I often like to imagine that I m somehow above the commonplace drive to indulge in gossip, whether spreading or consuming.  Of course I am not.

On the other hand, that I fail in this respect does not convince me that one's efforts to resist are not worthwhile, or are themselves implicitly self-righteous.  The trouble is the devotion of any sensitivity to this cause reveals a daunting onslaught which no one person could resist, particularly in a culture such as ours which does not value or praise such resistance.

Particles and waves.  People each have their own individual  ideas about the world which are really quite distinct from the next person's.  But they form aggregates which have peculiar common tendencies.  And one partakes of those tendencies, like a drop of water follows along with the ripples and waves of whatever body it is part of, though once it was rain.

Our culture is a vulgar one.  I struggle constantly with this reflection. Perhaps it has only gotten so much bigger because so many more people now have means and leisure to have a voice.  And then I think, if ever I were to find an audience for my own efforts that I could only thank the vulgarity of the culture willing to receive me.

We must fight the wanton variety of capitalism.

What makes a movie like The Departed very good is that it presents a complete aesthetic vision. It is about what(ever) it is about at every plausible level of interpretation: it achieves a genuine cohesion of form and content. Or, which is to say the same thing, a genuinely felicitous rejection of that opposition, which is, as we all know, though we pretend to have outgrown the vocabulary, no mean feat. Moreover, it is not unpleasant to find one's early judgments vindicated, though doubt were cast upon them.

Writing online

I have attempted to start writing online several times now.  I have never been satisfied enough with the forums that I have established to persist.  I have a tendency to circumscribe my own expression.  I either do so my explicitly stating the purpose of the forum or by adopting an unsustainable style (unsustainable because some how affected or fetishistic).

I have always tried again, however, because I feel constantly as though I have something worthwhile to say. And yet I come inevitably to perceive that there is no reason that anyone should care to read what I have written. The fact is that very little that anyone writ's is worth reading. Some people like to read and will look for things to read and read what they find for the pleasure of the activity so long as the matter is adequately agreeable--or at least so the behavior appears. I don't particularly like to read.  I get the sense that there is something somehow wrong about this, but I don't like it very much because I don't think I'm very good at it.  I mean I am not very good at the physical process--i think sometimes perhaps I developed bad habits, of eye movement, say, when I learned to read. I feel strained very early upon embarking to read anything of length.

This has always troubled me because I have like to believe myself otherwise intelligent.

I'm not very good at writing either.  I struggle with the process. I believe I have good ideas, when i reread my old writing it often seems cluttered and stereotyped, like bad Mendelssohn.  I struggle to find my own voice.  The trouble it seems to me is that my "true voice" is garbled with vulgarism, which I sincerely find unappealing. So though I make conscious effort to avoid it I tend to adopt a "grand style", or some manner of formal affectation, in order to cover up a natural tendency to express my thoughts ungrammatically.

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All else aside, though the drive may be sporadic, I am driven somehow to write.  I will try to do so here.  The parameters shall be only that I try to do so honestly, whatever that ends up meaning.