agency

If things became like they are depicted in 1984 or Brave New World, we wouldn't realize it because we would be inside it. Those novels only mean what they do to us because things aren't like that in our world. 

But in any case, say if the world was like that, each individual would have their own interactions and life - their own story. One of the things that helps me in dealing with mental health issues is the realization that we each have the power to shape our own lives. 

modern history

Here are some lines from Jonathan Healey's The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England (2023):

One evening in December 1620, two men approached the door of John Harris's Alehouse in Bridgewater. 

It was a winter's night: the smell of woodsmoke scented the crisp air of the Somerset coast, accompanied by the clattering percussion of the masts from the town's dock. In the windows of the townhouses, candlelight flickered against the warm smoulder of the log fires. 

This is history in the 21st century...so different from and better than traditional history books that didn't evoke images like this but stuck to the facts and figures. 

nailed it

In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom wrote that 'all [literary] criticism is prose poetry'. I like that. When I read Bloom or Bakhtin - for example - there isn't a singular meaning that I need to try and get. It's more like the meaning emerges from my engagement with the text, so it's really my own....I made this meaning. 

postex

I forget who said it, but someone influential and successful said that they learn more about the truth from novels than from non-fiction books. I like that idea but I don't think it fully defines the novel or literature. 

There's been a growing realization as well, that what we call non-fiction has a considerable degree of fictiveness about it. It's understood that information and ideas can be represented in different ways and the most effective way to do so is to embody them in stories. 

choice

I don't believe any decision is difficult. You never stand at a crossroads and face two equal paths. It seems to me there is always one path that, when you think about it, is the better path - it's the right path for you. 

foreign climes

When I visit other countries, I always marvel at the way there are some things that are the same as here and are probably the same all over the world....like trees, for example. Wherever you go, there are trees and they're basically the same, or at least, they're the same in basic ways. And soil, clay and rocks.

you know you're right

I really thought that I would be part of the Sydney Church of Christ for the rest of my life. There didn't seem any other option. 

One of the things that really opened up the possibility of leaving as a serious option, was Henry Kreite's open letter, because here was someone who had been in the top leadership of the church, decisively stating that the church could be wrong. That's what really impacted me, because I had been taught and had accepted the belief that the church is always right. If there's a problem, it's with me. So, I had defined all the issues - and there were many - in that way. There was something wrong with me and the ones that were going to help me were the church. 

What I took from Henry Kreite's letter was different from the meaning he intended and a lot of people took from his letter - that the church had started out perfectly and, over time, had gone astray. I read his letter as an identification of a flaw in the church that was central to its nature. It wasn't some mistake that had creeped in over time. 

A big part of it, as I already mentioned, was the claim to infallibility. The letter opened up the possibility that, actually, I could be right. My issues could be real and valid and the reason why the church had never been able to help me with those issues could be because of their blindness to those issues rather than my own spiritual blindness. 

That's the problem with making absolute claims like, I am always right. You only have to be wrong once in one small way, for the whole edifice to come crashing down. 

polarization

It's problematic that whatever happens, Fox news and Sky news Australia will interpret it one way and other, more left leaning, media outlets will say it's the complete opposite. There's no real debate or reasonable consideration. The people on these shows who 'debate' or talk about the news are only interested in delivering polemical tirades. 

the way overtaken

I think of the past with a lot of regret. Every interaction I've ever had seems, in my mind, to cast me in a negative light. 

I've learnt that that is a distortion. The way I habitually think is not true. It's not just negatively slanted, it's a lie. So, I'm learning, when I think of those negative imperatives, to deliberately bring to mind something positive. 

Those thoughts don't come naturally, but the negative ones flow like a river. But, as a friend once told me, just because a path is well-worn doesn't make it the right path. 

notes on notes on camp

One of the first intellectual books I bought was A Susan Sontag Reader. To this day I remember reading 'notes on camp' for the first time and how interesting it was. It's so enjoyable even though she's writing about something so ethereal. I usually don't like that...when a book is about some purely intellectual concept and it becomes so convoluted. It's annoying. It's not about anything real. Ultimately you're just reading something that's about itself. But that's what makes 'notes on camp' so good. It's consistently tethered to reality. 

w🌀rds ➕p🎄ktures

When you put words and images together, they affect each other. It's not just that the images illustrate the words. Something is opened up. 

