State of the Site: Year in Review
It’s once again September 11th, which means it’s been twenty-two years since three towers on Manhattan island were bombed in controlled demolitions and a missile struck the Pentagon. Please remember the victims of these events in your prayers.
It is also, somewhat coincidentally, the anniversary of The Pillarist’s rebranding and formulation. This post will be mainly addressing that rather than the national tragedy that took place in 2001. It will also be far less formal than usual and, therefore, far less informative. Apologies, friends.
There has been a dearth of The Pillarist this year. Where posts went from being roughly once a month for the two years before 2023, this year has seen only a small handful of releases by yours truly. There three main reasons for this, and it seems only appropriate that you, my wonderful readers, deserve some explanation.
Reason One: I Have Nothing to Say
What few ideas I’ve had which could have benefited from long form commentary have, for the most part, been reiterations of material already present on the site, or they’ve been pieces better written by others and available at other places. Repetition may be part of the gig, but it should be a minor part of it; in general, I’ve tried to refrain from just rewriting old posts with new words every so often. It might generate content, but it’s a waste of both my own time and yours, even if it would mean regularly scheduled posts. The Pillarist, I hope, does not come across as such a content farm. There are no ads here, no popups, and with the exception of a few links at the end of each post, no e-begging.
It’s true that there seems to be no shortage of topics to write about, and to some extent I’d agree. For instance, I could write about the election and the state of the country’s politics a bit more, especially as 2023 enters its last leg and the election season begins. It’s possible that some of these thoughts will find themselves on The Pillarist next year, but it seems unlikely, and there are two reasons for this: the spectacle of 2020 and its fallout made a complete mockery of American elections, to which there has been little mark of improvement, and secondly, because even if 2020 hadn’t happened as it did, the current lineup for the GOP is so bad as to defy insightful commentary.
If one is to vote at all next year, it’s clear that it be a vote cast against the cadre piloting around the dementia patient as if he were a mobile suit. It matters very little if it turns out to be DeSantis who wins the nomination, or Nikki Haley, or even Vivek. One can hope it would be Donald Trump again, though whether the party itself will even let him run given the present indictment fiasco seems like wishful thinking—and anyway, given what happened in 2020, there’s no reason to believe anyone, much less Donald Trump, is going to win. Hopefully I’m proven wrong, but 2020 seemed to be the last election that might have mattered, and this round seems like little more than a pay-per-view revenge match.
There needs to be a correction here: 2028’s election might matter, but only because there has yet to have been a president to challenge the two-term limit. The wartime socialist invalid who broke tradition remains the only challenger, and he wasn’t up against a law that would have to be suspended nowadays. The notion that current DNC leadership might attempt a DeepFake ChatGPT BidenReich remains an amusing plot for a short story, but it’s hard to imagine that they’re competent enough to pull it off without fatally backstabbing each other.
None of the GOP candidates smell like roses. All of them are bad, including Trump. He shouldn’t have played along with the COVID hysteria in his last year. He should have been a lot more attentive to how the election was run, and he should have done more to prevent things like mail-in voting or ballot harvesting at the party level. Most disgustingly, he should have looked into backing some of the legal fees for his supporters who spent the better part of a year in solitary confinement after their unscheduled audit of the Capitol building. Instead of all of this, he acted every bit like the buffoon that the media once painted him as prior to his 2016 presidential win. If only he was the criminal mastermind they believed him to be after that. Then we wouldn’t be in this situation!
But that’s how democracy is supposed to work, if it functions according to its myth at all: find the two most despicable, incompetent, unlikable, and malicious people active in politics, and hand the business of administrating the country over to one of them. 2020 happened to be a rare instance when mental illness was added as a dimension to that calculus.
Nonetheless, I’ll vote for the big orange idiot. I’ll even vote for the stiff Florida autist. Maybe even the Indian guy. It’s not like any of them will win.
