driven to abstraction

on the one hand....

Abstraction is elucidation not obfuscation. One way to raise the level of abstraction of a computer program would be to make it more elaborate - add in more steps, for example - so that the operation of the program becomes clearer to the user. 

So, maybe you could say that python is more abstract than C++. Or maybe, if abstraction is adding more and longer steps, you could say that Java is more abstract than JavaScript. But which is more abstract out of Java and Python? 

on the other hand....

Forgetting about abstraction being about more steps and elaboration, just intuitively, I would say that functional programming languages - like Haskell - have to be more abstract than object-oriented languages or programming styles. That's purely based on my sense of what abstraction is, and the mysteriousness of languages like Haskell. It seems like you have to be very smart to get Haskell. 

so...

abstraction needs reality. The two complete each other. 

on creation

If you're not intent on succeeding at all costs, you can't possibly sell-out, because there's nothing to receive in exchange. So, why not do anything you want to, anyway you want to? So we had the freedom that most bands deny themselves, because they're trying to make it; they're trying to 'do something'. We were trying to do something too, but we didn't care if it never got out of the four walls that we were in.

 - Sterling Morrison, on the Velvet Underground

inky

Around the time I was born, Joan Didion 'began to doubt the premises of all the stories [she] had ever told [her]self.'

you complete me

I was reading Andrea Wulf's Magnificent Rebels (2022) which is about the first Romantics, who gathered around Jena in Germany in the late 18th, early nineteenth century - including, the Schellings (husband and wife), Fichte, Goethe, Hegel, Alexander Humboldt, August Wilhelm Humboldt, Caroline Humboldt, Novalis, Schiller, the Schlegel brothers. These preceded and inspired the English Romantics. 

Fichte talked about how, after reading Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, he had been 'living in a new world'. He decided to go and meet Kant but he didn't want to just turn up empty handed without any recommendation or evidence of his intellectual abilities. So, in 5 weeks, he wrote a book! His treatise was about religion, which is the question that Kant hadn't addressed in his three Critiques. 

Fichte sent the manuscript to Kant, and then went to meet him in person a while after, and Kant said the book was really good and he should publish it. Kant said that his own publisher would publish it. So, it got published, and there was a bit of a mix-up. Fichte's name was missing from a lot of the printed copies. The copies to be circulated locally had Fichte's name on them but those sent further afield didn't. This may have been strategic on the part of the publisher....a new book comes out that basically completes Kant's work, published by his publisher....it was probably written by Kant, right? 

Then it was so good that everybody was convinced that Kant wrote it. The great man graciously stepped forward and informed the world that Fichte wrote it, which established Fichte as the next great philosopher. 

a kind of tension

There are 2 or 3 poems that I like, that spoke to me when I first read them. One of them is In the Waiting Room by Elizabeth Bishop. When I read it I was struck by how very strange and yet how very familiar and understandable it was. 

the difficulty of being a true believer

Beliefs and enthusiasms become constraints. 

It's difficult to write because there are qualifications about everything. No principle is absolutely true. As soon as I think of a truth to write, I start thinking about all the ways in which it isn't true. 

We come up with ideas and we are influenced in opposition to the conditions we find ourselves in, and those ideas and influences free us from those conditions. So, once that is done, those ideas are not relevant anymore. 

Good ideas change things, but we can't just hold onto those same ideas once things have changed. 

recalling yesterday on your 18th birthday

As an adult, you can never really recapture or re-member how you thought as a child, because your view of it will always be through the lens of adulthood. It's like trying to remember what it was like to see written words before you could read - what it's like to look at writing with incomprehension. 

On the one hand, it wouldn't mean anything. It would be like looking at trees or rocks or whatever. It's only an adult (and one who can read) who can have the thought - I wonder what it would be like to look at words without understanding them. So, it's an adult thought and you are already defeated. 

On the other hand, it doesn't matter. The same principle applies to any two points in your life, so don't worry. There are things that you don't even see now that will be revealed later - amazing things. 

anty angelic

What do you think it would be like to encounter an angel? 

It's terrifying to encounter an angel.

If you encounter an angel, mace won't help you. 

It's one of those things that, in your mind, you can imagine it, but the reality of it is something else. 

hits

Why do we use the same word - 'myth' - for stories that aren't true, but also for stories that, while not literally true, carry a lot of moral truth. 

metanarrative

E L Doctorow said that whatever a writer says about their own novel, is just part of the fiction and not to be trusted.