Barthes's distinction between 'the work' and 'the text' is relevant here. The work is a 'fragment of substance' - a physical book for example - while the text is 'a methodological field'[1]. The text is paradoxical and everchanging. This distinction also applies to visual art.

When you combine words and images, you create three source texts. There is the text that corresponds to the images, the text that corresponds to the words, and the text that corresponds to the combination of words and images. 

Notes

[1] Barthes, Roland, 'From Work to Text', Image Music Text, Hill and Wang, 1978

things change

One of the things that surprised me when I started to learn more about the subject of English, is how important poetry is. From everything I learned in High School, poetry seemed like a branch of English, but when I studied it at a higher level, I discovered that poetry was more like the whole tree...at least for most of recorded history it was. The novel - which is what I thought was the pre-eminent literary form - was a very recent development. The novel as we know it, in its modern form, has only been around for a couple of hundred years. 

hanover

A habit that has stayed with me since uni is putting little brackets around passages in the books I read. It was so important when I was first learning to write essays because I needed to be able to specify exactly where any quotes or ideas I used came from. 

Now, I still do it with pretty much any book I read (unless I don't own the book) even though I generally don't write essays these days. 

we can do nothing against the truth

It's hard to write a biography because there are so many different versions of events that all hold some truth. Even a made-up story carries meaning. 

some famous booktok tropes

'faces a reader makes'

addicted to books

more sticky tabs than pages

the 'aesthetic' of the reading 'lifestyle' as a separate thing from actually reading   

the long and the short

I'm prejudiced against short books, but when a book overcomes that prejudice and I can see that it holds real value, I then appreciate that book all the more. Examples include Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading by Harold Bloom. 

There's nothing like a book that is both really long and really good though, and there are a lot of examples of that - The Idiot and The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky, War and Peace and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, David Copperfield, The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son and Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, A House for Mr Biswas by V S Naipaul, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, to name a few. 

the death of the artist

Why do we read? It's hard to answer that question. There's no doubt that we get something real and substantial from our engagement with texts. 

The question of ‘why’ is related to the question of ‘what’. What is a text? What does engaging with a text involve? 

In high school we had the idea that the kind of analysis undertaken in the course of criticism, theory and the study of English - that that was pointless. It didn't help us to appreciate or understand the text, but anyway, reading itself - engaging with all of these texts - is pointless, so we thought. 

Barthes distinguishes between the 'work' and the 'text', where the work is the words on the page - the artifact - and the text is the mental field that the work gives rise to.... something like that. 

We don't think of the way we respond to music as a kind of reading, but it is. The same is true of art, ads and stuff written on packaging labels. So, I can do a close reading of the packaging of my acrylic paints set. The box asserts that:

Whether you're planning a masterpiece or you want to try acrylic painting for the first time - this set is ready for anything. 

So, 'this set' is autonomous. This set of paints is more proactive than you...only just. While you are only 'planning' or 'wanting' to try, the paints are 'ready'. Whether you are a professional artist or a novice, it's immaterial to 'this set', which is ready regardless. You are just the vehicle for these paints to make their art.

only natural

Part of discovering the truth is the realization that it's not what you think it is. That realization is not something to be feared. It's liberating to break free from the illusion that we always know the truth when we see it - that judging the truth comes naturally. 

quotidian supernature

The thing that's interesting and mysterious about this idea of beginning a new life, which is also a continuation of your old life, is the reality that the two lives both continue. It's like there are two personas within the one person. 

That's something that I think confuses a lot of people. It confused me. When I first became a Christian, because of everything the Bible says about being a new creation, and being born again, and so on, I thought that, when I take that step and I actually become a Christian, the old me would be no more. That's why it was such a difficult step to take. 

