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I get the urge to write - which is good, because of my current gig. Deadlines help that, but they're not solely responsible for the need to write; they're a part of a gestalt impulse, combined with a kind of... bubbling up, a simmer coming toa boil, maybe, of research and reading. Ideas that I knew, somehow, connected to each other slowly making their connections tacit where they had been explicit. It sounds like I'm a passive actor, here, but this is only part of the process, understand. This is my brain making connections and turning my work, which looked (and occasionally felt) like drudgery, makework, solipsistic copying and recopying of the same ideas in slightly different permutations which could, in many circumstances, simply be understood as a kind of cognitive degredation - the fuzz around the edges of a copied copied image in purple ink.
If you're of a certain age, you probably get what I'm getting at.
Um.
I have these borrowed books sitting around, that I've read. Having unreturned books languishing in my house bothers me in a specific kind of way - it's not a problem in itself, but it's the irritation of a task almost complete. Hakim Bey's Millennium and T.A.Z - which give every indication of being at least observed by Gibson in the interum between The Bridge trilogy and Blue Ant. Bey himself, aka, Peter L. Wilson, previously of Columbia University, overtly had read Gibson and others... so, a feedback loop. Cohen and Rutsky's Consumption in an Age of Information, Barolovich and Lazarus's Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (again), and Grebovich & Merrick's Beyond the Cyborg on the subject of the great Donna Haraway, who I clearly need to read more of... there's no shortage of people to read, ever. The firehose never stops flowing, now.
I read something, then I have to process it - which often comes in the form of re-reading. I rarely take notes the first time, so mentally processing it often looks suspiciously like physically processing. I don't like the mental image of extracting passages from the text, because that doesn't feel like what I'm doing. I read it and re-read it to provide context for it - the passage itself and the subsequent notes are a kind of filling in. You can't really take from a text, though you can say it and mean it colloquially. But, like data piracy, nothing is ever removed. Only something gained - often created in as close to a pure form as our technology allows for at this juncture - thought-forms and magnetic 1's and 0's.
If you're of a certain age, you probably get what I'm getting at.
Um.
I have these borrowed books sitting around, that I've read. Having unreturned books languishing in my house bothers me in a specific kind of way - it's not a problem in itself, but it's the irritation of a task almost complete. Hakim Bey's Millennium and T.A.Z - which give every indication of being at least observed by Gibson in the interum between The Bridge trilogy and Blue Ant. Bey himself, aka, Peter L. Wilson, previously of Columbia University, overtly had read Gibson and others... so, a feedback loop. Cohen and Rutsky's Consumption in an Age of Information, Barolovich and Lazarus's Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (again), and Grebovich & Merrick's Beyond the Cyborg on the subject of the great Donna Haraway, who I clearly need to read more of... there's no shortage of people to read, ever. The firehose never stops flowing, now.
I read something, then I have to process it - which often comes in the form of re-reading. I rarely take notes the first time, so mentally processing it often looks suspiciously like physically processing. I don't like the mental image of extracting passages from the text, because that doesn't feel like what I'm doing. I read it and re-read it to provide context for it - the passage itself and the subsequent notes are a kind of filling in. You can't really take from a text, though you can say it and mean it colloquially. But, like data piracy, nothing is ever removed. Only something gained - often created in as close to a pure form as our technology allows for at this juncture - thought-forms and magnetic 1's and 0's.