I started writing seriously in 2015, when I was teaching part time in Saigon, and set up a website on Wordpress called ‘The Lethal Text’. I opened a Substack account at the beginning of 2021, planning originally just to stack revised versions of my better essays, with a view to sequencing a book. Having experienced censorship problems with Wordpress and a warning filtre attached to my site on Google, Substack was a breath of free speech, and, much as I loved my Wordpress site, I spend much more time here now. Substack was where the original COVID dissidents were publishing, and they laid down a standard of high seriousness which is still in there somewhere. Discourse was serious and engagement polite; challenge was acceptable, but those were the rules of engagement.
Well, no man steps twice into the same river. Which is a paraphrase from another disappeared book, known only through quotations and paraphrases from other authors who had read it.
I have so many reasons to thank Substack for this free space — we all do. Substack is where I go to read, now, as well.
By the way, I tend to follow people rather than subscribe, because of the disastrous effect on my inboxes, and I don’t pay to read because of the disastrous state of my finances. All my work is free to read. It’s such a privilege to be read at all. But each to their own, I know everyone’s just tryna survive.
I’ve always agreed with T S Eliot that most writers publish too much — now way, way too much is all the rage — and I’d rather be known for a few good things that might (who knows?) rival the effect that certain seminal articles and essays have had on me. If you read only one thing by me, please make it The Carbon Epiphany. That one matters, if nothing else does.
I’m terrible at self-promotion, but as long as fellow spirits find me I’m happy. I have only have one tattoo on my body, the blazon of the great Edward de Vere, with a Latin inscription: Mente Videbori — “BY THE MIND, I SHALL BE SEEN”.
TheLethalText.me
