something made

I haven't really liked many poems...Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish, In the Waiting Room by Elizabeth Bishop. 

I suppose I liked Emily Brontё's poetry because I like Emily Brontё. 

I enjoy reading ideas about poetry - like, Harold Bloom's work, for instance, but as soon as he actually quotes excerpts of poetry, I'm lost. I get what he's saying in his prose about poetry, but as soon as he illustrates what he's expressing with an actual poem.....no. 

anyway, what he writes about poetry applies to all literature, and he applies it to all literature. Bloom says that ultimately literary criticism becomes poetry and vice versa (because all poems are about other poems) and I can see that in his work. 

Bakhtin's literary criticism also has a distinctly poetic quality about it. and he wrote a book called, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, so he obviously sees Dostoevsky's novels as being poetic. 

in exploring this rarefied field involving poetics and prose on Amazon, I end up finding books about narrative theory and then they lead me to a book that I own: The Anatomy of Story (2007) by John Truby, which is....is it a practical book? In a way it is - it's about how to compose a story - more specifically, how to write a screen-play - but it's full of ideas, references to literature, films, myths, poetry ....it's a very deep book and at the same time an eminently practical one. 

Truby quotes from Gaston Bachelard's, The Poetics of Space: 

Two kinds of space, intimate space and exterior space, keep encouraging each other....in their growth. 

 

Bibles

I've been watching a lot of videos by Cat Woods. Every one of her videos is about the Bible - reviewing different translations, editions, study Bibles, how she studies the Bible, accesories (pens, stickers, etc)....the Bible and anything related is her only topic, so if you're not interested in the Bible or reading it, this is not the youtube channel for you. 

It's refreshing to watch/ listen to Christian content that is not about any particular doctrinal approach or issues...not talking about current events as fulfilments of prophecy...not preaching and teaching, but just expressing enthusiasm for the Bible. 

my favourite translation of the Bible is the Revised Standard Version. I like it because it represents a good balance between the kind of richness of language that you find in the King James Version, and the accessibility of a translation like the Good News Bible. Probably the Bible I've read and continue to read most is the NIV, and now the TNIV. I quite like the New Living Translation as well. It came out in 1996 and I liked how it was noticeably different from the NIV. Some verses I thought shed an interesting new light on the text, while others I thought lost something compared to the NIV. The translation philosophy behind the NLT was what's known as 'dynamic equivalence' or 'thought for thought' translation. In other words, the focus is more on the meaning being conveyed and less on the language used. This can be a little bit problematic because it opens the translation up more to subjectivity and the danger is that the text gets diluted or corrupted. With the NIV, the translators tried to achieve a balance between the two approaches - word for word, and thought for thought. 

The next Bible that I want to get is the NASB - New American Standard Bible - because I've heard good things about it. I've heard that it's really good for Bible study because, in the balance between word for word. and thought for thought, it's heavily slanted towards word for word. 

on being negative

I always feel bad when I've been negative or critical. in my last blog post I was kind of critical of academia at the end. I thought about deleting it, because it doesn't really reflect my true feelings. 

I admire academics and I think that completing a PhD is a great achievement, it's just that I always seem to have issues with systems in general, including the academic system. Generally I feel quite alone with those issues, so it was nice to read something that was, maybe not exactly how I feel about the academic enterprise, but closer than I've found in the past. 

but anyway, Sylvia Plath was not opposed to the academic enterprise as such, it was just certain aspects that she was averse to. When she wrote the excerpt I quoted, she was studying and engaging with academia, but she was making the point that she couldn't see herself becoming solely a full-time academic, as she had a lot of other interests, such as writing her own poetry and other works, and interacting with others, having great conversations, etc. I feel something similar. I love studying, reading and writing, and would like to do something in the academic world at some stage - even do a PhD. It's just that, so far, it has never really worked out. 

It struck a chord with me, reading what Sylvia wrote about this issue. I've never read or heard anything as close to my own ambivalent feelings about academia, and it was interesting and encouraging. 

given to read

I'm trying to decide which book to read next. It's a strange thing...I arrange my books - I literally arrange my whole book collection - in the order in which I intend to read them. but then, when I finish a book and it's time to read the next one, I'm not satisfied with the order I have put them in. 

I wait for and want some sort of inspiration. 

It's similar to the dilemma I used to face back in the days when there were whole shops that specialised in selling CDs. Before that, those same shops sold (vinyl) records and cassettes. It was an exciting thing browsing in those shops and buying an album...or a single - you could buy singles in those days. Now I never buy CDs. I don't need to when everything is free on youtube. 

the dilemma though, was, whenever I wasn't going to buy anything, but was just browsing....and shops like HMV had listening stations where you could listen to some albums....when I wasn't actually going to buy anything, I would see all these albums that I wanted, but when I was going to buy one, sometimes it was hard to find anything I wanted. So, there were a lot that I was drawn to or liked, but, when it came to the point of actually buying one, it seemed like none really crossed that line. 

I have a lot of books that I want to read, and I buy a lot of books because I want to read them, but sometimes - especially when I'm in a particular mood - when it comes to the question of - OK, what do I want to actually read right now? nothing really stands out as a choice. 

A lot of the best books I've read, I picked them up kind of capriciously - thinking, this might be good to read - or I've had to read them for courses. My favourite three novels - Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, and Middlemarch - I read in the first two years of my English degree, which I started in my late 20s. It's funny to think that, just as I didn't know about those great novels before I had to read them for uni, there are probably novels and other books that are really good that I don't know about yet. 

The experience of reading good literature is sublime. Or maybe I should say 'good books' because literature is associated with prose fiction, but non fiction and other genres can also be very good. But, now that I think of it, there's a particular kind of deep enjoyment that novels offer that, I don't know if other forms do or can. There's a kind of immersion that happens with novels.   

but getting back to the question of choosing, even if I was inclined to follow the order I've planned out in arranging my physical books, the situation has become complicated by e-books. I have my kindle books (which are also on my computer in the kindle desk-top app), a lot of pdf's (67), and a 41 page (and counting) document with titles and links to project gutenberg and other websites. so it's hard to put them all in an order. Oh, and I also have a couple of hundred books (and growing) that I've put in my Amazon account...I put them in my cart and then click 'save for later'...I like lists. 

maybe I should read Infinite Jest...for some reason, lately I've been captivated by interviews of David Foster Wallace and other people talking about him and his work. I listen to them while I'm doing other things, like writing this

