gr8

E L Doctorow writes, in Ragtime, that J P Morgan had 'sensed in [Henry] Fords achievement a lust for order as imperial as his own. This was the first sign given to him in some time that he might not be alone on the planet.'

How extraordinary to be able to write in that way about real historical figures. Gore Vidal does that very well also. To be honest, I'm just amazed that anyone can write fiction about anything. 

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.