Monday 11 April 2011

You know what...?

You know what? Every time I lapse back into the terrifying and consuming realm of 'reality', this blog goes out of the window. Every time I come back to it with a half-arsed intention of re-kindling it from the embers, I make grand promises regarding its longevity, even if only for myself, then reality takes over again, and out of the window it goes. 

So this time there will be no grand promises, and for the record I don't intend to narrativise the past year of my life. In fact, the reason I came back here is because it's formidably enjoyable to fellate your own ego. It's good having something to read over. I feel like Krapp. I keep my blog for the sole reason of being able to rouse myself to nostalgia in the future. A future in which I can damn whatever I write and sneer at my past thoughts and (re)actions. No doubt that use of pretentious deconstructive brackets will be one of the first things that comes under fire when my identity has shifted again.

Despite my remark that there will be no grand promises, I would sincerely like to keep this going. I think that once I have graduated, in about two months time, I'll miss writing. I mean both in an academic and journalistic way. With Nouse gone and no more essays to write, I can see myself feeling lost. So yes, this blog will continue, as long as I do, but whether it is regularly updated or not, I can't tell. It all depends on states of mind. This blog is all based on a state of mind. I am also battling with the dilemma of whether to switch over to tumblr/wordpress or not. Blogger has always seemed sterile to me. There are better blogging formats out there, and blogger just seems old. So I think, in the back of my mind, I am planning a move. We'll see. 

Before I graduate, however, there is plenty to be getting on with. In fact, it is in some ways a surprise that a desire to begin writing this again has struck me now. With 13,000 words of essay to write and a newspaper to keep alive my words should perhaps be going to a more noble cause. I am currently writing an essay on McCarthy's The Road. A novel which, incidentally, I reviewed on this blog about nine months ago. It was the first novel in a while that I'd really stayed up all night to finish. That made it special in its own rite. However, despite its status as a kind of (post)modern American classic, it's interesting how much perspective 9 months of close-reading can give you. The novel, though thoroughly enjoyable, is constructed over a series of logistical fault-lines which make its very fabric kind of crooked in the first place. I mean, this is where my present idea has been born from. Focusing in on these fault-lines, and looking at the way they can be exploited, by the inquisitive reader, and with McCarthy himself. 

During the research for this essay I've been able to read so much that I've needed to for a long time. That includes Derrida, Zizek, Fukuyama, Marx. I think that perhaps it has been the most stretching essay I've written yet, both with regards to what I've read and how much I've read. It has also been ego-boosting, which is both a good and a bad thing. To have actually read the whole of Jacques Derrida's Spectres de Marx and understood it is something I could never have done three years ago. Much of my essay on The Road centres around Derrida's concept of the specter as a deconstructive entity, and his term hauntology. In fact, in the next couple of weeks I intend to write an extended post on the spectral and hauntological aspects of a number of texts and albums which have come to my attention. In conducting my research I found that very little has been written on the two terms with respect to popular and postmodern culture. The most informing texts I found happened to be on blogs (like this), where the terms could be applied instead of defined. The terms specter and hauntology elude ontologically stable definitions expressly by being ontologically unstable terms, making them formidably difficult to understand in the first place. So in some ways I want to share what I've learnt, and to perhaps help others who are interested in hauntology and spectrality get a grip on what they actually mean by using examples. 

But for now I will continue trundling along with the essay itself. And until that is finished there will be no blog post on the subject I can assure you. It's pretty much finished, but of course I have the long editing process and numerous confidence crises ahead of me. Wish me luck!  

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