all that

I'm hearing that web 3.0 isn't all it's cracked up to be. Some people are saying that the 'personal web' or 'indieweb' is much better. It's a quiet rebellion against the corporatization and algorithmization of everything. 

It's partly about going retro, back to the early days of the internet, and developing your own website in a very quirky and particular way. Some of the main websites that allow you to create this kind of website are: neocities, nekoweb, and Github pages.

Žižek's cat

I recently sat down [in my dreams] to discuss my latest novel with Jennifer Byrne.

This is an excerpt from the transcript. 

JB: It seems to me that there's a common theme in your memoir and your most recent novel, Žižek's cat, about the tension between home as a place of nurturing - a refuge from the world - and home as a stifling influence - somewhere that you want to escape from to seek adventure and excitement in the wider world.

DJ: Really? Where did you get that idea from? 

JB: Well....you're a writer and the main character in your novel is a writer and it just seemed like there was this idea of home as a place where the writer goes to work but then finds themselves isolated from the world and the kind of stimulus they need to be truly creative. So, there is this tension between the need for refuge - in order to write - and the need to escape refuge to pursue adventure, to have something to write about. 

DJ: That's a very interesting idea, and I think it's a good point, but the tension in my novel, that I was most consciously aware of, was all about the cat. I saw the film, The Hunger Games, and I kept thinking about catness....what is it about a cat that makes it a cat, y'know? Then, the tension comes in with the anti-catness. The tension between catness and anti-catness makes the cat qua cat really worth exploring and writing about.

JB: So, that was why you called the book Žižek's cat? But why Žižek? Why his cat? Why not someone else's cat? 

DJ: Well, it's partly an allusion to the kind of dialectic that Žižek is so preoccupied by...Ernaldo - the cat - embodies that dialectic in reverse...Instead of moving through the stages of thesis and antithesis to synthesis, Ernaldo devolves from a state of synthesis into the antithesis of a cat, which is a writer.....but of course, that only makes sense within the context of the story. 

Also, it's not his cat in the sense that he owns it as a pet. It's just a very Žižekian cat. Žižek doesn't like cats. He once said in an interview, 'Cats are lazy, evil, exploitative, dogs are faithful, they work hard, so if I were to be in government, I would tax having a cat, tax it really heavy.'

JB: What inspired the idea of the cat being the antithesis of the writer?

DJ: Have you ever seen a cat write? Has there ever been a writer who was a cat? So, that's where I got that idea from. 

NB

The Beatles' song, A Hard Days Night, was playing on the radio when I was born. I don't remember it, but I was told later. 

composing history

I wrote this on Sunday, September 25, 2016, on my old blog, caeusura:

Because I have a longer train journey to and from work now, I'm reading books a lot more. That's what I do on the train - I don't go online, though I probably could if I brought my laptop with me - I read and write the old fashioned way. I read books - the ones made with paper - and I write in a notebook...pen and paper.

I'm enjoying it, that time of reading. It's a regaining of something I had lost. In the last couple of years, most of my reading has been online and it's a very frenetic affair....reading and sharing different articles...scrolling....watching videos and gifs and images...having multiple tabs open.

There's a kind of shallowness about it, or there can be, a lot of the time. There's a lot of information - a lot of stimuli. Reading a book is more restful and deeper. It's harder actually, but in a good way. Your mind is more engaged, but less taxed somehow. It's a much richer experience.

I was looking at a biography of Mary Shelley the other day, and another one about John Donne, and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke and it struck me that the remoteness of the past is increasing at an accelerating rate. The past is more alien now than it was 10 years ago, but the factor by which it is more alien is greater than a proportional factor of 10 years.

When I was younger - say, in High School - it was pretty clear that the past was different from the present. It was interesting to learn about Medieval times because life was different then. But when I think about what life is like now, that difference (between the present and the past) is more real and visceral to me because of the preternatural change I've actually lived through.

Now I have more to compare the past to. I've lived through dramatic changes. The world I grew up in was a very different place to the one I live in now. And the main changes - at least, that I've experienced - are related to technology, especially the internet.

In some ways, 20 years ago is as remote as 100 years ago. They're both inaccessible to us. The world will never be like that again. The world is irrevocably changed. That was what occurred to me when I was looking at those books - that the world as it was (even as it was 5 years ago), is gone and we can't go back.

I wonder, though, if people from the past didn't feel the same way and have a similar experience. Change is not new. It's just that, as I said, the pace of change seems to be exponential. Like, in the last 5 years, we have seen changes that previously would have taken 10 or more years to take place. But what does that mean? Does that mean that in, say, 20 years, the changes we see now in a year will happen in a few weeks?

With regard to some things, that's probably true, but change would have no meaning if there weren't things that stay the same. We can only understand books that were written in the past because we have some common ground with the past. Even ancient texts....we can understand them because some things haven't changed. Language is language, a word is a word, fear is fear, love is love.

And the past itself stays the same while, because ourselves and our world are always changing, the way we see the past is always changing.

*    *    *    *    *    *    *    *

Now, it's nearly 2026 - another 10 years have gone by. 

Is the past more alien now than it was 10 years ago and is the factor by which it is more alien, greater than a proportional factor of 10 years?

My initial, honest reaction - I don't think it is. I think about things from the past - e.g. that fateful sojourn at the villa Diodati, with Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley, friends and family, during which Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein....that seems as remote and as close to me now as it did 10 years ago. 

As I wrote above: "And the past itself stays the same while, because ourselves and our world are always changing, the way we see the past is always changing." Except, I wonder how much the way we see the past has changed. 

I know more about the writing of Frankenstein and circumstances surrounding it, than I did 10 years ago - because I've researched it - so my view of it has changed in that way, but it hasn't been radically reframed. 

Why did I choose that though? Would I have chosen that 10 years ago? Probably not. That's a moment in history that I have almost composed myself. It seems very close to me, not because the historical events themselves are familiar but because my research about it is familiar. I've spent time thinking and reading about it and formulating my own written response to it. 

crank

There are certain ways of thinking that are generally regarded by psychologists and other mental health experts as unhealthy. One big one, is the 'should statement'. According to this view, it's not good for us to think, 'I should do X' - to think and act in accordance with imperatives that we feel obliged to follow. We shouldn't do things just because we feel like we should.

Along the same lines, it's not good for our self-esteem when we adopt and adhere to beliefs and values because they are strongly held by another person or group that we respect. We ought to live according to values that we have wrought for ourselves, not values that we impose on ourselves because it's the 'right' thing or because we've been told this value or practice is important.

But there are certain issues, to do with faith, where these principles can become problematic. If you're deeply religious, it doesn't matter what psychologists say, if God, as you conceive of God, tells you that you should do something, then that takes precedence.

I think the solution to this apparent conflict is to not be dogmatic and legalistic about anything - psychology, religion or anything else.

If you are too intense and inflexible about absolutely never making should statements to yourself, you've missed the point. Ironically, you're actually slavishly following one big should statement: don't follow should statements.

I think the opposite extreme - blind obedience - always doing what you think you should do, is unsatisfactory as well. That won't lead to fulfilment and personal growth. As a believer, I question the value of blind obedience and legalistic righteousness.

So, both extremes - never following should statements, and always following should statements, are unhealthy. As a believer, there are imperatives that apply to your life, and that might make you think that that's always wrong, but it's not. There is a place for should statements. There are bad things that you might be tempted to do, and there's nothing wrong with adhering to the 'should statement' - I should not do that. Likewise, there are good things about which you feel, I should do that, and there's nothing wrong with acting on that. 

I suppose the important factor is why you are, or are not, doing these things. Is it just because that's what you've been told you should or should not do, or is it a reflection of your values? It's generally not good if it's just what you've been told, and there's some threat of punishment or reward involved. There's a place for that - like for example with kids. For their own good you need them to do and not do certain things without having to fully understand the reasons. 

A more mature position is where you act according to your values, and also there's some discretion - you don't feel like you absolutely always have to do what you think you 'should' do. I used to be like that about sharing my faith. I thought I had to share my faith - talk to people about God - in literally every situation that I found myself in, whether it was practical or considerate and whether people wanted to hear it or not. The more inappropriate and humiliating the better, because that was a better demonstration of faith. But that wasn't sustainable and I no longer think that's what God wants. 

redaction

I wrote 900 pages with my inner censor turned off. Then I started trying to edit that and make it readable as a proper text. It's worth doing that, but you also lose something. 

There's a certain value and meaning in the lack of punctuation and typos, and you lose that when you fix it. 

gr8 werk

Great scholarship divides and polarizes opinion. Mikhail Bakhtin's doctoral thesis is a prime example. The assessment committee was divided. Half of them thought it was rubbish - insane nonsense. Half of them thought it was a work of genius of the highest order. Things got so heated the whole town was divided and the authorities had to be called in. 

Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence is another good example. He shared it with some of his colleagues just to test the waters and they advised him not to publish it. It was too 'out there'. They told him, whatever this is, it is not literary criticism. But he went ahead and published it.

Bloom's colleagues were right, in a way. It wasn't really literary criticism as they knew it. Same with Bakhtin's works. They're strange and not what we expect. There's a poetic quality about these texts. 

The best works redefine the field. We don't even know the extent of our debt to Harold Bloom. We take it for granted that there are 6 great English poets of Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, but that's only because Bloom insisted on it.