I know that the words "thank you" are almost beside the point, as you didn't write this to be nice. Yet the gratitude on my end is profound. I've gotten by without "confidence" but with a kind of blind compulsion. You raise many difficult and important issues: What happens to a writer who becomes an object of derision…
I know that the words "thank you" are almost beside the point, as you didn't write this to be nice. Yet the gratitude on my end is profound. I've gotten by without "confidence" but with a kind of blind compulsion. You raise many difficult and important issues: What happens to a writer who becomes an object of derision? They're supposed to admit defeat and stop writing.
I have spent most of my career, since late 80s, ducking and shielding from blows aimed at my worthiness as a journalist, and being a target for fear and loathing. From intra-office coup attempts, to pharma paid (I am certain) federal court cases, to occult blood rituals placed online to death and murder fantasies, to a 20 year stalker campaign from "our" side seeking to punish any *other* journalist who takes me seriously at all. (They hear from him in all caps, screaming his head off.)
This person, around 2007, aimed shrapnel at me in a public forum with words that almost did cause me to quit. "Atrocious" on "the science," an "embarrassment to all HIV dissidents," and "embarrassment" to the gay community, and my Harper's article 2006 an abysmal failure, not even fish wrap. Not only because it didn't include The Perth Group. A little bit of minutae: It DID. They requested to be removed from the article. You get my point: I could NOT WIN. I was never "safe," never skidding into home base, with a "good enough" feeling of any kind. I should "get the hell out," of the arena. I was making everything worse for the ones who were smart, could think, were good on "the science." It was to be a matter of the Grand Prize being carried off by people who can with Talmudic accuracy describe shadows of shadows of the shadow virus HIV and detail precisely HOW that which does not exist does not exist.
When I could breathe and see the screen through tears of humiliation, I defended myself on grounds I am not competing as a science writer. I said I am trying to be a writer-writer, and tell human stories. Tell of scientist's lamentations and mother's losses and whistleblower's shocks. The Gallo/Fauci AIDS Inc landscape.
Silence. I literally stumbled away from the screen, thinking I might fall dead.
I lit a candle, and called Robert Crumb, who sat with me on the phone until I could speak in coherent sentences again. But a major series of living wounds had been inflicted, regardless of how I might try to intellectualize or "consider the source." Elias Canetti calls this "the sting," and he describes, in "Crowds and Power" how it becomes a living thing, with a memory, trying to "reverse" itself and exit the flesh.
Every time I try to write about the extreme bullying, I delete it. I may even delete this comment.
Self pity is the worst. How to avoid it and be true to the record? Never mention it? I wanted to *understand* it.
But the thing is, Jon, you are not ever just writing about what you seem to be writing about. The light comes out from dimensions not so apparent at first glance.
The world is consumed with psychosis about "gender." I arrived in the US from Sweden in 1984, "gender leveled," by the social engineers over there. Neither male nor female. Only when the blows landed did I ponder the possibility that I was not the right thing.
But today you have allowed me to swim to the surface, like the Japanese goldfish 10 years ago who hid in an aquarium filter since it was thrown into the tank as pirhana food as a baby, and fed on falling scraps. When it was rescued, it had no "gold." The gold on the scales develops from sunlight.
Japanese tourists came to visit the pale fish, it became a symbol of something everybody understood. I wrote about the Japanese fish, in yet another passage I hid or deleted.
As for the boys club of media, truth is I was never truly invited, not even after OJ, except briefly. Esquire asked me for one more piece after that. Would I be willing to write a tortured essay about my body—kid you not. I'll spare you further details, and I was never one to whine about misogyny. I just wanted to work.
And finally, finally, Substack arrived like the cavalry. I found my readers, my exodus from the sunless filter, all the hiding and surviving. We meet here, around this campfire, and all our intermediaries are elsewhere.
Sunlight still feels uncomfortable. Praise and attack can feel the same—one should believe neither. But to have one of the greatest living writers describe what he sees in my work, this feels like an antidote to all of it, a way to shed it all, and move forward, and close the portals with all the screeching gargoyles. Maybe even laugh.
Thank you, Jon. You didn't need to do this but you did.
If I don't use it as a healing moment, I'm only helping our shared opposition.
ps. I might delete this. This isn't how a winning Boxer speaks. Or is it?
Please don't delete/self-censor your comment. You speak Truth, and it doesn't come across as self-pity at all. As you stated above, "... I am not competing as a science writer. I said I am trying to be a writer-writer, and tell human stories. Tell of scientist's lamentations and mother's losses and whistleblower's shocks."
Thank you for your work, and for sharing this intimate exchange. The respect you both have for each other is impressive and inspiring. Having the courage to stand in your truth is not diminished in the slightest by your very human emotions and responses to the hate and anger that have been directed at you.
All the best and continued good health and strength as you continue your “training”. 😉
Reading Jon’s article and your follow up comments just reminds me how much I love being on Substack, the greatest thing that’s ever happened on the internet. At any rate, allow me to interject that perhaps the best part of being human is how we transform, and learn, and grow, and maybe fall, and get back up all while trying to make sense out of what is senseless by nature. But after all is said and done, the beat goes on and those of us who can cut through all of the noise and confusion realize the value of simply taking one more step. After all as George Harrison sang:
Celia (and Jon), You two define what's best in humanity, and why anyone who tries to shred what you guys embody comes up looking so lost and deluded. There are always two standards: the material and the spiritual. Higher levels of consciousness intertwine those two truths like long, bradded hair. Lower levels deny the ubiquity of the Divine.
Jon, I'm speechless.