I think I might read, at least for a while, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, because I was thinking earlier about good writing and that book came to mind. I remember buying that book. I hadn't planned to, but I came across it and flipped through it, reading parts, and it was just a delight...enchanting, beautiful, vibrant....

but then, when I read a few parts of it just now, it touches on topics that cause me pain....touching wounds

I think another reason I was thinking about Sylvia Plath is because I saw a post on twitter about a volume of her letters that was published last year, and apparently it's pretty amazing. It's a 2 volume set edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil (who also edited the unabridged journals), with all her letters (I think), unabridged and without revision. They're huge too...vol 2 is 1088 pages and vol 1 is 1440. I already have some of her letters in a book called Letters Home which was edited, and the letters selected, by her mother, and (of course) most of but not all of the letters in it are to her mother. 

oh...I just read a bit from Letters which had the opposite effect that I described earlier...it made me smile and feel good: 

People are still infinitely more important to me than books, so I will never be an academic scholar. I know this and know also that my kind of vital intellectual curiosity could never be happy in the grubbing detail of a PhD thesis. 

yeah, I like that....

construction

I'm pretty sure that my first book that I write is going to be a kind of creative non-fiction - like, personal essays. Technically, I already published an e-book (Daemons and Radicals), but I don't really count it because it's only 15 pages long....actually, I just counted the pages in my kindle copy and there are 41 pages...that's cool. I felt kind of embarrassed publishing something so short, but 41 pages, that's not too bad. I don't know why it says 15 pages on Amazon...

I was thinking about writing a whole book in the same vein as Daemons and Radicals, which is basically an academic essay, but there are some problems with that idea. One problem is that it would be a lot of work....it would mean basically writing a long thesis...I wouldn't mind that/// it's something I want to do anyway - I want to write a thesis, and I've already started writing it, but a thesis should only be converted into a book once it's gone through the process of being academically validated. If I was to write a thesis as a book, and just publish it on my own intitiative, with no expert feedback or mentorship, it would be like publishing a rough draft...it wouldn't be the best quality, and I want to write something good. The other big problem with writing a book like that is to do with copyright and attribution. You can't quote from academic and literary texts in the way you would when you're writing an academic essay for school, when you write a book. You have to get permission from the publishers. 

but one of the main issues is time. I want to write something fairly quickly. I was listening to a conversation between Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin recently and Ben Shapiro was saying that he writes a book in a month, or I think he even said he can write a book in about 10 days if he works on it full-time. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be that quick, but I'd like to get it done fairly quickly. I think personal essays are the best medium for me to be able to do that, because it's the format that comes most naturally to me. 

mind you, I haven't even started. I just have the idea - the idea of the book - but I have no ideas about the individual essays. 

Maybe I could make it autobiographical like Lena Dunham's Not that Kind of Girl (2014), which I quite enjoyed, by the way. I know she received a lot of criticism about some of the content, and I understand the criticism, but I read the book before I heard the criticism, and the impression I got when I was reading the book is that, in the problematic parts and other parts, Lena was using some creative licence...there was an aspect of performance about it. It seemed pretty clear that there was an element of truth to it, but there was also a creative aspect. 

or maybe I could use Montaigne's, or Emerson's or Orwell's essays as models. I really admire Emerson's essays. I find them very uplifting and profound...I feel a sense of refreshment when I read his essays, as if I have a gift that I didn't know I had and he makes me aware of it||| He makes me aware of the richness of life. I don't think I could write with his gravitas and authority though. 

I was just looking through a book I have called The Next American Essay (2003) edited and with notes by John D'Agata, and, to my delight, I found that it contains an essay by David Foster Wallace...but what I was looking for is something D'Agata writes in the notes about Emerson's turn to the essay. Apparently, at one stage his main outlet for writing was sermons, and he felt constrained by that...it seemed to him that what that format required was something decorous and fine sounding but kind of bloodless, with no real passion and verve. He was looking for 'a new literature', and he found it in the essay - his own particular style of essay (because an essay, in this sense, is a very malleable form). In the essay, Emerson found a medium in which, so he wrote in his journal, 'everything is admissable - philosophy, ethics, divinity, criticism, poetry, humor, fun, mimicry, anecdotes, jokes, ventriloquism - all the breadth and versatility of the most liberal conversation, highest and lowest personal topics: all are permitted, and all may be combined into one speech.' 

Actually, The Next American Essay is a good illlustration of the versatility of the essay form. It's exactly as Emerson describes, with a few more textual forms included. 

Generally, I respond well to freedom of expression - to being able to write whatever I want and in whatever way I want. It's also good to hone your writing skills though. I remember at uni, in first year English, we were taught how to properly write an academic essay - how to structure it. The lecturer was an expert in linguistics, so she really knew about structure and discourse and what constituted the praxis of writing an academic essay. I remember how much of a struggle it was, once I understood how I needed to structure an essay, to tranlsate my thoughts, and ideas and research, into that structure. The thoughts in my head were not organised like that, but they're all related in a certain way in my head. To pull the different parts out and fit them into the proper structure was really hard, because each idea or piece of information only makes sense in the place where it is in relation to all the other ideas in my mind. 

but structure also helps. When you know how to use it, it guides you. I remember our lecturer saying that, if you're writing an essay and you get to a point where you're asking yourself the question, what am I going to write about next? it means that you haven't structured your essay well, because, when you set up an effective structure....it's like building a house....the builder never has to stop and think about what to do next. 

point of view

is being happy a skill? It probably is more than most of us realise. We tend to think of it as something easy. We think that happiness comes naturally. Happiness and pleasure is generally what we want and pain and sadness is generally what we don't want. And somehow we think that what we prefer is more natural - that it comes naturally....all things being equal, we will just be happy as a matter of course, and if we go through pain or anything unpleasant, we think something is wrong. That way of thinking is so deeply ingrained in our consciousness that we use the word 'wrong' to describe challenges and problems. We say, what's wrong? is there something wrong? 

