everything is a conversation

you may not be able to escape audience capture, but you can at least curate your audience so that you become captured in a way that's beneficial to you

Caught in a contradiction, playing both despot and revolutionary, artist and critic, “straight man” and clown, the manifesto writer must persevere. The secret to this perseverance is drama. The theater of the absurd. You build a little self-contained world and invite the audience in. Describe this world in detail. Don’t be afraid to make it

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Most dialogues are just monologues in disguise.

Old paradigms die hard. Puking, sweating, convulsing every vestige of What No Longer Works into a heaping pile of shitty compost that will eventually grow something new and beautiful, but not until you’re scraped raw of every notion of what that might be.

Universities claim to promote social mobility but inadvertently perpetuate social hierarchies, whereas the military is an explicit hierarchy that inadvertently promotes social mobility.

Somewhere along the way, you realize that no one will teach you how to live your own life — not your parents or your idols, not the philosophers or the poets, not your liberal arts education or your twelve-step program, not church or therapy or Tolstoy. No matter how valuable any of that guidance, how pertinent any of that wisdom, in the end you... See more