The death of the author as a movement in cultural production had a performative bite – given that it was concerned with authority, simply to doubt from a position of economic or authorial power undid some of the power of the author. It’s an anarchist position in literary studies.

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Being the one who is literary and plays games – who loves books and history, and also spends time on videogames – is a schizoid experience, due to their manifest difference as regimes of meaning, as cultural industries. Hopefully it can contribute to forging a new kind of subjectivity, new desires and new ways to fulfil them – simply to to think what we are playing.

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You can in fact control the attention-devour – you can quit that site. You can use concrete techniques to structure the attention economy of your daily application use. Learn to notice and hate that platform that removes your own control over what you view, what you do. Reform your attention span – go to those media which don’t dissect your attention – curate your content. Lifehack the socials – follow no one, but bookmark their pages, bookmark your subscriptions channel, fight the encroaching time-suck they place in front of you with its psychological price tag. That is, don’t use the site how they want you to. Use it in a way that you have designed. If you want to, that is.

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My favourite attempt to define poetry is that of the physicist Paul Dirac, which is this: to attempt to tell someone something everybody already knows, in a language that no-one can understand. We could go further – it’s an attempt to tell something that no one knows, in a language no one can understand. Not so different from any speech act 😉

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Lavish Description – the function of long and flowery passages had its origin in the time where filigree and gold were the preserve of the rich, and hard to come by or see – and the image too was rare – it brought the reader into a long and crafty fashioning of a complex thought-vision. Now, we often find this extraneous – we have better things, we want the barest of descriptions, we have such rich material to work with already with our waterfall of images. We want a choice phrase. This is part of the historical materialism of the imagination, conspicuous consumption of the intellect.

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The Right – we need never allow them to be self-satisfied, never let them forget what they have done. Never forgive their bull-headed idiocy. As they arrive in their enclaves, we will haunt their steps and avenge their banal malignity like a mosquito leaving hundreds of bites on the conquistador, crisping the hell they have built for themselves.

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Ecoanxiety and Eco Zen – I hear and feel the regressive tax on the conscientious, the pain of caring for the world. We can make the acknowledgement, in the background, that things are dying, but we need not take the romantic or fatalist path. We can take the absurd path, laughing at how ridiculous it is – the laughing Buddha, re-figured as a Diogenian – frankly admitting the horrific situation but smiling. You need not always be panicking, crying about the fate, that we all share, of death. But rather, laugh at it, and say, this is not just a tragedy – it’s also a comedy. None of this precludes taking action, nor cancels the ethical, by the way.

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Didn’t the idea of a populous heaven have this problem – what if I don’t really want to hang out with everyone? But then as Christopher Hitchens said, designing an attractive heaven was never the strong point of theology. Heaven could almost have the character of a threat sometimes – we’ll all be there together, and you’d better well like it.

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There is an unwieldy burden of proof on those who think computers could ever experience as humans do, become vectors of morality – and that is, to prove that the material composition of a mind has nothing to do with its quality of experience.

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The consistent and contextual materiality of perception is what crumbles idealism.

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The prose poem is made up of one big stanza of lines that run on to each other, each with a different metre, each with an adaptive assonance to the sentences around it. It brackets Grice’s maxims of quantity, relevance and manner, and unchains the metaphoric play. Sometimes.

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The mind changes, and identity with it. The plasticity of neurons equals a more or less evolving psyche and desire. The range of entities in human time with stable identities is very limited – or rather stability is to do with physical law, that is, with simple scientific concepts, and geo-evolutionary time concepts – hyperobjects. We, ourselves, have no stable identity, on a human timescale. We have identity in the way that hastily upkept carvings in melting ice, with a waterfall flowing over them, freezing and refreezing, have identity. This is the bracketed truth of the concept of the blank slate – although tendencies which are more or less fixed operate within us. And the stability of our conceptual schemes themselves is hardly more robust. Even this one I am speaking from within. The stability of conceptual schemes becomes authoritarianism of the mind, prescriptivism of the will. Prescriptivism and normative and norming behaviour are the pragmatic, the obsessed-compulsed vectors in the society trying to maintain their peace, through force. But you cannot escape these tendencies.

This is why democracy, the conversational democracy of worker power, of co-operatives, and worker ownership, is the only way of politicising that is honest about its source of authority. Or actualises it, rather than placing it in a strait jacket.

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Sight and thought are bio-chemical reactions in concert. It’s a simple thought but its implications are constantly surprising.

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Those who believe there is nothing new under the sun, if they ceased gazing directly at it, might find their world reflowered, full of slight and subtle origins. The new arrives all the time, and the nothing-new-under-sunners habitually say, ah, nevertheless it never happens and if it does, that was the last.

They must separate forever the past and the future, and may enjoy new things but never praise them in exuberant terms. Each great thing is always a fluke, or the last, or is only great because it is an echo of greatness. The sun has burned their retinas.

They are motivated either by laziness – by not wanting the trouble of finely sifting the new from the rest – they make originality a mark of elite status and vanishingly rare. Or they are ideologically invested in maintaining some given aesthetic standard, through extravagant self-regard.

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If you realise that religious meaning-production is a process of bracketing-of, eliding-from and adding-to the religious textualising process, you should then think – ah, which are the key points in this holy mass of text where I can hang a painting of liberation. Of course, the more authentic path is to openly speak of that production.

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So you’re atheist – was it an argument that convinced you? Worse. History.

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That something could come from nothing would retrospectively bestow upon nothing the conditions of having produced something, which is to say, something. I’d be confused if this doesn’t apply to physical theories too. It’s hard to get behind a beginning so fundamental, so ‘beyond time’.

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Aspirational – there’s a problem in England which is a problem of identity – the centrist identifying with a metropolitan aesthetic, the American sharp suits and business class – a kind of decayed imperial bureaucratic aesthetic – and the conservatives identifying with a kind of hunting shop kitsch – identifying with a lost class above. Class false consciousness. This is a boringly intractable problem, and something to do with empire, and royalty, doubtless.

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Unearthing some horror isn’t enough. You have to write it into the annals of the horrific, and teach people to be afraid.

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A vice of paranoia is to think, when something really changes – ah, so it was like that all along, after all.