Information used to be a gunk or a hole. After that, information became free electrons, electricity. Now it is light, photons. It is little rhythms of light. The rhythms are flashes sent in fibre optic cables, and the rhythms of light flashed out by the Light Emitting Diodes which make up the screens.
Tip tap tap tip tip tap. Groovy.
Fibre optic transmits at a top speed of 10 billion bits per second. That’s 10,000,000,000hz, or one gigahertz. That is above the maximum wavelength of the human ear. It’s a UHF radio wavelength, used for walkie-talkies.
I would love to be able to hear the rhythm, though. Just once. Drop my ear down to the router, and pick up the groove of 10 billion seemingly random combinations of zeroes and ones. Noise or no noise, changes between those two states at such a speed that my feet are compelled to tap. So that I begin to move apace with the flows around me.
251116
1. Love Sonnet for Phone
This writing came attached to a Web Log Review. As with this review, I will attach a short piece of creative writing or poetry to the Web Log reviews, so that every week has something new, but without requiring as much of a contribution as a regular stand-alone Web Log post,
Love Sonnet for Phone is a poem written in traditional sonnet form, 14 lines, iambic Pentameter, ABABCDCDEFEFGG rhyme scheme. In it, I confessed my love for my phone.
In many ways, I hate the object that is my phone. But it's impossible to deny that I'm obsessed with it. I use it compulsively, often for emotional regulation, like a binky. So in order to explore my devotion towards the thing honestly, I wrote a poem addressed to it.
I find the poem quite funny. I think it’s funny to think that someone might store their phone in their bum overnight. I also find rhyming funny, inherently.
I have to credit Middleton Maddocks with the phrase ‘phone world’, which has been stuck in my head ever since they sang about it a few years ago.
I’m not sure if this poem does much exploration beyond making me chuckle. It does touch on the fact I seem to be subservient to the phone, I am ‘your waif’. It acknowledges my complicity in the relationship. It acknowledges that this is a physical relationship, built upon contact and touch. Some of the terms of the addiction are compiled, but not elaborated on further, in any-which direction.
I enjoyed working within a strict poetic structure. I’d not done this before really, it changes the structure of the challenge that is writing quite dramatically. Perhaps a haiku will be next, I don’t really know any other types.
251123
2. What If Ahab Was Chill?
A short story, third person perspective, set on Ahab's boat from Moby Dick. Ishmael (the narrator in the original story) spots the whale Moby Dick. In this iteration, Ahab is unbothered. His singular obsession is dissolved and he feels no affinity or hunger for revenge towards the animal, without suggestion that he ever did, even as the inciting incident (the loss of his limb) remains the same.
I am curious about what it is that makes up a story. What might be the minimum viable story? I am unsure whether people require stories in their cultural diet in the same way it seems they once did. New forms of media seem less story driven than, say, the novel or the feature film.
In this writing I tried to write a story without conflict. The driving compulsion of one crucial character is eliminated, and the entire story - in this instance I think that word means something akin to ‘tension’ (but I think it means other things in other cases) - falls apart.
Removing story was a question then, in this case, of altering character. I am interested in this too, the possibilities of literature without character. I read an interview with Italian writer Nanni Balestrini in which he describes his conception of the ‘collective character’, an effort of his to channel the struggle of a larger group through the novel form. Doing so requires the dissolution of the novel’s traditional fixation on the individual. In Ian Watt’s 1951 literary history of the 19th century ‘The Rise of the Novel’, he describes a shift in the criterion on which literature is judged, in which ‘conformity to traditional practice’ no longer defined the ‘major test of truth’. Instead the novel became increasingly driven by its ‘truth to individual experience’.
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/users/philosophy/courses/211/l1%20descartes1note2.htm
And yet, by simply dissolving a pivotal character, I have not left it behind as an anchoring structure. Jon Repetti’s article ‘The Novel After Character’ has been more useful in understanding the present literary tendency this piece falls into, more so than any grand old Socialist Realist traditions of depicting collectivity.
https://fivegoodhours.substack.com/p/the-novel-after-character
He describes, through a quote from British author Rachel Cusk-disputing the continued validity Victorian notion of character that Watt outlines- how writers are searching to find other means to be true to the individual experience, when ‘readers no longer experience themselves as characters’.
‘We can no longer comfortably and unthinkingly inhabit these social roles, and therefore we encounter them not as deeply felt forms-of-life but as so many costumes to be worn and removed as needed. If a man takes his social role too seriously—if a vicar really believes himself to be a vicar, all the way down, rather than simply a man in vicar’s clothes who does the work of a vicar and writes “vicar” on his census form—we sense something faintly ridiculous, even pathological, about him.’
I think this nails the structuring motivation of my short story square in the forehead. Captain Ahab is perhaps the most famously pathological of all characters in literary history (notably, he was a 19th century creation). He is written so in order to exemplify obsession, a universally shared state.
Repetti goes on to centre his analysis of the novel after character on a work of literary criticism written by Timothy Bewes, Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (2022). Bewes’ assesses trends in contemporary literature as ‘engaged in the process of “unthinking” [a set of 3] ideologies’ previously commonplace in the novelform, including ‘the ideology of the expressive subject (individuals as principal subjects or envelopes of thought)’.
