I still don't feel like I'm firing on all cylinders for some reason, and am having trouble concentrating on any one particular project. That's not really like me at all, since if anything I tend to get obsessively single-minded about whatever captures my interest, often to the exclusion of other things I should be paying at least some attention to. Whatever it is I guess I'll just have to go with it and wait for the monkey to stop jumping around.
There's a whole bunch of stuff I really should get on with, so perhaps I should make a list (because everybody knows that making a list is equivalent to solving problems). O.K. These are the things I should be doing, in no particular order:
- The Conference Centre - a set of fictional conference abstracts for an imaginary symposium. Somewhat in the style of Stanislaw Lem, or maybe Borges, connected (possibly) by the narrative of a fictional attendee. (This has been on the back-burner for years, and some early posts on this blog use that conceit). I also started a website for it. http://theconferencereport.net/conference1/
- The Poetics of Thought - another half-baked project coming out of my PhD research and which I thought might be a book of some kind. As a professional academic I guess this is really what I should be doing. http://poeticsofthought.wordpress.com/
- The Last People - a collection of very short stories framed around the idea that at some point in the future there will be no more childbirth. Some utopian, some not. I did think about crowdsourcing this project on Youtube, maybe that would interesting.
- Essay/Exhibition on 'Epistemic Objects' - This is something I was researching a couple of years back before life intervened. I liked the idea of defining a class of objects which were neither simply functional (tools etc) but were also not decorative or primarily aesthetic (some art). These 'epistemic objects' are examples of thinking processes extended or outsourced onto the physical world.
That'll do for now. There is other stuff but the dog is wanting a walk and I am powerless to resist. Does anyone read this blog? Probably not (except maybe you J). Let me know what you think.
5 comments:
I read your blog, and watch your vids.
@Michael Cheers Michael.
Here's my thoughts for what they're worth. There's quite a lot of them. I hope they fit.
It seems as if you're feeling you should be this and do that. You should write scholarly articles because you're an academic. You should complete old projects because you thought of them however long ago, or invested energy in them in the past. This seems to me to be a good way of preventing yourself from doing anything inspiring at all.
How can you find what inspires you if you are looking backwards? How can you create what lies inside you if you set yourself a string of conditions before you even start? Maybe you should start with exploring transition. It's something you and I have in common, a long transition, so I'm acutely aware of the effects, though of course your transition and reaction to that transition will inevitably be quite different from my own. But I do know that re-emerging after change of any kind requires a fluidity of imagination and an acceptance of the very gradual nature of internal shifts to catch up with externals. That in itself is a good topic. Self flagellation may be fun at times but in the end it can pin you to the spot. I could ramble on much more than this but I'm sure this is too much as it is.
Here's my thoughts for what they're worth. There's quite a lot of them. I hope they fit.
It seems as if you're feeling you should be this and do that. You should write scholarly articles because you're an academic. You should complete old projects because you thought of them however long ago, or invested energy in them in the past. This seems to me to be a good way of preventing yourself from doing anything inspiring at all.
How can you find what inspires you if you are looking backwards? How can you create what lies inside you if you set yourself a string of conditions before you even start? Maybe you should start with exploring transition. It's something you and I have in common, a long transition, so I'm acutely aware of the effects, though of course your transition and reaction to that transition will inevitably be quite different from my own. But I do know that re-emerging after change of any kind requires a fluidity of imagination and an acceptance of the very gradual nature of internal shifts to catch up with externals. That in itself is a good topic. Self flagellation may be fun at times but in the end it can pin you to the spot. I could ramble on much more than this but I'm sure this is too much as it is.
Nice to know that I’m not the only one who reads this blog. I follow your video’s too – so long as they appear in my Blogger dashboard. More occasionally I visit your channels on YouTube and BlipTV - usually to find something specific or to get a flavour for what I’ve been missing through my little Blogger window.
Good to know about the Poetics of Thought Blog – I’ll need to take a much closer look.
In answer to your question:
For a long time I’ve harboured nagging a feeling that your prolific output is being limited by issues of coherence. You have such wide ranging interests that it can often be overwhelming to contemplate looking back through your videos, whereas following you on a regular basis is fine. But where does that leave all the ideas and material you leave in your wake and how could these be better dealt with?
For me it’s the difference between accumulation and accretion - which leads me to think that a good bit of curation would make a world of difference. The more self contained “artwork” videos do tend to distil a lot of your ideas and have a satisfying completeness about them that seems to work very well. They also tend to stick to your central concerns rather than becoming embroiled by the more localised disputes or topics.
With the other videos I find myself asking where it’s all heading (which I guess is the same question you are asking really).
I’m tempted to suggest that you should work with what you have done rather than what you “should do” or perhaps better still that the different paths need to be more clearly defined so that you, and everyone else, can see more clearly where they have been, where they are and where they might go.
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