Composition of Philosophy. July 26.

Chapter 3 is now completely revised. Other than 3C, a terrible bear that would have bored or lost the reader in its initial form, this was not an especially difficult piece of revision.

From zero to final draft, Chapter 3 took 4 hours and 36 minutes.

Total length in signes is 24,293, so it’s still going well on that front. (I should be averaging just under 25,000 signes, or characters including blank spaces, for each of the ten chapters. Better to be slightly under than slightly over, because final revisions always tend to add clarifying words more often that they subtract superfluous ones.)

The most recent target of having a polished final draft of Chapters 1-5 by the end of July is now so within reach as to be nearly inevitable, barring sudden illness such as swine flu, or some other unforeseen crisis. There are five days remaining to revise the final two chapters, and though 4D and most of 5 will be tough, five days should be plenty.

I have business on campus tomorrow, and hence may decide that tomorrow is worth a simple day off to recharge the batteries. It depends on how I’m feeling.

I’m glad I read the Montfort/Bogost book on the Atari, Racing the Beam, at the beginning of the month (a lot has been packed into July– it feels like ages since Bogost & Co. were in Cairo).

The main theme of that book was the clever programming tricks required to design playable games for a piece of hardware as surprisingly feeble as the Atari VCS really was. Read the book if you’re interested in hearing all the examples, but one of the funniest is that the “neutral zone” in Yar’s Revenge is a visual depiction of the software code itself, a brilliant memory-saving idea that also had a suitably ominous visual effect.

With this book I’m in a similar position to Atari programmers or weapons miniaturizers. Never have I packed this many of my ideas into a mere 70 double-spaced pages (the final 70 pages will be largely new material that none of my readers have ever seen before). Many of the cuts have been painful, of the order of: “my God, will the argument even make sense if I remove that step?”

But more often than not, compression and allusiveness can be made to work. This book is certainly going to have a very rapid pace, like a high-speed film of a horse running. But though I wouldn’t wish to write every book this way, it’s a fascinating exercise. And I’m having to invent a lot of “Atari programming tricks” to pull it off.