But then when I did take the step, it was an anti-climax. Here I was - the same. It was a relief, but it was also a huge challenge, because now I had to do all the things that I thought a Christian does but with the same old nature that I had always had. 

La Vita Nuova

My experience with detox made certain spiritual concepts come alive for me. Like, how you can, on the one hand, be the same person you've always been, but, on the other, be a new creation. How is it possible to be both? I know now because I've experienced it.  

I had a conversation with the social worker early in my 10 day detox and she told me that, of course detox is going to be challenging because it was very literally the beginning of my new life - a life without alcohol and valium. That idea really stayed with me. I was beginning a new life. It wasn't just wishful thinking or some theological sleight of hand; it was a solid reality - the fact that I stopped drinking and thereby began a new life.

Before, I never imagined that I could be in the position I am in now where I just won't ever drink, ever again. It's not will-power or self-discipline. I don't have to resist temptation. I'm fortunate to have learned that drinking alcohol is incompatible with life for me. My biggest failures taught me that lesson. The first failure happened after I had stopped drinking previously for a couple of years. Someone was encouraging me to have a drink and I thought - what's the harm? I can just go back to not drinking tomorrow. But I didn't. I found myself back in the cycle of regular drinking. So, that's the first lesson. 

The second failure and major lesson was what led to me going to detox. I was tapering off Valium and my Doctor forced me to reduce a bit faster than I could handle. I thought about how I was going to cope and decided to drink to get through it - not excessively, just enough to manage. Just like it was a lie that I could have one or two drinks and then go back to sobriety, it was a lie that I could drink just enough to cushion myself from the suffering of a taper that was a little too fast. When you think about what valium and other benzos are, and what alcohol is, it makes sense that it wouldn't work. But to say that it didn't work is an understatement. It destroyed me. Alcoholism took hold real fast. I was drinking at least 2 bottles of red wine every day, and I needed to just to function - to do anything. I knew that it was killing me - destroying my mental and physical health - but I was stuck in the cycle. 

That lasted for 5 or 6 months, and then I went into detox, which saved my life. The staff at the detox facility I was at are amazing. I had more than one truly life-changing conversation while I was there. I started eating better. It was the beginning of my new life, as messy and terrifying and intense but exciting and joyous as new life is. 

duality

Because of the length of the Bible, one of the challenges is the dichotomy of working through the whole thing while also making sure that you're regularly engaging with certain parts. Like, obviously you're going to want to read the gospels frequently, and then also the epistles as well, but if you were to just read from cover to cover, starting in Genesis, if you read a couple of chapters a day, it's going to be nearly a year before you even get to the New Testament. So, the challenge is to systematically read through the whole book and, at the same time, be dipping into different parts. 

So I came up with a solution....I divide the Bible into 4 sections: history books, the prophets (+ psalms and proverbs), the gospels and acts, and then the epistles and the rest of the New Testament. I read a chapter from section 1, then a chapter from section 2, then section 3, then section 4, then back to section 1, the next chapter of, etc. 

second brain

Something I would do if I was going to do any more formal study, is to put my notes into some kind of system...like, for example, obsidian. 

Octopus watercolor tutorial: EASY/beginner. For Nature Sketch Crate step...

echoing through eternity

The circumstances in which Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg address were hardly auspicious. It's short. It's lacking in drama or rhetorical fireworks. Yet, it's among the greatest speeches ever given. 

the way forward

The biggest personal change that I've ever made (I think) was three years ago when I made my daily goals non-negotiable. Until then I had thought of them as preferable but not essential, but when facing the challenge of tapering off valium - that grueling, long, painful, impossible process - I had the insight that the only way forward was to make these things essential. 

death of the pick me author

A good biography conveys the illusion that the writer is like a clear lens through which the reader perceives the objective reality of the subject's life. There's really an art to that. It's a kind of selflessness. Sometimes the writer imposes too much, though. They want to tell you about their connection with the subject, and they want to tell you about how this project - the biography they're writing - fits in with their life's work and what they were trying to achieve in writing it. I think it spoils their book. I'm interested in the person they're writing about, and only in them - the writer - insofar as knowledge of them sheds further light on the subject. 

