Browsed by
Category: Diary of an Adamant Lover

Essayish 2: Great Regrets

Essayish 2: Great Regrets

We are worried! We are fretted! Our foreheads are corrugated! Our eyes are pinched! Our hands tremble like the flutter of a dove’s wings as it settles down into its bouncy olive branch.

The “Statement of Faith” is boring and confusing! Ditto for the “Intro to Something Deeperism”. What are we to do!?

The “About this Text” introductory material to “The Pitch” is somehow off. The mishap lies, we believe, mostly in the quotes attributed to Constantine Clement George.

a self-described “Romantic Robin a pecking at the egg forever and evermore”

Just doesn’t quite sit right. And the long speech that he supposedly made his seducees swear is somehow too much; I get bored before finishing it.

And then there’s the ending of “Chapter 1: Love Engineer”! If you follow a proof for the infinitude of primes and then conclude that there are in fact an infinitude of primes, you are making a metaphysical leap even more wild than the one from the experience of Pure Love to the conclusion that Pure Love in fact exists. For if Pure Love exists, it seems quite likely that the experience of Pure Love would carry within it certain knowledge of what you are experiencing (ie: the experience of Pure Love would have the stamp of Truth within it); but even if the standard human mathematics where we believe to have found proof for an infinite number of primes exists, it seems unlikely that any experience of mathematical logic would have “Absolute Truth” imprinted upon it as clearly and indelibly as the experience of Pure Love. On the other hand, perhaps the ending of “Love Engineer” is not supposed to assume the leap from a mathematical proof of the infinitude of primes to the metaphysical belief that an infinite number of primes actually exists, but just an affirmation that there’s an infinitude of primes within the mathematical system where we just proved there’s an infinitude of primes. In that case, it seems that the author of “Love Engineer” is confusing the experience of a proof within a system with the experience of a proof beyond all systems. Very worrisome. And so what can we do? How can we proceed? What God will answer our jumbled, confused, blathering prayers?

Author: BW
Copyright: AMW
Time: The worry time

About this project:

We’re letting Bartleby write his book; we’re even publishing it for him; it is two loosely bound sketchbooks:

(1) Love at a Reasonable Price: Stories of his magically timeless time here at Wandering Albatross Press interspersed with writings from that time or from now but somehow connected to that time–stories about manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling Pure Love;
and
(2) Diary of an Adamant Lover: Stories of his current time here all alone with the quiet squeaking floorboards and the rats thumping in the ceiling: Stories of his cries for help in the ruins of Wandering Albatross Press, the black and dark time after the hope and before the answer. We’re splitting this one into two sections: Biographical (writings that mostly relate the current movements of BW, AMW, and the rest of the WAP gang are ex) and Essayish (writings that mostly stay within a certain thought entertained and cultivated by the author and/or his editor).

Both books sold as they evolve here:
Buy the Books/Chapter
That page also includes a current list of chapters for each book.

Actually, the posts of Diary of an Adamant Lover probably won’t ever require a subscription. Still, with a subscription, you get a nicely ebound eevolving ebook compilation of the writings, and you get a quick buy eye-connecting “Thank you” from AW and BW as they bow their way out of the subway car with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the songs in their lungs.

This blog will consist of extracts from the book’s chapters as they are released into the lumiferous aether. You can buy BW’s book as he writes it here. You can also consider this blog a long advertisement for Wandering Albatross Press’s some-such-several wonderful products; like . You can also view this blog as it’s own thing–a good unto itself–and as such a sweet, chaste little kiss running through the infomaterous aether (the theory of a lumiferous ether through which electromagetic waves move is no longer widely accepted and its originators all long dead; it is very much in the public domain and so publishing houses, such as the beautiful WAP, can use it any way they please). But insofar as this is a commercial venture, we still need it fundamentally grounded not in profit-motive, but in kind delight. So cross your fingers for us; say a prayer for us; keep a gentle but stern, a wary but hopeful eye on us. Help us to try. Or at least let us try.

Author: Bartleby Willard, fictional character

Copyright holder/editor: Andrew Mackenzie Watson (of the Sand Springs Watsons)

Essayish 1/Biographical 2: A Revolutionary Memo

Essayish 1/Biographical 2: A Revolutionary Memo

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

[Update November 2021: We’re back at Diary of Adamant Seducer. We’ll try to bundle it into a book someday. For now the chapters are linked to above. See Buy Our Books for the books we’ve already completed. Character-name reassignments are as follows: literal truth becomes poetic Truth; timespace becomes a laughing mush; the Gods become the Giggling Beauties; we become only the love we knew and lived.]

