I’m down under it this week, so this one will be short. I may have mentioned before that I got caught up on a wholly “unnecessary” but it turns out quite vital revision draft of my novel, Enneaka, this summer. Well: I’ve set myself the contract of bringing it all home by the end of the year.
This has necessitated fully rewriting at least one thesis chapter if not two (and these chapters are like, 9,000 words each), and the process of doing so was awful as shit for a very long time.
And then, halfway through reading Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field and on the back of my rather good Ramen Safari, whatever the spirit is that animates these outputs stopped whispering and started to roar, like the old river up Lost Channel in springtime at the place where my family used to have its cottage.
Here’s another contract I made with myself: to keep foregrounding the writing projects as the major occupation of my time for all of at least 2024 and 2025. Welp, that was two years ago, and as the blood red smear on the streets in the image above might tell you (if not the magnificent blanket of snow we got over the weekend, joy!!), that contract is about due.
So in and around the steaming of Christmas puddings and the reorganization of my books, I’m spending no insignificant part of my time thinking about, if not wholly taking action upon, some of the bigger things I wouldn’t mind spending my time doing in the years ahead.
The equation
Unrelated to any of the above, here’s something I’ve been unable to stop noodling:
What does this,
plus this,
equal? Answer in the comments.
Sorry, both pieces are a bit lengthy. They’ve both also given me a lot to think about in the past couple months. You know that old Werner Herzog saw about how we need new images, if we’re going to survive as a society? I don’t know if these serve as proof of that; or if they’re showing us that the images have arrived and they’re nowhere near as thrivable as we thought.
The devil plays the flute
Other than being hyper-aware that people used to write stuff like this down instead of making half-hour videos about it, this is quite good: