{"id":14128,"date":"2024-02-02T17:10:00","date_gmt":"2024-02-02T17:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=14128"},"modified":"2024-03-19T17:11:43","modified_gmt":"2024-03-19T17:11:43","slug":"all-the-channels-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2024\/02\/02\/all-the-channels-2\/","title":{"rendered":"all the channels 2"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

all the channels 1<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

i wrote a whole book about introspection, in part because i believe i\u2019m pretty good at it, and i believe i\u2019ve gotten a lot of value from it, and i\u2019ve helped lots of people get value from getting better at it too. but that doesn\u2019t mean i actually introspect a lot, or even \u201cas much as would be optimal for me\u201d. come to think of it i haven\u2019t done much \u201cproper\u201d introspective journaling in quite some time, which seems like a bit of a fail on my part. so maybe i\u2019ll do some now, in real time<\/p>\n\n\n\n

i have always been someone with many competing interests and curiosities, which is something that has been both wonderful and terrible for me, sometimes simultaneously. i have so many things i\u2019d like to be doing, and if i\u2019m not careful, i end up spending all my time and energy simply switching between them, without making any substantial progress on anything. sometimes i manage to convince myself that this is fine, actually, and that i\u2019m doing a kind of meta-work by going around touching everything, a sort of \u201cmanagement by walking around\u201d, tending to my mental garden with little touches. but sometimes it feels quite apparent that i\u2019m \u201cjust\u201d avoiding doing anything, because of inertia, or flinching from discomfort. this often feels to me like i\u2019ve been sitting too long in a bath, which was pleasant and warm earlier, but has now gone cold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

one of the reasons i\u2019ve been taking so long with my substack posts is that i want the essays to be really good, and i haven\u2019t properly articulated what \u201creally good\u201d means to me. so i\u2019m stymied by vagueness. i know that even with my substack, with a tagline \u201call the channels at once\u201d, I stubbornly want to achieve many things simultaneously. have i listed them out before? I vaguely feel like I have. Have I listed them out in a substack post? I\u2019m not so sure. In which case it\u2019s probably worth repeating myself, since evidently I didn\u2019t get the message clearly enough myself the first time, if there was a first time and i wasn\u2019t just imagining it or writing it in my notes or drafts somewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

part of me wants my substack to be autobiographical. i\u2019ve been wanting to write my memoirs since i was a kid. before I wrote and published Friendly Ambitious Nerd, one of my projects was to publish an ebook memoir titled Naughty Boy. That project now feels sorta quaint and irrelevant, FAN does a better job in some respects. So I then wondered, should I repurpose Naughty Boy into maybe a series of substack essays? like, 3-5 essays about my life so far? A part of me got excited about the idea, but another part pushed back saying \u201cthat\u2019s too self-indulgent, that\u2019s too much about myself, Voltaic Verses is supposed to be all the channels at once<\/em>, not just The Visakan Veerasamy Channel.\u201d And then I got disheartened for a while, but then I thought about it further and realized, hey, it\u2019s not like I ever stick to any one single topic anyway. If I did<\/em> write a series of autobiographical essays, it would be inevitable that they would contain other things as well. I would definitely find ways to sneak in commentaries about culture, and I\u2019d likely talk about history, and quote a bunch of cool people. So I\u2019m still open to the idea of trying to condense my entire life into a handful of essays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

part of me wants my substack to be about creativity and the creative process, but not too much. one of my favorite books of all time is Stephen Pressfield\u2019s The War of Art, and I feel like I could probably write my own remix of that book. But I don\u2019t want to be a creative who writes primarily about creativity. That feels too<\/em> self-referential for my taste. Stephen Pressfield himself wrote screenplays and he wrote at least a couple of novels, one about golf and another about the Battle of Thermopylae, before he wrote about writing. I think that\u2019s the right way to do things. I do have the draft of a novel about local music, maybe I could tell that story? I also have a collection of drafts and sketches of short stories that I\u2019d like to put together someday, but that feels a bit premature. But maybe I could talk about that. A post about my love of stories in general, I think is something I\u2019ve circled around writing so much that it\u2019s worn me out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

part of me wants my substack to be what I\u2019d describe as \u201cold timey magazine columns\u201d. lemme quote from an old thread: \u201cmade a couple of new friends yesterday and they asked completely reasonable questions about my work, which I don\u2019t actually get very often and don\u2019t really have great answers to. \u201cWhat do you write about?\u201d I\u2019m a bit of a media theorist, a bit of an old-timey magazine columnist\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

the annoying thing about my work is that I\u2019m trying to do trickster shit, and the worst or hardest way to do trickster shit is to advertise that outright. One frame is that I\u2019m trying to \u201cdo education\u201d without labelling myself an educator, without lecturing or preaching\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

another frame I used is that \u201cit\u2019s sort of like being a travel writer but not necessarily actually writing about going to different countries, more about seeing with new eyes\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

another is that it\u2019s about trying to get people to see how they see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Herb wrote jokes, gossip, puns and anecdotes for 60 years as \u201ca continuous love letter to San Francisco\u201d and I\u2019d basically like to do my version of that, for nerds worldwide. he wrote 16,000 columns of 1,000 words each, coined the term \u201cbeatnik\u201d, popularized the term \u201chippie\u201d. This is pretty much the spirit of what I wanna be doing with my writing. His columns offer \u201ceverything you expect from an entire newspaper\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

we don\u2019t root for perfect characters or for perfect authors. we\u2019re looking for something real<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

what else do i want my substacks to do? i want them to have great quotes in them, pointers, references, trails for people to follow. you should always come away from a visakanv substack post with at least one new curiosity, something to add to your to-read\/watch list. was recently reminded of how Maxis games like SimCity and The Sims came with lists of recommended reading. I loved that so much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

abandoned<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

all the channels 1 i wrote a whole book about introspection, in part because i believe i\u2019m pretty good at it, and i believe i\u2019ve gotten a lot of value from it, and i\u2019ve helped lots of people get value from getting better at it too. but that doesn\u2019t mean… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[730],"class_list":["post-14128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-substack"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-3FS","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14128"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14129,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14128\/revisions\/14129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}