As these thoughts are the sum total of what I have to say about the upcoming 2024 election, it should not be any surprise that they haven’t warranted a post of their own. But that aside, I could of course write about more pressing matters of interest. Creationism, perhaps. Augusto del Noce. Yukio Mishima. Marian devotion in the Franciscan tradition. Music. Church design. Architecture. Who knows? But all of these subjects would require me being able to pick up books again, which, while not impossible, is a little difficult for excuses I’ll offer below.
Reason Two: Shift in Focus
The second reason, related to the first, has been a shift in focus of what I have been writing. Since approximately 2016, I had prioritized social and political commentary, with sporadic research-driven projects mixed in to keep things interesting. This, however, was not always my focus. In the years before beginning The Pillarist and the blog that preceded it, my focus had been predominately in literary fiction, which had resulted in several unpublished novels and various short stories.
As paid subscribers at Ko-Fi and Patreon know, fiction is once again at the forefront of my writing interests. Unfortunately, and I apologize for this, the short stories and segments of pieces I have uploaded for supporters hardly reflect the seriousness of my interest in fiction. Most of them are pieces ill-defined in ends and rushed together in means, usually going through only a single draft before getting thrown onto the site without ceremony. There is, however, something to be said for that, and I’ve treated the experience sort of as practice. To all or any of you who read those pieces, thank you. Really.
The last year and a half or so has seen the revision of two old novels written between 2010 and 2015, and the additional writing of a new one. I have considered sending the manuscripts out to real publishers on the off chance that they might, somehow, get looked at, but the odds of such a thing are so low as to remain beyond the boundaries of demoralization. Literary fiction is an exclusive club, after all, and I’m too white, too male, and too straight—and too lacking in the sort of ethnic or personal connections to counter any of this—to be allowed entry. Literature once indicated the industry’s cream of the well-connected crop, but the crop has wilted on the vine and its cream is poisonous to the sane American mind. Now the label seems little more than a petri dish for New York ethnics to complain about white guys, or for women to talk about their sex lives. Despite my interest in the genre, I want no part in its present company.
I could, of course, seek publication through smaller and more rightist independent presses. The cash advances would be smaller but the slice of royalties higher, and, unlike the route I’ve chosen to do, it would actually get my work in front of some kind of audience. On the other hand, with zero overt political messaging present in my fiction, and with no obvious aesthetic resemblances to what the internet has come to consider ‘right wing’ literature, the potential for backfire seems higher than my willingness to tolerate. I don’t write sword and sorcery, adventure stories, westerns, high fantasy, or hard boiled detective fiction; I don’t really even write science fiction except in what limited format is found in my short stories; I don’t tend to write realistic fiction with big themes concerning demographic replacement, the sexual revolution, or other culture war keystones in mind. The stories I’ve been much more serious about, both those completed and those I plan on writing in the future, are significantly more mundane—and, as you can imagine, much harder sells. That said, they might just be self-indulgent messes of jumbled prose and unrealistic dialogue, but they’re my novels and I’m going to do what I want.
Consider it a mark against me if you must, but I don’t believe real literature, literary fiction, what-have-you, should or even can be written intentionally with the bifurcated political compass in mind. What must be recorded is lived experience at the time, or otherwise that experience projected backwards or forwards as its medium and genre allow. Whatever messaging is present in a work should be a realistic emergent quality of the text; literature, albeit a form of communication, remains a communication that not only allows but requires reflection upon it in order to be deciphered. It’s not simple speech, but neither should it be treated as a bug in amber. The man who writes a story intends certain things to be communicated, and so too does he probably communicate things unintentionally as a result of his placement in what can only be called ‘his times’; this does not, however, invite impossible interpretations of the text as if the text exists separately from him as an obscured object. Never can the medium be removed from its nature as a message—and yes, I recognize that I’m using this terminology a bit differently than the idiom suggests. There is more to be said on this topic, but I’ll leave that for a more formal piece to come sometime later.
That also said, there are plans for the sort of Big Brained Heavy Themed Book About Our Times in the works, but I don’t expect to seriously tackle it for a few years. I have one novel that I’m working on putting the finishing touches on before 2023 ends, and two more works of fiction planned before getting to the big one. Maybe I’ll have time in 2025. We’ll see.
