Bloggasm

The blog Spurious began on December 2003. Complete Review describes its content as follows: ‘various musings, philosophical, some literary’.

Simon Owens: I’ve noticed that your writing style is a lot different than most book bloggers: you go into not-quite-slipstream tangents on your literary topics. How do you go about planning and writing (and structuring, for that matter) your posts?

Spurious: No planning – I like to begin and finish a post in a single gesture, all at once. What I write at the blog reflects my philosophical concerns; I don’t count myself as a litblogger, but nor do I blog as a philosopher.

The tangent is everything - how might the topics of concern at Spurious be touched by writing? Increasingly, it is writing itself that is my major concern. How to write about writing except by digression? As if there were a place you can only reach indirectly, by keeping it in the corner of your eye. ‘I digress’ – but is there a way of engaging writing as digression, as the tangent that touches without intersection, and is always changing course?

Simon Owens: You write about your love for very-detailed fiction. What do you think of experimental, fast-paced literary stories which don’t stop to analyze their surroundings very often?

Spurious: My tastes in fiction and poetry are informed by a more general concern with the challenge literature poses to philosophy. Think of literature as a kind of writing in lieu of itself, which has not found its form. As an ‘experimentalism’, fast or slow paced that does not belong to any particular era. Heraclitus is as contemporary as Char, and wasn’t Plato already aware of the dangers of a literary practice that doubles the world and sends linguistic meaning on an infinite detour? A practice that is also internal to his own philosophical writing; the enemy within.

Simon Owens: In what ways do lit blogs differ from your average book column in major newspapers?

Spurious: I can’t speak for litblogs; I read only three or four. I feel an affinity with Stephen Mitchelmore, who writes at This Space, and has, over the last two or three years, directed me towards Handke, Bernhard, Appelfeld and others.

What matters is to allow criticism, or a writing on literature to partake of literature, to embody the same risks. The question of style is paramount; the experimentalism of literature (its modernity), must also be carried over to literary criticism.

Great criticism – Blanchot’s, for example – is part of literature. But it always has its eye, too, on philosophy (and couldn’t the same be claimed of literature itself?). Without philosophy – scepticism about everything received, including what comes by way of the column and other kinds of journalism, which prop up a particular image of the world – nothing. And isn’t there a kind of philosophizing, or at least a kind of research, implicit to literature?

Simon Owens: What upcoming book publications are you looking forward to the most?

Spurious: In philosophy, Christian Kerslake’s Deleuze and the Unconscious, Mark Sinclair’s Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art; in musicology, Richard Middleton’s Voicing the Popular.

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs you’d recommend to supplement the reading of your own?

Spurious: In addition to This Space, I always check in with wood s lot. For politics, Lenin’s Tomb; for political philosophy, I Cite; for philosophy, music and film, K-Punk.