Having been fingered for this by Brenda I was going to let it pass me by, being allergic to good intentions these days. However, on reflection it seems:
1. a good way to fill a blog post, and less cynically
2. a genuinely useful way to ruminate on one’s lot in life.
New Year resolutions are of course doomed to failure. Producing a list of 20 (or 19 or whatever) things to do seems to be somehow much more realistic in that such a list can only be broad brush. This is already sounding a lot more pretentious than Brenda’s idea so without further preamble:
1. Write more and keep focussed. In the past four years I have started two novels (both for NaNoWriMo) but because I let my attention drift in both cases they never got finished. (OK the first is probably crap too, but that never stopped some people)
2. Blog more. I’ve separated this from 2 above but obviously they are both complementary and conflicting. I seem to be incapable of writing even a three line blog post without revising and refining it, so even minimal blogging takes away from more formal writing.
3. I’m developing an interest in what I think of as ‘practical anarchism’ and I need to develop these ideas further – in other words we can’t get rid of the bastards, but we can still make their life hell… (see also 1 and 2 above!)
4. Get to grips with my Bronica camera. In particular this will mean getting better at using a light meter, which has never been my strong point.
5. Paint. The desire to paint has resurfaced recently, perhaps prodded back into existence by my digital work. I haven’t really worked out if this is a sub-conscious feeling that digital art isn’t really art, a genuine artistic upswelling, or if it stems from my inability to do anything properly with getting diverted to something else after a couple of months
6. Get out more. For a variety of reasons that hasn’t been an option over the last 2-3 years, but both photography and painting demand it.
7. Get more business like about selling. I’m actually not too bad at the selling once I get to something like a craft fair, but I need to take a much more hard headed look at where and how I sell. I’m certainly not going to go back to being a wage slave – the very idea makes me feel ill – so selling my pictures or other craft work like jewellery is the only option, unless someone takes up my novel to make a block buster film.
8. Keep learning. Like most people I have huge gaps in my knowledge and at my age only having a goal in mind will give me any chance of filling even some of them in any systematic way. Until I was 61 for example I had never read Jane Austen. That gap has now been filled by one of her books. I probably won’t be reading another, but now that is from choice, not ignorance…
As an example of my present scattergun approach, the books on my current reading pile include:
- Anarchy, State and Utopia – Robert Nozick
- A Glastonbury Romance – John Cowper Powis
- Just and Unjust Wars – Michael Walzer
- Cash – Johnny Cash
- What are Old People For? – William H Thomas (Recommended by Ronni Bennett)
- The Compass Rose – Ursula K LeGuin
- The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
- Poetics of Space – Gaston Bachelard
9. Get angry. I’m retired and beholden to no one. The first time I saw the clip (below) I thought it was hilarious, but now it brings tears to my eyes, because we have taken it – time and again we have taken it and we are still taking it. So the new strap line will be:
