Starting things is interesting. Plant seeds, see what grows. My short description of Dear Magician reads: 'A Wizard's field notes ~ Beach-combing, city-watching, omens, ideas ~ A zuihitsu1 of the weirdinary'. I’m not entirely sure what it will evolve into. One way or another, I’m hoping that this Substack will be a way to speak more directly to those who want to pick up what I'm putting down, rather than throwing paper planes into the void (read: tangling with incomprehensible algorithms.)2
After some deliberation, I’ve turned on paid subscriptions, because Wizarding is a gift economy.3 However, I will likely keep all my posts free for the foreseeable future.
P.S. This little fragment is an edit of the automatically-generated Coming Soon post that Substack makes for you when you sign up. One can’t delete it, so I decided to modify it into something more interesting. As the Coming Soon post is merely a placeholder— not emailed out— this tiny Beat-manifesto will only be found by the truly interested, like a kind of Easter egg. The actual first piece I wrote on Substack was this one: The Pūpū Tarakihi / Paper Nautilus Method of Wizarding. (I began with Le Guin.)
Diane di Prima says: "You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology a cosmogony laid out, before all eyes there is no part of yourself you can separate out saying, this is memory, this is sensation this is the work I care about, this is how I make a living it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole... history is a living weapon in yr hand... bring yr self home to yrself, enter the garden the guy at the gate w/ the flaming sword is yrself the war is the war for the human imagination and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you The imagination is not only holy, it is precise it is not only fierce, it is practical men die everyday for the lack of it, it is vast & elegant... the fire is central"
‘Pen at will’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuihitsu
I had felt more and more uneasy with gifting my creative labour to a certain Platform of the Damned— feeding the evil machine, and contributing to keeping other people trapped there. That made my soul feel bad. So I jumped ship.
I give away most of what I do for free, and sometimes receive gifts / koha back.