drossbucket

it’s been abstracted too far for my tastes and stinks of algebra all over
that putrid stench? that would be the dead rotten hand of algebra

I dug out an interesting-ish writing experiment from a few years ago, where I just wrote out rubbish that came into my head as fast as possible over several evenings. I guess I should be horribly embarrassed by the result, but for some reason I like it, so I’m posting the whole lot to a pastebin here.

It starts out stilted and self-conscious and pretentious and derivative and crap, and then eventually relaxes a bit into being, well, still very pretentious but vaguely worth reading. And every so often there’s an odd little section I’d never have imagined I could write, based on my normal output.

This was a year or so before I started reading SSC, got a tumblr and got fascinated with the whole odd rationalist-adjacent world, so in a lot of ways the prevailing weather in my head was pretty different. I mean, some things never change – as well as the algebra bit there’s another maths rant 500 lines or so in, this time about terminology in differential geometry. But I was finishing up my thesis and was utterly sick of it, and winter was hanging around a lot longer than usual, and the main loops in my head were these sort of miserable ones linked up somehow with M. John Harrison’s Viriconium series and the Anatomy of Norbiton blog. The Pastel City and the Ideal City. And of course underneath it The Waste Land and the Unreal City, my longest-lived and most faithful source of brain noise (that and some Empson stuff).

There was some kind of depressing economics-related news around too, whatever this Harrison post was soaked in. I honestly can’t remember what particular thing it was now that the whole of the news is such a shitshow, but it may have been something about automation/’the post-work future’? “Outside it’s minus ten & you have no idea what’s happening on the old housing estates by the river.” That image of boiling an egg in the same water is completely lodged anyway, even if the specifics have gone out of my head.

Anyway it’s been interesting to read back. I’m a lot more cheerful right now despite the news, and my brain is currently working around some new loops, so maybe I should try this exercise again.