What was I thinking!

Past writings, diaries, letters, course notes, publications and blog posts reveal what I was thinking 10 to 20 years ago and beyond—or do they? To read them now is to be reminded how much any authored text is steeped in the artifices of language, culture, and circumstance. There is no direct access to an original thought. Texts don’t deliver an unmediated window into an author’s mind, even for the author looking back.

This small collection of posts from 2013 is a case in point. The post titled Why music reaches the parts that architecture can’t explored the emotional potency of music compared with place, drawing on psychological frameworks and deconstructive readings to show how moods are shaped and amplified. 

The post The past is a construct of the mind engaged with pop philosophy in science fiction alongside historians such as Carr, White and Jenkins, noting how narratives of history are inventions as much as discoveries. 

I’m in the mood for love reflected on seduction, contagion, and the cultural politics of netporn. Some recollections succumb to cultural pressures of decorum. As a case in point, I struggled to find a suitable synthetic voice to read the post aloud. I didn’t want the post to sound “sleazy.”

Finally, Digital mood modifiers considered how devices, from Botox to smartphones, influence our posture, affect, and sense of well-being, resonating with Philip K. Dick’s imagined “mood organ.”

ChatGPT assisted with a summary: “These themes—music, history, seduction, and digital affect—intersect around questions of mood and its modulation. In this podcast I re-present the posts as a way of reflecting on continuities, shifts, and distortions across time, while recognising the inevitable filters we apply when constructing or reconstructing a past.”

Most of the content here later appeared in my book Mood and Mobility. I list the posts here.

• 144. Why music reaches the parts that architecture can’t
• 145. The past is a construct of the mind
• 146. I’m in the mood for love

• 147. Digital mood modifiers

Reference

• Lowenthal, David. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.