"Have you sat on your arse in front of your writing machine...Sit yourself down, strap yourself in, try that for a for a few hours and then come and talk to me." Ronell.
A refreshing and humorous look at the difficulties in the schizophrenia of writing a dissertation and daily life. Writing a dissertation seems difficult enough, but I do wonder about the difficulty in jumping from a creative work to dissertation. That is required in a creative PhD and DCA. I started reading (not getting that far) Umberto Eco's book on writing a thesis, so it was good to hear another view. The student's mentioned another text on the subject, but I couldn't make out the author. ?? Wolfgang...
Writing something 'new and interesting', is wrong according to Ronell. Texts are like relationships, you want to remain monogamous for two years and not flirt with any skirt text and not having a mono-manicial focus... it will escape you.
Go, slow—unload the myth you are doing something new. Apprenticeship and slavery to the text. Ronell has techniques: The first draft no one will ever see. Throw on the page and get the cleaning woman to clean up the shit. This isn't music it's language. NO judgement on first draft. The secretary then types up the text... she has personas... unengaged persona help...
Stand by your text
Superego comes later... you negotiate all the parts in a summit meeting... Bevis and Butthead... let her know if it sucks or its ok... Distribute, stagger and start modest the practice of writing.... No Alpine oversized judgement... Start small. Listening to your passion. Be collaborative, allow yourself to be hot and shit. Chose your free spirits.
Goethe... nothing survives if you show your friends. Expect the shredder and the eraser, smile. No substitute for reading, reading, reading. Situate yourself, stand up for yourself and research. Fake it till you make it. Then bring it to the table.
Impossible to do something new. You are in conversation, responding, quoting attending... Sacred part of writing, stalls and stumps... become a sleepwalker—don't look look down.
Deleuze: all writing involves you becoming woman... not sure what he means by this. Disappearance of agency. Dialling it down.
Ronell sees herself as an architect/rock band Go through translation work. Documentary on the Rolling Stones. Charlie Chaplin: micro level of the gesture. I do enjoy her examples
Block out diary, write everyday, ten minutes one hour. Ronell writes first thing in the morning. I do try to work everyday, but i have a tendency to get bogged down with research and go down rabbit holes, that aren;t necessarily relevant, si i was pleased she gave me permission to do so, at least for the first year.
I love all this. I'd never heard of Ronell, so I spent too much time after watching this seeing her other YouTube videos.
With Deleuze's quote— "We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resist to the present"—Gibbs sets out to argue that writing is a critical form to important aspects of the present in a richly referenced essay that I needs unpacking. So many ideas to examine in this essay.
Bricolage and and experimental tinkering in writing. How could a dissertation be written in a 'perverse way.'
Coding and designing an important form of literacy... This too is becoming so simplified and democratised, everyone's a designer. I was reminded of the little book by a Mexican writer, Gabriel Zaid, So Many Books (1996) a meditation and observation on reading and publishing. He suggests a book is publsihed every three seconds.
The second half of the essay, Stewart's 'ordinary affects' are “public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they’re also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of,” they are “a drifting immersion that watches and waits for something to pop up” (2, 95). I'm interested to read this book, to see how perversion might be somehow related??
Flusser those "who write despite knowing it makes no sense". We no longer need to be intelligent, to extract meaning. Do we amalgamate and bricolage? It's sad to think that writing could be seen as a 'nostalgic practice.' What is the future of the novel? if as Goldsmith suggests writers have become information miners and managers. There is not even a curatorial aspect to writing. We are storing things remotely in clouds and on external drives. We are losing our own memories.
More Flusser: The contrast between Wikipedia and Diderot is telling (p10), end of the individual voice... aggregation and algorithm rules. Writing is superseded by technical image. Cognitive capitalism. (p9)
Writing becomes a research methodology in its own right. Algorithms a potent source of practical vocabularies