I know that the words "thank you" are almost beside the point, as you didn't write this to be nice. Yet the gratitude on my end is profound. I've gotten by without "confidence" but with a kind of blind compulsion. You raise many difficult and important issues: What happens to a writer who becomes an object of derision? They're supposed to admit defeat and stop writing.
I have spent most of my career, since late 80s, ducking and shielding from blows aimed at my worthiness as a journalist, and being a target for fear and loathing. From intra-office coup attempts, to pharma paid (I am certain) federal court cases, to occult blood rituals placed online to death and murder fantasies, to a 20 year stalker campaign from "our" side seeking to punish any *other* journalist who takes me seriously at all. (They hear from him in all caps, screaming his head off.)
This person, around 2007, aimed shrapnel at me in a public forum with words that almost did cause me to quit. "Atrocious" on "the science," an "embarrassment to all HIV dissidents," and "embarrassment" to the gay community, and my Harper's article 2006 an abysmal failure, not even fish wrap. Not only because it didn't include The Perth Group. A little bit of minutae: It DID. They requested to be removed from the article. You get my point: I could NOT WIN. I was never "safe," never skidding into home base, with a "good enough" feeling of any kind. I should "get the hell out," of the arena. I was making everything worse for the ones who were smart, could think, were good on "the science." It was to be a matter of the Grand Prize being carried off by people who can with Talmudic accuracy describe shadows of shadows of the shadow virus HIV and detail precisely HOW that which does not exist does not exist.
When I could breathe and see the screen through tears of humiliation, I defended myself on grounds I am not competing as a science writer. I said I am trying to be a writer-writer, and tell human stories. Tell of scientist's lamentations and mother's losses and whistleblower's shocks. The Gallo/Fauci AIDS Inc landscape.
Silence. I literally stumbled away from the screen, thinking I might fall dead.
I lit a candle, and called Robert Crumb, who sat with me on the phone until I could speak in coherent sentences again. But a major series of living wounds had been inflicted, regardless of how I might try to intellectualize or "consider the source." Elias Canetti calls this "the sting," and he describes, in "Crowds and Power" how it becomes a living thing, with a memory, trying to "reverse" itself and exit the flesh.
Every time I try to write about the extreme bullying, I delete it. I may even delete this comment.
Self pity is the worst. How to avoid it and be true to the record? Never mention it? I wanted to *understand* it.
But the thing is, Jon, you are not ever just writing about what you seem to be writing about. The light comes out from dimensions not so apparent at first glance.
The world is consumed with psychosis about "gender." I arrived in the US from Sweden in 1984, "gender leveled," by the social engineers over there. Neither male nor female. Only when the blows landed did I ponder the possibility that I was not the right thing.
But today you have allowed me to swim to the surface, like the Japanese goldfish 10 years ago who hid in an aquarium filter since it was thrown into the tank as pirhana food as a baby, and fed on falling scraps. When it was rescued, it had no "gold." The gold on the scales develops from sunlight.
Japanese tourists came to visit the pale fish, it became a symbol of something everybody understood. I wrote about the Japanese fish, in yet another passage I hid or deleted.
As for the boys club of media, truth is I was never truly invited, not even after OJ, except briefly. Esquire asked me for one more piece after that. Would I be willing to write a tortured essay about my body—kid you not. I'll spare you further details, and I was never one to whine about misogyny. I just wanted to work.
And finally, finally, Substack arrived like the cavalry. I found my readers, my exodus from the sunless filter, all the hiding and surviving. We meet here, around this campfire, and all our intermediaries are elsewhere.
Sunlight still feels uncomfortable. Praise and attack can feel the same—one should believe neither. But to have one of the greatest living writers describe what he sees in my work, this feels like an antidote to all of it, a way to shed it all, and move forward, and close the portals with all the screeching gargoyles. Maybe even laugh.
Thank you, Jon. You didn't need to do this but you did.
If I don't use it as a healing moment, I'm only helping our shared opposition.
ps. I might delete this. This isn't how a winning Boxer speaks. Or is it?
Celia - you're a warrior. An example to us all.
Please don't delete/self-censor your comment. You speak Truth, and it doesn't come across as self-pity at all. As you stated above, "... I am not competing as a science writer. I said I am trying to be a writer-writer, and tell human stories. Tell of scientist's lamentations and mother's losses and whistleblower's shocks."
Thank you for that.
Thank you for your work, and for sharing this intimate exchange. The respect you both have for each other is impressive and inspiring. Having the courage to stand in your truth is not diminished in the slightest by your very human emotions and responses to the hate and anger that have been directed at you.
All the best and continued good health and strength as you continue your “training”. 😉
Steak and butter for the win.
"We meet here, around this campfire, and all our intermediaries are elsewhere.
Sunlight still feels uncomfortable. Praise and attack can feel the same—one should believe neither."
Celia Farber: This is great writing. Thank you!
Reading Jon’s article and your follow up comments just reminds me how much I love being on Substack, the greatest thing that’s ever happened on the internet. At any rate, allow me to interject that perhaps the best part of being human is how we transform, and learn, and grow, and maybe fall, and get back up all while trying to make sense out of what is senseless by nature. But after all is said and done, the beat goes on and those of us who can cut through all of the noise and confusion realize the value of simply taking one more step. After all as George Harrison sang:
When you don’t know where you’re going
Any road will take you there
https://youtu.be/r8fFdc-karA
Celia (and Jon), You two define what's best in humanity, and why anyone who tries to shred what you guys embody comes up looking so lost and deluded. There are always two standards: the material and the spiritual. Higher levels of consciousness intertwine those two truths like long, bradded hair. Lower levels deny the ubiquity of the Divine.