I'm suffering a little from writer's block currently. As per usual, I find the only way to get through it is to power through, but I'm a discerning writer. I don't like writing if I'm not satisfied with what I post. It annoys me that it takes me a couple of hours to wrangle together a pair of paragraphs which I'm only really kind of satisfied with. My apologies to those I'm in threads with.

So I try to write other things, like this blog here, to take my mind off things and to get my writing juices going. At this point it's pretty much straight out whatever's on my mind, as you can no doubt tell. I had a topic in mind when I started this though and I'll get back to it in a second.

Oh yes. Empty spaces. I'm taking a class in literature theory this semester. It's quite interesting. Anyway, there was one particular aspect of it I was going to talk about. Empty spaces. If you want to sound faux intellectual I guess you could call them lacunae.

Whenever someone reads a text there is something which is left up to the imagination or the interpretation of the reader. To give a very banal example, I could write for example, "there is a wooden house" and the reader would fill in the details, perhaps thinking of a specific type of house, perhaps giving it a certain look. Or I could be leave even more of an empty space, giving a character a smile at a certain point, leaving the it to the reader to decide on why he smiled and what his motivation is.

In part this is what makes pbps interesting to me, you write something and then you see someone else's interpretation of what you've written. It's never the exact same interpretation as your own, they might have other takes on things than you, their knowledge might be different from yours, all in all though, it's a different take on what you wrote.

There's always going to be words in a text that are open to interpretation. Even as I was writing this, I misunderstood what someone said because I interpreted what they wrote in a very different way from what they might have expected. Modern literature theory tells us there is no such thing as a wrong interpretation of a text, but I think I have to say I disagree in this case. Lacking the extra visual medium of body language and things like tone of voice, these things have a tendency to happen. Quote god knows how many flamewars across the internet that have started because someone misunderstood what someone else wrote.

The fact I hurt a person because I read more into something than what was there bothers me and is irrefutable proof that in some cases interpretations of a text can be wrong. Gadamer might just have been on to something. He'd have probably have said something about needing to be more aware of your personal prejudices or something at this point.

Aaaand, I think that's about it. Maybe I'll try posting again now.