We use the same word - wrong - to describe what is morally reprehensible, what is incorrect, and what challenges us. 

maybe things are meant to go wrong, and maybe that's a good thing

one of my favourite metaphors about life and its vicissitudes is the journey of the hero. the first step in the journey is the call, and the standard response to the call is refusal. being a hero is kind of like what Mark Twain said about the classics - everyone wants to have read them, but no one wants to read them. we are called in our weakness - called to be something we are not

Siri Hustvedt says some interesting things about looking at art. you have to come to the work without expectations. it's virtually impossible to really see a work like the Mona Lisa, because of its association with greatness. the word is always an abstraction in a way that looking at an image isn't. people who try to make the experience of the image the same as the experience of the text are wrong....text is more of a sequential thing, where, in an image, you can apprehend all the details at the same time...so the writer can't translate the image into text, but they can attempt to translate their experience of looking at an image into an essay

and

I didn't realise how much I do it until someone told me it was wrong - starting sentences with the word 'and'. Once I was told that I shouldn't do it, I suddenly became aware of how much I do it, and I had to really think about how not to do it. 

even though I didn't realise how much I did it, I have a sense of why. it's a certain impulse I have - an inclination...things like starting sentences with 'and' or 'but' really appeal to me. it started when I was at school....the inclination I mean, probably not the practice. If I had done that in essays I wrote for school, I probably would have been told the same thing I was told more recently - that it's wrong.

it's interesting to me that I didn't realise how much I do it, but now that I've been made aware of it, I know why, even though it's kind of hard to explain. After it was pointed out, I was very conscious - mainly in my communications with the person who pointed it out - of doing it and I would figure out how to reword what I wanted to write. 

lately I've become even more interested in trasngressing the rules - not capitalising at the start of sentences, using things like / and | and other symbols as punctuation, not using normal punctuation....at some stage I'd like to try writing really fast so that I make typos and then  leaving the typos as part of the expression

stories

lately I've been thinking and writing about the strange situation that has developed where two ideologies or groups that are fundamentally opposed to each other (humanism and Christianity) are, nevertheless, united in their opposition to a third ideological approach (critical theory). I didn't understand how that could be the case - how they could so strongly agree about their opposition to this other ideology when their own ideologies are so fundamentally in disagreement. And their criticism of critical theory has a lot of overlap. 

but then I watched a youtube video and read an article that shed some light on the situation. they were talking about how the internet and the way we use it and interact on it - the way we produce and consume content - has brought about a much more complex environment with regard to news/media/ideology than existed before, say, 30 years ago

disagreements that used to be bilateral - atheist vs Christian, Left vs Right, liberal vs labour (in Australia), democrat vs republican (in US), etc - have been replaced by multilateral disagreements, and a kind of tribalism in which opposition to groups that traditionally would be in your camp is as strident as your opposition to groups that have traditionally been opposed to your group. 

So, instead of large, homogenous ideological groups that are directly opposed to each other, at least in terms of their views, not necessarily in terms of animosity or forceful opposition, there are now a multiplicity of subgroups that are all opposing pretty much every other group. 

The internet facilitates a kind of bubble effect as well. groups only engage with their own content, so they become more and more sure of their own views and more dismissive of the views of other groups.

the article I read actually had a link to a spreadsheet that was a taxonomy of all the different groups, or at least a lot of them. It was kind of surprising and interesting. 

I didn't agree with everything in the article (or the youtube video) and that's why I'm not referencing them, but I found both very interesting. For the sake of making our argument, we all represent ourselves as being objective and fair. Like - not to be critical of the writer(s) of the article, but here is someone or a couple of people, analysing the ideological landscape and presenting their findings, and by making a virtually exhaustive list of all the different idealogical groups, but of course not claiming allegiance to any of them, they are representing themselves as being, in a way, ideology free. They are able to 'see' all of these other ways of seeing, and describe them, but you can only see if you have a way of seeing

we all have stories we believe - narratives to which we subscribe. 

talking about history

I wonder if there is such a thing as an absolute fact. It seems to me that, even the most objective and 'solid' facts, are more relativistic than we tend to think. Like, what could be more factual than a date in history that some famous event happened? That's an absolute fact, right? But no, because dates depend on the type of calendar you use. The calendar we use now - the Gregorian calendar - was instituted in 1582, and before that the Julian calendar was in use (instituted by Julius Caesar in 46BC), and before that there was the Roman calender. For every day between 1901 and 2099, the Julian calendar is 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar. So, today is the 23 July 2020 according to the Gregorian calendar, and 10th of July 2020 according to the Julian calendar. 

But there's an even bigger complication than that - after all, that's just a difference of days: the year that things happened would still be the same...unless of course the event happened within 13 days of the new year....and it's the new year that this further complication relates to. In medieval Europe, even though January 1 was always called 'New Years Day', they counted the next numbered year as beginning, in some places on 25 December, in others on 25 March, and in others on Easter (which gets really complicated because that would be a different day each year). All of those differences are related to Christianity....25 December is Christmas, 25 March was recognised as the date of the annunciation - when the angel informed Mary that she was going to have a child - and Easter is pretty well known so I don't need to explain it.  

Things also got very complicated in France during the French revolution because they made drastic changes to the calendar. They basically wanted to decimalise everything. The year still had twelve months, although the months began and ended on different days to the Gregorian months, and had different names. Each month had 30 days, and the extra 5 or 6 days every year were not designated to a month - they were called 'complementary' days. Each month consisted of three weeks because a week was 10 days long, and each day was 10 hours long, with each hour being 100 minutes long. Years were numbered from the date of the French revolution - so 1789 was year I, 1790, year II. Decimal time never really took off and was officially abandoned in 1795, and the new calendar was abolished in 1806 by Napoleon, who became the emperor of France in 1805. 

One thing that really did catch on from the changes made during the French revolution is the metric system - millimetres, centimetres, kilometres, etc and, now, in the 20th/21st century we have bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes....it's interesting that there's nothing axiomatic or fundamental to the characteristics being quantified that lends itself to decimalisation. Like, a byte is made up of 8 bits and a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, not 1000 bytes, The same ratio applies as you go up e.g. a megabyte is 1024 kilobytes. 

Who knows why decimalisation of time didn't catch on while decimalisation of weights and measures did? Although, in some ways, time is decimalised...we talk about centuries and millennia. 

Even numbers themselves weren't always as they are now. Our numbers are decimal - based on powers of 10 - and that system didn't exist before the 6th century. Our number system relies on two crucial principles that were developed by Indian mathematicians in the 5th and 6th century: the principle of place-value notation, developed by Aryabhata of Kusumapura in the 5th century CE, and the use of zero, developed by Brahmagupta a century later. It's amazing to think how revolutionary that symbol - zero - the symbol for nothing - has been. The combination of those two principles means that, as seems simply logical to us now, adding zeros to the end of a number dramatically increases that number, but before the 6th century there was no such idea. 

