Had almost a two week blogging hiatus, despite being very active all over social media – some idiot called Trump/Brexit/Corbyn? And indeed reading books as well as on-line reads, but all very fragmented with no effort into linking and synthesising. It’s fixing the idiocy – received wisdom – that really interests me.
Still can’t find the cross-over between Eco and Child that prompted my previous post, and still have a handful of unfinished and new reads lying around. No longer motivated to try to remember it now.
I was rude to call it drivel, but time to draw a line under Child’s Reacher I reckon, and put it down to a matter of taste.
Martin is right, Child is clever when it comes to crafting his series of stories to a formula that sells in the hundreds of millions. I finished Make Me and maybe a third of Reacher Said Nothing (The Making of Make Me) and was finding every impression re-inforced. Signposted, predictable and meta-predictable. Even without any pre-determined schema or plot for each story, there is a process and a stock of devices to draw on as well as a production time-table. Campbell was maybe right, there are only so many stories to be written, and only a sub-set of those featuring the loner Robin Hood super-anti(?)hero-of-few-words. If there are any deeper stories and messages in the choices of subject matter in each plot I didn’t see them. Or I didn’t see any deeper than the obvious – even the obviously mis-directed twists – but the sheer repetition, including the treatment of the female characters, I found mind-numbing. The only saving grace for me has been the shared experience of Americana and smoky bars.
Clever, but. Line drawn.
Good news is Andy Martin continues to produce intelligent writing.
My focus for a while is going to shift back to the technology. So many content threads seem to be converging on the “colonisation of the mind” by what passes for received wisdom, that it’s almost becoming a no brainer – albeit a no-brainer without the words to articulate. What I really need to get sorted is the book-marking and cross-linking, so that all the convergences can be collated and synthesised without the labour-intensive reliance on memory.
Some combination of PinBoard and IFTTT maybe, to capture all tagged thoughts, wherever they arise in social and mainstream media, on or off line, and package them according to tagging events in WordPress and/or Medium posts? At least then I can choose which such Index Cards I turn into a piece of writing with a point to it, without forgetting those that simply remain on-file-with-archived-links.
My biggest memory failure, is the instantaneous recognition of an important or significant link, with strong circumstantial recall of the linked memory, but no memory of the linking content itself. A particular problem for me, where I hold a world-view that all significant value-add – all reality in fact – is in the dynamic connections! Our conventional world of objects (and subjects) being merely meta or modelled orthogonal to this actual reality.
And, Les Mis is next on my Great Books reading list.
I may be some time.