being mean

You can change the meaning of your thoughts and experiences by recontextualizing them. 

telling the truth

Is there a kind of writing that is more suitable than others for expressing the truth? Wordsworth probably would have said poetry meets that standard. In his 'Preface to Lyrical Ballads', he wrote:

The Man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.

I wonder if anyone still thinks like that. I think a more modern view would be that the novel is the best way to express the truth, or maybe creative non-fiction. 

their own language

Out of all the different theoretical approaches we learnt about in first year English, the one that interested me most was post-colonial theory. Later on, I had other interests....Harold Bloom and the psychoanalytic approach, Bakhtin and his ideas about discourse, structuralism, post-structuralism and semiotics. 

The unit we did about Marxism was interesting. It wasn't what I expected. By saying that everything is political it eschewed any discussion of political ideology - in other words, any discussion of Marxism. The idea was that all of our interactions involve power dynamics. 

What interested me about post-colonial theory was the idea that power is at the margins not at the center, and then it was also fascinating learning about creole languages and how they represent the subversion of power. To write serious literature, the colonized have to write in the language of the colonizer, but informally, a creole language develops which is a fusion of the two languages. Then, at some point, people begin to write literature in the creole language, which is empowering because they are writing in their own language rather than someone else's. 

progress goals

My time in detox coincided with a realization about my need to change. Not just change in ways that related directly to my addictions but changing the way I went about my life - changing from withdrawal, rumination, and catering to/cultivating my anxiety, to engagement, activity and cultivation of my life. 

One of the first things I did was to start making a list of goals. These were a different type of goals to any I had made before. They were extremely achievable, but they represented the choice of engagement and activity over withdrawal and rumination. They were a way of moving in the direction that I wanted to go. 

apprecisation

Recently I bought a copy of Samuel Beckett's three novels, in one volume - Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. He originally wrote them in French and later translated them into English, and they were hugely influential over later literature, both French and English. 

I kind of just wanted to have a copy of the novels because of their standing as literature. It's a separate thing from my appreciation for the text itself. 

aesthetics

For me the plot isn't as important as the quality of the writing, the atmosphere developed, the ideas conveyed. Take The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, for example. Those opening pages are so impressive, but what actually happens? They have a picnic on the grass and then they go inside and look at paintings, but it's so much more meaningful than just the action. 

science fiction

There's a mistake that is often made where people think that, because someone has expertise in one area, their views about other issues should carry more weight. This often happens with writers. When someone is a successful novelist, they will often start commenting on different cultural and social issues, and they're taken very seriously. 

A similar thing happens with technology. The views of people who have been in upper-level management of tech companies or who were involved in the development of cutting-edge technologies, about anything related to those technologies, are taken very seriously, when actually, about those particular issues, they aren't any more knowledgeable than anyone else. There was that case where someone who worked closely with AI thought that it had developed consciousness, and people took his view seriously because of his real expertise in AI. 

Then, recently, there have been experts predicting that AI will kill off humanity within a few years unless regulations are put in place to curtail its development. I'm not saying that there aren't issues there. I'm saying that, just because someone has worked closely with AI, doesn't mean they know what's going to happen in the future. This has always happened around technology. There's always a fear of what could happen, but is putting the brakes on development because the technology could be misused, the solution? I don't think so. 

More importantly, the idea that there is something malevolent at the heart of technology that we need to nip in the bud before it gets too powerful and there's not stopping it...that narrative is not new at all. At least since the 19th century there has been that fear of the unknown potential of science and technology and there have been stories and views about the threat they represent, and with progress, those fears proved unfounded. Fear is never going to tell you the truth.