That brings me back to my original point and makes me realise that, although history and the world and the universe and our reality are complex and sometimes mysterious, we can talk about facts. We can talk about principles and ideas that were developed and we can talk about changes that happened, in a meaningful way. 

some things

in chapter 5 of the book of Revelation, it's interesting that the first two things that the multitudes of angels say that the Lamb (who represents Jesus) is worthy to receive are power and wealth. then they mention wisdom, strength, honor, glory and praise

people always think everyone else is like them. 

some things just cannot be, and some things will always be, no mattter what

art

i bought some prismacolour pencils....just to see....I was pretty sceptical. Like, how good can coloured pencils be? but yes, they are really, really good. To me, they were noticeably better than even other specialised artists pencils I've used. Apparently, the absolute best coloured pencils are Faber Castell Polychromos, so I might try them one day, but not for a while...I still have plenty of use to get out of my prismacolours, as well as lots of other pens and pencils - some cheap, others more expensive - some reasonably priced but quite good, some cheap and not particularly good quality, but you can actually make art using pretty much anything...cheap pencils, cheap paints, cheap markers, crayons, salt, etc. 

one of the things that really attracts me about using coloured pencils is the lack of mess, and also lack of special processes. Paints are kind of messy and a bit inconvenient to use, but with pencils all you need is the pencils and paper (and a pencil sharpener). 

I bought a wacom graphic tablet a couple of years ago, but unfortunately I don't use it at all any more. What happened was that I bought it at a time when I was trying to develop my art skills, but then I found that using the wacom was like another dimension of difficulty/ potential in that process. I ended up following a lot of very basic tutorials and producing drawings that were kind of like cartoons (drawing on paper, not on the tablet, but I was going to get to the tablet eventually)....they weren't too bad, but they weren't conceptually interesting. 

I really like seeing the way other people do digital art - the way they combine the use of a graphics tablet with software like paint tool sai, krita, gimp, fire alpaca, inkscape, blender, clip studio paint, etc and they create characters and animations. There's a fluency in the way they work...moving between different levels, drawing things fast, moving parts of the drawing around. you watch tutorials of people doing that stuff on youtube and you think it's filmed in time-lapse, but then you see someone doing it in real time and it's pretty much the same speed. 

i want to get back into the practice of making my own images for my blog, but i have to make the art for the sake of making the art, not so that I can use for my blog

the dance

؟؟؟

i always think that, if you have a goal, and you aren't meeting with success in your pursuit of that goal, but you keep going, that's better than if you had achieved success quickly. 

in the same way, I'm more inspired by people who have their struggles and setbacks and fears, but they try anyway, and they keep trying....to me that's more inspiring than someone who achieves a lot because of their strength or talent

but then there's also another kind of achievement that really impresses me, that is kind of related to talent...it's when someone does something that is so well done that it achieves a kind of  perfection. I think a good example of this is figure skating in the winter olympics. There are performances that are really good, and impressive.....and then there are those that embody a kind of magic. They are flawless....and when you're watching a performance like that, it lifts your spirits, because you're seeing someone achieve the impossible, but there's also a strange sense of inevitability about it...there isn't going to be any slip-ups or errors, because such things have no place in such a performance 

the obstacle is the way

courage is not the absence of fear. courage requires fear. courage is acting or speaking in spite of fear. but fear is also a lie. when you confront fear, it doesn't just crumble or dissipate or whatever....it ceases to exist

but it's so convincing. and there's the irony that to really have courage means that you have believed the lie. 

only the hopeless situation provides scope for redemption 

i remember a while ago - sometime in the second half of last year (2019)....I had a really challenging year....and in the midst of the storm I was in, one day pinterest spoke to me. all of these positive messages appeared. there are these pins that are like a message from God, or just a message that something good is going to happen, and others that are like affirmations. 

So I got the idea that God was going to bless me. I actually remember thinking - tommorrow something spectacularly good is definitely going to happen (that's what pinterest told me). the next day was a Saturday and I was working at a tutoring college, and because I'm so obsessive about not being late, and also the tutoring college is quite a long trip away, I used to always arrive about an hour or more before I needed to be there and I would go to a coffee shop and have something to eat and a coffee

it was just a normal Saturday really. but that idea that God was going to bless me made me start thinking about what that would look like....what do I want? so I started to write things down. it was pretty inspiring. I continued to add to the list over the coming days, and I still have it. The things I wrote down were, I felt and told people that I shared some of the things with - they were basically outside the realms of possibility. but there was something coinpelling about the list. this was pre-covid, so if they were outside the realms of possibility then, they are even more so now.....

time went by and more Saturdays came and went/// like I said, this was a difficult and stressful time in my life. I remember thinking one Saturday, if only I could get past this, get over all this stress and the sense of crisis in which I was mired....if only I could do that, then maybe all of these goals I have, or some of them, could happen. 

and then it occurred to me that I was thinking about it the wrong way. what would prepare me to achieve my goals? would feeling more comfortable and secure - feeling the way I imagined I would feel if all of those things happened....would that bring those things about? no 

what occurred to me was that the pain and turmoil - the discomfort - I was going through was the necessary preparation. it was exactly the right preparation I needed. you become strong by going through things that require you to be strong. it wasn't exactly cathartic....like, I didn't suddenly feel better. I didn't feel like, oh, it all makes sense now. but it was a realisation that brought some meaning to the challenges I was going through. 

irreducibility

in an earlier post about the critique of critical theory and post-modernism, I wrote about the idea some critics of post-modernism have that modernism is associated with the enlightenment and reason and that post-modernism is a rejection of that. but then, I did an internet search - both google and microsoft edge - and searched amazon for books, and it seems like no one else uses modernism in that way. Modernism is a movement that happpened in the late 19th/ early 20th century.

to look into it further and see if anyone actually uses the word 'modernism' to describe developments from the enlightenment, I did a search using the terms Locke and modernism, and I found that Locke, Bacon, Descartes, the enlightenment, etc are definitely associated with modernity, but not with modernism. 

On the website, encyclopedia.com, it says this: 'Modernism is distinguished from modern philosophy in that it is linked to certain movements in art and literature that began sometime around the end of the nineteenth century. While drawing upon some similar characteristics of "modern philosophy," modernism in art, literature, and philosophy involved novelty, break with tradition, progress, continuous development, knowledge derived either from the position of the subject or from claims to objectivity, and concomitantly the crisis in knowledge produced by this very dichotomy. Hence in modernism, at the same time that certain theories based knowledge on a centered, transcendental, interpreting subjectivity, and others based knowledge on certain, atomistic, analytic, empirical objectivity, the crisis in knowledge created a sense of uncertainty, paradox, incompleteness, inadequacy, emptiness, and void. Modernism in art and literature involved a shift away from the dichotomies of romanticism and realism to the stream of consciousness, lived and internal time-consciousness, transcendental subjectivity, narrated remembrance and awareness, portrayed speed, mechanisms, objects, and abstractions.' 