In these novels, the character sits in tension with their own possibility to represent a real person, and in fact ‘declare their own inadequacy’. ‘But this is not all that I am! Beneath and within and across all this I am singular, utterly singular! There is something untouched and unknown and unknowable within me, a dark core of impossible me-ness which I could not give up even if I tried!’
Or... perhaps not. Perhaps my Ahab inhabits his apathy as strongly Melville’s Ahab does his obsession. I do not declare an unknowable Ahab, instead an inversion of his previously describable characteristics, transposed into the resonant frequencies of the narrative until it resembles... white noise, a flatline, a 4/4 metronome, take your pick.
It can be taken either way, the result is the same. I don’t feel I move much past the character or the story by remixing a canonical character into a dull guy. That’s ok, it was my first jab. But perhaps these two tenets of human culture will prove more wily adversaries than I first thought. Disconcerting news, I will report back when I hear more about their condition in the wake of my short story...
251130
3. Project Review: Future Stories
This was a review of some artifacts of my creative practice. A self-crit of sorts, similar to these audits of my writings. I split the review into two angles of analysis: content and form, for the sake of simplicity.
So: to review a review. That's tricky. I've not yet created anything similar to the filmed readings I critiqued, and so not yet attempted to assimilate my reflections. But I will do my best to assess my assessment.
My essential points are: The goal of the work was to broach feelings of anxiety I hold towards the future, through soft speculative scenarios, mildly dystopic.
My set up of the content in this series, a tone of gentle humour, was intended to disarm the anxiety, to allow it to be broached. The gentle, vague speculations were again left as such to avoid cortisol spikes, but also to avoid a hard sci-fi specificity that would’ve overwhelmed a short reading.
I still fundamentally agree with this analysis. I heard something once about making art, that I’ll paraphrase as: it requires you to give something of yourself in the work in order to make something compelling. The writings were a good first step, but more bravery is required I think.
Also mentioned, under the ‘Form’ subheading, was appreciation for the multimedia aspect to the slideshow. I do like the Gesamtkunstwerk as an idea, I will continue to ape it in any small way I can think of. I also praised the use of a just-about functional bluescreen I found on the street, to improve capacity of my work, albeit in a quick and dirty manner. Setting up and setting out my tools is an important part of my plans for the year.
In short, I still think it is a fair critique. Perhaps, to assess the assessment fully, I should also evaluate its two part structure. I did in fact this quite helpful to make quick headway into understanding how I felt about the piece. Is bifurcating my understanding of how my work works always going to be a good thing? Almost certainly not, I don’t believe it is a binary that is experienced by the viewer (see McLuhan for more on this), and therefore to some degree a distraction. A helpful one for writing a weekly blog, nonetheless. I will do more of these project reviews as and when I publish more projects.
251207
4. Bloomsbury
The weekend I wrote this short fiction I had been away with some friends near the village of Rodmell, in Sussex. This is where Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard lived for the duration of their marriage, and after Virginia's suicide in nearby river Ouze, where Leonard lived until he passed in 1969. They were part of an informal artistic and writing collective called the Bloomsbury group, which sprung out of Cambridge University in the late 19th and early 20th century.
In this writing, I write from Leonard's perspective, describing what I think he may have felt as the purpose of their collective, what brought them together and what ends they intended to work towards.
I am quite doubtful of the efficacy of their group's methods or their ideals. I find their Liberal approach to politics and aesthetics unuseful. With little more research than a smattering of perused articles on their legacy, I’ve decided to agree with historian Raymond Williams that they had little influence as a cultural force, other than the exceptional Virginia Woolf, and the economist John Maynard Keynes, who was not a crucial or longstanding member of the social set. My disinclination towards the group led me to attempt to clearly state what it is I believe they aimed for, so I could deal with it in manifesto-format, rather than just rejecting the Vibe, as was my initial hankering.
To be clear, this is a straw man I have set up to knock over. My writing wasn’t taken from any specific first hand texts they produced, only from third hand research. But I decided I need not worry about misrepresenting some long dead bohemians, I intend only to clarify my own methods as an upper middle class progressively and politically minded artist, writer and designer, by clarifying the methods of a bourgeois and liberal group, so that I might better know how to be more radically minded instead.
I confess, this Audit has been a deep naval gaze. I am not sure whether this will make compelling reading to someone who isn’t quite as fussed if I write good blogs or not. Luckily the point of this Web Log isn’t always to write compelling blogs, it is to further The Project. Defining that would require an entirely new Web Log, but I can assure you that writing regular reviews of my own work is proving helpful in those terms. This is lucky, because otherwise I’ve just been rearranging lint in my bellybutton for the last 2000 words.
In other news, I have not written this blog for several weeks. I did not intend to take a week off, it just happened. That led one week to become two, and quite quickly it was an entire month. December is a busy month, but so was November and October and I wrote reliably through those. I am glad to be back to regularly scheduled on this first weekend of the New Year, but also now aware that I can’t miss one week, because that’s the same as missing a month. This is a shame, I was skirting around the idea of taking longer periods of time to write blogs of a larger scope. Instead, I am bound to write each week as if it was a curse, an itch that is better to just hurry up and scratch. I’ll be back next Sunday x