A thought occurred to me: if anyone’s reading this, they might be curious about something or other that someone I interview on my trip to the States might have to say. (I’m trying to not picture me sat there saying, “And one of our readers in Milton Keynes wanted to ask, who do you think should be evicted from Big Brother?”) If you do, leave them in the comments here and I’ll see if they work their way into the interview’s flow.
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It seems web service outsourcing is the way forward. When you work all day (OK, most of the afternoon and the odd night or two) designing and coding websites, you tend to lose a little enthusiasm for constructing your own site. Further, web apps are getting good, with less leeway for those “I could do this better” annoyances. Flickr is a current favourite, home to the photo to the right here (I find these rain-laden, sun-touched clouds unutterably beautiful). And in any case, I’m trying to get this thing going as quickly as possible, ready for my imminent travels; thus, my blog’s here on Blogger. And you can talk back!
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This is just to let anyone still checking in here know that I’m going to make this rather long lull in my blogging into a more formal break from it all.
I’ve a load of plans, personal and practical, definite and open-ended, for 2005. Among them lurk an idea or two for writing projects that are really only suitable for print publication, and will require a much more concerted effort of research (online and offline) than I’ve become used to of late.
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A quick plug for what promises to be a great little event down in Elephant and Castle this Friday:
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‘ You will see I want to be just to the Germans: I would not like to be untrue to myself in this—so I must also tell them what I object to. Coming to power is a costly business: power makes stupid. […] Deutschland, Deutschland über alles was, I fear, the end of German philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1888) ‘
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‘ The main of faith, the ‘believer’ of every sort is necessarily a dependent man—such as cannot out of himself posit ends at all. The ‘believer’ does not belong to himself, he can be only a means, he has to be used, he needs someone who will use him. […] Conviction is the backbone of the man of conviction. Not to see many things, not to be impartial in anything, to be party through and through, to view all values from a strict and necessary perspective—this alone is the condition under which such a man exists at all. But he is thereby the antithesis, the antagonist of the truthful man—of truth. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ ‘
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Just been skimming through the debates on the BBC News site (‘Eton or the zoo?’ and ‘What does it mean to be human?’) about the recent, wondrous discovery of hobbit-sized human remains in Indonesia. Feeling pretty cynical about us so-called sapiens, I posted a comment that I thought I’d stick here in case it doesn’t get selected by the Beeb’s editors:
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I saw Richard Linklater’s excellent, provocative Waking Life last night. The film gets points straight away for giving practical, accurate, still relatively little-known tips on lucid dreaming (John Christensen is hilarious in this little scene). And of course, I’m fascinated by any film that furthers and expands our culture’s capacity to represent and communicate the dynamics and textures of dreaming itself. Bob Sabiston’s wonderful animation techniques should serve Linklater’s upcoming Philip K. Dick adaptation, A Scanner Darkly, very well.
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Dream: I’m doing yoga-cum-breakdancing with friends (probably inspired by working through some back problems with Hatha Yoga, and the hilarious outtakes of Simon Pegg doing breakdancing in Shaun of the Dead). When I do an especially bendy and impressive Plough-like posture, my upside-down face is greeted by several ginger kittens. In some improbable way, they are upside-down too, forming a common bond of topsy-turviness. I look carefully at the kittens’ eyes as they advanced towards me with coy friendliness, and as I catch a certain angle, it seems that their eyeballs are actually set back into their skulls, and you can see through the head, in one eye socket and out the other. It even seems sometimes that they don’t have eyes at all—just empty little sockets.
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I’ve just started reading a promising biography of the wide-ranging, often controversial, and certainly neglected Arthur Koestler. The introduction intensifies the impression I had of him as an eclectic, troubled man, with references to alleged rape incidents, and the fact that not only did he commit joint suicide with his wife (which I knew already), but that he did so because he was suffering from a severe illness, while his wife was perfectly healthy. There are hints of controversy around his wife’s consent in this, of which I’ll no doubt discover more towards the end of the book.
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