history is made of actions not of thoughts

'what I think, what you think, who gives a damn? what's going on in my head is irrelevant as long as I act upon the world. history isn't made of inner dialogues, it is made of fights, encounters and turmoil.'
nechaev

nausea: words as map, experience as map.

In nausea sartre fails to point out that the experience of the world itself is not it's essence or 'existent' but barely another level of representation of it.

Bad faith

Bad faith (where one denies one's total freedom, instead choosing to behave as an inert object)

Self-deception.

We are always radically free to make choices and guide our lives towards our own chosen goal. We cannot escape this freedom, even in overwhelming circumstances. For instance, even an armed mugger's victim possesses choices: to hand over his wallet; to negotiate; to beg; to run; to counter-attack; or to die.

Although we are limited by our circumstances these cannot force us, as radically free beings, to follow one course over another. For this reason, we choose in anguish: we know that we must make a choice, that it will have consequences, and that some choices are better than others. But for Sartre, to claim that one amongst our many conscious possibilities takes undeniable precedence (for instance, 'I cannot risk my life, because I must support my family') is to assume the role of an object in the world, merely at the mercy of circumstance - a being in itself rather that is only its own facticity.

We can all choose to die. We can all choose to end. We can choose misery. We can choose happiness. There are no obligations in existence.

existence precedes essence

existence precedes essence, at the most basic level of understanding, is based on the idea of existence without essence. For humanity, it means that humanity may exist, but humanity's existence does not mean anything at least at the beginning. This concept can be applied at the individual level as well. The value and meaning of this existence—or essence—is created only later

"The world is founded upon the absurd"--Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov

nausea

Pienso qué éste es el peligro de llevar un diario: se exagera todo, uno está al
acecho, forzando continuamente la verdad.

Pero ahora se acabó; he releído lo escrito en el café Mably y me ha
dado vergüenza; no quiero secretos, ni estados de alma, ni cosas indecibles; no
soy ni virgen ni sacerdote para jugar a la vida interior.

No hay gran cosa que decir: no pude levantar el papel, eso es todo.

wasteland's

I will show you fear in a handful of dust

shady areas where no one's right.

STAR: A key concern in ''Snow'' is the desire of many Muslim women to wear headscarves to school -- an issue that raises delicate questions about where you draw the line between, say, the tolerance of religion and the imposition of religion. The current Turkish government has, controversially, attempted to assist the graduates of religious schools. Do you feel that is a legitimate cause for them?

PAMUK: Look, I'm a writer. I try to focus on these issues not from the point of view of a statesman but from the point of view of a person who tries to understand the pain and suffering of others. I don't think there is any set formula to solve these problems. Anyone who believes there is a simple solution to these problems is a fool -- and probably will soon end up being part of the problem. I think literature can approach these problems because you can go into more shady areas, areas where no one is right and no one has the right to say what is right. That's what makes writing novels interesting. It's what makes writing a political novel today interesting.

si no quieres que el arte te decepcione

mejor que no se te ocurra verlo como una profesión. por mucha habilidad y condiciones que tengas, busca el dinero y el poder en otro lugar, de manera que al no recibir la justa compensación por tu trabajo y talento, no llegues a odiar al arte.

favor experience over analysis

(bis) favor experience over analysis.

what I like about dostoievski's drama

is the sense of the absolute, the electricity that runs and burns at the surface of each and everyone of his characters.

camus

the ideomotor effect

"just as in a good dance we don't feel pushed, when the trance state is deep, no one feels like being lead on a Ouja board. One person inadvertedly leads while the others inadvertedly follow, wich allows for a flow experience. People often experience the trance state to -i.e. the Ouija board getting 'warmer'. Curiously when the backgound-biased participant who's most likely to know or fantasize about the questions asked is blindfolded the answer is much more late to arrive. "


William James

The Gestalt therapist contrives experiments that lead the client to greater awareness and fuller experience of his/her possibilities. Experiments can be focussed on undoing projections or retroflections. They can work to help the client with closure of unfinished gestalts ("unfinished business" such as unexpressed emotions towards somebody in the client's life). There are many kinds of experiments that might be therapeutic. But the essence of the work is that it is experiential rather than interpretive, and in this way distinguishes itself from the psychoanalytic.

Gestalt Therapy is a psychotherapy which focuses on here-and-now experience and personal responsibility.