I was only going to quote the first sentence because that's the main point I wanted to make - that modernism and modern mean different things - but I really liked the description of modernism, so I included the whole passage. 

the book that I have that is a Christian critique of post-modernism, doesn't use the term modernism - it talks about modernity and uses the term 'modern' - but the more purely academic text (which I don't have but have previewed) uses 'modernism' to describe the movement associated with the enlightenment, the scientific revolution, etc, which I think is quite problematic. That brings me to one of the main issues I have with a lot of the critics and criticism of post-modernism.....

My interest is literature and literary theory, so I relate movements and approaches to those. And critical theory has a lot of very cogent things to say about literature. I think I can say that that's a fact, or at least it's a fact that people like me, who are interested in language and literature, are also interested in critcal theory (or whatever you want to call it...I don't really like using the term 'critical theory' because it seems to be the term favoured by those who hate theory). So anyway, nearly all the people (at least that I've come across) who are stridently opposed to critical theory and post-modernism are philosophers or scientists, not literary theorists, and their criticism of post-modernism is based on it's ideologial aspect, which is a different issue from the theorys' application to literature. 

I think this highlights a more general problem in our world, including the academic realm. We tend to think that someone who is an expert or successful in a particular area can speak authoritatively about other areas. For example, we're generally quite receptive to the views of successful writers about social issues. We tend to think that they're somehow wiser or smarter or their views are more valid because.....*checks notes*....they are good at writing novels. I'm not saying that that's necessarily wrong, but it's not necessarily right either. 

Anyway, I still want to read the book about post-modernism that calls the enlightenment modernism because I'm interested in the ideas. Another book I want to read, which engages with these ideas is The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (2004) by Alister McGrath. McGrath too seems to use modernism and modernity interchangeably. He writes this about the relationship between modernism (the enlightenment type, I think) and post-modernism:

Postmodernism is a cultural mood that celebrates diversity and seeks to undermine those who offer rigid, restrictive, and oppressive views of the world. Modernism - which tried to reduce everything to a uniform set of ideas - is excoriated by postmodern writers as a form of intellectual Stalinism, a refusal to permit diversity in our readings of the world. Postmodernity celebrates diversity of belief, seeing any attempt to coerce individuals to accept the viewpoints of another as being oppressive. (p 227)

I think that's a pretty good description of the dynamic between modernism and post-modernism. McGrath goes on to talk about how, on the face of it, it would seem that postmodernism, as defined in the quote, would lend itself to an atheistic world-view. He brings up deconstruction - a type of post-modern analysis that considers the power relationships manifested in but not explicitly mentioned in texts - and talks about how, surely that approach too would lead to a rejection of God because the idea of God as represented in the great texts of Western culture could be read 'as a powerplay on the part of churches and others with vested interests in its survival.' But then he writes that that's not how deconstruction is meant to work, at least according to Jacques Derrida, who devised it. According to Derrida, deconstruction was about openness to 'the other', and decentring. 

There are social and polical implications of these ideas. There are moral dilemmas. I think part of the answer to those dilemmas is the realisation that complexity and nuance is not the enemy. 

in expression

sometimes it's hard to just keep going. normal interactions and simple, routine tasks are overwhelming. making progress - for example, eating a healthier diet or doing more exercise - is difficult when you're struggling to do the bare minimum. And there are so many things like that - areas where you need to improve or get your life in order - clean and tidy your room/house, do your laundry....and all your other personal goals. When things are a mess, maintaining order is not possible because the order is not in place to maintain. all the issues combined keep you trapped and stuck 

and then you look at the way other people succeed in life in different areas and it makes you feel worse because you can't do what they seem to do so naturally - you can't even begin. I know that's not fair....that everyone has their own struggles, but I'm expressing my thoughts, even though I know they are distorted 

I also know that there is the other side. there are things that I can do - things I can do well - that some other people can't. 

there's a certain state of mind where everything seems wrong or inferior. Like, if I'm trying to think of something to write, every idea I think of, I will entertain it for a moment, and then be like, no, I can't write that, because....so it's just a lot of thinking and no writing. there was one time when i didn't censor myself in that way and I wrote 900 pages in a few months. I basically wrote a book (although I didn't publish it)...simply because I just allowed myself to express my thoughts and feelings without censorship, as they came to me. I was also writing a lot at that time....that was the main thing I was doing besides working, eating, sleeping, etc 

that's depression - that inability to write or speak...it closes you down. that's kind of the essence - or one of the essential features - of depression - that 'stuckness', but with lots of thought - a lot going on inside, but it's going round and round like worry and there's no resolution. 

I think that's one of the main reasons why people don't talk about depression. There's something inexpressible about it - something that even defies expression, not just in the sense that it's hard to talk or write about but in the sense that it's opposed to or closes down expression. Maybe it's to do with meaning. depression is an absence of meaning....there's nothing to express

but that's why writing can be powerful....it's a way of making meaning

inspirant

slowly.....very slowly...it begins to dawn on me | when you've never seen something before, you don't know what you're looking at and you are held captive by lies

a still small voice reaches you and pierces the pain temporarily 

in that moment, you doubt the lie

you realise that there can be another story

listening to writers

I'm listening to an interview with Don DeLillo. I think it's Jonathan Franzen interviewing him - the video is called A Conversation with Don DeLillo and Jonathan Franzen. Franzen asks what, to me, seems like a super weird question: how important is meaning to your writing? It's hard to know what he's getting at. One clue is that the question comes after he reads a quote from one of DeLillo's stories that evokes a dichotomy between the sound of language and its meaning, and emphasises sound over meaning.

But DeLillo really gets the question and gives a very interesting answer. He says that meaning is not 'the primary force' in his writing. Language is more important and he says that he will sometimes 'yield meaning to words - just to words...to the sound of words...to the look of words...and to the beauty, at times, of a phrase, or a sentence, or a paragraph'. He goes on to say that he doesn't know where meaning comes from....it builds slowly as he works on a novel or story. That's kind of counter-intuitive. Isn't that what writers do - they convey meaning through their writing? Isn't that what it's all about, in a way? 

