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

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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.