Speed Writing

I decided to write.. but had nothing in mind to write.. so I chose a font and size and started to write whatever came into my head, stopping only if I made an egregious spelling error - this piece took me about 65 second to write:

Let's Dance!

Print & Digital & Thought

Corey Pressman on the impact of digital

I came into this series on the impact of digital - and indeed, the impact of print - on thought, on how we engage with the universe and each other as humans - and on our spiritual lives [but more about that in my religion blog].

This particular post looks at the idea of finality - how print required a self-contained, 'this, and not that' view of reality.  A book, or pamphlet or article in a journal has a beginning, a middle, an end.  It is self-contained, an object of and in itself, delineated from other objects.  It can be just black print on white paper in an innocuous font - or as in many early books, an objet d'art - a thing not only complete, but a thing of beauty in its completeness - a cover design, the feel and texture of the paper chosen, perhaps a supple leather binding, interesting fonts within, colours, abstract and realist pictures and later photographs....

What, perhaps, digital publishing/writing [they are the same with the advent of self pub] has done is remove this finality.  A text is never complete - and no longer requires the clumsy artifact of second, third and so on 'editions' - each of which in the non-fiction world require years of revision and are thus already out of date when they appear.  The academic world has not accepted this intrinsic aspect of digital pub/writing as of yet - I was told once by an acquisitions editor for a university press that, they did a few eBooks - by which he meant, they took an out of date version of an academic work and put it into pdf form online.  Yecccchhhh.  [sorry, the best word i could come up with that expressed my opinion of this in one 'complete' expression!].


The 'academic' book I am writing on the relationship between religion and society will be permanently ongoing - well as permanent as there are others to extend, correct, and alter it after I am gone.  I put 'academic' in [what are those thingies called?] because to be called academic, one must be peer-reviewed and printed... and this will have peer criticism I am sure, but will most definitely NOT be printed.

This idea of non-finality is more interesting when you turn to fiction, however.  I am also writing a work of fiction - multimedia, bizarre and unending - call it a novel if you must - which will at some point be up and available, but unfinished.  I hope to keep it going for as long as I am able, and then would hope others would play around with it beyond that point -......

A quick rumination

@notlimey: Life is mostly hell so I decided to savour all the fleeting moments of beauty I stumble across

I came across this tweet I made (twitted?) in early June... It does look negative, but is quite optimistic I would argue.  Maybe I will post it in the argument clinic on fb.....

Beauty

Most of my thoughts here are likely going to be trite, following a well-worn path.  I have not done an Historian's due diligence, which is very bad of me, having been trained as an academic.  That is, I have not read as much as I could find or stomach already written by others better qualified.  I will, of course, think anyway, this being my blog!

For a male, beauty most often inheres in women.  Men, of course, love beautiful buildings, paintings, sculpture, scenery and so on.. but the purest form is found in women.  This most probably has a sexual core, but is not as pornographers and ironically those who attack pornography, wholly or even mostly, sexual. What I am trying to express here [and doing badly] is another theme in my intellectual life:  dismay at the control scientific classification maintains over our imaginations to the detriment of a holistic view of life.  The male sense of the pure beauty that is connatural to femaleness is a part of an organic whole.  

This sense, and I must emphasize the word sense in order to make a clear distinction with any logic or rational apprehension, takes a wide continuum of forms.  This includes abusive pornography and swings far off to Victorian florid poetry.  Neither of these extremes bear much resemblance to the reality of the human female, but they do have that essential core of beauty.

Well enough of setting terms... what is beauty?  More particularly, what is this beauty men find in women?  Only a poem will do....for now,

Her eyes flashed

seeing him

her smile warmed

and touched his skin

she moved, yawning

and stretched

singing a silent tune

that held his soul

deep within

Here I go again

Well... I must write so will.... but how much writing I will manage to squeeze into my 16 hours a day 7 days a week work schedule I am not certain....

The Last Day I will write?

I woke up today, tired as usual, but clear-headed for once.  A week ago I set up a daily schedule in an attempt to find some good, solid time for writing.  I won't go into the banal details of my life which made this effort necessary.  Let me say simply that I have unavoidable duties which take up about 75% of my waking day, and writing and my paid teaching must live in the remainder.

So....this morning I woke up after a short and fitful night's sleep to the cold, grim realisation that this schedule was not working.  I have written nothing since last Wednesday, and even then it was a piddling, fiddling around with photographs for a book I will finish.  No writing.  No words that fly and sing, or plunge to the depths.  None.

So I lay there and came to the calm, considered realisation that i had run out of time to write.  I have been writing for more than ten years now and have a clutch of books to my name.  But four years ago I decided to write things that were me - good, pure, unadulterated works of imagination and verve and fire - poetry, prose-poems, an experimental multimedia work - and some history that interested me.

Well, at this precise moment, I have finished my morning rota of duties, and have eaten and am on my second mug of coffee.  This fuel has given me the energy to allow myself a last day to write - I will go to church to pray and meditate - then see what unfolds today.  I will not force it - poetry is my marker - will any words rise out of me?  Or will that blank emptiness that has been my writing continue?  

Well, enough for now.  

Ted