Dear Readership real and imagined,

We the exalted leadership of Wandering Albatross Press; two lank men born before the universe began and dead after it ends — if indeed it will end, which we very much very haughtily doubt; two ferocious, incorruptible visionaries; have had another great revelation, the seed of another tremendous revolution:

People — those frail wisps of downy fluff, blighted by mortality — need something steady. They need a nice, safe space to slide into, where they are known and where they know. Witness, for example, how Cheers’s theme song “I wanna go where everybody knows my name”, though neither melodically exceptional nor tied anymore to a popular television show, continues to sink icy fingers and forked flames into the hearts of all who hear it. Or voila! the hold that snugly pajamas — thick plush fabric with a white-scar zipper running from tiny ankle to narrow neckline — have on both children and caregivers alike: a hold all out of proportion to their actual physical comfort. Conclusion: People need a friend, and not really anything else.

People need a friend, and WAP is dedicated to giving people what they need at a reasonable price. But how to sell friendship? Impossible! Ah, but there we’re lucky: We have Bartleby Willard. Manufacturing the impossibly wondrous is not just Bartleby’s chosen career: it is his inborn, God-given all-consuming vocation. And so we turn our tall, proud, cliff-like shoulders toward BW and ask him what it is ours to ask; then we pivot our great mainmast shoulders back to again gaze out giant floor-to-ceiling windows in the wide, tall, old-wood WAP common office here in the WAP Building on Wall Street, Empire City, USA.

After a drifting pause, Bartleby responds:

“Two books! Only way. One artsy collection of stories, as already promised. But then also one continuous, gently strolling narrative about all us here at Wandering Albatross Press. We are sentient beings real and imagined who live with life — this tureened mix-and-match, this criss-cross of watching lines within raucous yet solemn beauty. Why not let readers join us here in tales that echo and shape our reality? Why not? We’ll be their distant, one-sided, lonely friends: They’ll hold us in the glass dome; they’ll shake our world and watch the snow drift peacefully across the backward-bowed, sharp-tipped rooftops of our hazy-dreamtime hamlet.”

We therefore announce two books: “Love at a Reasonable Price” and the concurrent “Diary of an Adamant Lover”. We’ll release about one portion of each every so often, and we’ll sell the two stalagtiting (or is it stalagmiting?) books for a grand total of US$12.

How is a serial story like a friendship? It is familiar; it is fairly reliable; it is known by the readers, and, if the author opens up to the circumstances with a reasonable amount of brave kindness, it also, by an amazing play of refracted light, knows the readers: for readers are flickering souls and experiencing Beauty is not more nor less than the sparkling consciousness of what is common to all. Asleep awake, we oft daydream separate realities; but awake awake, bright-eyed, happy-in-the-sparklingdewdrop, we live and breathe the blessed, shapeless blaze that winds through the myriad, the surface back-and-forth, the particular-contortions.

To see a layout of the current chapters, go to Buy the Book / Chapters or just scroll down to the bottom of this page.

Sincerely,
Thundration “The Instigator” Whistletown
&
Archangelbert “The Agitator” Skullvalley

Memo forged by Bartleby Willard with revolutionary support from his rambunctious editor, Ambergris Whistletown.

Author: Bartleby from Willard
Editor: Ambergris from Whistletown
Copyright: Andrew M Watson

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

From Before:

About this project:
[Update November 2021: Don’t forget this was all written long ago and the below plan’s long since faded away.]

We’re letting Bartleby write his book; we’re even publishing it for him; it is two loosely bound sketchbooks:

(1) Love at a Reasonable Price: Stories of his magically timeless time here at Wandering Albatross Press interspersed with writings from that time or from now but somehow connected to that time–stories about manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling Pure Love;
and
(2) Diary of an Adamant Lover: Stories of his current time here all alone with the quiet squeaking floorboards and the rats thumping in the ceiling: Stories of his cries for help in the ruins of Wandering Albatross Press, the black and dark time after the hope and before the answer. We’re splitting this one into two sections: Biographical (writings that mostly relate the current movements of BW, AMW, and the rest of the WAP gang are ex) and Essayish (writings that mostly stay within a certain thought entertained and cultivated by the author and/or his editor).

Both books sold as they evolve here:
Buy the Books
For a current list of each book’s chapters, please see
Into to Diary of an Adamant Seducer or Intro to Love at a Reasonable Price, depending.

Actually, the posts of Diary of an Adamant Lover probably won’t ever require a subscription. Still, with a subscription, you get a nicely ebound eevolving ebook compilation of the writings, and you get a quick buy eye-connecting “Thank you” from AW and BW as they bow their way out of the subway car with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the songs in their lungs.

