Last night I mentioned to someone that I have a new blog on Identity Theory, and she said, "Oh, you blog for Identity Theory." I'm still getting used to the syntax here -- I love saying "I blog for Identity Theory," since it sounds a bit like "I play hockey for Sweden," or "I brake for whales."
About the title: I originally wanted to call this blog The Semi-colon's Dream. I got into Elias Canetti's fragments, back in the late 1980s, after reading a negative review of The Secret Heart of the Clock in a British newspaper. The reviewer quoted the fragment "the semi-colon's dream" to indicate that Canetti had lost his mind -- but the phrase inspired me enough that I went out and bought the book.
So my mental state in the late 1980s passeth all understanding, but I think what the phrase evokes for me is suspension and tension -- the fascination of being in the middle of a sentence, where it pauses and may change direction.
I never use semi-colons myself; the only punctuation mark that contradicts itself.
It turns out Craig Conley already has a Semicolon's Dream Journal Blog -- this is a crowded blogosphere I find myself in -- so I went with another fragment about irresolution from The Secret Heart of the Clock. "Everything unfinished was better. It kept you suspended and dissatisfied."
What's in a name? The Beatles is a really lame name for a band, if you think about it -- you just never thought about it.
"A semi-colon is a strange kind of thinking that I don't understand." -- Peter Rock, My Abandonment
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