Psyberspace

Just saw the DVD The Source about the Beats. Had to go and
find (and found) the points listed below which were
spoken in the movie by Johnny Depp. These tips make a nice
counterpoint to Garbl's (see below).

Belief & Technique for Modern Prose

by Jack Kerouac

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for
yr own joy

2. Submissive to everything, open, listening

3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house

4. Be in love with yr life

5. Something that you feel will find its own form

6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind

7. Blow as deep as you want to blow

8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind

9. The unspeakable visions of the individual

10. No time for poetry but exactly what is

11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest

12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you

13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical
inhibition

14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time

15. Telling the true story of the world in interior
monolog

16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the
eye

17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself

18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language
sea

19. Accept loss forever

20. Believe in the holy contour of life

21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in
mind

22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture
better

23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr
morning

24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language
&knowledge

25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of
it

26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American
form

27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman
Loneliness

28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under,
crazier the better

29. You're a Genius all the time

30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled
in Heaven

William Gibson stops blogging blog-end:

The bits and pieces that Joseph Cornell assembled in his shadow-boxes wouldn’t have seemed nearly as interesting if he’d simply left them arrayed on the bench of some picnic-table –- and they certainly wouldn’t still be there.

I crave the sweet and crazy-making difficulties that can only be imposed by the box, the Cornellian stage, the frame, of a formal narrative.

Makes sense, I need to get into the difficult stuff too! Damn.

Later: Been thinking about this and it seems to ignore one, that weblogs are a box, a FORM. Secondly they are a way of doing research.

PS Joseph Cornell

Explored Garbl’s Editorial Style Manual and found:
Page for E, where he cites:

e-mail A shortened version of electronic mail. OK to use e-mail (lowercase) in all references, including first. Capitalize as E-mail only to begin sentences, headings and headlines. Do not drop the hyphen. Follow the same style for words like e-business and e-commerce.

Made me wonder if I am on the loosing side of this as I prefer “email” – not as a general rule for initial based words, just that one, email, because it is ubiquitous. How does it Google?

267,000,000 for email

15,000,000 for e-mail

Not only that, but in the last search it asked me if I meant email. I am sticking with email! Not just because of the numbers, I stick with counselling because of the culture I live in, and email is a bit like that. It was not till Wired lost its original impetus that it changed to e-mail, it was part of its demise as an icon for online culture.

While I have my view on this it does not take a way from the site – the site is a nice one to have a link to – covers a lot of ground.

Garbl’s Writing Center, wonderful site. Web oriented.

Welcome to Gary B. Larson’s portal to a free editorial style manual, annotated directory of writing Web sites, concise writing guide, personalized advice and writing forum.

He has a powerful page on Bush Lies as well and the values shine right through the writing style material. He has a sense of how words can hurt and how they can heal.

When I see a site like this I become curious about American English, International English and in my case New Zealand English. There really is no one style for all. I run into problems with my site as I have Online Counselling and Online Counseling to deal with. I always write counselling but need to put the more common American one in the various places for key-words etc.

Here is how they Google:

2,290,000 counselling

8,890,000 counseling

more here.

Couch.JPG

Speaking of Freud's couch, here is a beautiful image.
Probably by Edmund Engelman

Engelman's photos were used as a basis for the set in the film
Nineteen Nineteen

CyberTherapy 2004 – 10-12 January, San Diego, CA.

This looks like it is more about the technology for a wide range of e-health rather than psychotherapy online. When it comes to psychotherapy I am a bit of a luddite – if that can be applied to an online therapy enthusiast. The great potential of plain text emails is mostly underutilised. Therapy thrives on simplicity. Freud is famous for a couch! It was a device to reduce visual contact. Many of the boundaries we take for granted today also reduce usual interactions. The emphasis on the communication, on what can’t be seen in rl – the inner stuff is important. Psychotherapy spares the inner world of the complexities of ordinary day-to-day life.

So I am not an enthusiast for real time and more devices to replicate reality, not for the purposes of therapy. Images are a different story. Drawing, painting, photos and cinema all have a part to play in therapy, others’ art and one’s own art. Art is a way of going beyond the surface of life to the experience of life. Art therapy online makes good sense.

But I digress from the actual conference, which sems thorough given its brief.

Watched DA Pennebaker’s movie Bob Dylan Dont look back. Fun with the commentary turned on.

I liked seeing Joan Baez, whose song “We Shall Overcome” bought on this wave of nostalgia when I heard it the other day. I find it sad that once I did believe that we would overcome and now… I merely want to believe it.

Snapped these two shots while watching… I like the way we have performers, then a movie maker, then a DVD then a digital photo on a PC, then an image on the web nearly 40 years later. The Joan Baez one I quite like with its Picassoesque look, though her music is not of that ilk. The movie itself though is a stylistic mirror of the Dylan touch and era.

Insight :This from a 1998 interview with James Hillman makes sense to me, I feel like that:

Hillman: I’ve been wrestling with these questions for thirty- five years. I sometimes get short-tempered in a public situation because I think, Oh God, I can’t go back over that again. I can’t put that into a two-word answer. I can’t. Wherever I go, people say, ‘Can I ask you a quick question?’ It’s always, ‘a quick question.’ Well, my answers are slow. [Laughs]

FeedDemon is a new RSS aggregator for Windows machines. It’s a fine beastie, allowing you to categorize multiple feeds flexibly and usefully. There’s an interesting Watch feature, which is supposed to trawl the blogosphere for terms you enter, like OpenCola was going to do.

(thanks to Mike Richwalsky!)

and also to Bryan Alexander where I lifed this whole Item after downloading Feed Demon and liking it enough to kill my other one. This is from the maker of Homesite – and it follows form.