On a treadmill

This blog is mired in a serious malaise, one that at times feels terminal. Though I don't have any desire to quit, lately I have been finding it extremely difficult to finish writing posts that I begin. Part of the problem, as ever, is my tendency to link too many ideas together, resulting in so much rambling, bad writing. Just when I think I've gotten the hang of it all, I invariably hit a snag, writing slows down, ideas dry up. Or they come to me, but on the train, in whole paragraphs, good ones I'd like to think, but who can write on the train? (The Marc commuter train is not the smoothest ride in the world, and my handwriting is poor enough as it is.) And if I wrote on the train, anyway, when would I read? (Never, by the way, is the answer to that one. I don't think my reading at home this calendar year has added up to more than a few hundred pages.)

One problem, I realize, is my reluctance to just put it out there. I persist in thinking that I should have read this or that before expressing an idea. When it comes to the actual writing itself, the germ of the idea gets buried, in fact unwritten, as I bog myself down in shaping the introductory remarks or the background. A bog that weighs me down, when what I desire, what I value, is lightness. (God, I looked at my numerous posts in draft status, and there's an earlier unfinished whinge about how I can't write... I'd naturally forgotten all about it.)

All this is to say that I have a lot that I've been wanting, and failing, to say here. Here are just a few topics I hope to get around to finishing posts on in the nearish future, though I make no promises:

  • J.M. Coetzee (on Diary of a Bad Year, naturally, while everyone else's moving onto Summertime...)

  • Flannery O'Connor and politics and literature

  • Evelyn Scott (again)

  • Art and Ontology

  • Chomsky, an appreciation, and more

  • Conservatism and relational political spectrums

  • Modernism and post-Modernism

  • a line or two about Gayl Jones' Corredigora (in connection with Modernism)

  • ideas about primitive accumulation and lost social orders

  • more on Blanchot, possibly finally getting into his ideas on communism

  • communism as the original human, cultural state (circling back on Art and Ontology, touching on Chris Knight and Heidegger and more)

  • the role of play in the former, as well as in art, and what that means for us, moving forward (combining, if possible, Knight and Josipovici, among others; in truth, this feels like my main unwritten book)
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