Drama therapy

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Drama therapy, also known as the single word Dramatherapy outside the US, is the intentional use of theater techniques to facilitate personal growth and promote health. Drama therapy is an expressive therapy modality used in a wide variety of settings, including hospitals, schools, mental centers, prisons, and businesses. Drama therapy exists in many forms and can be applicable to individuals, couples, families, and various groups.

The use of dramatic process and theater as a therapuetic intervention began with Psychodrama. The field has expanded to allow many forms of theatrical interventions as therapy including role-play, theater games, group-dynamic games, mime, puppetry, and other improvisational techniques. Often, drama therapy is utilized to help a client:

• Solve a problem
• Achieve a catharsis
• Delve into truths about self
• Understand the meaning of personally resonate images
• Explore and transcend unhealthy patterns of interaction

Drama therapy is extremely varied in its use, based on the practitioner, the setting and the client. From fully-fledged performances to empty chair role-play, the sessions may involve many variables including the use of a troupe of actors.

"It's bad policy to speculate on what you'll do if a plan fails when you're trying to make a plan work." - Condi Rice (2007-01-11)

I feel I understand life better when I filter it through fiction.

Kenny Craig

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The Little Britain character Kenny Craig (played by Matt Lucas) is a hypnotist who uses his powers for trivial things, such as winning a game of Scrabble against his mother or attempting to avoid paying the entrance fee to a swimming pool. His catchphrase is "Look into my eyes, look into the eyes, not around the eyes, don't look around the eyes, look into my eyes(clicks) you're under, (after dialogue involving the situation), 3, 2, 1, you're back in the room"

Kenny Craig
First appearance	Series 1 (first series appearance)
Information
Gender	Male
Occupation	Stage hypnotist

The character is featured in both the radio and TV in sketches where he often uses his special hypnosis talent to get his own way, such as saving money when going out on a date by hypnotising his girlfriend into choosing food from the set menu.

It is probable that, at first, he doesn't really have any hypnotic skills at all, and that people only do what he hypnotises them to do just to make him happy. However, in his final scetches, he could hypnotise a whole audience into believing that they have witnessed a spectacular hypnotic show, which shows that his powers have developed considerably throughout the series.

His name is a combination of weight-loss guru Jenny Craig and real-life hypnotist Paul McKenna.

In Little Britain Abroad, he meets Paul McKenna in Portugal. He takes his hypnotic powers away.

""Is," "is." "is" — the idiocy of the word haunts me

""Is," "is." "is" — the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment." robert anton wilson

we define based on what seems, what we experience, not on what 'is'. kant

'adress to this dull and effeminate age'

big 8==D words by Drake.

la charlatanería de nechaev

mezcla verdad, mentiras y pasión para confundir y guiar a quien oye.

un alma en borrador

antonio machado.

l. cohen:

I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order.

charm into submission

stee-mulate your mind!!

Feedback, rewriting and amnesia

Which brings us to feedback. I know, I know: showing other people your drafts is tough. Exposing yourself like that, making yourself that vulnerable, can be terrifying. It's perfectly reasonable to avoid that, to not show other people your stories, or to shy away from asking the dreaded question, "What did you think?"

That is, if you're a pussy. Otherwise, you need to suck it up. Your pride isn't relevant here. All that's important is improving your story. And for that, you need feedback. Lots of it.

Man, what I'd give for the ability to erase my memory after each draft, so I could read my own books for the first time again. It would all become so clear: where the story sagged, where the promising leads left unfollowed lay, where my characters' motivations got muddled and, oh God please yes, what the core of this goddamn story really is.

some guy at palahniuk's

the modern reader

...your audience is smarter than you imagine... younger readers distain most books - not because those readers are dumber than past readers, but because today's reader is smarter. Movies have made us very sophisticated about storytelling. And your audience is much harder to shock than you can ever imagine.

Palahniuk.

Nechaev on the Devils

On November 21, 1869, Nechayev and several comrades beat, strangled and shot Ivanov, hiding the body in a lake through a hole in the ice. This incident was fictionalised by writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his political novel The Devils, published three years later, in which the Peter Verkhovensky character is based on Nechayev.

So far I have read of Coetzee's

* Youth.
* Master of St. Petersburg.

I wanna read Disgrace and the one about Robinson Crusoe. I'll buy Disgrace this weekend.

Impressions on the Master of St. Petersburg (half book so far)

I like the Dostoievski ripoff. Great tension management. I dislike the occasionally occurring melodrama. Ingenious fiction-reality interlock. I wanna learn a bit more about Nechaev, though I consider him an idiot.

