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…
Now this is a blog I can truly enjoy