Hello hello. A few updates, nothing hugely surprising.

Firstly, I was very happy with the way writing went this week. More exactly, I was happy with the way it went for about half the week. I’m trying (slowly) to shift my approach to writing and started to have some success in the latter half of the week. I have a lot of bad habits and one of those bad habits is a tendency to avoid doing difficult things. It’s not quite procrastination. Rather, I’ll do bits and pieces here and there, and I’ll do them in a way that I know is half-hearted and uneven. This isn’t rational of me, especially since I believe that I find writing difficult because it is difficult, and because I think that I am trying to ask/answer difficult questions. So I’m trying to pay more attention to my mental state while writing, and, forcing myself to accept and deal with the difficulty, rather than working it into a demoralising narrative. After all, the difficulty is part of what makes it fun.

I will hopefully have a completed essay by the end of next week. I’m not sure yet if I’ll post it here, it might just be for me this time.

I’ve been doing some further emotions reading. I’m working through a volume, edited by Robert Solomon, called Thinking about Feeling. It’s one of those volumes that’s, honestly, a bit light-weight. Most of the chapters in it are pretty short, and fairly light on argumentation. That said, it’s a good introduction to a lot of the approaches in the philosophy of emotion that have been influential over the past few decades. Definitely worth reading if you’re interested in the field.

I’ve also been brushing up on my Marx… I wouldn’t call myself a Marxist, as such, but I have been reading him on-and-off since I was a teenager. Apart from a few years ago, when I worked through Capital, I have never really approached his work systematically. I’ve also failed to appreciate his journalistic/historical work properly. So, I’ve decided to read The Political Writings volume put out by Verso. I doubt I’ll finish it all at once, but it is worth reading here and there. Turns out Marx was a really good political journalist!

I have some questions about the selections made in the volume, but that would have been the case no matter what collection I went with. One day I’ll read through the MECW… (Or, I’ll learn German and go through MEGA).

Definitely getting to be a bit difficulty balancing all this reading. There’s always another book.