Of course there's an irony here, because the more they impose their self into the picture, the less they cast their self in a positive light. The more they illuminate the life of the subject, the more they actually shine a light on their self. 

i am bic

Since stopping drinking, I get addicted to other things, like honey and lemon soothers. 

visualizing progress

A few years ago, not long after I decided to get serious about tapering off valium, after a couple of months I had reduced from around 50 x 2 mg tablets a week to 29 x 2 mg tablets. That number stuck in my mind because, as I was walking home from the chemist that day, I passed a house with a big '29' on it. 

Now I'm down to 5 x 2 mg a week, and I still pass that same house on my journey to and from the chemist. It makes me think about how far I've come. Then, the other day I had the idea of counting the houses off and seeing, in terms of my walk down that street, the corresponding progress made on my taper. It was encouraging because no. 5 is right near the end (or beginning) of the street. For all intents and purposes, it's basically the end. It's just a few steps until the end. So that's where I'm at. It sometimes seems like this taper drags on forever and I'll never get through it. It still really affects me. I encourage myself that I've made a lot of progress, but I still feel like I have a way to go. Seeing it visually like this really helps me to grasp that, it's not just wishful thinking - I am actually at or near the end. It's a fact. 

Then today I had the idea of counting the other way - after passing the no 29, counting upwards and getting a sense of the progress I made between when I started and when I reached 29. It gave me a sense of the progress I've made since the beginning. It puts in terms of a distance walked. An interesting thing is that the final number on that street (at least on that side) is 47, which represents around when I started my taper - around 47 x 2 mg a week. So that road is, funnily enough, a real representation of my taper. I started at the start of the road and now I'm basically at the end. 

working with flooring

I like lino cut printing because it's an easy process, with no messy chemicals, but it has unlimited potential. It's a good example of how limitations can produce creative results. You have to do simple designs because you can't really carve a complex design into lino, but that gives lino cut prints that special look they have. 

heavy

you went into a gesture drawing frenzy and 

broke my skin

and I fell out

bbt

I watched an interview of the cast of Big Bang Theory and Jim Parsons talked about how he often asks Mayim Bialik what Sheldon's lines mean, because she's much closer, in terms of academic achievement, to Sheldon than Jim Parsons is. 

completion

Some things may or may not be done with malice or negligently, but there's no coming back from them. A small thing or a big thing can presage an irrevocable and permanent change, and no explanation is relevant or necessary. 

re

One of the keys to overcoming depression and anxiety is learning not to react. It's hard to learn. It's not the sort of thing you can achieve by trying to do it. It's more like, as you make progress, you realize that that's what you're doing. 

apprehension

My favorite play is Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Before watching it I didn't realize how much I actually knew about the witch trials. Or maybe I didn't know it. There's that phenomenon where, when you encounter profound truths, you feel like you already knew them. You know - yes, that's true - because you already knew it, or at least it resonated with what you already knew and adds stuff you didn't. 

making tradition

When the young Harold Bloom took the manuscript of The Anxiety of Influence to show his colleagues, they told him absolutely not to publish it. Whatever it was, it wasn't literary criticism - it wasn't the work of a respectable scholar. But he did publish it, and it's one of the greatest works of literary criticism of the twentieth century. 

enigma

What keeps me watching Riverdale, even more than the story, is the use of color. The different colors and lighting always have a meaning - every color in every scene. It's like a constant puzzle to be savored throughout every episode. 

destinatum

The best topics are the ones where you can keep learning indefinitely, but you never get to a point where you know all the answers, because, at that point, the topic holds no interest. 

goodness

I have no sense of what is good and what is not good poetry. I know some things that I like in good poetry. It's such a clear thing to the experts. Like it's almost universally acknowledged that Wordsworth had a good decade but outside that his poetry was poor. I guess I could study it and get a sense of the difference, but just reading the poems, I don't see it. 

