short books

I'm very curious about the book Fight Club because I loved the movie and I'm interested in how a writer would convey what the film conveys, in a book. 

That interest has never been keen enough to get me to actually read the book though. I think it's because it's a fairly short book. I'm prejudiced against short books. I feel like a great novel can't be done in less than 300 pages.

Then again, some of my absolute favorite books are short - Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, The Anxiety of Influence. They are special though. 

I remember hearing Harold Bloom talk about The Anxiety of Influence and saying that, on rereading it, even he was not sure what he meant in some parts. It was pretty early in his career when he published it and he ran it by a colleague first and that colleague advised him not to publish it because it's not really literary criticism as we know it. 

feeld

City of Angels is the reversible octopus plushie of films. 

interim

I remember sitting on the plane when I was coming home from Hong Kong after living there for 8 months. For some reason, the plane just sat there for a while. 

I felt really contented, like I was cushioned between the chapter of my life that had just ended and the one that I was returning to begin, and I wasn't part of either. 

based

I do really well at lists with a lot of classics and literary fiction, and below average at lists with a lot of popular books. 

read

Doing a lot of booklist challenges has really motivated me to read decent books again. 

hard

I'm glad that my alcoholism got so bad, because if it hadn't have been so bad I would still be drinking. 

I'm glad that I have this additional challenge with benzos and tapering off them. It's the biggest challenge I have ever faced, and it means I have to fight, which brings out the best in me. 

what is this?

What's the appeal of literature? The Russian Formalists said that what makes literature what it is, is 'defamiliarization', which means to make something strange. So, it's as if you're seeing something familiar in a new light. 

The most interesting thing to me is how literature does this, and the Russian Formalists, Victor Shklovsky, to be exact, explained that literature does this by extending the time of perception. This is what fascinates me - the mechanics of that. 

There are different ways to explain it. One way is to compare simple, factual language to poetic or literary language. When you're reading a recipe or some kind of workplace document, a lot of your thinking is automatic. If the recipe says, 'use one onion', that's all there is to it. You don't have to think about the meaning of the onion. But in literature, an onion could represent all kinds of things...just think of the old phrase, 'pealing the onion'. So, that's one way that literature slows down our perception and thereby makes things strange and interesting - the language is just richer; it makes us think more. 

Another way to explain it, which is my favorite and it's how I was first taught the concept of defamiliarization, is related to the nature of written language. We can read in our heads more quickly than we can read out loud, and we can think much more quickly than we can read. The act of reading - following the text word by word - slows you down, and it's in that extra space that defamiliarization happens. 

tip

The most arduous challenge I faced as a child was spelling the word, 'beautiful'. As with many other challenges I faced when I was 6, I had no system to draw on - no toolkit to access....or did I?...yes I did, it's just that I had to construct it myself. 

It's the 3 vowels in a row that makes it so mysterious. The solution I found was to sound out each of the vowels and remember that. So, in my head, instead of pronouncing 'beautiful' as you were supposed to, I would sound out each vowel. So it was like - be..a..u..tiful. 

I still sound it out like that to remember how to spell 'beautiful'. 

gleme

Books are often not what they appear to be, and therein lies their magic. 

HK coffee

I had the best ice coffee ever at the peak in Hong Kong. There was a glass full of ice, a pot of really good hot coffee, and a small jug of cream. It was like real coffee, but iced, and it was exquisite. So good that I remember it more than 30 years later. 

momentous

I remember sitting in a courtyard in China in the cool of the day, drinking cognac around a wooden table, surrounded by very rustic looking brick buildings, and I could hear the sound of children playing.  

crisis

Whatever issue I happen to be grappling with at any particular time, always seems to be the most important thing

double meaning

I was intrigued when I came across Jeffrey Young and William Simon's book about Steve Jobs, called: iCon: Steve Jobs, the greatest second ACT in the history of business. Was it a critique? 

