Saturday, May 2, 2009

Start

Twenty-five years ago I edited a print journal called The Journal of Rambling Speculation. It was pretty much completely a psychology journal by a post-internship all-but-dissertation ex-English major adding in the vivid experience of a beginning career. Around 1988 one particular psychological crash ended the journal for twenty odd years, the oddness filled with an increasingly busy professional life and my usual extremes of heaven, hell, abysmal ignorance and a sense of connection with the universe, or something, in my personal life. For the last ten years I have wanted to resuscitate the corpse, the corpse, in part, being me. But I've been too busy. Other stuff. Laziness. Now, thanks to my wife, who moves me past my quill pen technology, I'm planning on doing this, slapdash, not being as careful as I'd like, putting things down that I know that I'll later wish I'd revised first. If you're interested and ever want to comment, that'd be great, but I'm pretty sure I'd do this if I were the last person on earth. In fact, I'd be more likely to do this if I were the last person on earth. I have strong impulses, but I have an even stronger brake. My ultimate, catastrophic psychic collapse is into catatonia, a landlocked mountainous country between France and Spain with no coastline, no airport and a principal industry of smuggling. There, I factor license plates into prime numbers (which I do anyway) and become caught in shifting tectonic plates of ambivalence. But it's been a long time since I was catatonic and I'm willing to take the chance. Most future entries in this lottery will be less personal and more observational (I hope). But today I had to be Perotsky. It's the inaugural reissue. It's personal.
" 'S will be done." Said by the attackers in the name of of religion as they commit atrocities. Swill be done.

3 comments:

  1. Welcome to the world of the blog!

    BRD

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  2. Just a comment on slapdash. I think that slapdash is pretty important for a blog in terms of actually keeping going. You are publishing, but you are not formally publishing. Not that I don't go into mine and correct it when I find a typo of a dangling thought, but if you treat it the way you would treat an article or thesis, (ahem) you would never push the Publish button.

    It is public, of course, and as such can't be entirely slapdash, but it is dynamic and need not be, I think, as nailed down as most compositions.

    Looking forward to reading more of your thoughts.

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