Hey, you got peanut butter in my chocolate!
Ignore me, I'm just playing around with my new Substack account.
They’ll rejoice—I've returned at last!
I mean, was I ever really gone? Aren’t you, in fact, secretly wishing I would FINALLY go away? Sorry, suckers—Ain’t gonna happen. As Sinatra used to say to his adoring fans during concerts, “May you live to be a hundred, and may the last voice you hear be mine.”
The headers below are the Substack team’s prompts to me. I’m supposed to replace them with my own text, of course. But what would be the fun in that?
Why this, why now
I am launching this space because…Leaves of Grass? In multiple senses. Yes, I am stoned right now. But also, the other thing. How that man wrote one book of poems, but he wrote it over and over and over again. I want to do something like that. Maybe a little bit with poems. But I mean more with my whole life. Not life as in the times of our life (“The laughter and the tears / The shadows of misty yesteryears” identify and get a free month of Substack) but rather life as in the life force. So, more Luke Skywalker and less Kodak (that’s a hint to the lyric ID challenge).
Next they want me to say what brought me here and what inspired me to do it now. I can answer both of those questions regarding Club 82, a gay sex club on E. 4th Street RIGHT across the street from KGB bar that opened around 1992—but I’m bored with this section and I want to move on. They say “Think of it as a mini personal manifesto.” But as regards that, I don’t want to leave anything in writing.
What kind of community are you looking to build here
You know, I mean, you are not just starting a newsletter when you start a Substack, you are starting a community. I am inviting people to subscribe to my thinking. What kind of space will this be? God only knows!
Be specific
I have yet to figure out when I will be posting. You can expect certain posts on specific days—It’s just not clear yet which posts, or on which days. I don’t know what you free subscribers get. I have no use for you anyway. Is he serious? Or just stoned? Well, he said he was stoned; but does that ipso facto mean he is not serious? Qui sait?
What does a paid subscription buy you? I think it’s called logorrhea—which is better than gonorrhea, but less fun to get.
TBH
What I said about the whole Leaves of Grass thing. For someone as stubbornly and persistently unknown as I am, I’ve written a lot of different shit. A bunch of it is on the Web, in legacy locations like my blogs Pedagogishness and Criticality. Short stories I (sort of) published in the early 1990s before I ever published a poem. I mean, for Heaven’s sake, articles in HONCHO, a gay porn mag…hmmm, also from the early 1990s. Okay, so it’s true, that about which I have tried to remain in denial: My heyday came and went THIRTY YEARS AGO. In an eerily similar vein, my doctoral dissertation on queer kinship and camp aesthetics in Juvenal’s ninth satire.
Anyway, there’s going to be a lot of stuff on this Substack, and when I drop the faux self-effacery, the fact is, I think some of it will be pretty compelling, and a teeny bit of it may even be groundbreaking. Yes, I will reproduce things from my archives, but I will post new things, too. Some of it will surprise you: for example, I believe that gender is binary. Some of it will disgust you: for example, I believe that gender is binary.
Ignore our advice
There is no one true way to go about building a Substack. This is your playground, experiment with it. If you’re having fun, your readers will too.
Now they tell me.