Of course, in a way, iCon, is a very clever title. It ties the 'i' prefix of the Apple products to Jobs's status as an actual icon. But it could be read differently.....it says I Con, and then it likens Steve Jobs's second tenure at the head of Apple to an act - a dramatic performance. I was thinking that maybe it was going to be an expose.

I looked it up and it seems that it's not a critique or satire at all. It's about how great and inspiring Steve Jobs is.  

since I've been eating

For the first time in my whole life, I'm putting on too much weight. Is it an age thing or is it because, in another first, I'm eating properly for the first time? 

cooking and eating

I started eating steak. Every couple of days lately I get a steak from Coles, cook it and eat it. The reason I thought of doing that is that I've been eating really healthily - I eat a lot of fruit, vegetables, grains, nuts, oats, fish - but I still feel a lot of fatigue....so, it occurred to me that eating red meat might help. I think it does. 

I realized another probable reason for the fatigue, which is probably why eating steak hasn't made more difference, so I'm addressing this other thing. 

One of the things I really like about eating steak is that I've always had the feeling that cooking raw meat is going to involve a difficult and complicated process, but it's actually really easy. 

hope

It's been demoralizing lately because things seem to be getting worse. It's like living in a nightmare. The idea that, although it may take time and effort, the nightmare will eventually be over, and things will be better, and, along the way, there will be times of respite - that idea gives me hope. 

When things are getting worse, I lose hope. But I think I've figured out why it's been like this recently and I'm addressing it, which helps. Just the idea that things aren't spiraling down out of my control, helps. 

learning without intention

No one taught me to play chess. I learnt without even intending to. It was in year 5 and I always watched the other kids play. Day after day I was watching chess and enjoying it. I never once tried to remember how any of the pieces moved. 

Then one day someone wanted to play me and I realized that I actually knew how to play. I knew how all the pieces moved and how the game worked. 

beasts of the mind

Labels for mental health conditions can be useful because they give us a way of talking about our experience, and they can provide a rough guide as to what's going on with someone. It's important to be mindful of the limitations of these labels though. They're not definitive. 

Say, for example, like me, you have anxiety and depression, that doesn't mean you have some kind of objective phenomenon which meets all the criteria of depression and then, separately, you have another objective phenomenon that corresponds to anxiety. The mind is not a zoo that holds mental illnesses like animals. It's way more complicated than that. 

changing standards

A single digital art image on my computer now can take up 10,000 times more memory than the whole RAM of my first computer. It had 5K of RAM. I used to think that computers with 100 - 200 K of RAM were like super computers. Now, when I'm freeing up disk space, if there's 800K RAM somewhere, I'm not even worried about deleting it. It's negligible. 

stuck

It would be good if I could see some progress between now and a year ago, but I don't. 

There have been moments and days when I did feel like I was really making progress. I notice that what was very difficult is not as difficult. 

But generally I feel stuck and the struggle seems endless. 

ctrl z

It's worth noting that so much of the advice about how you have to do multiple drafts and your first draft is always going to be rubbish, comes from a time before word processing. 

the bends

I really don't know what's mental and physical health and what's benzo withdrawal. 

strong themes

I don't think novels are meant to take on great themes. The best novels are much more personal than that. Tolstoy though, was able to make great themes personal somehow. 

Dostoevsky kind of does, but when I read him it's more for his portrayal of the personal. I think that's why my favorite novels of his are Demons and The Idiot, rather than The Brothers Karamazov, which is recognized as his best work and everyone loves because of the important themes. 

Now that I think of it, that's probably why I prefer Dostoevsky to Tolstoy, and it's also why my favorite Dickens is David Copperfield, whereas all the experts prefer Bleak House, which kind of bores me to be honest. 

this influence

Harold Bloom talks about writers being belated - born late in history when everything good has been written. So, they need to willfully misread their mentors. They know perfection  has already been achieved and it kills them, so they resist. 

