating and passing us by, the chance to let go of collective identities and craft a personal one is as essential as ever. Doing so without the benefit of posting images and status updates to a corporate controlled social media company will give people the opportunity to start relishing our in-person interactions.

​For Péladan the object of life was “to remake the soul that God has given him: to sculpt it into work of art.” Another way to look at it is as self-reinvention. In times of change and crisis, whether personal, familial or on the broader scale of the collective, individuals can choose to pivot, change their tactics with tact, and instead of reacting to situations, pick a measured and proper response in line with a newer set of values, information, or just based on a hunch, rolling with intuition. 

For his predecessor Baudelaire there was a “burning need to create for oneself a personal originality, bounded only by the limits of the proprieties … a kind of cult of the self.”

In America the idea of creating a cult of self has found even more fertile soil than on the embattled fields of ailing Europe. Here, individuality is an ethos and a creed. It came out of the land and seeped into the minds of the people who wrote the Constitution, and Bill of Rights and continues in our long conversation about what those things mean today. Personal freedom and the rights of the individual have long been championed by Americans of a variety of political persuasions.

When McGovCorp gets too big for its britches and the rights of the individual get trampled upon, ferment and fire start burning beneath the brows of the American imagination.

At such a time the cultivation of a beautiful person, and being a beautiful person becomes all the more relevant for what it can offer the greater good.

The alternative of self-creation lends itself to a more ugly world. When we refuse to choose for ourselves how we ought to live and be, others can step in and choose for us. The choices they make, as can be seen throughout history, are not always in the best interest of the person or the greater society. Particularly in a time of social decay and disintegration the appeal of mass mindedness and letting others do your thinking for you is great, because then you can abrogate any sense of responsibility for what happens in your life and what is seen going on around you in the world.

The tact of deliberately cultivating your presence, your appearance, and living an artful life, will in turn open up even further choices for freedom and opportunities to follow the path of your destiny. Modern society would keep us crippled in the mind. Self-confidence ebbs, depression and anxiety rue the day. Schools and workplaces mete out derogatory training so that the lowest common denominator is upheld. Rather than giving them tools and practices to help lift themselves up, sleeping dogs are let to lie, the willing are whipped, and the ability to thrive and live an excellent life for all is diminished.

To build the discipline it is necessary to get to work. The late artist Monte Cazazza, who gave us the term “industrial music for industrial people” for his friends in Throbbing Gristle has some fine words on the work it takes make an alternative culture, knowing that our own inner resistance was a big part of what needs to be overcome. In the Re/Search Industrial Culture Handbook he tells us:

​“I think that psychology is half the battle. And probably anyone can do almost anything. It's just their lack ofself-confidence, and derogatory training, that stops them. And it's a really sad fact that makes the world a much less interesting place. It's humanity's loss that this is still continuing to happen. In some ways I've been lucky, just because of certain chances. But I also capitalized on those chances when they occurred, and tried to recognize them-but actually I've decided that I didn't capitalize on them enough! You should be doing work because you want to do it. You think it's valuable and worth doing. And maybe it's just part of your personality. That's a really involved and very complicated question, and I don't really think there is one total answer; there's all these different types of answers that enter into it. And as Mark Pauline would say, ‘All work is dirty.’ It's all dirty work no matter what it is, and that's the way it is. If people don't realize that, and they are going to get into these forms of activity, they should stay out of them if they don't expect that. And they should not interfere in our work-because it's hard enough to do already. No one is writing you big checks-all along, what you've done is because you wanted to do it.”

​That’s the kind of work that takes discipline.

.:. .:. .:.

The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. 

☕️☕️☕️ 
​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. 

​Adapting like the ailanthus
                 into the bloom of societies crack;
seeds dandelioned like Leo dandies
       to bring down the sun into the sidewalk.
Child! Don’t break your mothers back.

Cut the Lazarus lizard some slack as it slips
into the porch wall behind the boxwood;
hush the mind as the locust leaves drop
(protruding thorns like the crown of Christ)
quiet, as the poison ivy makes its potent push

to new adopted homes,
        along the jacked asphalt surface pothole pools
summer rain gleaming with illuminated gasoline
              & ditchweeds growing despite the spills
projecting a liquid lightshow of spoiled chemicals
& now gathered with Gatorade yellow piss bottles
from truckers cross country toils.

Ass hurting to a fault from long hours in the drivers seat
chasing white crosses where steeplejacks climb up with Red Bull
to the evangelical resurgent flower powered churches
from the Jesus freak hippies whose minds were blown
                                on an acid casualty gospel preached
by a minister who lurches to cultivate his mustard seeds.   

Fleeing the wreckage of the big box stores
into a megachurch with MAGA merch ladies praying
spiritual warfare against goats straying to eat the weeds
left on the roadside as if the candy wrappers were a trail of clues.

Synchronicities to be deciphered all the way to the laundromat
where the unwashed masses tumble in a speed cycle
hoping Michael the archangel will intercede as a diplomat.


It is the psychology of the adept to embrace the obstacle
inside a chalk circle they dodge the bullet on the way to the lodge,
pasting life together into a collage, held together by Mod Podge.
Bricoleurs use whatever may be found on the ground
to heal the sick and find the universal panacea
going to the middens land of empty lots
where they gather the pharmacopeia. A cornucopia
amidst refuse where the milkweeds flourish
to feed the tussock moths as much as to nourish
the sublime monarch of transformation.

See the landscape change.

​See the dead fox rot and call it decomposition.

Under the freeway overpass life blooms inside its corpse
           birthing a hundred baby flies.

So we carry on, we carry on
as the vulture takes its feast
where the purslane pokes its succulence
up from the dry bones, a vacancy sign
retains its partial flicker-fucker
and the rusted out grocery cart laments its loneliness


Far away from the corral, but still OK.



​.:. .:. .:.

The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. 

☕️☕️☕️ 
​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​
​