Generating worlds, exploring them, losing the thread.
In I Am a Strange Loop, an attempt to show how consciousness arises, Douglas Hofstadter at one point is explaining how Kurt Gödel deflates the grand ambition of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica.
I’m reading this explanation, and not following it at all—I’m that mathematically adept I still have problems with fractions—when I come across the following passage, which teases me with the notion I might finally be getting a glimmer.
“This may sound a … Read more
Scratch the Mayan Apocalypse. One less thing to worry about, eh?
Of course we still have all the political issues du jour—left vs right, conservatives/conservatives1/conservatives2 vs liberals/liberals1/liberals2, pro-gay marriage vs anti-gays, legalize ganja vs leave the trade to the mobsters, red vs yellow, orange vs chartreuse, etc., etc.
Beneath these lurk more fundamental issues, among them these:
Where do stories come from?
In the last post, we looked at stories as products of a process. The writer doesn’t proceed like this: “I have this story in my head, and now I’m going to record it in written form.” The text isn’t a given that merely awaits transcription. It’s often—perhaps usually—the product of a writing activity. It didn’t exist before being realized in that activity, not even in the mind of the writer. In such cases the … Read more
I wanted to be a writer from the time I was a kid—the notion just smacked of romance and freedom. It also had the advantage of annoying my father, who wanted me to be an engineer. But I was 40 years old before I wrote anything for publication.
Twenty years before that, having just spent a couple of years working underground in an Ontario nickel mine, and having more money than I’d ever seen in one pile before, I … Read more
Today I present two gnomic items of writerly advice. Subsequent posts will expand upon them.
These are aimed first of all at myself, who knows better but, it seems, keeps forgetting. In fact, in drafting this second of a series of futuristic novels, the sequel to Syn, I’ve been committing these most basic of errors.
1. Don’t think. Write.
2. Don’t wait till you know what your story is before you start writing it.
3. Try to be … Read more
“Good writers have two things in common: they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
1. Expanding on Nietzsche’s insight
The writerly impulse to be admired rather than understood is generally associated with certain stylistic horrors.
Right away, seeking the admiration of “knowing and over-acute readers,” the unwitting writer serves up long and complex sentences like a tangle of spaghetti. The more clauses the better, eh? And … Read more
Soon there’ll be nowhere left in the world to run to, no place to hide.
In response to something I posted on neural parasites some time ago — “Fable with parasites I: Bravery lies in the brain of the beholder” — Steve Hyde said this: “Reminds me of those tourists that have been taken over by their backpacks … [Like the chickens in your post], they’re … known to fearlessly approach dangerous beasts.” I believe he was referring to … Read more
I am Nikon. I am my iPhone. I am a chimera, a mongrel composite of my Levis, my Dockers, my Tilly hat, my Bush Country SUV.
I am whoever I choose to be. I am whatever. I am a staunch iconic mashup doing my part to keep the wheels of industry turning. I am my modular personality du jour compliments of the advertising industry and my own f***wittedness. Cool.
But it gets weirder than that. And maybe more … Read more
Greetings. I’ve been away for a while, distracted by travel, a restive Muse, this and that.
Writers are notoriously perceptive, and so it is that, during my travels, I saw that drugstores were not the same drugstores I used to go to and say gimme some aspirin, or “I’d like a packet of those things, you know … Yeah. No, no! You don’t have to wave them around, for chrissake.” Like much else in our world, things have changed since … Read more
Pussy hounds, rejoice! Your behavior may be built into existence almost from the outset. Here is an intriguing New Scientist video clip from a couple of years ago (“‘Intelligent’ oil droplet navigates chemical maze”). Could it be that this pass at sentience even in drops of oil may help to legitimize dick-directed behavior in higher organisms?
And here’s ‘Crystals, Information and the Origin of Life,’ a recent article from Technology Review that … Read more
