It Feels Like Déjà Vu (All Over Again)

"Boredom is the threshold to great deeds. Now, it would be important to know: what is the dialectical antithesis to boredom?" - Walter Benjamin

The only way to answer Benjamin's question successfully would be to ignore it - to avoid it, to void it in the nothingness that is the antithesis to boredom that exceeds any inclination to playing his game.

But here is another blog entry, and the game somehow goes on.

Now, immersed in the soft light of my alterna-paradise, I lose myself in the art of indexing. Indexing my book (META/DATA: A Digital Poetics) means indexing my past, means prioritizing what stands out as the keywords and crucial content that somehow bind the entire manuscript together. It is a subjective exercise in tagging my creative writing with metadata.

It is a gentle boredom, where the hours slip away and the work gets done.

Indexing is a memory trigger and brings to mind the various places my story takes place. Some of it happens in Boulder, some in Kailua, some in Sydney and Melbourne, some in Berlin or London or even Singapore. And that's just for starters.

But all of it has one constant: the Network (within / without).

Even now, my connection to the WWW is strong and the accompanying will-to-aestheticize is still as fierce as ever (which is a good thing, and reminds me of this panel I was on last year at the World Summit put on by UNESCO).

Maybe tomorrow I will finally win this game of trying to locate the dialectical antithesis to boredom, that is to say, boredom's other will have its final say, and I will, once and for all, throw away the ethernet cable that, like an umbilical cord, feeds me my new media source material 24/7/52.

But then as soon as I boot up my laptop, it will immediately ask me: "Do you want join the Blue Sky Network?" A free wireless connection, emanating from an anonymous router and leaking through the walls of a nearby neighbor, will entice me, and it will be hard not to submit -- to say, like Molly Bloom at the end of "Ulysses," "yes I said yes I will Yes."

Until then, there's always indexing. And with indexing, more mind time.

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Metadata: blog, philosophy