tricks

Recent idea of mine: if I ever publish a book, I will also write and try to publish a review of my own book that totally slams it and points out all its weaknesses and urges people not to buy it. As one friend pointed out to me, this means that my critics would have nothing to say!

As far as my biography, I am worried about an absence: my correspondence. I am bad about keeping a clean inbox, but there's still so much I delete, and that others delete. How will my correspondence be preserved? Is it even significant enough for my biography? Is it well written? I suppose I can't win at everything.

I'm interested in the ways in which criticism and interpretation act as narrative. That is, there have been certain cases lately where I have read criticism on a book, then read the book, and been shocked by how little of the book's narrative was contained in the criticism. I've read the book and found a drastically different narrative than what I believed the narrative would be. This happens when I write my own essays, of course, because there's too much too account for. But it's interesting to me that criticism and interpretation is really a creative process that ends in a new narrative, more than it is an explication of "what is there." Of course, this is unaccpetable to anyone trying (for example) to discover truth "what it REALLY says" by interpreting the bible, since any interpretation alters the narrative itself, so they're no longer interpreting the bible but telling the story they want to tell (or feel obliged to tell).

I'm also interested in precision as an excess of information, and editing as a necessary economy of information. At times I feel obliged to explain myself or my thoughts as precisely as possible. Lately, I've been discarding this for the sake of communication, and as paring away excess information, where precision would be too confusing or counter to my purposes in communication. Partly this is in writing, but partly in just talking to people, telling people about my day, etc. Sometimes this means I alter the details of a story: it is confusing and disengaging to say I heard something from a friend who heard it from a friend, rather than saying that I witnessed it myself, or heard it from a friend. When it's actually important, I'll maintain the accuracy of where I received information/narrative, but usually it's not important. But I operate on the assumption that people are always on the point of not listening, or not reading, and feel the need to explain things in a way that is either entertaining or brief.

I also, I assume that no matter how precise I am, people still won't understand, so I might as well exaggerate and/or edit. I don't mean that to be dramatic about myself, but about anyone, everyone.

I've also noticed recently how little I talk about theology on here, whereas that used to be 90% of what I talked about. In part, that's just because I'm not thinking about it much, and in a lot of ways I don't know what use God or Jesus have in my life.

But in other ways I think it's because I don't know yet how to do theology, and that most of what passes for theology isn't theology, it's biblical exegesis (in Leviticus we see this...therefore God is _____ ). I think theology is supposed to be much more creative than that, and perhaps what we should learn from the bible is half what the writers say and half to do what they do, which is invent and create and discover, and to stop acting as if the bible is "truth" or that our own inventions are supposed to be truth and represent truth.

Part of what I'm also feeling is a reluctance to be an exhibitionist about God and "my relationship with him." Why is that something that anyone needs to know about? And how respectful is it to broadcast my thoughts, feelings, stories, opinions of God out to the world? And how arrogant is it to try to figure God out, like a math problem, or a trick?