I’m really glad to be working on a book that’s not government funded. A stack of money has been poured into this and we need to earn the money back to pay off the debt.

This just came to mind when I was talking to a guy who put out a bunch of comics with a group called Silent Army. He said they never had a real distribution model – they used half the grant to make an approximation of the funded book, then the rest to make the book that didn’t fit within the funder’s criteria.

Fine, but this guy was disappointed they could never really get the books out to a broader audience. Government funding has a tendency to hinder considerations of sustainable business models in the arts – especially with literature, which is so labour intensive, in a culture where production skills outweigh business acumen considerably.

Today we figured out we need to sell half our print run to break even, then we have the potential to make enough to for Breakdown to do another book.

This is the sort of thinking that I’m really happy to be a part of.

I have this thing – a kind of guiding principle – that I have come to call Three Degrees of Uncoordination. Calling it a principle is a bit of a stretch. It’s more like an explanation for my disorganised, frenetic, fumbling approach to life. For a long time, before I labelled my own methodology of life, I just read and wrote and observed the world, noticing things and ideas and wondering what on earth to do with them. And I talked a lot of shit.

Recently I began to get pretty tired of all the talking, and frustrated by the lack of doing. But I’m reluctant to act without conviction in my opinions, so I got kind of stuck: how could I act without conviction about my ideas, but how could I reach conviction without experiencing life (without acting)?

This was all happening at the end of my tenure as Voiceworks editor, where I had been reading a lot, talking a lot, editing a lot, crunching spreadsheets a lot, and not writing a lot. I was leaving my editorials to the last minute, but they came naturally when I finally got down to them.

This, I found, was because all of the reading and talking I was doing had a place to coalesce: as I drew from things that had happened in the three months since I last wrote an editorial, usually about three separate instances of something like intellectual coincidence would occur and I would have an idea – something to write about, some intention for the editorial.

Usually the process of writing the editorial had forced me to think about something in a way that I had not previously considered. I would express this, with the intention of encouraging readers to do the same.

Since then this ‘principle’ has developed naturally as a way of connecting ideas into some form of coherent thought, without which I get wickedly confused and forget my opinions all the time. I still chase ideas down rabbit holes until I find bits of grit, around which all those ideas coagulate.

I don’t have editorials to write anymore, but I have posts to write for this blog. The themes will develop sporadically, as I process ideas and output them here: kernels of principles I will then use to guide my way through life in an approximation of goodness and decency. Maybe, dear reader, you will too, as, here, in the category Three Degrees of Uncoordination, I will capture those kernels in the hope of disseminating something useful.

Indeed, they are opposites. According to Socrates’ oracle, the wisest of them all is the person are aware of their own ignorance. Such an awareness cultivates an ongoing, organic interest in gaining, challenging and validating your knowledge. Doing this, and then applying that knowledge to life is what I do, and the central theme of Socratic Ignorance is Bliss.