Category Archives: On Writing

culture = audience?

Electrons and Yellowstone National Park both struggle with a similar problem. By observation, the thing you wish to observe is changed.

I was struck while reading something in which a character considers traveling to several different cultures, to experience their unique characteristics. He was visiting localized cultures, physical land areas in which the people live in a certain way, with specific traditions and behaviors. This character also lives in a future of instantaneous travel from one point to another, across dozens of worlds - all of these cultures he visits exists in a framework where every other culture is easily available. We have a similar situation here and now in the real world. More and more, the artifacts, ideas, music and food of distant localities is available to us. Right here in Oregon, I can buy sushi, durian fruit, brie, Ethiopian coffee, and lichee flavored Chinese black tea. Immigrants have brought with them the flavors of their old world, and commerce takes care of the rest.

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marginalia

It’s a common phenomenon, I think, to find the creative muse hiding behind rocks whenever you get away from your computer. I find myself composing excellent fiction as I drive, for instance. A particular species of this curse fills up margins and empty places in my notebook during classes. Just for instance, todays output:

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Easy Distractions

How do you like the new journal? I have paid for it in itchy eyes and undone homework. So easy a thing to do, tinker and tweak the code, when real work needs to be done.

Who was it who said, the greatest battle is the battle with self? Here is the battleground, a web diary with a slick interface and little content, little read, of little import.

New beginnings

A housekeeping post, this. Just to keep place in the writings which will follow, like a bookmark squeezed between cover and that first dry page of copyright information.

Do you feel the excitement yet? That frission of collective expectation for what is to come? I envy you, not for what is to come, but for your joyful anticipation. It is my great phobia and my great jealousy, that others may be having fun while I miss out.