You can’t really say you have not been neglecting something. Because if people have noticed you neglecting it then you probably have been. But you didn’t know you were because you were distracted. That’s how neglect happens.

Although I have been thinking about the site I have not actually ventured into it for a few weeks. It has come to that time of the year for domain and hosting renewal. The domain renewal was a modest £12 ($24 USD approx) and so that’s not a problem: leostableford.com belongs to Leo Stableford. All is well.

The hosting.

Ah, there’s the rub. We’re talking nearly £100 for that and I just don’t have it spare. The hosting is coming due in about three weeks.

I’m wondering, therefore, whether to beg, borrow and steal for it for my birthday or to take something a bit, er, freer and lose the dedicated hosting. That would mean redirecting my domain to a journal elsewhere. It would also mean redirecting my mail somewhere else where I could not guarantee my mail would go out as coming from leo@leostableford.com. This is a pretty hard choice as I use the e-mail for more than egotisitc frivolity. It’s actually my professional e-mail also.

So what to do?

I’m sure you can appreciate the mull time I’m taking.

Back soon.

One of my friends categorised me as a pragmatist at the weekend. This was in response to my assertion that I had played a video game for six hours on Friday afternoon because I had suddenly realised that there was a whole untapped market out there for old style, simple, computer games of a certain quality and reasonably priced.

Whether you agree with any of this or not I think it was entertaining that he thought that a moment’s distraction which turned into a fun time with Mrs. Monkey (for we were playing the game together) and myself could ever be six hours worth of pragmatism. Pragmatism would have been to get the idea and sweep the market place for other concepts. There was more to my survey than pragmatism.

I thinkt he word pragmatist gets used as an insult far too often. I think that many people feel that a pragmatist’s view of compassion and good humour are that they are not pragmatic things to possess. Actually a pragmatic view of the research surrounding the Prisoner’s Dilemma (search for it) reveal that compassion and good humour are the height of pragmatic traits.

I also think that artists who are not pragmatic run the risk of being out of touch with an audience. A pragmatic writer upon realising that he/she uses too many long words and overlong sentences would go back to the schools of technique and think again. I, for example, studied pulp voraciously to pound my sentence structure into some kind of shape. But the freewheeling artist can demand patience of an audience with impunity. There is nothing artistic about quality control, they can say.

As before I beg to differ. I want my creations to be felt by people and if the only way to do that is to be pragmatic and to school myself in simple accessibility and to wonder about the techniques of getting people to listen to you then so be it.

No one without pragmatism can hope to survive in this world for very long.

There’s something comforting about addressing the issue of quality if you’re Gordon Ramsay and this is one of your Kitchen Nightmares. Food is visceral, gustatory, if people don’t like it they cannot contain their disgust. If people are not wowed by it they will not pay for it. There is, it turns out, a right way to cook and a right way to run a restaurant.

It’s not that easy when you’re writing… I imagine it’s not so easy with any kind of art. Those Ancient Greeks thought they had it cracked. Art can be visceral and if it upset you in the wrong way (e.g. without dramatic catharsis) then it was “wrong”. Now we’re all popomo and a room with lights going on and off in it - summed up by the artist himself as “a room with lights going on and off in it” - can be the optimum cutting edge aesthetic output for a year.

I remember thinking that I’d be so in love with House of Leaves if it weren’t for the fact that the typsetting and structure made my head hurt. Apparently that’s genius.

Is it any wonder that people produce crap and think it’s worthy? We brought it on ourselves. I watched with enchanted, alien wonder as a Ramsay Nightmare chef finally broke down and admitted he was rubbish. Would that I had ever seen an author who previously believed in the quality of their own artistic vision do this.

Of course if you’re a rubbish chef you can sometimes be taught. People believe they can’t be taught to be writers. Many of the more popular writers eschew the process of systematising what they do. Creative writing classes are seen as a social indulgence.

I’m not sure any of these things are all true, either about cookoing or writing. I sometimes find the resistence of people to challenging these dogma to be trying.