First steps: (24th October 2004)
It started innocently enough with a Sunday shopping sojourn; it started entirely aimlessly and proceeded to spiral out of control, ending only when the plastic cried out.
One of the assorted nothings was a sleek coffee machine. The logic was quite simple: why let the 21st century equivalent of McDonald’s ruin my coffee experience and make obscene amounts of money from people like me? Why debase a tradition that was started millienia ago and cultivated as an art form by monks intent on the utmost concentration during their evenings’ chants?
For if a brew can be divinely savoured, if a brew can elavate thus, and if the telos of aforementioned beans is to inspire the flow of enchanted praise, surely the brew deserves machination befitting it. Caffeine made better with Krups: a modest haul.
From then on, the litany of expensively assembled nothings grew. An automobile here, an outrageously priced pair of Hugo Boss shoes there, an Asus there, a Cerruti suit over here, etcetera. One’s very environment fell into disrepute, a sense of self only salvaged upon signing on the dotted line for an address and a mortgage.
The author came to ask: amidst all this reality, what of my virtual home, the website? Something was amiss: the site had hardened into a mish-mash of rubble held together by an undeserving domain. Change beckoned.
Of course, change can take place negatively; for example, the growing relevance of (and identification with, perhaps?) The Business Times is a worrying sign of impending adulthood and the discarding of pre-adult ways. Somehow or other, all through the years of reading the Thatcher tinged Financial Times, one had always been able to disassociate “the rational kernel within the mystical shell”. One would waltz by the “Markets & funds data”, creep pass the “Jobs & classifieds” section to lay seige on its weekend section.
Indeed, the “Arts & weekend” section continues to be a highlight, less for the Robin Lane Fox penned Gardening column but for the excellent review section. And so it was, on that very day when my consumer streak ran wild, when rational thought and nausea exchanged functions, when the end of meaningful writing drew closer, that these lasik-ed eyes chanced upon an article which showcased Latin America’s literary scene.
What forced itself on what little was left of this wretched soul’s ability to imagine and comprehend was the concept of the cr?nica - “a hybrid genre, on the verge between the journalistic and the confessional …” The English “chronicle” fails to capture the wilderness and free reign implicit in the untranslated.
So it was that I took the opportunity to reconceptualise this site towards its intended direction: “Have life, not blog!”
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