Coetzee's inner parallels

• All of Coetzee's writings are similar in that they often center on a solitary character. No direct moral is ever given, but rather situations are set up for the reader to think about. Coetzee’s aim is not to provide solutions, but to highlight problems and have the reader form their own conclusions.

  
  

Coetzee writes an hour a day.

Rian Malan wrote that Coetzee is "a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word." [1]

I think of coetzee as a dull man. Lesson to learn: even dull men can become amazingly strong writers out of dedication and self discipline.

Copy what you like

July 2006

When I was in high school I spent a lot of time imitating bad writers. What we studied in English classes was mostly fiction, so I assumed that was the highest form of writing. Mistake number one. The stories that seemed to be most admired were ones in which people suffered in complicated ways. Anything funny or gripping was ipso facto suspect, unless it was old enough to be hard to understand, like Shakespeare or Chaucer. Mistake number two. The ideal medium seemed the short story, which I've since learned had quite a brief life, roughly coincident with the peak of magazine publishing. But since their size made them perfect for study in high school classes, we read a lot of them, which gave us the impression the short story was flourishing. Mistake number three. And because they were so short, nothing really had to happen; you could just show a randomly truncated slice of life, and that was considered advanced. Mistake number four. The result was that I wrote a lot of stories in which nothing happened except that someone was unhappy in a way that seemed deep.

For most of college I was a philosophy major. I was very impressed by the papers published in philosophy journals. They were so beautifully typeset, and their tone was just captivating-- alternately casual and buffer-overflowingly technical. A fellow would be walking along a street and suddenly modality qua modality would spring upon him. I didn't ever quite understand these papers, but I figured I'd get around to that later, when I had time to reread them more closely. In the meantime I tried my best to imitate them. This was, I can now see, a doomed undertaking, because they weren't really saying anything. No philosopher ever refuted another, for example, because no one said anything definite enough to refute. Needless to say, my imitations didn't say anything either.

In grad school I was still wasting time imitating the wrong things. There was then a fashionable type of program called an expert system, at the core of which was something called an inference engine. I looked at what these things did and thought "I could write that in a thousand lines of code." And yet eminent professors were writing books about them, and startups were selling them for a year's salary a copy. What an opportunity, I thought; these impressive things seem easy to me; I must be pretty sharp. Wrong. It was simply a fad. The books the professors wrote about expert systems are now ignored. They were not even on a path to anything interesting. And the customers paying so much for them were largely the same government agencies that paid thousands for screwdrivers and toilet seats.

How do you avoid copying the wrong things? Copy only what you genuinely like. That would have saved me in all three cases. I didn't enjoy the short stories we had to read in English classes; I didn't learn anything from philosophy papers; I didn't use expert systems myself. I believed these things were good because they were admired.

It can be hard to separate the things you like from the things you're impressed with. One trick is to ignore presentation. Whenever I see a painting impressively hung in a museum, I ask myself: how much would I pay for this if I found it at a garage sale, dirty and frameless, and with no idea who painted it? If you walk around a museum trying this experiment, you'll find you get some truly startling results. Don't ignore this data point just because it's an outlier.

Another way to figure out what you like is to look at what you enjoy as guilty pleasures. Many things people like, especially if they're young and ambitious, they like largely for the feeling of virtue in liking them. 99% of people reading Ulysses are thinking "I'm reading Ulysses" as they do it. A guilty pleasure is at least a pure one. What do you read when you don't feel up to being virtuous? What kind of book do you read and feel sad that there's only half of it left, instead of being impressed that you're half way through? That's what you really like.

Even when you find genuinely good things to copy, there's another pitfall to be avoided. Be careful to copy what makes them good, rather than their flaws. It's easy to be drawn into imitating flaws, because they're easier to see, and of course easier to copy too. For example, most painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used brownish colors. They were imitating the great painters of the Renaissance, whose paintings by that time were brown with dirt. Those paintings have since been cleaned, revealing brilliant colors; their imitators are of course still brown.

It was painting, incidentally, that cured me of copying the wrong things. Halfway through grad school I decided I wanted to try being a painter, and the art world was so manifestly corrupt that it snapped the leash of credulity. These people made philosophy professors seem as scrupulous as mathematicians. It was so clearly a choice of doing good work xor being an insider that I was forced to see the distinction. It's there to some degree in almost every field, but I had till then managed to avoid facing it.

That was one of the most valuable things I learned from painting: you have to figure out for yourself what's good. You can't trust authorities. They'll lie to you on this one