I enjoy listening to David Foster Wallace a lot more than I enjoy listening to Franzen. To me, Franzen seems very aware of his own stature as a writer, but Wallace seems more tentative and more concerned with what is interesting in general and what other people think than with imparting some kind of writing expertise. Maybe I'm being unfair. After all, this wasn't an intereview of Don DeLillo - it was a conversation between two successful writers. I've read neither of them but I intend to...maybe if I knew their work I would find the conversation more interesting. Also, the topic of the conversation was writing, and people had come to listen to two writers have a conversation, so I can hardly blame Franzen for talking about his craft or being aware of his stature as a writer, which is the whole reason he was there having the conversation. 

Franzen and Wallace were friends too, so there's that. I haven't read any of them - Wallace, Franzen, or DeLillo, but I plan to...probably Infinite Jest first, because I've heard such good things about it, then Underworld by DeLillo, then The Corrections is Franzen's novel that I've decided to read first. 

|-|-|

sometimes I think....why am I still struggling with this? 

ሪሴስታንስግ

I sometimes wonder who reads my blog. I can read the stats about how many page views I get and what country they're from and that tells me some things, but it would be interesting to know more. On the other hand, it's good not knowing, because it frees me from any compulsion I might have to write what I think my audience wants to read. I have no idea who my audience is. I know that I always get the vast majority of page views from the United States. For my old blog, Germany came in second for page views, and I think Australia was third.

My new blog hasn't been going that long, so I think new trends might emerge over time, but so far it's been interesting to see that I'm getting quite a lot of page views from central and eastern European countries - like, Czechia, Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine. And Germany is still fairly high on the list. Besides that, I seem to get some page views from all over the world. 

But yes, I wonder how people access my blog. Like, I have some posts that do really well - get a lot of page views - and some that don't. Some posts (not many) continue to get page-views over time - like, a year or two after I post it, it's still getting around 20 page views a month or something like that. I wonder how that works. Like, where is it that people are accessing it from? 

Sometimes I spend a lot of time and....it's not work or effort, but let's say, investment...I invest a lot in a post, and it doesn't get many views. Other times I'll write something really quickly and it's kind of unstructured and stream-of-consciousness, and that post will get a lot of views. 

I think, in general, because this blog is new, I don't get the amount of page views that I had started to get after my old blog had been going for a few years. It's a bit dis-heartening sometimes. With my old blog, I was used to, as soon as I posted and shared on facebook, twitter and pinterest, I would get around 12 to 20 views straight away and then, I would keep looking back at the stats page and refreshing and the amount of page views would keep climbing or go down but then up again and sometimes, over the course of the next couple of days, there would be periodic spikes. The same thing still happens with my new blog, just on a smaller scale. 

I'm pretty sure that most of my page views come from twitter, because I don't have that many friends on facebook, or followers on pinterest, but I have a lot more followers on twitter. But yes, as to which of them are reading my blog and why, and how many return readers I have, I have no idea. Sometimes I have wished that my blog was more interactive - that people would make comments or that my posts would stimulate some kind of discussion. I do get some 'likes', which I always appreciate, and some people I know in 'real' life have given me some feedback - usually positive but, at times, I have used my blog to have a bit of an indirect dig at some people - a veiled attack - and sometimes the other person has let me know that they did in fact feel attacked. And sometimes I have received positive feedback on social media.  

It's probably a good thing that I don't know my audience and what brings them to my blog and what they want. It means that I write what I want. It's a weird thing, in a way - writing, but you don't know who it's for. I've always found that different types of writing take time to get used to. Over time, a kind of formula evolves, but it's a complex one, otherwise what you write would be formulaic, but this formula is a kind of structure within which you can create something fresh and new. 

something about modernism

2 things I've discovered recently:

• some people really hate post-modernism 
• when those people (and probably others) talk about modernity and modernism, they're not talking about the modernism that emerged in the early 20th century and led in to post-modernism; they're talking about the enlightenment, the scientific revolution and thinkers like Bacon, Locke and Descartes.  

That second point is really new to me, and interestingly, that's probably because I learnt about modernism in a modern university, which, like all modern universities, so the argument goes, is in thrall to post-modernism and wants to frame post-modernism as a movement of progress (from the modernism of the early 20th century), not the rejection of reason and all the positive developments that flowed from the enlightenment, as the critics of post-modernism suggest. It blew my mind when someone (an academic) I was listening to on youtube said that modernism has been around for centuries....that's news to me. 

What really interests me is the allliance that opposing post-modernism has formed between Christianity and parts of academia. It's really striking. There are whole books and long talks on youtube representing the Christian critique of post-modernism, and others representing an academic critique of post-modernism, and their arguments are similar in many ways. Why it's interesting is that the enlightenment was in many ways an anti-religious movement. It was very humanistic.

What forged this alliance is the common perceived enemy of left wing ideology, cultural Marxism, critical theory, social justice, etc. But, leaving aside the historical issue, and just considering current issues, it makes sense that both Christians and some academics would be vehemently opposed to post-modernism. 

The academics' opposition to these ideologies is based on a perception that they represent what some call 'grievance studies' where the validity of ideas and arguments is judged not by the quality of the reasoning they represent (so the argument goes) but by compliance with an ideology which favours certain groups percieved to have been traditionally disadvantaged and seeks to undermine groups that have been traditionally advantaged. 

I think the main Christian opposition to post-modernism is related to moral relativism and the conclusions it leads to. But again, this is why it's so interesting that this alliance between Christianity and some parts of academia has been formed, because it was this impulse that we see in post-modernism now, to reject traditional moral imperitives, that was also a major theme in the enlightenment. 

To be really blunt, the enlightenment thinkers and the modern academics who oppose post-modernism, want to exalt reason. The enlightenment thinkers wanted to turn away from traditional thinking, which was dominated by Christian ideology, and figure things out using reason. The modern academics' opposition to critical theory is that it represents flawed scholarship - flawed because it is subjugated to ideology rather than reason. Christians' opposition to critical theory is more concerned with the ideology itself because (not all but many) Christians believe that social changes associated with critical theory are contrary to God's will. But, even though I'm saying that the humanist academics and Christians are allies in this contest, there are real differences nevertheless, which become clear when the humanist academics go into the details of their arguments. There are thinkers like Kant and Kierkegaard who were religious, and contributed to the development of modern Christian theology but apparently were part of the counter-enlightenment. Nietsche was famously anti-God but had a major impact on the development of philosophy. 