This applies in an interesting way to Mary Shelley's introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein because, firstly, there are reasons to doubt the veracity of the story that Mary tells, but also, it's the perfect story told with all the verve and wit of the novelist that Mary Shelley is. 

Like Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein's structure is one of nested narratives - a story within a story within a story - and in a way, Mary Shelley's introduction is like the perfect packaging - a perfect outer narrative for the novel/ a perfect introduction/ a great story. 

She needed to answer the question that was frequently put to her - “How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?” - with a story, and that's what she provided. 

science fiction, a poem

remember when pinterest used to have pages

you would say i'm just going to scroll to the end of this page

now you can't do that any more

but does that make you scroll less or more

when you're always at the beginning of an endless scroll as opposed to being at some point in a finite page

¿¿¿

first ever

In 1659, Christiaan Huygens used his homemade telescope to become the first person ever to observe and document the surface features of Mars. 

lit

Good literary criticism is not purely systematic and analytical. It's not like science. It's like poetry. 

structure

I think being creative is not about being able to come up with lots of different ideas. It's more about developing a process and you do the same process over and over and over, but experiment within the parameters of the process. 

just tell me what to do

Can an ideology be imposed systemically? Like, is it possible to be a true believer by following a set of rules or principles? 

I said to Minh once that I wish the Bible just told us explicitly what we need to do....like a checklist. And his response was 'no you don't'. He said that not so much because it's a bad idea, but because he knew I would hate that, but it is a bad idea. 

letting go

I like the idea that 'success is the best revenge'. Sometimes there's a choice between righting perceived wrongs and moving on and pursuing something else. I think it's always best to pursue worthwhile goals rather than trying to bring the people that hurt you to justice and making them pay. 

I suppose the two things sometimes go together. In some cases, it's important to assert your rights and bring people to justice, but it's a choice. If pursuing your freedom and empowerment involves setting things straight in that way, good, but it may not. I would rather get on with living my life and pursuing my goals - going where I haven't been before - than harnessing all my passion and drive to something that happened in the past. 

staying home

Growing up, America never really interested me. Asia did...especially China and Japan. It seemed to me that those Asian countries were both very alien and very familiar, whereas America was too much like Australia, where I'm from. Like, why go there if there isn't going to be anything strange about it?

anacrostic

Unless it's strange and unexpected, it ain't true. 

prose ache

It's really interesting when you read books that are made up of interviews or transcriptions of people speaking about some topic or person, because the syntax of speech is so very different to that of written texts. It's more like a kind of poetry. You can be so much more expressive in fewer words when you speak, but I guess part of that is due to tone of voice and other non-verbal language, which sometimes makes transcriptions of spoken word difficult to understand. 

But overall, I think direct transcriptions of spoken language are understandable and more evocative than prose. 

art and artifice

Susan Sontag did one of Andy Warhol's 'screen tests', which weren't screen tests in the normal sense, but just the subject being filmed for 3 minutes doing nothing or whatever they wanted. Here's a video about it: SSscreenttest. 

What I find fascinating about this short video is how naturally Warhol and Sontag interacted. I imagined that would be the case. In most interviews I've seen, Warhol comes across as kind of affected, as if he's playing a role or wearing a mask, but here he's very natural and very funny. 

blanks and spaces

Some of the best classics are Science Fiction books - Neuromancer, Stranger in a Strange Land. Even Frankenstein is sometimes characterized as Science Fiction. 

the source

The young'uns don't know about John Milton, but he's the poet who was revered by all the poets we think of as great - Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley. 

making history

An odyssey is an arduous, long and challenging journey. It's defining features are that it is more arduous, long and challenging than any normal journey. 

We only have that concept because of a poem written by a legend. I'm not using the word 'legend' just as a superlative. Homer is a legend in the sense that we don't know the truth about him. 

too much for the world

The Bell Jar is one of those books that captures beauty and innocence in the midst of destruction. The impression you have afterwards is of something very sweet but dark and traumatic. 

all of our competitions

My favorite Japanese author is Sayaka Murata. I like how she portrays characters that don't buy into the competitions that nearly everyone else seems to. Like, in Convenience Store Woman the main character has no greater ambition than to excel at her job in a convenience store, and she has no desire to get married. 

the ich

Wordsworth invented modern poetry - poetry that is a personal expression of the poet....it's about their thoughts and feelings. We just think that's what poetry or writing in general is, but it wasn't always like that. 

making meaning

Sometimes when I read the Bible, I don't know what is being conveyed - the intended meaning. I could look up a commentary to tell me what it means but I think, in many ways, that defeats the purpose, because I need to draw my own meaning from it. 

portal

One of the great ironies of the 'red pill' is that it comes from a work of fiction - it's made up. 

art

Sometimes I look at my art and think that I wish it looked nicer. It's ugly and messy. Sometimes I think that I really failed. I tried. I know what I was trying to achieve. 