Reason Three: Real Life
The last one is, predictably, changes in real life. When I first started the blog that preceded The Pillarist, I was newly married, childless, and in fact, not even Catholic. Eight years later has seen two of those things change and one of them bear happy fruit. Between financial commitments, the duties of manhood, fatherhood, and home ownership, the time and creative energy required to invest in the long form commentary that this site exists for is scant, to say the least. This is especially true as my interests, as mentioned, have shifted toward further developing and honing my fiction rather than my nonfiction. What time and creative energy I have these days goes into working on some novel or other.
The pendulum of creative interest will swing back. Of this I have no doubt. Anyone with a newborn recognizes how priorities reorder themselves for about a year, or less, every time one comes along. I expect to have a bit more time to focus on nonfiction writing and research sometime next year.
As I still haven’t managed to get back on Twitter, what time that was once spent ‘brand building’ or, more appropriately, passively doom scrolling through my feed, has been spent instead getting life sorted out. I’m not someone who really thinks that social media is purely toxic, though some platforms are clearly better than others. In theory, I think some presence online is probably good for most people, provided that a platform existed which wasn’t terrible. Unfortunately, after Elon Musk’s acquisition of the only apparently tolerable social media platform on the web, Twitter has become every bit as unusable as we feared it would become under its previous management. Watching all this from the sidelines has only verified, once again, how delusional Musk is in his visions of the future, and particularly of those that he directly has his hands on.
Suffice it to say that, since he reneged on his promise of amnesty, I’m probably never going back. It’s too much hassle now to join the platform that thinks a proton mail account is a spambox and requires you to register verified cell phone numbers with it. Worse, bans are still arbitrary, the moderation seems inflicted by algorithm even more than it used to be, and Musk’s choice in content oversight remains as poor as ever. Even taking the current ADL controversy into account, the very notion that he’d have agreed with that organization in the first place shows how clueless he is and will always be.
But, it’s not like anyone else is doing what Twitter used to, either. Alternative sites remain huddled with their niche body of users, and if you’re lucky or discerning enough, they aren’t also hocking your information to the FBI. But this means that the news function that worked for Twitter fails on these smaller platforms due to the limited size of their userbases. Twitter worked because everyone used it; these alternatives fail because this can’t be said for them. It’s not really the same as running a video hosting site alternative to Youtube. People will find that sort of content even if it’s not on Youtube, provided search engines continue to crawl the sites that host it. Microblogging venues like Twitter exists specifically for tight, fast, and disposable interaction. If everyone isn’t using the same platform, you’re basically stuck with a ghost town.
In any case, being forcibly ejected from the one social media platform I saw any value in, and that platform’s subsequent (clearly not-coincidental!) decline has helped my focus quite a bit. One would think that would give me more time to do things like read, or write, or pursue hobbies, but quickening family life and the additional responsibilities of aging have meant that, for some reason, I have less time than ever. Strange how that works.
Future Plans and Finishing Up
The Pillarist is not going away. This site will remain up and I do expect to continue on nonfiction projects and articles sometime in 2024, hopefully with some modicum of regularity. It’s possible I’ll even get to a few book reviews between now and the end of the year, too.
Eventually, I plan to open a storefront, because I’d personally like a mug or two and maybe a few t-shirts to be available if just for my own selfish use. Likewise will my writing be made available in hard copy, both my fiction and, eventually, collections of nonfiction works that may or may not have originally been published here on the site. There have been vague plans to go ahead with publication for years, but I’ve just never gotten around to sorting out the back end requirements to make it happen. That’s gradually changing.
There are no plans to release audio content in the near future. It’s too tedious to record old posts, especially years after the fact when their relevancy is somewhat diminished if not made now totally obsolete. Likewise, my availability to stream a talk or lecture on some subject or other is shot for the time being, not that there’s ever been a particular demand for that, anyway. For both of these reasons, podcasting remains off the table unless someone can convince me otherwise.
To finish this update off, I’d like to thank again everyone who reads and has ever read my work here at The Pillarist. It’s been a slow 2023 for the site. The work continues, the site endures, and I look forward to offering you more of this material in the future!
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