Question: have you read through all the “hits” indexed at left? Or re-read them? As I periodically explain, I’m not aiming here to present stirring reads. I’ve concocted lozenges to be mused over and periodically re-read. I hope they’re worth it. I think many of them are, but what the hell do I know…
Brief story. An online friend told me he’d experienced a shift of perspective that left him framing things differently. He was plowing through my stuff, finding that it was the only place guiding him to understand and expand his mysterious shift.
Nice, right? But it wasn’t thanks or praise. He was registering a complaint. “There’s so much to read!” He protested. He asked me to boil it down. Point to the essentials. Maybe write a book. Give him the shiny tome that could be one-stop-shopping for everything he wanted to know (as if I - or even he - could possibly anticipate this). Frustrated by too many answers to the vexing questions vexing him, he left in a huff.
Another one bites the dust. Oh well. But then don’t imagine you don’t have anything to read here. If I get run over by a bread truck tomorrow and never write another word, there will be more than enough to sustain those kooky enough to get a charge out of this sort of thing.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go throw away yet another cache of painstakingly acquired treasure.
I usually go into your "greatest hits" the most when you mention them in current posts to be honest. I feel like I barely can keep up with your current writing, but hope to one day make a deeper dive into your back catalog. I'm glad you've put them there.
ReplyDeleteA lot of what you write about really could be boiled down and retooled into a nice book, so I get what your friend is saying. However I really appreciate that you haven't done that to be honest. There's something quite smug, pretentious, and constructed in efforts to wrangle a book together, no matter the good intentions of you and an editor. Something about the unvarnished parts of this blog make it way more magical & practical to me than a discrete book to consume and file away.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
My stuff is already too long and tortured. People complain about having to choke down dense cognitive thickets of 1000 words. But the only reason they’re not 10,000 word essays is my ability to link to explanations of underlying concepts. I’ve been stacking insights, and connecting them, and unless I’m able to link to do this, the project would be unapproachable. Not a lick of it would make a lick of sense. That’s why it needs to be on web, in hypertext.
ReplyDeleteWriting it in a book form (I already explained this to you, Ryan) would yield a 6,000,000 word book sans links. It would not be better. Sorry, man, but I can’t spit masticated worms down your gullet. This is the best I can do to translate 60 years of super avid pondering into digestible form. It cannot, alas, be reduced to a vitamin pill.
To me, this IS a tidy vitamin pill. Ive been relaxing into and embracing unusual difficult outcome, trying to get to the bottom of stuff. I wrote about it here: https://jimleff.blogspot.com/2022/11/ultimate-failure-is-eschewing-cookie.html. This is EXPENSIVE insight, and I don’t know anyone else who’d have kept their eye on the reward cookies through such turbulence. I am saving the reader that horror. I am making it fun…and amusing….and readable….and not require the world scraping your skin off.
But, yeah, you still need to move your eyes from left to right a bunch of times.