But then another time, sometimes I think something is really great, but it doesn't get many likes, and other times I'll think it's OK, but it gets heaps of likes. 

But I go on making art because I want to. I like Andy Warhol's dictum:

Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.

 

word

I was watching 'Vanilla Sky' with the subtitles on and, where he says, 'I think I've met the one remaining woman in this world who is almost completely guileless', instead of the word 'guileless' - which is crucial for the meaning - the subtitles used the word 'guyless'. 

hands across the water

Faith is like water flowing out of a tap. The stream of water is clearly defined, but you can't grasp it. When you try to grasp it, it changes and ceases to be a stream at all. 

strange

Viktor Shklovsky proposed the idea of 'defamiliarization' to explain how literature works. The idea is that the act of reading slows down your apprehension of the subject, because words are slower than thoughts. That slowing down, makes the subject strange, kind of like when you focus on particular details rather than the whole picture or when you repeat words over and over until they seem weird or nonsensical. 

do the thing

From my own experience and what I've learnt from talented and creative people, I think the most important factor in someone's success in creative endeavors - more important even than talent - is the desire to do the thing. 

nb

I got excited because I was watching a video about Edith Wharton and they said that Edith Wharton hated dusk-jackets (that's what I heard). I thought - finally I've found someone who shares my antipathy. But when I replayed that part of the video, it was talking about how she hated a particular dust-jacket because of something it said.

I feel like, at this stage of my taper, time is on my side in a way. Instead of carrying a weight that just gets heavier over time, it's now getting lighter. 

Marilyn Robinson's book of essays - The Givenness of Things - includes the transcript of a conversation she had with President Obama. 

Pronuncation guide:

Donne = 'dun'

Goethe = 'ger t'

Albert Camus = 'al bear cam moo'

Basquiat = 'bas ki ar'

Guy de Maupassant = 'ghee...' the rest is as you would expect

threshold

Pressure brings out what is good. It isn't a threat or something to be feared. It's not breaking you down, the way it feels; it's breaking down the walls you've built to keep yourself safe - all the rules you've applied to yourself - which imprison and limit you. 

fine words

One of my favorite examples of the error that can result from words being taken out of context is the following quote from John Milton: 

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

It is a great quote and John Milton definitely wrote it. I've seen it used in books about psychology and inspirational posters and posts. I also think there is some truth to it. 

BUT......what is its context? It's from Milton's Paradise Lost. Which character speaks these words? Satan - the father of lies! So, did John Milton believe that these words were true? No. Not at all. 

The astonishing literary genius of D H Lawrence

D H Lawrence's novel Kangaroo (1923) is such an eloquent expression of 'Australianness'. It's rightly regarded as an Australian classic, even though D H Lawrence wasn't Australian. It's all the more amazing that he wrote the novel in 6 and a half weeks while staying in Thirroul. All together he stayed in Australia for 4 months.

no squared

I wouldn't know how to work hard at reading more

you would, no

more reading hard at work

I would know

some milestones

I think a lot about how difficult it still is as I taper off Valium - how I still, after all this time, am not sleeping well and struggling with mental health issues. 

But then an encouraging thought occurred to me. Every single year for the last 4 years, I have reached a meaningful milestone. At the peak of my Valium use, I was getting through around 50 x 2 mg a week. 

I started seriously tapering in 2021, and by the end of that year I was down to 25 x 2 mg a week. Then, by the end of 2022, I was down to 14 x 2 mg, by the end of 2023, I was down to 10 x 2 mg, and by the end of 2024, I was down to 6 x 2 mg. 

Like I said - each milestone was very meaningful. 25 was meaningful because I didn't feel ready to reduce to that yet, but my doctor forced the issue. I thought - that's OK. I will just drink more. That lead to a really severe alcoholism which took hold really fast. Like, overnight, I started to drink at least 2 bottles of red wine a day, and I needed it. I couldn't stop. It was killing me and I knew that. So, on 15 March 2022, I went into detox and, with help, stopped drinking, and to this day I don't drink at all, and I never will, for the rest of my life. 

