top of page
Search
sebastianmoronell

God-awful reflections for the faint hearted

Updated: Feb 22, 2022

Why I write


Four years ago, I started a blog. It lasted about a month. This is my second attempt at it.


I have written other things since then. Some have been published, but the remains are scattered across bundles of paper and impossibly obscure folders on my laptop. I know these are inefficient methods of storage, but I am an inefficient writer. It takes me an aeon to write a paragraph before I am beset by doubt. In the age of mass-produced copywriting 'creatives', where the value of a sentence depends on how fast it can be strung together, this doesn't bode particularly well for my self-esteem.


Don't get me wrong, Financial Mathematics for Communists: God-awful reflection for the faint hearted is not a confidence-building exercise. It started as a light-hearted protest against the cluttered world of consumerism, one where I was beset at every corner by some new gimmick. Writing the blog was a spring-clean of my senses, often marked by some new and irrelevant revelation about my doubts or myself as I fumbled from one existential crisis to another. Today I cannot say that I am any less doubtful or any more knowledgeable about myself, but I am still compelled to write.


Part-time writing


Writing has almost always been a part-time occupation; over the course of history most of its patrons have had to make ends meet in other ways. But on a more profound level writing can only ever be part-time - it requires a certain engagement with the world it reflects upon, whether these are scholastic essays borne from the dusty archives or a novelist who has created his own 'cosmological event', to borrow a phrase from Umberto Eco. Of course, part-time writing also fits in quite neatly with current corporate practices that have consistently attempted to degrade workers' rights in lieu of less-formal jobs with little benefits. We may, at some point, all be part-time workers.


Promises and lies


I am hesitant to promise a schedule for writing this blog. But I'd give it about two weeks apiece - that's probably the going rate for a personal crisis of some sort. There are, further, some lofty ambitions I have entertained for this blog, that remain the same as before:

  • Counter neo-liberal gerrymandering (ever since the Berlin Wall fell I haven’t seen the end of it).

  • In an act of patriotism attest to the lasting preeminence of Russian literature (to my fathers Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn – I salute you).

  • Propagate hard-to-read armchair revolution-talk. Political activity is political suicide.

Take this then, dear reader, for what it is: a part-time complaint, full of contradictions. Cynical and quixotic, senile and infantile, specious and delusional. These are the terms on which my mind rests, and which I believe the world operates on. I hope you enjoy it.

Until then!

Workers of the world…


88 views1 comment

Recent Posts

See All

I'll take the irony for now

The dozen or so readers who have entertained my writing would have noticed that I have not posted since May. Since May there has been a...

The end of summer

The turn of seasons provoke memories, and at times nostalgia. Maybe it is because they recreate, in such short time, completely familiar...

Ukraine and the prospect of history

If history rhymes, then today it sings. It sings in many voices, harmonising till the pitch resembles the whistle of a bomb as it drops...

1 Comment


aadamtoefy23
Jan 27, 2022

Now this is a blog I can truly enjoy

Like
bottom of page