Eating the elephant one bite at a time

Yesterday's post, I realise in retrospect, was a tad ambitious. But more importantly, it set this blog up to be worthy. Even boring. The cardinal sin.

I'm not an academic, nor do I have pretensions to come off as an academic here. I do want learn more about our incipient crises, collapses and transitions, and to try and figure out what we, that is I-you-we jointly and severally, do about them. And I do think Jem Bendell's book, while not being much of a good time, could be a crucial text for my understanding of the predicament. I know that understanding this predicament is something that feels very important to me. And, I also know that I would not read it without a publicly-promised project like a chapter-by-chapter summary. So there we go. I will carry on with the book summaries.

But, but.

I will also write whatever the heck I need to write here.

The thing I pushed to the back of my consciousness when laying out my schedule was this. I absolutely cannot, and I know this to the core of my being, I cannot stick to writing a blog for six months that is made up entirely of book summaries. It's not that you'd get bored — though I have little doubt that you would — but that I'd get so stultifyingly, extravagantly bored with even the idea of the thing, that I'd lose interest and walk away within a week.

In some other incarnation of my online writing I asserted that, for someone like me to sustain a creative life, someone like me should optimise, above all, for staying interested. And while I've learnt (and failed to integrate) many other things about the life creative since then, I stand by this as a foundational principle on which everything else can rest.

I imagine and hope that my staying interested can be a precursor to your getting interested and following along. But, to be honest, that is a lower-priority consideration right now. This site is for me first, and if you find something meaningful in it too, I'll be very glad. But I understand now that this is, must be, all for me, and for that I make no apology.

Ciao — 
James