I've Only Been Internet Crazy For 20 Years!

Now I'm almost ready to get out into February's Valentine(?) I'm sure you all know how specific I can be. Asemic writing is a term I learned from Tim Gaze 20 years ago when I was infected with a computer virus. Before then I was so bad at typing that I used an actual typewriter. Now my Raspberry pi is down, so I've gone from 2 finger typing and kerning errors to advanced squiggles masquerading as deep blues strategy for world domination of calligraphic intent! Now we know who the real humans are and the pretenders. What type of illiterate scrapper are you? How good are you in a pen fight. Anyone can make a line even if it's only the penmanship tipping over in exhaustion at the excesses of historical cursive. The goal with Asemica is to act on the page, to dabble from the circumference of your cranial cabinet a symbolic system you gift or curse the repository field via a convenient appendage. I usually use a paper product. It's not about scarring a dead tree, since cotton makes for some of the best and most durable paper. I've used paper, dirt, canvas, plexiglass, and the computer for my string signs. Be bold and free, or make it expensive and call it art. 

My symbols are descended from petroglyphs, undeciphered scripts, alchemy symbols (golden-lead), Doctor's prescriptions, sigils, spiritual ciphers, and artistic illiteracy. Asemic writing is addicting but it's a habit that has benefits as long as you don't run out of ink. Carbon and gum Arabic can be used to create new ink if you have a dry pen. Any paint or even makeup could also be a substitute. Any person who has ever held a stick has probably made a mark at some point. Asemic writing is just extending the activity into a literary or poetic context conscious that scribal communication is the intent. I wouldn't call it babble because it isn't necessarily phonetic though sound poetry is a proper spouse to asemic writing. I would house it in a genre of its openness. You have captured a line, now how are you going to explain yourself? If you can't find the right word just say you were inebriated on internal or external chemistry. A love letter to Belle perhaps that an aware cautiously protective father might grill you with. Practice. Study. Read the clouds and the twigs. The tracks everyone leaves are also a good place to start for an asemic-accute situational awareness. Listen for a line, the sound of a writing utensil on a surface is also a honing beacon.

This year is my anniversary for the matrimony of my asemic writing and the computer I shared with my family. I don't know if I would have ever gotten one if I wasn't a writer of asemics. My primary drive was to publish my asemic novella The Giant's Fence on Lulu. Lulu is a print on demand book publisher that I used because stapling a zine gets difficult for book length works. My book was an experiment and was decidedly non-mainstream. It was 80 pages of infinity and nothing clashing and dancing in rivers of partial unfixed symbols. I wrote the book because I am mortal and wanted to test the writing journey and transition from an artist with limited skills into an author who would be capable in a variety of transient circumstances. I make writing that adapts to new everything. I never know where I will end up next. So I create work that can be bent and utilized or called upon for life's circumstances. 

A crucifix made out of a question mark was the first knock to my consciousness. A short stint in rehab for teenage rebellion is where I was first introduced to the potential wonderous daze and utility of newly invented symbols. Codes to operate with on the inside. It's a sign from a god of course. You can learn from anything and everything. Apply the symbols when and where you deem fit. I personally enjoy books though they are a pain in the ass to haul around when you have to move them. I had a job sorting and hauling library books so I started from the literary bottom. Stack them towards the cab so the truck doesn't fishtale. Look at your fellow comedians to the left and the right also keeping the libraries functional and think someday I want to make this worse. 

Ebooks are not my favorite thing to read but my eyes are adapting to them. Has anyone seen my light speed gif pohms? They are traveling away from me at the speed of photons. I had them trapped online, someone may have borrowed them and forgotten to return them to the library. The fine will be a 12 pack of fresh NA beer at the proper temperature. Bottles are preferred because they allow the light speed gif pohms to interact with the beer. A blessing will befall the kind soul who returns the pohms, picking up trash poetry on the highway is where you will be if you are trying to conceal them. If you are a truly desperate creative just tell me the light belongs to all of us.

Cheers to 20 years of online publishing. It's been a journey of tremendous highs and lows. Have we survived the anthropocene yet? 

From Henri Michaux to publishing collapse and regeneration, my mind and pen have been interacting with the Internet. I don't think I can separate reality and the virtual and asemic writing is my personal trans-symbolic current of experience I make sense of this zeitgeist and entanglement. The Giant's Fence was just my first acknowledgement and stroll through January's garden. It's a labyrinth of life where I remember the aposition.

India ink is cheap and feathers fall from birds all of the time, cell phones have drawing apps. I'm done with asemic writing for the moment but I am glad it carries on with or without me.

Here's a great review of TGF and thrashing in the comments the book received on HTMLGIANT:

https://htmlgiant.com/random/the-giants-fence-by-michael-jacobson/

dbqp: a first review:

https://dbqp.blogspot.com/2007/03/sans-teeth-sans-eyes-sans-taste-sans.html?m=1

A Soundpo translation:

https://post-asemicpress.bandcamp.com/track/the-giants-fence

The first cover for the perfect bound edition.

https://archive.org/details/TheGiantsFenceMichaelJacobson

This is where my online and offline paths began to twist around each other like strands of DNA. Now there's an Asemica Tribe online who are quiet and creative and many more offline existing with capable pens.

Hi T.M.

Hi A.N.

This post is dedicated to Jim Leftwich and Tim Gaze. Poets. 

The Giant's Fence was primarily written in South Minneapolis. But I was a courrier so I worked on the book on every work break in small towns around central MN, and on a road trip down I35 to Mexico and Texas and New Mexico and Colorado and...? SD, Sioux Valley Hospital is where they cut my cord. 

Winter counting.