I've started writing a biography.

Maybe it's too early to say that. I'm still gathering my sources, secondary and primary, and still taking notes. So many notes. I downloaded over a dozen academic articles, I have five books, I plan to get more books from the library this afternoon. The desire to do this slowly swelled within the recesses of my psyche ever since I finished the 25 page research paper. I had a lot of fun writing it. It never got boring, it never felt daunting. I worked on it for hours every day, reading books, reading articles, taking notes, doing original research. I came to realize over the past weeks -- I really miss it. It's over and through, the class is over and through, I probably will not have to write another paper for the remainder of my duration at this university. But I miss it. I came to the conclusion a couple of weeks ago -- I could write a biography. It's really quite exciting and I anticipate it to be really fun.

Initially, my subject was Sergei Rachmaninoff, the Russian composer and conductor, but I observed that five biographies of him already exist. I did not accept defeat; I decided I would do Vladimir Harowitz. He was an excellent pianist, and my interest in him is emergent of the fact that he was good friends with Rachmaninoff, and would regularly perform his music. Rachmaninoff said that Harowitz played them the way he could only dream of playing. So I look to see if biographies already exist. They do -- in fact, there are four that I could find. Defeated, I decided to find a more obscure man to write on, someone who has no more than one biography already written. And then it dawned on me, descended upon me like rapture. Vercingetorix. Vercingetorix!

The last and greatest king of the Gauls. There is no biography written of him in the English language -- there are several in French, but none in English. It's a niche desparately aching to be filled. The only issue is that we have no idea what his childhood was like; we don't know if he was educated, who his friends were, what his relationships were like. It would be a biography of speculation. This speculation, though, can be educated speculation -- we know a lot about ancient Celtic culture, about what life was like for the Gallic people. We know Vercingetorix was charismatic; he united all the tribal leaders of Gaul into a singular entity, despite their differences, to fight for freedom against Caesar. His father was killed by these tribal leaders for attempting to become king, but Vercingetorix managed to pull it off. Additionally, we know from Caesar that his army was well-organized, and that he used a "scorched earth" policy -- he burned everything, all the fields, all the supplies, so that Caesar's legion would starve. 

He was born decades before Christ, in a culture foreign to us today. But, to this day, he is considered a national hero to the French; numerous Frenchmen have written about him; statues of him exist, depicting him as a freedom fighter, a man of courage and nobility. I intend to explore this in the biography as well. I wrote up an outline, of all the topics I want to cover and the order I want to cover them in. I plan to flesh out this outline as the research makes my task more intelligible and tangible, and less ephemeral and vague.

Ugh. It's all I can think about. It's the only thing I want to do. I expect it to be quite the task, but I'm not rushing myself. Rushing myself, self-imposed deadlines, a target daily wordcount, I have observed that these things are the cause of burnout, at least for me. I am choosing to work at my own pace; instead of target wordcount, I might try target time spent writing. Maybe two pomodoros a day, or something along those lines. It's a tangible goal, but there's less pressure, less ego, less stress if I were to "fall behind".

War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength

What's that, Donald? We are supposed to call it the Gulf of Mexico now? What, you mean the same way we all call Twitter "𝕏" now? The way pretty much everyone refers to it, in writing, seems to be "X, formerly known as Twitter". I think that The Gulf will forever be remembered as "Gulf of Mexico". This is Newspeak at work, at least attempting to be.. In the news, I noticed that Google announced¹ that they are reclassifying America as a 'sensitive country', along with the like of Israel, Russia and China. ¹ Google Maps may well be showing different names for The Gulf depending on where the user is based; some will see one version, some another, some possibly both.² There's a vast group of people who refer to the US Left liberals as "snowflakes", but this is the snowflakiest thing I believe I have read in my 64 years of reading things. The next fuckwit who calls me a liberal snowflake had better duck, and fast.

This is an example of your government at work, Making America Great Again by renaming things and attempting to rewrite history;"The Gulf of America has always been the Gulf of America". Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. I can think of countless things the White House resident could be doing to make America great, starting with those stupid red hats. At the very least make them in America. I'd be able to applaud that, at the very least with an ironic golf clap.

I also note that some of the "patriots" pardoned for invading Congress on January 6th, have already been arrested for new crimes. I hate having to write about current events with the current political climate; I would laugh if it didn't really fucking hurt. ALso, I am trying hard not to allow myself to be reduced to abuse of anyone, or to descned into "us vs. them". That said, what's next? Two minutes Hate? We're living in the universe imagined by Orwell, I can see the future in the film Brazil. But I am not laughing. Seriously, you should watch Gilliam's Brazil if you've not already; you will laugh through the pain and shame. Still, Lie Quest 2025 is coming, I console myself that we at least have some good material to write about. ALso, Brevity Quest 2025 begins Saturday, 1 February.


² "sensitive America" at CNBC
² I just checked, and Maps currently calls it the Gulf of Mexico. Still, there's always tomorrow, or at least we hope there is. Update: 31 january Still "Mexico".



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