Having set myself the task or writing a new blog entry each week day this month, it hasn’t taken me too long to hit upon a stumble. The point is that it just doesn’t feel like I have very much to write about: there’s very little in the way of clever ideas or deep thoughts screaming out to be set down and communicated to others — not at the present time anyway.
These days I usually come home from work late, around about 7pm or 8, have something to eat and then by the time I’m eventually ready to sit down in front my battered old laptop I’m so tired that there’s really nothing very significant going on my head. The things I think about during the work day tend to occupy me during my free time too, and I’m very vary of writing just for writing’s sake. I know that’s essentially what I am doing with this month long experiment, but I would still like to avoid being too banal: I want to write about something rather than nothing.
In the last couple of entries I’ve posted things that I wrote in the past which kind of defeats the purpose of using this blog to improve my current writing abilities. Today since I’ve been allowed the time and the opportunity to write a little earlier than usual, and my head’s feels slightly fresher, I’ve decided to write out a list of potential future topics, or germs of future topics, hoping that inspiration will strike.
– I’m reading Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances Yates at the moment — very, very slowly I must say given the little time that I can put aside for doing so. But all this stopping and starting is a getting little problematic, since each time I return to the book I spend so much time just re-aquainting myself with what I read the previous occasion that it makes my progress even slower. Maybe if I get into the habit of writing wee notes or summaries about the book and committing them to the blog it will help everything sink in a little better.
– I’m also trying to learn Italian right now: so it would be interesting (perhaps) to write about the tribulations of getting to grips with a completely new language as an adult.
– Languages in general interest me a lot these days: artificial languages, natural languages, possible languages, impossible languages. I would like to learn more about how to use language as a means of self-programming/self-hypnosis or to break out of problematic patterns of behaviour. I am deeply interested in the effects and power of ritualistic uses of language.
– Metaphor and Polysemy
– I could write about my favourite books, poems, and music…OK that’s fairly mundane as a suggestion but the results might be interesting depending on the angle I take. I’d like to talk about how my relationship with different songs and albums has changed over the last 15 years or so.
– A topic that interests me a lot is the strategies that traditional, closed cultures and societies use to try to cope with the effects of modernity and globalisation, and the long term societal changes that have occurred in places that have had much more time to deal with the effects of industrialisation and the fragmentation of the traditional extended family structure.
-I don’t like the direction the world is heading in, more and more of the world’s wealth and more and more of its resources are becoming concentrated in the hands of a miniscule, mega rich elite, indeed to an extent that would have been unimaginable throughout most of human history. The worst thing is that a lot of it is happening in broad daylight…Why have the bourgeoise been so complacent or indeed even complicit in this process of wealth redistribution? Are we heading towards a a point of no return in this process, a sort of singularity, after which the character of human society changes fundamentally, eventually leading to a kind of Morlocks and Elio type scenario…has this rubicon been crossed already?
– I watched a lecture recently where a conservative thinker repeatedly emphasised the need for modern day cultural institutions to preserve and transmit the important cultural artifacts of the past. But if there are no vital artistic currents or movements around today that are able to really respond to and refashion that heritage, does it not just become a one way conversation which ultimately says very little to us about our lives today?
– Are modern day hipsters really the cultural parasites that I believe them to be, or am I being too harsh?
– Why do people in Scotland drink so much? Is it cause the weather is shite? Is it because of the psychological scars inflicted by hundreds of years of English oppression?
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