But maybe there's something else other than the influence of tradition that empowers literary creation. If I was a writer, I think I would disagree with Bloom's view. Yes, there's a sense in which there's nothing new under the sun and everything's been done, but one of the best things about writing and art and music, is the way that the best creators fuse tradition and their own spirit to create - to make something that is at once absolutely new and absolutely recognizable. 

cap

I come fresh from vanquishing my own weakness. 

wait

It's easy to take for granted small improvements, but what gives them weight is when they are permanent. 

flexibility

Does anyone ever think of a goal and then work towards it and achieve exactly that goal? We talk as if that's how it works when we talk about SMART goals, but how many people do you know who have actually worked through that process and achieved their SMART goals? 

You don't achieve success or anything meaningful by having a fixed idea of what you want to achieve. It's like going to a place you've never been before. At first you can't even see it. You only know the right direction to go. Eventually it comes into view, and, as you get nearer, what you see changes purely by virtue of the fact that you're getting closer. So, the thing you're aiming for looks different as you progress towards it. 

Likewise, your goals will not look the same as you make progress. The same goal will look very different at different stages of the process of working towards it. 

the benefits of o

Simple changes can make a huge difference. You don't always need a regimen of medications. Eating o or not eating q can make a huge difference. That's what I've found. Try something. It might just work. 

this body

I remember when I made my very first digital artwork, or at least I remember the first one I was able to post to Instagram. As of today, I've made around 900 digital artworks. 

It's only been a couple of years since that first one [later edit: I looked up the date I posted it and it was March 6, 2021]. I remember how lost I was at first. I bought my wacom intuos drawing tablet because I really wanted to do digital art, and then I tried to use it and it was so demoralizing, because I can't do normal art as it is, and then to do art on a drawing tablet is harder. 

So, I actually packed it away and gave up. It stayed like that for maybe a year and then - in 2021 I think - I thought, I want to use this damned thing. I don't know what it was that drove me. It was a desire to create, and it was also a sense of abandoning all the standards and requirements.....a resolve to do art in my own way. 

question

Is it possible for me to be fixed? 

things won't end here

I'm in darkness, and I'm in this house I've spent a lifetime building out of fear and pain, and life outside is unthinkable. Every now and then there's a moment of light in the darkness, where I realize that this place of endless fear and coldness is not my home, and I don't need to stay here. 

how to think

When I sat down to write some goals, at first my mind was just a blank, and it's because I was thinking in terms of what is possible. I was uninspired. Then I changed to thinking about, if anything was possible, what would I want to happen, and then I came up with a lot of ideas. 

taking my time

For the last couple of months I've been posting every day on Medium and as a result I'm earning more from it. It's plateaued off a bit now, but I'm still earning more than I was. But today I came up with an idea for a post, and I really need to think about it and craft it. It's a really good idea, so I can't just pump out this post. I don't mind. I'm happy to spend a few days on it. 

Likewise, with my designs for print-on-demand.....I'm learning how to use affinity designer, and my vision is to bring together my art and design to create something good. So, I'm content to just learn and experiment for a while and not produce much. 

action

One manifestation of my change from rumination and withdrawal to engagement, is about giving up. As I wrote earlier, there's no action  associated with giving up, and yet, in the past, I've been very occupied with giving up. That 'activity' was all in my head. That's what happens when you actively engage in giving up....there's a lot of action but it's all pointless and destructive.  

thought exercise

Giving up is not something you can do proactively. There are no milestones, short term goals or habitual activities associated with it. 

let's get virtual

For a while there was a panic about e-books replacing physical books, but I think that fear was overblown because, besides all the advantages of reading e-books - like being able to search the whole book, being able to copy and paste quotes, being able to carry a whole library around on a kindle, usb or whatever, how cheap e-books are, especially the classics (e.g. all of Thomas Hardy's novels for a couple of bucks) - when you read an e-book, you're still reading the book. I still have a sentimental attachment to physical books though. They have something that e-books don't. Like, I still have physical copies of different translations of the Bible, and I still write my insights in a notebook. 

u\r\a miracle

The human body is pretty amazing. The heart pumps blood around the body for a whole lifetime, however long that is. 

