My recovery is taking a lot longer than I anticipated, and I’m much more exhausted than I could have imagined. For those of you who want to know what’s going on with me personally, you can check here. But don’t sweat it.
I’m dumping a few important links here, along with notice that I very well may not be able to blog in the near future. What energy I have must go to more important places. Links after the jump… Read the rest of this entry »
More excellent writing advice, this time from Kurt Vonnegut (and who better, I suppose), via Merlin Mann’s excellent 43folders site.
The seven points, in all:
- Find a subject you care about
- Do not ramble, though
- Keep it simple
- Have guts to cut
- Sound like yourself
- Say what you mean
- Pity the readers
“The suck” being Merlin Mann’s characterization of the period Ira’s discussing. Stuff like this, from older, successful, more experienced people I admire, is so important. Because, see, I’m in the suck right now, and although I’m actually writing (a huge relief in itself), it’s always with the very conscious realization that what I’m writing just isn’t where I want it to be. In fact, a lot of the time, it’s pretty darned well below where I want it to be. Ira suggests just getting over it, and producing copious amounts of the bad material in response. Eventually, he promises, I’ll get better.
Thanks, Ira. [via]
[suck, the
I am the rebirth of Proust
But I will be free of his will.
To understand that requires that you understand how one can be both the same and different from a personality in a previous birth; how one can be the product of past actions with which one identified, and yet retain the possibility of escaping the repetition of the same. It requires understanding how one can learn from mistakes. It requires understanding how Buddhist rebirth is imagined.
It is also an assertion of will: I will write more briefly.
The blog is going to continue to be quiet aside from news updates from Cambodia until at least the end of March, I expect, as I’m busy writing up the drafts of chapters two and three from my dissertation for excerpted presentation at two conferences in both March and April.
And here it is folks. The only regular, high-quality magazine of which I am aware, for the publication of new creative language arts in the Khmer language. The Nou Hach Journal, online, in unicode.
It’s a good idea to have heroes to beg to not be taken seriously. In fact, those are the only heroes that make sense. I’m sad to have to say goodbye to one of mine.
Robert Anton Wilson has had his check cashed. Should it bounce, I hope he keeps grinning when he comes back.
Here’s a shout out to Chris at More Minimal, a web site recently morphing into a new version of its old mission. More Minimal alerted me to the presence of Quicksilver and Copywrite, which I use now, and left a nice comment on a page of mine recently.
Here’s a link to a very decent set of suggestions on improving your writing (always a concern) from MoreMinimal
I often write about things that are either difficult to bear emotionally, or difficult to bear cognitively. Often times, I write about things that are both, at the same time, such as when I exhaust myself and my reader (or do I have 2 now?) by dealing with Bataille, Deridda, Castoriadis, or even Agamben before spitting forth an insight that came to me without ever being framed in any of those terms when I first conceived the thought. My writing, and I imagine, that of others, often suffers as a result of the paradox: the more respectable the writing is, the less clearly the inspiration for it is communicated, and the more it suffers under the weight of the literature it must reference. This paradox is at the heart of many sociologies, just as it is at the heart of academic writing. Sociology and history’s problem is often characterized as finding a way to account for the uniformity of change and continuity without privileging one over the other. The dominant contemporary model in the academy remains that of dialectical materialism. In the various ontologies of mind propounded by different philosophers, similarly, there is always a need to mediate between perception and truth, as between the one mind and the other mind.
The dominant model for this mediation has been, since the time of Plato, that of the imagination. I find the teleology of dialectical materialism both downright wrong and rigidly overdetermined (and therefore completely uncreative), but acknowledge the need to focus on real forces in play, and the possible and impossible consequences of the same. On the other hand, even though I often deny at some level the correctness of the assumption, ever since Plato, that Reason can be known (a denial which questions the function of the imagination itself), I am less inclined to dismiss the mediating function of the imagination. But let’s return, for the moment, to why academic writing so often feels ‘dead.’
It’s dead because it surrounds itself with the dead, as a matter of polite acknowledgment, practical necessity, and sheer fetishism.
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Here’s the conference paper I presented at the MCAA last weekend. I’d appreciate any feedback those with too much time on their hands would like to give me. Cheers.
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