For me personally, these revelations are quite exciting. I love the idea that modernism begins with Locke, Descartes, Bacon and the scientific revolution.....there's much to explore in that. And then the idea that Kant, Rousseau and Kierkegaard represented an opposing impulse is also very interesting. More recently, the work of Ayn Rand embodies and illuminates the distinction between the academic opposition to post-modernism and the Christian opposition to it because she advocated reason as the only way of attaining knowledge and rejected faith and religion completely. 

There's a very interesting, very much live, current debate about post-modernism and related issues. Also, this gives me an interesting context within which to place works of literary criticism. So....lots of reading and writing to come. 

Late addition: I wrote above that Kant was part of the counter-enlightenment (after hearing that argument made by an anti-post-modernism academic), but just now, I was listening to a youtube talk that directly disputes that....and I'm kind of happy about that. Kant is so central to western philosophy, literature and humanities, so I like the idea that he made a positive contribution to the enlightenment. 

The video I'm listening to now (which is pro-post-modernism) absolutely shreds the one I was listening to earlier when writing the above (which was critical of post-modernism)....it's hilarious. The thing is though....it's the one that I don't agree with (the former) that inspired me to want to read, write, think and interrogate my views - provoked me to want to research and think for myself and form my own views. 

creative work

today is Sunday and it's exactly 2 weeks since I wrote a post saying that I was having an unproductive day, and went on to write about David Foster Wallace. Last Sunday I couldn't write that, because there was some work I had to do, but this week, having just finished my latest work project last Friday, I'm having a couple of days off, so I can have an unproductive day.....but maybe 'unproductive' is the wrong word.

unproductive is a negative word ||| is spending time partaking of freedom of action and expression and the kind of disinterested (which doesn't mean uninteresting) pursuit of knowledge that is only possible when one is free to browse and sample - is that unproductive? Some of the best - and most valuable, in terms of monetary value and otherwise - work, is produced from that position. 

we call them 'works' of art or literature or music, but i wonder whether that's the right word. in any case, it's understood that this use of the word 'work' is different from its use related to what most of us do to make money. 

and there's no accountability for this kind of work. no one is going to keep tabs on your creative productivity or assess you against KPIs. nobody can really be your boss or your supervisor with this kind of work, because creative work is your own personal work. no one else is an expert in it. no one else knows what you're supposed to do. 

what we consume when we're not working, is other peoples' work - artists and sports-people of all kinds. that disjunction between what the artist is doing - their work - and how we perceive it - our enjoyment - is matched by a disjunction on their part, actually. that's the strange thing about creativity....the output corresponds to something within and resonates with it, but it's not a straightforward correspondence. The best example I can think of to explain this in terms of my own experience, is playing guitar. Writing is not the best example because, with writing, it's easy to imagination a direct correspondence between the output and what lies within...like, I'm expressing in my writing the issues and ideas that are on my mind. 

but with playing guitar, I found that, after I had learnt and practiced a lot, I got to a point where I could just play extempore, and improvise. And it felt really good to do that. What I was playing corresponded with something within me. 

introducing language adds another dimension, because then I think there's more of a correspondence between the artist and the reader/viewer/listener. There will be differences of course. If I write a song, that song won't mean exactly the same thing to a listener as it does to me, but I have more control over the meaning that they make from it than if it was just an instrumental piece. It would be interesting if we could somehow study this - if we could look at the work of, say, Beethoven, and see if there is a correspondence between his inner state in composing his music and the inner state evoked in the listener. 

context

I really enjoyed reading Barthes: A Biography (English tranlsation by Andrew Brown 2017, original in French by Tiphaine Samoyault, 2015) and I didn't really know why. But just now, referring back to it and thinking about it, I think it's because Samoyault entwines Barthes's ideas with his life and relates those ideas and that life to other thinkers, like Foucault and Kristeva. 

so there's a very nice fusion of the intellectual life and the lived experience, and it establishes a kind of relationship between you, the reader, and the subject - Roland Barthes. It's interesting to think about this in relation to Barthes's idea of 'the death of the author'. On the one hand, Samoyault doesn't intrude on the text. Her concern is to tell us about Barthes. But, on the other hand, it is her unique capabilities and sensibilities that enable her to do this so well. So, by forgoing the role of the intermediary, she acts as a very effective intermediary. 

and I think that gives us some insight into the true meaning of Roland Barthes's famous idea of  'the death of the author'....actually, when I use the word 'true', I'm probably just talking about a meaning that I feel comfortable with and that I like - a meaning that I find interesting and thought provoking. It's not about saying that a text is not the expression of the author or that texts are composed by historical and social forces (although some people pretty much do end up expressing these kinds of views). It's about the role of the reader in constructing meaning and the way that the actual life of the author has very little bearing on that process. Like, for example, a lot of people enjoy the 'Game of Thrones' books and TV series, but they aren't that interested in George R. R. Martin, and most importantly, nobody needs to ask Martin what the real or true meaning of the texts is. Enjoying the books and the TV show may lead people to take an interest in George R. R. Martin, and it's always interesting to hear a writer's view about their own work, but they are different matters. When you're watching Game of Thrones, you don't even think about George R. R. Martin - you're thinking about the characters and the story. 

This separation of the text from the author is a good example, actually, of how birth is a also a kind of death. As soon as you express something, it becomes a thing in its own right, and the fact that it is separate, even from you, the one who expressed it, is born out by the way that you engage with it. We write to get a sense of what we think. Somehow we don't know, and we are as surprised as anyone at what comes out. That's what makes conversation so interesting.

social media

i remember the first time i looked at tumblr....i didn't get it. the main distniguishing factor back then (in 2014) was that it had a lot of movement, while facebook and twitter didn't have that. now all the platforms have it. it's normal for pictures to move. 

the other thing was that I didn't get the style of it. i thought it would be informative and serious. i followed tumblrs about teaching and they had these moving images with captions that had nothing to do with teaching...they were a kind of satire. it seemed really busy. in each post, there were multiple frames and in each frame the action would advance a little bit more....it seemed frenetic and it was disorienting. 

but it was like that with all the different websites....i didn't understand twitter, facebook, pinterest, linked in, when I first started using them. probably the one that took me the longest to get was reddit because it seemed to have very definite rules and you needed to know the rules to play. 

east and west

the volleyball hit the end of i think it was my thumb and it took weeks to heal....i remember the guy whose specialty was standing behind the baseline and when the ball was just about to land - just inside the line - he would dive and punch the ball into the air and over the net

i remember moving from an apartment complex to a flat with a bay window and an ocean view and wood floors...the apartment complex was new and clean, but the flat was one of the nicest places i've lived and there was a bookshop there all my life i've been near the beach or outwest....moving further and further outwest until visting places that were closer to the city was like going back in time and then, when I moved east, visiting places in the west was like going back in time

what to write

I have 4 youtube subscribers now. That's a 400% increase since last year! woo hoo! 