Someone once explained to me the mechanisms and reactions that are activated when you cut yourself, and I was in awe about the precision and complexity and the multi-staged, conditional nature of the whole thing. It's really something. 

baking

I'm going to write my novel and I'm going to write all the things I want to write. All the things I feel strongly about - all the situations and issues and dramas - are going to be infused into it, but unrecognizable as the actual thing that they represent. It's like when you make a cake...you don't taste the eggs and flower and....*checks notes*...whatever else goes into a cake. It's all cooked into something else - a cake. 

unwritten

I often delete what I've written here or on Medium because I'll think later that someone might take what I've written in a negative way. There's so much that I could write if I could just write. 

plays about futility

One kind of literature I don't really like is absurdist literature. There's something about it that disturbs me. When I was younger and I heard about some of these plays, I thought that the premise they were based on was interesting, but as I got older and read more and studied absurdist texts and other texts, I disliked them.

Maybe I just don't get it. 

savage

Harold Bloom talked about how our culture is losing/ has lost the capacity to read certain literature. One writer I think that applies to is Thomas Mann. I know that his novels are works of genius, but they're just too ponderous and slow moving for me, and I think that's because of the torrent of information and stimuli that is just a normal part of life now. I've been reduced to what Wordsworth called a 'state of savage torpor'. 

a reason

We associate healing with feeling better and not being in pain, but when you look back on all the painful, difficult struggles in your life, and when you're struggling now and you look back and you see the same struggle and you think that it's never ending, that's healing. All of that was work being done by and in you. 

the everyday

Last year there were a lot of firsts. I don't think very much of my achievements because I don't think anyone else does. Big deal if I started achieving my main daily goals every single day instead of 'trying to'. They're just ordinary goals that anyone could do. 

But it is a big deal. 

Some other firsts and changes:

• I'm making money from writing
• I'm making money from my art
• I'm on top of my responsibilities
• I exercise every day
• I have a quiet time every day 
• I cook and I eat healthily
• I read every day 
• I make art every day

I have a whole lot of other daily goals that I don't yet do every day, and things I want to work on. 

But yeah - it's something. It's not nothing. 

lying voice

The exciting truth is that we can continually make fresh starts. I don't feel like that's true. It doesn't seem true to me. I'm always thinking about how things are going wrong and how I'm in decline, and so on. 

But I'm learning something different. I've actually been thinking like that for years, so it's obviously not true, because I've been thinking it's the end for decades. 

I've continually proved that voice wrong by living on and surviving. 

desertation

From being an English student, I've studied a lot of poetry, I've read a lot of poetry and analyzed a lot of poetry, but I still feel like I have no idea. 

I suppose it's partly a kind of imposter syndrome. 

strange tale

I'm engrossed in a story about hopelessness and loss. It defies expression. 

I think so much, and yet it's all futile. It's like the big nothing in the never ending story. 

looking

I think because healing happens so slowly, it's hard to appreciate it. It's easy to get caught up in a sense of crisis. I know that I'm not where I was, but I think, so what?...I'm still doomed. 

infj

It's the curse of being an introvert - you crave human contact but you dread it.

the hunger

I don't know why, but recently - in the last couple of years - I was really interested in reading books and watching videos about conspiracy theories and extreme ideologies. But since I've been doing so many book list challenges lately, I have a renewed desire to read the classics and literary fiction and good quality non-fiction. 

rundown

I'm more durable than I think I am. There have been a few times in my life when I feared that I was broken beyond repair, but as it turned out, I wasn't. In the last couple of years, as I've been going through the rigors of benzo withdrawal (if that's what it is) I quite often feel like I'm at breaking point or like I'm permanently broken. Often at night, when I'm between asleep and awake, I will have that awareness. When I went through the really bad period of depression between 2010 and 2014, I often felt like that as well. 

The good thing is that it's not true. There's something in me that doesn't break.