Even highly technical blogs don't give you detailed accounts of the several ways the writer failed to solve a problem - which in a way is a shame, because others reading it might like to know what approaches to avoid.
But if there's one thing less interesting than someone else's success, it's someone else's failure.
I eventually did solve all my problems, which were:
* How to set up a computer to automatically record a series of movies.
* How to turn a series of ebooks into a series of talking books, using a text-to-speech synthesiser that doesn't produce totally unlistenable output.
* How to generate nonsense lyrics and chord structures semi-randomly as a way to spark creative songwriting. I'll write about that one when I've got the strength.
There was also a little short story about family values.
So, I now have a growing set of subtitled classic/sci-fi/action movies with subtitles that I can show to my students (when I finally have some) instead of getting them to play stupid games all the time that supposedly help them practice their English.
I also have a set of mechanically produced talking books on my mp3 player, broken up into half hour chapters, to be played when I'm doing nothing but walking from part of town to another.
Ah, but what are the books? Harry Potter? American Psycho? How to Win Friends and Influence People?
Not quite. The acknowledged classics of marxist philosophy! Not marxist economics, not marxist history, not even marxist politics - rather, the works of Engels, Lenin, Plekhanov etc, which (so I've been assured) founded the uniquely marxist view of the universe.
I thought, seeing as I'd been calling myself a marxist for over a decade, and originally got interested in it for the philosophical aspects, which have proven elusive and baffling, I ought to read the great books. Or at least have my phone read them to me in the voice of a BBC newsreader.
And I have to say, the more I hear, the less impressed I get. Today, Frederich Engels told me that absolute zero temperature is a contradiction in terms. Yesterday it was how calculus and the irrational value of Pi can't exist - and all those silly experts who disagree just don't understand.
Don't worry, I won't be boring you with my metaphysical deconstructions of German political activists from 150 years ago. Though I have been writing essays about it, and they'll probably get a blog of their own.
But here's a non-philosophical essay which dropped out of my head a few days ago. If you've had involvement with any kind of political group, it may describe something familiar.
How many socialists believe in socialism?
Put it another way: How many committed socialists are committed to the cause of socialism (however they conceive it), and how many are committed instead to their particular party? Or to their role within that party? Or to their career within that party? Or to the party's leadership, the support network offered by likeminded comrades, or the sense of struggle?
How many would know what to do if the struggle succeeded? Indeed, how many care more for being the scrappy underdog than the vanguard of a new world?
It might seem a self-evident contradiction to say that most catholics believe in god - surely belief in god is the absolute desideratum of being a catholic?
The average practicing catholic believes in the teachings of the church and the word of the scriptures - even though they're rather vague on what the church actually teaches, and their bible probably sits unopened but prominent on their bookshelf.
The priest will have been through seminary, learning exactly how vacuous the theology is - and how to cover up that vacuity with platitudes and impressive-sounding nonsense. By the time they graduate, what faith they have remaining tends to be so rarefied and abstract it serves only to give them the assurance that they still have a faith.
Around half those who qualify for the priesthood don't enter it. Those who do, in honest moments confide to discreet friends that they believe more in the social good the church can do, than in the reasons it gives for doing it. That, and they don't have many other career options.
Professional theologins are often more able to be open about their faithlessness, while the deacons, bishops and arch-bishops are obliged to keep it firmly closeted.
It's a Kafkaesque world where those who believe don't know what they believe, and those who lead do so on the condition they never admit what they don't believe.
Socialism isn't a religion, but it is a church - complete with sects, schizms, heretics, plaster saints, holy songs, failed prophecies and a host of false popes.
There are also the lavishly published but largely unopened founding texts, and the few professional interpreters who can justify any action, any theory and any reversal by quoting them.
When we see our leaders making impassioned speeches for courses of action we later learn they oppose in private, when we see petty personal feuds disguised as serious theoretical debates, I think we can be forgiven for suspecting the higher you get in the organisation, the less you care about its alleged cause.
When we see apparatchiks barefacedly flipping policies (and lying that they've ever changed) to gain favour in the hierarchy and climb another rung - before opportunistically defecting to another party, effortlessly swapping loyalty after sometimes decades of work...I think we're justified in asking how they so easily rearrange their principles - and if they have any left.
So, is the pope catholic? Perhaps he can't afford to be.
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