Inventory Time

It’s that time of the year were all society’s gears slow down a little bit to re-focus on their different familial nuclei and take stock of what has been done while looking forward to what has to be done.

Blogging- wise this hasn’t been such a productive year for me since there have been months that I’ve neglected this platform almost completely. Just taking stock every now and then of what was shaking and moving the blogosphere. Lately I’m skipping over the Trump-posts, although I’m also quietly worrying and started to interrogate myself if I should not get ready for some kind of apocalypse with this new crew moving into Washington. Not that the ones in the Kremlin or in Beijing are inspiring much more confidence: at best they seem to deserve each other. And Africa slides further down into the abyss of corruption and nepotism, South Africa apparently also getting sucked into that spiral, while South America seems to get its act together.

But I’m getting distracted. Yes, I have probably spent more time reading posts then actually writing them. And so what? If we’re all going to spend more time on writing posts then reading them, we’re going to have a forum of writers without readers.

And then you have that phenomenon that is called “Life Away of the Internet”. When I see the productivity rate of some bloggers, I wonder if they still have such thing or if they leave the management of their website to some chatbot.

This year I’ve managed to finish the transcription of Finnegans Wake from gibberish into plain English and lard it with some illustrations. The work is called Here Comes Everybody’s Karma. Next I traveled to Dublin to launch the book at the Bloomsday festival, who by the way invited me to come over again next year to give a lecture about it.

Here Comes Everybody’s Karma, Print ISBN
Bostoen, Copeland & Day, isbn print edition 978-1-7377832-9-9, amazon 979-8324434571

Here Comes Everybody’s Karma is a transcription of Finnegans Wake from a contemporary perspective that reflects the links that can be laid between Finnegans Wake and some Asiatic philosophical tenets, quantum mechanics, and the systems theory.

Then in September I curated an exposition in the margins of Manifesta 15 in Barcelona called Manifesta del Raval, a co-creation model that linked critical urban research, community building and contemporary culture with local identities and visions.

And then I still have of course a family to take care of and the usual dramas this involves. Mother died (at age 93), the in-laws are getting increasingly incapacitated by old age, a little inundation in our house, the studio and adjacent living space (still) under reconstruction and the related wrangling with contractors, and I could go on and on…

I still wonder how I found time to do some creative work done in between. So the blog was put on a backfire for a while. I have seriously considered of canceling the Facebook after reading that it’s a main source of brainrot and it seems that most traffic is anyway generated by chatbots talking to other chatbots. Just decided to keep it on for promotional purposes of events, although I start to have serious doubts about that too. There might still be some actual humans who use it as a communication tool.

Right now most of my time is going into the editing of a new novel and after new year I’m off to Malaysia for two months where I hope to be able to make finally a start at the 4th part of my series The Maharajagar, which is already four years overdue. The problem is that I know what has to come into it, but the right words seem to escape me. The whole storyline is drafted, but every time I’m trying to type it out, the rights words seem to fail. Time to give it a new push when I’m done with editing and my latest novel moves to the publisher.

Wish you all a happy end of the year and a fresh start in the coming one.