This blog will consist of extracts from the book’s chapters as they are released into the lumiferous aether. You can buy BW’s book as he writes it here. You can also consider this blog a long advertisement for Wandering Albatross Press’s some-such-several wonderful products; like . You can also view this blog as it’s own thing — a good unto itself — and as such a sweet, chaste little kiss running through the infomaterous aether (the theory of a lumiferous ether through which electromagetic waves move is no longer widely accepted and its originators all long dead; it is very much in the public domain and so publishing houses, such as the beautiful WAP, can use it any way they please). But insofar as this is a commercial venture, we still need it fundamentally grounded not in profit-motive, but in kind delight. So cross your fingers for us; say a prayer for us; keep a gentle but stern, a wary but hopeful eye on us. Help us to try. Or at least let us try.

Author: Bartleby Willard, fictional character

Copyright holder/editor: Andrew Mackenzie Watson (of the Sand Springs Watsons)

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

Biographical 1: Salesmen pouting in the hall of the mountain king

Biographical 1: Salesmen pouting in the hall of the mountain king

Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer

[update October 2018: Yeah, we think we’re going to go forward with this evolving ebook. If you think you might like to subscribe to it, please join our mailing list at the bottom of this page.]

[update November 2021: Now we’re going forward with this evolving ebook. We’re not talking about subscriptions at the moment. You can see the link to the chapters above. What is here called “Andy Watson” has now become “Amble Whistletown”. Andy Watson is not a fictional character; he is a legal entity; he holds the copyright and buys the groceries.]

Bartleby Willard and Andy Watson, who do not approve of anything or anyone, are here to sell everyone various products, from cat-themed totes to stories about buying and selling Pure Love (an eternal good: Pure Love is infinitely kind; normal love partakes to some degree of Pure Love, but because tainted with impurities like greed and boredom, normal love’s vision of what to do and how to do it is to some degree off).

They live in the hall of the mountain king. The hall is open-air, lined with gnarled pines. Its flooring is angular stones and thick green grass. At one end of the hall, the mountain king with the wrinkled round head and big pocked nose sits potbellied on his throne, conversing — by appointment only — with the many mountain monsters. He drinks cold mountain water from a chalice carved out of pine and wears a bearskin robe over his hairy knobby shoulders. Bartleby Willard and Andy Watson stand back towards the end of the hall. They cross their arms across their gila-monster-bellies and lean a little back and more on one foot than another. They have rounded fratboy muscles and wear maui flip-flops, baggy athletic shorts, and maroon T-shirts emblazoned with several random Greek letters in puffy white. They wear ball caps with concave-down brims backwards. They keep to themselves and circle their jaws and squint their eyes as they nod and back-throat laugh and cool and know it all.

They used to live in the Wandering Albatross Press Building in Somewhere Sometime Wall Street, but have decided to remove themselves to the hall of the mountain king and forget about their olden days. Still, under contract and having nothing better to do, they draft blogposts and fit together storybook entries.

Would you buy anything from these cynical dropouts from humankind? Would they sell anything to you slop-hop bloat-boast lazy loafers?

Would a dragon get into a violent argument with a giant ground unicorn, necessitating the intervention of the reluctant mountain king? Would the scrawny little tree troll journey up from the valley to request an audience with his royal mountainness? Would this skeletally-waify canined apparition (picture a three-fingered aye-aye stretched out into a three-foot-tall humanoid with fur everywhere except for his strangely bald and appallingly gray face) wax eloquent about the need for a normalization of mountain thaw runoff policies?

You see: Stranger things always and forevermore happen, and the crimson chord of capitalism binds us all, keeping us tightly packed together so long as it doesn’t snap and toss us asunder, down into our angry chasms and the blast.

Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer

From Before:

This is the first Fictionish writing in Bartleby’s Diary of an Adamant Lover. For more on this book and what all else’s going on in this blog, see the words beneath these words.

About our ebooks project:

We’re letting Bartleby write his book; we’re even publishing it for him; it is two loosely bound sketchbooks:

(1) Love at a Reasonable Price: Stories of his magically timeless time here at Wandering Albatross Press interspersed with writings from that time or from now but somehow connected to that time–stories about manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling Pure Love;
and
(2) Diary of an Adamant Lover: Stories of his current time here all alone with the quiet squeaking floorboards and the rats thumping in the ceiling: Stories of his cries for help in the ruins of Wandering Albatross Press, the black and dark time after the hope and before the answer.

The books will be sold [when?? Maybe Love at a Reasonable Price will be out by Christmas 2018.] here:
Buy the Books/Chapter
That page also includes a current list of chapters for each book.

If you think you might like to buy Love at a Reasonable Price and/or subscribe to Diary of an Adamant Lover (which we think we’ll release as an eSerialnovel, beginning maybe early 2019) and/or just maybe want to hear from us from time to time:

Subscribe to our mailing list

* indicates required

View previous campaigns.


Author: Bartleby Willard, fictional character

Copyright holder/editor: Andrew Mackenzie Watson (of the Sand Springs Watsons)