I was meant to come off Valium in detox. They did a very fast 8 day taper to get me down to 0. But that wasn't possible for me. It was tough though because my doctor refused to prescribe valium at all for me anymore. It was really dire. Fortunately, I found a doctor who would work with me and allow me to taper more gradually, so I kept pushing myself and by the end of 2022, I was down to 14 x 2 mg. 

Then, throughout 2023, I kept pushing and by the end of that year, I reached 10 x 2 mg, which seemed like a good milestone. It's a nice round number and the next cut would be down to single digits. 

Then, by the end of 2024, I was down to 6 x 2 mg, which is a good milestone because it's less than a whole 2 mg tablet a day. 

At each stage, the next milestone seemed impossible. When I was on 14 x 2 mg a week, I was so hard pressed that getting down to 10 x 2 mg a week seemed almost impossible, but I got there and then I got down to 6 x 2 mg a week, which encourages me that I will be able to make further cuts, as unthinkable as it seems at times. And there aren't that many more cuts that will need to be made. 

analogs digital

I was watching 'Andy Warhol's Diary' on netflix, and they were talking about how, as part of a promotion, Commodore got Andy Warhol to make some art on one of their computers. I think he used an early version of MS paint or something. 

That kind of art production was right up Warhol's alley, and he even wrote in his diary, something about how, if he had discovered this kind of art making earlier, he might just specialize in it and not even paint at all. That's interesting and I wish that had been the case or that, maybe if he had lived longer, he would have pursued digital art. 

In any case, he wrote about the art he made as part of the commodore promotion, and he said that it was really bad - it was just rubbish. But of course it was...he had literally never used a computer before. Still, if it was saved or printed (which I don't think it was) it would no doubt sell for millions now. 

inviolable

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. - Romans 12:21

When people do things that are harmful to you, either maliciously or negligently, it can feel very invalidating. You feel vulnerable and like you don't have agency over your own life. But two truths I want to affirm: 

Firstly, the energy and the spirit behind that person's actions can be converted into something positive and good. Somehow it provides an opportunity for change. It raises a lot of issues, and that gives you the chance to address those issues. 

Secondly, no one can trample or violate the things that really matter. Your values, goals, aspirations, beliefs, are yours and they can't be touched. There are things that do not 'perish, spoil or fade'. (1 Peter 1:4) 

the art of life

When we go through a crisis, we think something is wrong. We think things shouldn't be like this. I've felt that, when I was wracked by depression and anxiety and desperate for relief from the pain of those conditions. 

But I also see that crises represent a chance to make a fresh start - a real new beginning, which can only come about through pain. 

Through my journey of recovery, as I stopped drinking and tapered off benzos, I embarked on a new life, but it was only because I had to change. It was out of that same desperation for relief that I already mentioned. 

It was the only way. Changing brought relief. It's like art. With art you absolutely can't represent things the way you think you're supposed to. Likewise, you can't find real relief in the ways that seem to you that they would lead to relief. 

You have to do what seems hard and unnatural but, as you're discovering, is the path to life. 

defference

When I go to other countries, it strikes me as strange that the soil and plants are the same in some ways. They're like universal things. 

crimes

A path lies open before me, not of anticipating and responding to threats or criticism, but of doing stuff and living. 

o possum

I call this humble pie. 

un/readable classics

I'm coming to the conclusion that Henry James is the most readable of all the classic writers. I recently read (but didn't finish) Dickens's Oliver Twist, and though I really like Dickens, I didn't like this book. It's puerile, nasty, racist, and melodramatic (but not in a fun way, like Ann Radcliffe).

But now I'm reading Henry James - one of his early novels - and it's like a palate cleanser. I'm looking forward to more. 

I still like Dickens though. 

poiesis

Hunters and Collectors were the first band that made me listen and think about the lyrics. 

unfamile

He wrote a novel in which he depicted certain historical events as being driven by machines and inanimate objects. No, it wasn't so much that events were driven by those things, it was just that that was his focus. He portrayed them as if they were a kind of natural phenomena, which they aren't, and that opens up creative possibilities. 

Maybe he was critiquing the arbitrary nature of historical explanations. 

sold as is

something new

untainted by the stories that presume their own existence

and always were that way

Christ died for the unworthy

I think the idea that, as a Christian, you should love citizens of your nation more than you love non-citizens, as espoused by J D Vance - that there is a hierarchy: you love your family, then your community, then your nation, then other nations - is not Christian. What did Jesus teach? Love your enemies! Love your neighbor! The idea that the way you treat a person and whether or not you should care about them would depend on their visa status or their culture or their religion is abhorrent, at least to me.