Bad Note 1

We start often from a place of nonjudgement, self-nonjudgement, stop that for a bit and write. The editing maybe is where qualitative questions seethe in. Like, this bit is good, I like this, I’ll keep it or deepen it. I guess then there’s the reverse as a reader or a critic, like: we suspend judgement while reading to see what a text is doing. We are trained really well to do this in the academy, to read in this particular manner. So if you go beyond bad and good in reading that’s a critical skill, and it is worth emphasizing that this is also the case in composition. We also need to keep in mind though that there is work written which deliberately conjures up this good-bad distinction, in order to twist it into shapes which are unfamiliar, to fuck with a communal sense of bad and good or sometimes retain it while inverting it, or tip it sideways, or leave a lit cigarrette on its doily to slowly burn it.