“There’s little actual logic in good writing. There’s a current of thoughts and ideas and observations. Some may be linked by evidence. One point may substantiate or corroborate another. But what passes for logic or argument is usually little more than a succession of ideas Connected mostly by proximity and analogy. Writing doesn’t prove anything.… Continue reading

“Hit with your body, and hit with your spirit, and hit from the Void with your hands, accelerating strongly.” Miyamoto Musashi, The Book Of Five Rings (c. 1645) Continue reading

“This book is…an inquiry undertaken in order to systematically ‘feel out’ the presence of my subject matter as it brushes against the consciousness…I will reconstruct the ghostly voices I hear while walking on Scarp in an attempt to relate my own story to theirs, to locate my own voice and sensations in the ones that… Continue reading

“What makes random access important, in a creative setting, is being able to grab chunks or tiny fragments of music to copy, paste, cut, fix, tune, move, and modify. Writing a book or even an email is now, almost, unthinkable without being able to move, modify, and fix things. Manipulative power has become integral to… Continue reading

“That the idea or conception of something is adjudged superior to its concrete implementation is a natural consequence of a society in which theory has become increasingly important. The execution is dirty and imprecise, while the idea is pure and unsullied. Theory is always flawless, until you try to apply it in practice and get… Continue reading

“Writing is not the memorialization of ideas. Writing distillate, crafts, and pressure-tests ideas—it creates ideas…They emerge from a process, they represent their becoming, and that emergence, in their final form. Writing is therefore a kind of learning. Active writing should not involve saying things you already understand and know, but instead let you think new… Continue reading

“To create a desire for something one needs to engage in a labor of human happiness. Need is a demanding and obscure thing that defines the dependence of one person on another. To identify it and want it is to define oneself as a person. That’s the secret of culture, the secret of cuisine, the… Continue reading

“On a bike your consciousness is small. The harder you work, the smaller it gets. Every thought that arises is immediately and utterly true, every unexpected event is something you’d known all along but had only forgotten for a moment. A pounding riff from a song, a bit of long division that starts over and… Continue reading