I sometimes toy with the idea of doing a vlog. At the moment, I'm more keen to wrte a book though. I hear a question from the crowd.....hey - what kind of book? Originally (by which I mean a couple of days ago) I was planning to write something kind of academic....like a published thesis....but that's problematic. Not only is it a lot of work, which would probably take years, even though I do have a draft already, but the bigger problem is to do with copyright. When you write and sell a book, you can't just quote from texts the way you do when you're writing an essay or thesis as a student. You have to get permission to quote from someone else's work. 

So, I'm just not down for that any more. I do love writing essays though, so I was thinking that I could write a series of 'personal' essays. I can still quote from texts because most of the literary texts that I like the most are old and in the public domain...you can access them on websites like project gutenberg and archive.org. I just won't be engaging with 'cutting edge' scholarship, but I'm not that keen to do that anyway. Or if I do, I can just write about their ideas without quoting from their work. I'll be giving my take on their ideas. 

I like the idea of writing creatively but not having to write a story, and I like the idea of writing essays without being restricted to the rules of writing academic essays. 

point of view

The places we live - both physically and mentally, inner and outer lives - have the quality of palimpsests. A palimpsest, according to one definition, is 'something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form'. 

Often, what we experience as a crisis, is the removal of what we have known to make way for something new and surprisingly good. 

The way we see ourselves is different from how others see us, and I think their view is closer to the truth. 

implications of theory

I shouldn't be judged by the things that I 'like' on facebook. I'm intrigued by thinking that I don't necessarily agree with. I've been further exploring the arguments against critical theory. 

There are actually some good points, I think, against the critical theory/ post-modernist/ social justice....insert lots of other ideological lenses here.....paradigms. I made an interesting discovery. I've been associating opposition to these ways of thinking with Christianity. There's a long-standing, ongoing dispute between Christianity and post-modernism, etc. But then I discovered that some of the people who are most strongly and directly critiquing critical theory are also critical of theism and talk about how it makes no sense to believe in God. 

So, they lose me on that. The Christian critique of critical theory loses me as a thinker and the humanist critique of critital theory loses me as a Christian. But anyway, neither of those are the main point. The main point is that I like critical theory and am fascinated by it. 

A lot of what I'm calling the humanist critique comes from inside academia itself. Harold Bloom spoke of 'the school of resentment'. In 1996, Alan Sokal, a physicist, published a paper in a cultural studies journal which was purportedly about the application of post modern theory to physics. Then, after the paper was reviewed, accepted and published, he announced that it was a hoax to expose the shortcomings of post modern theory, because it was basically a bunch of nonsense that nevertheless conformed to their expectations about what constitutes scholarship. A similar thing was done more recently (in the last couple of years) by Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose. They wrote a whole series of papers that effectively used the discourse of critical theory to make arguments that were seriously flawed but were reviewed and published anyway - and some praised as ground-breaking - because they represented acceptable ideology. They, and others, call the dominant movement in academia at the moment, 'grievance studies'. 

These examples remind me of the Ern Malley affair which happened in Australia in 1943. Conservative writers, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, wanted to mock modernist poetry and show how vacuous and lacking in real literary value it was, so they wrote 16 poems in one day, imitating the style of modernist poetry, and submitted them to a modernist literary journal, claiming that they were the work of Ern Malley, who didn't actually exist. The literary journal devoted a whole issue to Ern Malley and hailed him as a genius. So, it was pretty embarrassing for Max Harris, the editor of Angry Penguins - the literary journal in which the poems had appeared - when it was revealed that the poems were a hoax. The hoax affected the reputation of modernism in Australia and undermined, not just modernist poetry and poets, but also novelists - for example, Patrick White - and artists who painted in an abstract, modernist style. 

Interestingly, McAuley went on to found a periodical called Quadrant, which is still around today, and just three days ago published an article titled, 'The True Crisis of the Humanities', which brings us back to the current issue. 

Personally, I have a deep appreciation for literature and history, which was only encouraged by my Arts degree. I think the criticism of the academic enterprise as it is currently conducted is a bit misplaced, although I do accept some of the points that are being made. This hatred for critical theory or literary theory is too much, and it's very negative. Aside from the quality of the argument being made, I just don't like negative arguments or books where the whole thesis is a negative statement. For example - and I want to give an example that's not related to this issue that I'm writing about - books that argue that the internet is adversely affecting our minds and lives, and the whole book is about that. I don't see the point of doing all that work of writing a book, and the main function of the book is to point out a problem - to say something is wrong. 

I thought it was interesting that, in the Quadrant article, the writer singles out the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism as representative of everything anti-western culture and traditional humanities. Come on....that's going too far. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism includes representative work from a vast range of the most important scholars and thinkers going back to Aristotle and Plato. 

.....I'm reading the article as I wrote this, so it's like a live commentary....

now the writer is criticising structuralism, which he says, 'reduces human beings to place-markers in an infinite system of signs'. I'm not sure what that means but it's not how I understand structuralism. 

but I want to change tack and agree with the anti-theory argument in some ways, but in a way that shows why I disagree with them in other ways. I've noticed the decline in English (as in English literature) as a separate discipline. The movement is towards 'cultural studies'. A lot of universities don't have separate schools or faculties of English like they used to - they've been brought under the aegis of media studies, communication. Where English courses are offered, they often don't have any reference to actual works of literature. I've heard from students who desperately want to study literature, because that's why they chose to do English, and some semesters, there is not one course available to them that actually deals with literature. So, I see that and I don't like it. It's part of what those who are saying there is a crisis are talking about. 

But - and this is just my own personal view - theory, literary theory, critical theory, whatever you want to call it, is intrinsic to the study of literature. Theory is not the enemy or the problem. 

symbiosis

I published my first e-book on Amazon (Daemons and Radicals), although it's more like a pamphlet than a book, at 15 pages, but I have plans to write actual books now. It's probably going to be a while before I publish anything, because I want to work on a few different books of different types. There's at least three that I have in mind and I'm going to work on, or have already started.

I like the idea that they will influence and relate to each other - that, in some ways, they will be about each other.