arte

In the tradition of some of my art heroes, I've started making postcards. I'm going to make hundreds of them. So now I do digital art and postcards. I'm also starting to experiment with different kinds of printmaking. Digital art, postcards, then....canvases? clothes? art journals? we'll see

frisson

I saw a painting by Glenn Brown where he fuzed the figure of a person - the whole body - with a face, and you could see both very clearly in the image and they complemented each other. 

vvvv⋀⋀⋀vvv

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. 

the morality of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

Some modern art is worthless trash....like Richard Prince blowing up other people's instagram images and framing them, and Marcel Duchamp's infamous urinal. The problem with works like that, I think, is that they involve no creativity. They are not 'made things'. They are 'found things'. It wouldn't be so bad if there was some meaningful editing or adjustment - some augmentation - of the found things, but there isn't. 

Still, it's very lucrative. Richard Prince's blown up instagram images sell for around $100,000.00 each. 

impresszt

My art looks different to me, because I made it. Sometimes when something really comes together in a way that pleasantly surprises me, I think - wow, that's great - but then it doesn't get much of a response from people. Other times - not very often, actually - I'll have an idea and I will execute that idea, and it becomes a bit laborious, dotting all the eyes and crossing the tees, but people really like it. 

ambition

Something that I think is key to understanding Warhol's Campbell's soup can paintings - maybe the most important thing, even though it's easy to overlook - is the intense personal associations that Campbell's soup had for him. It wasn't just some mass-produced item, to him. 

That's what I notice about his art and films - what matters about them is what he thinks and feels. He doesn't cater to an audience in an obvious way. Like, with the Empire State Building film....it's just a shot of the Empire State Building that goes for 8 hours and 5 minutes. The only observable change is when it gets dark and the lights come on. He said himself that it was probably better to think about the film than to watch it. But he was making something that was interesting to him. 

It's not like he didn't care how his work was received, though. He really wanted to succeed at art and he did everything with that in mind. 

burn

It's discouraging to lose people - like, when people who were part of your life are no longer - but there's a positive way to look at it. You're becoming your true self, and those people know the old you. You've grown out of them. 

I can think of lots of ways that things could have worked out better. If I was normal, things would be very different. I always interpret that movement away from others as a fault of mine. I don't measure up. 

But maybe it's not that there's something wrong with me. It's like the tale of the ugly duckling, who was neither ugly nor a duckling, but something else entirely. 

Una nuova vita

It's a mystery how you can truly begin living a new life even while your old life continues. In a way, the new life isn't even real, but the truth is that it's your old life - which seems so real and substantial - that isn't real. 

of arms and the man

There's a whole series of battles that each of us fight that no one really ever talks about. It's probably the most challenging and noble endeavor that you are involved in, but it apparently doesn't rise to the level of content. 

we need another Byronic hero

I'm enjoying watching Riverdale, but I don't think Jughead should be dating Betty. Cole Sprouse is great as the moody, enigmatic, intelligent, rebellious, angry young man. He's so good as that. But then they're trying to make him soft and sensitive, and I don't think it works very well. 

brick by brick

I so much prefer the RSV translation of Proverbs 14:1, to pretty much all the other translations. 

The RSV reads:

Wisdom builds her house, but folly with her own hands tears it down.

Every single one of the other translations - without exception, that I could find - refer to a wise woman or women, and I think that loses something because the verse is not about a woman or women, it's about wisdom. It is interesting that wisdom is designated as female, here and elsewhere, and that's something to really think about, but to make the verse about wise women vs foolish women - I think that misses the point. 

What brought this verse to mind was that I was watching a video about our current political moment, and the discussion centered on the way that humanity's baser tendencies, which seem to be winning out at the moment, are self-defeating. They tear themselves down. 

aimë

You have to make a whole new world, but it's not as hard as it sounds. It's really just a matter of going outside, and the world is all there. Where you are now is not the real world. You're living in a mansion you built to save yourself. 

universally acknowledged

You don't realize until you travel how inordinately strange the world is. Things you have always taken for granted, such as, not allowing animals to drive and not wearing a heavy coat in summer, are not universal.